Memorials are a first-class Seldeo feature

Why we built memorials in from the start

The single most under-served part of every mainstream social network is grief. When someone dies, their profile is either frozen behind a moderation flag or quietly deleted, and the friends and family who used that profile as their main channel to talk to that person are left holding a URL that no longer loads. That's not a memorial. It's a broken link.

Memorial support on Seldeo is not a checkbox for compliance with digital-legacy laws. It is one of the reasons we started the company, and it drives real design decisions across the app:

Posts and stories persist by default. You cannot memorialise a feed that only exists for 24 hours at a time.
Accounts have shape (real name, real photo, real memories), not just an identifier.
Comments and reactions are threaded and preserved so a memorial page reads like a guestbook, not a timeline fragment.

The help article on memorialising an account is the operational how-to. This post is the why.

What a memorial account is on Seldeo

A memorial account is an account whose owner has died and which has been converted, via a family request or a designated legacy contact, into a shared, contribution-enabled memorial page. It stays reachable at the same URL and username the person used in life. Signed-in family and friends can:

Read the person's public posts and comment on them.
Add photos and voice notes to a dedicated In memoriam section, moderated by the memorial's designated contacts.
Leave reactions and short messages that everyone visiting the page can see.
Watch a chronologically ordered "life timeline" the contacts can curate — birthdays, weddings, graduations, the trips the person shared.

Once memorialised, the account is:

Read-only for its original owner's authentication method. No one can sign in as the deceased. No new authentication methods can be added. The old sessions are terminated the moment memorialisation is completed.
Cleaned of sensitive UI. No login history is shown. No activity signals ("last active…"). No location metadata. No monetization eligibility banners. No advertising panels.
Excluded from friend suggestions, ranking, and any algorithmic surfacing. Memorialised accounts show up only through direct search, direct link, and past interactions.

The contact model

Every memorial has one or more memorial contacts — people with the authority to accept or reject a submission to the memorial page, curate the timeline, and, if the family requests it, request permanent deletion.

Contacts are named in one of two ways:

In life, by the account owner. In Settings → Legacy → Contacts, an owner may designate up to three people as future memorial contacts. Nothing is shared with those contacts until the account is memorialised. When memorialisation begins, the named contacts are notified and invited to accept the responsibility. Any of them may decline; a memorial can operate with any subset of the named contacts.
After death, by verified family. When no legacy contact has been named, a next-of-kin can submit a memorialisation request with proof (a death certificate or, in some jurisdictions, an obituary and a signed affidavit). Our Trust & Safety team reviews the submission, and, once verified, invites the requesting family member to be the memorial contact.

The account's data is never handed to any contact. Contacts get curation rights — the ability to approve, hide, or delete contributions and to edit the timeline — not full access to the person's private messages, notes, or account history. The private material either stays private (in the case of messages, which remain end-to-end encrypted and undecryptable to us) or is deleted at memorialisation (in the case of drafts and activity signals that are not the person's public expression).

Contributions

The heart of a memorial page is the In memoriam stream: photos, voice notes, and short written memories submitted by friends and family. Contributions:

Are attributed to the contributor's Seldeo account. Anonymous contributions are not accepted; a memorial that welcomed anonymous contributions would become a spam target.
Are held in a review queue until a memorial contact approves them. This is not because we distrust contributors; it is because grief communities attract bad actors, and the review queue is a modest speed bump that keeps the page peaceful.
Can be hidden by the contributor at any time, and deleted by the memorial contacts.
Are dated with the contribution's own timestamp, not the person's biographical dates.

We support voice notes on memorials for a specific reason. Reading a friend's voice note in a memorial guestbook is a different weight than reading a written one, and the friends and families we tested memorials with almost always noted the voice memories as their favourite feature.

What happens to messages

The person's end-to-end encrypted direct messages remain undecryptable to us and to the memorial contacts. We do not have a key to those messages, and memorialisation does not create one. If a family member wants to access a person's messages, the material path is the same as for any end-to-end-encrypted messenger: the physical device that held the plaintext.

We know this trade-off can be painful for families. It is not a policy choice we've made lightly. The alternative — a back-door key that decrypts messages under a defined process — would fundamentally weaken the privacy of every messaging session on Seldeo, including the ones the deceased conducted in confidence with people who are still alive. That is a price we are not willing to pay.

Permanent deletion

At any point, the memorial contacts (with unanimous consent, if there is more than one) may request permanent deletion of the memorial account and all its content. The request is honoured within thirty days, aligned with the same deletion SLA that applies to normal accounts (see the Delete account help article).

What we're still building

Anniversary notifications — an opt-in, low-frequency reminder to memorial contacts on the person's birthday or the anniversary of their passing.
Physical keepsakes — a print-ready export of the memorial's photos and contributions, for families who want a hard-copy record.
Multilingual memorials — contributions in a language other than the memorial's primary language surfaced with clear labelling and, optionally, machine-translated captioning.

If you need this feature now

The help centre's memorialise an account article covers the exact steps. If your circumstances don't fit the standard flow, email memorials@seldeo.com and a member of our Trust & Safety team will help. We answer that mailbox every business day, and often on weekends.

Memorials are one of the reasons Seldeo exists. We treat them with the seriousness they deserve.