I Added a Twitter Archive site to My Instagram Archive site
I started using Twitter at SXSW in March, 2007, because all my friends there were using it to coordinate what they were doing that week. After the week was over, I found it was a great way to keep in touch with the people I met there. I was no stranger to online social media; I started using Usenet 20 years earlier, in 1987, when I started working at AT&T and got access to the nascent net. I met my wife on Usenet in 1990. So while I initially resisted Twitter, SXSW turned me around on it, and I quickly became an avid participant.
And I continued to be an avid participant for most of the next 16 years.
By the end, I was getting a little tired of it. I had accumulated a list of people I was following that was slightly too large for me to keep up with, and it started to feel like the tail was starting to wag the dog. So when Racist Spice bought the company, it was like he did me a favor in giving me the opportunity to burn it to the ground and start over somewhere else.
I could characterize the people I followed on Twitter into a few categories. There were my initial follows, the people I met at web conferences like SXSW over the years; that overlapped to a large extent with people I knew in previous years from the early days of blogging, so I kind of treat them together. Then there were the journalists and political posters I started to follow at some point. Some of them were prolific posters, and a few posted so often that I eventually had to unfollow them just to keep from feeling overwhelmed. More recently, two other communities that I started to follow were film photographers and experts on Ukraine. It was a great way to keep up with what was going on in the world.
A few years ago, I set up an account on Mastodon. I participated sporadically. When Twitter was set on fire, I moved the effort I had been putting into Twitter over there. Of the four communities I mentioned, the photographers made the most effort to move to Mastodon, so the majority of the people I follow there are photographers. A few of my OG follows from blogging and conferences and web stuff have moved, but really not that many. Journalists and politicos have largely stayed on Twitter, although there are a few who have jumped into Mastodon with both feet. And Ukraine? With one exception, a guy in Canada who posts a lot of translated stuff from the Ukrainian armed forces, none of them moved. I miss the people who haven’t moved. I tried to read Twitter sporadically after I stopped posting there, particularly through lists made up of the communities I mentioned, but when Twitter turned off API access for third party clients like Tweetbot and Twitterific, I stopped. Having to read Twitter through their own site is a freaking nightmare. I don’t know how anyone puts up with their terrible interface.
When I stopped posting to Twitter, I downloaded the archive of my posts that they offered. Much like Instagram, they have a lot of information about you, but don’t share the stuff that other people have created in response. So the archive lacks most of the context. They do include the number of retweets and likes each post got, which Instagram doesn’t include, but nothing about who did them. There is a bit of context in that quote tweets are identifiable by the fact that they end with a link to the original tweet, and that reply tweets include a link to the tweet they’re replying to. So that’s something, and it’s better than Instagram’s petulant insistance that they own the community aspects of your presence. One other thing that’s nice is that for shortened URLs, they include the original URL in the data, so you don’t have to contact Twitter’s services to decode them.
Prominent members of the web dev community that I’ve folllowed over the years have always made the point that you should post your content on your own sites. In that spirit, and in the understanding that Twitter may not continue to exist in its current form forever and all that effort would be lost, you can see all my posts there at https://tweets.thereisnocat.com/.
Posted at 1:00 PM