Leaving Twitter

I’ve been a passive user of Twitter for over two years now. My last tweet dates from 8 August 2021. Since the pandemic began, the number of tweets from conspiracy theorists has risen sharply and finally reached an unbearable level for me. I removed my Twitter client (Fenix) from the home page of my phone and ignored Twitter for months. I never really went back. After a while, I did check my timeline from time to time, but that too ended with the third-party client ban in January 2023.

A few months later I started using Mastodon. It’s still a very small community, and so far it has none of the toxicity that X has developed. On Mastodon, I also came across a post describing how to host your exported tweets as your own archive. This is even more relevant as X forces users to sign in to browse tweets since June 2023.

Since I'm seeing a new wave of people saying they plan to leave Twitter, you may like my browser tool that takes the zip file of your Twitter export and returns a zip file of a web site that lets people browse and search your tweets. You can just upload the files wherever you normally host html and it'll work just fine.

https://tinysubversions.com/twitter-ar…

Example archive: https://tinysubversions.com/twitter-ar…

— Darius Kazemi (@darius@friend.camp) June 30, 2023

As I did not like the look and feel of the suggested web application I did a little research and found tweetback. I exported my data from X, extracted my tweets, and published my archive at tweets.davidfuhr.de. I also removed the X widgets integration and replaced the links to my X profile with a link to my personal archive. I’d be happy to see more media outlets join the Fediverse to fuel discussions there and make X less relevant.