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There are a few commonly held reasons for using social media. The first is to create an illusion about our lives that's shinier than it actually is. My Instagram account, for example, is replete with pictures of my sweet kitten and my expertly done manicures. In reality, I keep stabbing myself in the leg with my own pointed nails and my cat just tore a hole in my favourite sweater so that she could push her face through the torso.

The second is to remember all the great things that have happened, like graduating or getting a new job or having a baby or taking a record of all the people who didn't write "HAPPY BDAY!!!!" on your Facebook wall when you turned 44.

The third is, often, to commemorate people we've lost: Facebook groups saying a collective goodbye, photos tagged #tbt to drain whatever sadness is left after someone dies, websites we set up for funerals or donations or just a place to dump our memories.

Social networks are not always optimized for the deceased, so someone has come along with a service to create a dedicated social account to remember all the dead people you know. Elysway allows users to make a profile for the deceased, and then allows others to look at it and share memories, photos, and videos. It's a way to interact with your grief on a grief-dedicated platform.

It's a kind of Facebook for the long gone, but significantly more complicated. All Elysway users are called Passengers – they can only see the public information of the cedeased. Then, there are Angels, those who have unlimited access to the profile of the deceased. To become an Angel, you have to ask permission of the Starangel. The Starangel manages the page of the deceased by either creating it themselves of asking another Starangel. Stars, meanwhile, are what they call the people who have died. (You can create your own Star page before dying, to get your own story on record.)

Are you confused? Probably. Death rarely makes sense to the people it affects, but good god, does this complicate things even further than it needs to.

All of this effort seems dedicated to that first use of social media: to create a shiny, safe-for-consumption version of yourself or others in the afterlife. It also would seem to cause more problems than it fixes. Would you want someone else – even someone you love – controlling your image after your death? Who would you choose? Your parents? Your partner?

There are other ways to prepare for death without making it a complicated web of galaxy-linked titles. Deathswitch, for example, is a network that takes in your passwords and other relevant online information – plus a letter from you after you go – that gets sent to your friends and family after you die. The network checks in with you every few months or once a year, and if you don't respond, they send your package to your chosen recipients. It's like a small-scale will that would let your family get into your online accounts after you die. (Maybe you can get your friends to delete your Google searches before your wife finds out what horrors you had been searching.) The only real downside to saying goodbye on the Internet is if you haven't actually died but just forgot to check in with the site. What a shock for your sister if she gets an email with the password to your bank accounts and a heart wrenching goodbye from you beyond the grave.

Social media is an outlet for anything that comes with the human condition. Any feeling, any event, any reaction, any life can be recorded online for us to recall or ignore entirely later. A year ago, a cousin of mine died suddenly and I still see Facebook posts from her friends remembering her. People post old photos and tag her inactive Facebook account. They wish her happy birthday. Everyone is just trying to find another way to remember her, publicly. It's a comfort to connect with her somewhere in the ether in whatever way we can.

That, however, is entirely different than creating a version of her after her death, something you can manipulate the way you want it. There's a difference between remembering someone who's died and who you miss, and creating an inauthentic version of them online that has little to do with who they were and everything to do with how you want to remember them.

Death is inevitable, and there can never be an app or service that will truly help how we handle it. It certainly doesn't mean you should recreate the lives of your loved ones after they're gone. We live on social media now, but that doesn't mean we have to find even more ways to revive those who are gone on an endless loop.

Scaachi Koul is an assistant editor at Hazlitt magazine. Are you trying to sound out her name right now? You probably are. (The "c" is silent.)

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