Twitter will remove inactive accounts after December 11th, which means you might soon be able to get that username that you couldn’t because it was taken.
The rollout will be over “many months,” so it will take some time before a username is made available, Engadget reported.
Twitter is doing this cleanup in a way to “present more accurate, credible information,” which users can rely on.
Engadget explained that this might be helpful for those trying to search for a user or their tweets, without having to go through thousands of random or inactive accounts.
It also means those accounts belonging to deceased users or those in extended hospital stays might be deleted. That would mean that their tweets will be long gone. With respect to this aspect, Internet Archive software curate and digital preservationist Jason Scott launched an iniative to preserve tweets from deceased loved ones. Called Twittering Dead, the project will archive the accounts of deceased individuals.
At the moment, there is no way that an account can be memorialized.
“We do not currently have a way to memorialize someone’s Twitter account once they have passed on, but the team is thinking about ways to do this,” a Twitter spokesperson told The Verge.
You can be a part of the project by filling out this Google Form.
