My mother passed away before the internet evolved into something a middle aged woman would enjoy using.
I went searching for anything I could find, and I did manage to come across an ancient website for alumni of her highschool where her name and email were listed. Sort of blew my mind, she’d obviously come across the website and emailed the admin to add her contact info.
This would’ve been 8 or 9 years before Facebook blew up. Man, she would’ve loved Facebook and Farmville. She’d probably be doing Wordle every day and be a Rachel Maddow wine mom if she’d survived.
How much I wish she’d had a significant online presence so I could look her up and sort of connect with her again in some way.
Keep in mind that your descendents probably won’t care about a huge majority of what you leave them. Photos annotated with a date, time, people in them, and an explanation, maybe, but generally my generation hasn’t given a shit about the tonnes of books, music, photos, furniture, knick knacks, and antiquities bequeathed to us. It would be bizarre if our kids didn’t maintain that tradition.
Bear in mind, though, that the technology for dealing with these things are rapidly advancing.
I have an enormous amount of digital archives I’ve collected both from myself and from my now-deceased father. For years I just kept them stashed away. But about a year ago I downloaded the Whisper speech-to-text model from OpenAI and transcribed everything with audio into text form. I now have a Qwen3 LLM in the process of churning through all of those transcripts writing summaries of their contents and tagging them based on subject matter. I expect pretty soon I’ll have something with good enough image recognition that I can turn loose on the piles of photographs to get those sorted out by subject matter too. Eventually I’ll be able to tell my computer “give me a brief biography of Uncle Pete” and get something pretty good out of all that.
Yeah, boo AI, hallucinations, and so forth. This project has given me first-hand experience with what they’re currently capable of and it’s quite a lot. I’d be able to do a ton more if I wasn’t restricting myself to what can run on my local GPU. Give it a few more years.
I agree. I keep loads of shot that I’m hoping one day will just be processed by an AI to pick out the stuff people might want to actually see.
“People” includes me. I don’t delete anything (when it comes to photos, videos, etc) and just assume at some point technology will make it easy to find whatever.
You said you released it on your writing. How did you go about doing that? It’s a cool use case, and I’m intrigued.
It’s a bit technical, I haven’t found any pre-packaged software to do what I’m doing yet.
First I installed https://github.com/openai/whisper , the speech-to-text model that OpenAI released back when they were less blinded by dollar signs. I wrote a Python script that used it to go through all of the audio files in the directory tree where I’m storing this stuff and produced a transcript that I stored in a .json file alongside it.
For the LLM, I installed https://github.com/LostRuins/koboldcpp/releases/ and used the https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3-30B-A3B-128K-GGUF model, which is just barely small enough to run smoothly on my RTX 4090. I wrote another Python script that methodically goes through those .json files that Whisper produced, takes the raw text of the transcript, and feeds it to the LLM with a couple of prompts explaining what the transcript is and what I’d like the LLM to do with it (write a summary, or write a bullet-point list of subject tags). Those get saved in the .json file too.
Most recently I’ve been experimenting with creating an index of the transcripts using those LLM results and the Whoosh library in Python, so that I can do local searches of the transcripts based on topics. I’m building towards writing up something where I can literally tell it “Tell me about Uncle Pete” and it’ll first search for the relevant transcripts and then feed those into the LLM with a prompt to extract the relevant information from them.
If you don’t find the idea of writing scripts for that sort of thing literally fun (like me) then you may need to wait a bit for someone more capable and more focused than I am to create a user-friendly application to do all this. In the meantime, though, hoard that data. Storage is cheap.
That’s awesome! Thank you!
If you don’t find the idea of writing scripts for that sort of thing literally fun…
I absolutely do. What I find as a potential showstopper for me right now, is that I don’t have a nonintegrated GPU, which makes complex LLMs hard to run. Basically, if I can’t push the processing to CPU, I’m looking at around 2-5 seconds per token; it’s rough. But I like your workflow a lot, and I’m going to try to get something similar going with my incredibly old hardware, and see if CPU-only processing of this would be something feasible (though, I’m not super hopeful there).
And, yes, I, too, am aware of the hallucinations and such that come from the technology. But, honestly, for this non-critical use case, I don’t really care.
I only just recently discovered that my installation of Whisper was completely unaware that I had a GPU, and was running entirely on my CPU. So even if you can’t get a good LLM running locally you might still be able to get everything turned into text transcripts for eventual future processing. :)
Nicceeeee! Thank you!
It sounds like something similar to RAG (retrieval augmented generation) or a database lookup. Are you storing the transcripts in a SQL like database or noSQL db or doing semantic similarity on any of it?
I was thinking of a similar project and building a knowledge graph for each person.
If you’re interested in “chatting” with your writing there’s a couple of out of the box solutions right now, like Kortex or Reflect Notes. They are AI first note taking apps. I don’t use them out of privacy concerns but if you don’t care that much they might allow you to do what you want. They claim to be E2E encrypted and the AI unable to phone home but these are companies that sprung out of nowhere so I don’t trust they necessarily have done all their homework to actually provide full privacy.
Alternatively there’s an Obsidian plugin that I believe allows you to do such a thing as well with local LLMs if you wanted to which is the privacy first way to this. I’ve just moved to Obsidian from Capacities so I have yet to try it out as I’m still setting up my vault.
Privacy first is my only path. There are a lot of privacyless solutions for this, and they’re all dead to me. The obsidian route is pretty cool. Personally, I don’t care to chat with it, but I like the auto-tags and auto-summaries.
Looked through the plugins and found this: https://github.com/niehu2018/obsidian-ai-tagger-universe
I think it would be interesting to have some kind of global archive. Even if descendants don’t care “now” has the potential to be the beginning of the best documented era in history. Historians would kill for photographs by random average people from any other time.
A lot of people thought that that’s what the Internet would be, but that’s obviously not the case. And I know the “right to be forgotten” is a thing, and deservedly so, but at some point you’re throwing out the wine with the amphora.
Doesn’t archive.org provide that?
In theory yes, but not a lot of people are uploading their family photo albums AFAIK.
No, we do have that. Social media is a gold mine for analysis, both for modern sociology and for future archaeology.
Yup. My parents aren’t even in ill health, let alone dead, but we recently took all the old VHS tapes, including a lot of OTA recordings, and a significant number of DVDs, and dumped them. Recordings of talking with relatives got digitized, same way you’d keep family photos.
I have no expectation that people keep my junk. I’ll pass on a handful of stuff like identifying photos of people and places, but nobody wants or needs the 500 photos of my cat. Even I don’t want that many, but storage is cheap enough that I don’t bother to delete the useless ones.
but nobody wants or needs the 500 photos of my cat
You only have 500 photos of your cat? Is your camera broken? Got the cat yesterday?
I’m trying to curate a few hundred photos for my kids. I’ve written a couple of bios of relatives. I’d like to record something like a story for them. If they want to trash it, that’s fine, but at least there will be something meaningful for them if they want it.
Assuming it survives the climate wars. 🫠
My wife’s parents recently passed. It took months to slog through their stuff and my wife was over it only weeks in. She dumped so much but constantly fights with herself for both taking more than she wanted/needed to and yet less that what she feels she should have. We’ve told our daughter multiple times “our stuff May mean a lot to us, it doesn’t have to mean anything at all to you. If you don’t want it, never feel bad dumping/selling/letting it go.” Out of all the stuff we all collect in life just by living, barely anything has any sentimental value.
On one hand I’ve got a huge collection of photos and albums I’ve taken and collected. I’m trying to clear some out as I go… but I’m not looking forward to that process when my parents go. My dad’s an avid photographer and I know he has a few hundred thousand photos, most of which are near duplicates and he rarely cleans them up.
Just think. At least you can sell off those nick-nacks. What value is there in digital goods you don’t want?
Nobody wanted my grandparents collected crap. Or their photos. Or their books. I tried giving them away. I tried consignment. I tried posting them on Facebook. Most ended up in a landfill.
Hadn’t thought of it like that. I wish I could at least donate my digital library, though.
Yeah - I’m totally for full, real, actual ownership of digital stuff, and we should be able to give it away.
But I’d be surprised if my kids would be interested in more than a tiny fraction of it. Or anyone else, for that matter.
Pretty sure theyd love a literal metric shit ton of free and cracked content that fits ontop of their pinky nail.
My kids aren’t really interested in the movies I like. They actively avoid the music I listen to. I’ve gotten them copies of the books I love and they give up after a few pages. They get bored with the games I played as a kid.
My dad loves Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the Whole Earth Catalog, and Bruce Springsteen. I do not. If he wills me his copies, I will keep some out of guilt and then my kids will have to throw them away.
Thanks to capitalism, you don’t own most of that “digital legacy” and do not have the right to bequeath or transfer ownership for the vast majority of it.
You can take ownership of a lot of it. Thanks to GDPR, major platforms offer ways to export data like photos, videos, activity on their platforms, messages etc. Store locally first, avoid over reliance on online platforms for safekeeping your data.
Also, we need to fight to keep ownership of digital media while we still can. Buy movies and music on physical media so they keep making them. Buy physical books. Buy from DRM free platforms like GoG. As convenient as it may be, avoid over reliance on streaming services.
And of course, make backups of anything you care about. Only you can keep your data safe. Online services will only keep your data as long as they can exploit it to make money.
I’m just trying to figure out a way to keep my 20+ tb of Linux isos curated and still accessible.
I flat out told my family “when I die, just burn it all down and buy basic consumer stuff.
There’s no way my tech would survive for more than a handful of years without a proper sysadmin, and the entire thing would be two dead HDDs away from total data loss.
I hate how true this is.
Who wants to inherit my lemmy comments?
I’ll inherit yours if you want to inherit mine should I ever die first
We could make like a death webring.
Deal. Let’s setup dead man’s switches that will DM our passwords to one another if we fail to log in for a week.
Send me your passwords. I’ll notify you when either of you stop commenting for an unusually-long period of time.
I plan on being dead then, so do what you want with my digital wake.
This is something that I’ve really been thinking about lately as I get older and my kids start to grow up. I’ve got 60TB+ of digital data, including all my families history of photos and videos digitized which are backed up to 3 separate cloud services, onenote filled with information, password managers filled with logins and details, etc, along with my Steam/Xbox/Playstation/Epic/GOG/etc accounts with 1000+ games on them.
I’m tempted to make a website/app to try and tie it all together in an easy way tbh.
If you do, make sure you build in a note taking/comment feature so they can track how its changed from what you’ve documented.
backed up to 3 separate cloud services
Why so many?
I already pay for storage for one of them for other reasons (M365), but I much prefer Google Photos as a service, especially for sharing photos and albums, so I pay for that too. The third is just some crazy good deal with “iDrive Photos” where it’s $5/year for unlimited upload from my phone haha.
Also in case anything happens to one of my accounts, especially since one is tied to my Xbox account and I have kids.
Gotcha, and yes, another friend of mine uses iDrive for its insane deal!
My digital legacy is going in the dumpster, unless somebody figures out how to break encryption that I’ve never shared the password for.
Probate can figure out the rest.
Someday the hashes will be cracked.
It’ll be possible. Whether someone will take the time and cost on are another question altogether.
Share me it, ill tell my ancestors theres valuable secrets hidden within and theyl crack it with their quatum computers.
You’d be very disappointed. Most of it is stuff you can get off usenet yourself, and the rest is documents and pictures nobody cares about but me.
I’m lucky
I have no children, and never will
My family and I aren’t close
My fiancée and I met through the erotic content that I create, and all my friends are well aware of it
My image has already been shared far and wide (without my permission), so that ship has already sailed
I’ll be dead, and nobody will be worried about my digital legacy whatsoever
I know, however, that I’m very much the exception and not the rule
A long time ago, I had the idea for a startup to keep digital material, including accounts, passwords, old documents, etc. in a digital vault that would be released to the next-of-kin when someone dies. It would also convert documents to newer formats so your old unpublished WordPerfect novel could be opened and read by the grandkids (should they choose).
Problem is, nobody would (or should) trust a startup with that material. This is stuff that should be around for many decades and most startups go out of business.
Bitwarden does all that. If you pay the subscription you get a GB of storage and delegate emergency access to other people.
Does Bitwarden have emergency delegation now? I’d been waiting for it
At least for the 2 years I’m using it
This could be a non-profit funded by participants and government grants.
This is stuff that should be around for many decades
Should it? 99.99% of my email doesn’t need to be around for more than a few days, let alone decades. And that number will only go up when I’m dead. Really important stuff, like ownership titles, is on file in paper here in my house and with the relevant title agency.
A couple years ago, I would have agreed. Most of our email is junk. But nowadays, you can have an LLM digest and summarize it for you. That could also be a service the legacy system offers. Grandkids can just ask for a free-form search term without having to wade through everything.
“You can’t remember their favourite song, so you try to login to their Spotify account. Then you realise the account login is inaccessible, and with it has gone their personal history of Spotify playlists, annual “wrapped” analytics, and liked songs curated to reflect their taste, memories, and identity”
Instead you could track your listening habits on ListenBrainz. In doing so you safeguard yourself from Spotify ever restricting access to your data, data which they consider theirs. For ListenBrainz of course you must be willing to share your data freely, but it will be for the benefit of all, whilst if you don’t it will only be used for the benefit of Spotify corporates. You’ll help facilitate a healthy online music ecosystem, because people can built apps on top of the ListenBrainz dataset. You can get recommendations from algorithms of your choice instead of having to rely on Spotifys algorithms.
Not working for Listenbrainz in any way, just an enthousiastic user that plugs it when he sees fit :)
In 2017, I helped develop key recommendations for planning your digital legacy. These include:
- creating an inventory of accounts and assets, recording usernames and login information, and if possible, downloading personal content for local storage
- specifying preferences in writing, noting wishes about what content should be preserved, deleted, or shared – and with whom
- using password managers to securely store and share access to information and legacy preferences
- designating a digital executor who has legal authority to carry out your digital legacy wishes and preferences, ideally with legal advice
- using legacy features on available platforms, such as Facebook’s Legacy Contact, Google’s Inactive Account Manager, or Apple’s Digital Legacy.
Books, games, music should be willable, but they are not. That we allowed ourselves to reach this particular spot is just sad.
My plan is: baleted
I am putting it on my will that before I die all my social media has to be marked as being one of the first really stupid AI Agents.
