EX-Twitter: A Half-Day-Only Project

I’ve decided to exit Twitter. I’m going to leave the profile alive, so that strangers can’t easily claim my user name, and/or hijack my identity. [This isn’t a challenge - don’t take it as one.]

I’ll be shifting to some other platforms – you can find them linked on my homepage if you’d like to reach out.

Why make a change?

Personally, I don’t like the current politics of the service. I think it’s best for democracy when editors have some self-restraint. This includes media owners, human editors and algorthimic editors (e.g. feed designers).

If you’re going to be a digital town square, don’t let your town square be taken over by robofacists with megaphones – because people will leave the town square. I’m going to put my presence and focus somewhere else.

Although it’s been in the thoughtworks for a while, it was triggered today by the change in X-Twitter’s terms-of-service – they’re going to start training a bunch of grok language models on my provided content / data. I’m not comfortable with that, so now is the time to exit.

The goal: leave Twitter, reasonably preserve my public Twitter history (not that it’s a seminal work), without relying on twitter to maintain link continuity.

Discovery

  • Looked at using a few different scripts to do some porting
  • Pretty straightforward to download the overall archive (required under GDPR)
  • Pretty straightforward to use a script to modify the archive from its default structure
  • Pretty complex to migrate to hugo for useful publication here, so will need some sort of scripting to modify.

What I’ve done

Here’s what I’ve done:

  1. Requested, waited, then downloaded my twitter archive
  2. Cloned this great parser into my own git instance so I have a record of it
  3. Use the parser to generate a library of monthly markdown – note that there was some complexity in (my cluttered) mac install, with python3 vs python2 and a ton of extra config to figure here
  4. Optional (cleansed out some non-value-add tweets / content without useful context)
  5. Optional (cleansed out the public profile on twitter – nothing serious to worry about)

My personalisation

Here’s what I did next:

  1. Constructed some markdown files to make it legible using a script [1]
  2. Did a one-time media shift, so images are presented properly.
  3. Put the tweets here in my blog.
  4. Updated my social presence icons on the left panel. Particularly, you can now find me on Bluesky

Learnings

  • Some HTML and markdown expertise is valuable here
  • When you download your archive, you don’t get a full archive of the things you’ve retweeted (it retains snippets only). Your content is preserved in full, however.
  • You get a download of all your PMs – probably a warning here for public figures who didn’t think ahead about assumption of privacy ten or twenty years ago

[1] A script I used to make the markdown legible for hugo - don’t judge me

This post was edited after publishing for brevity and levity. Also, changed how it worked so that I could regenerate the twitter archive properly.