On March 7, 2007, I tweeted—though it wasn’t yet called that—for the first time. I remember feeling like I was late to the platform: If I understand how member ID codes work, I was the 817,268th person to sign up.
I didn’t really figure Twitter out until some point in 2008. Once I did, it became one of my primary modes of communcation. I had loads of fun and my share of glory. Early on, for example, TechRepublic named me as the #1 techie to follow. (I can’t prove it, as any evidence long ago vanished from it website.) I came up with the idea for TWTRCON, a conference about using Twitter for business that drew the likes of MC Hammer and Martha Stewart as attendees. And then there was Animoji Karaoke, the Twitter fad I launched.
Over the years, I pretty much accomplished everything I wanted to on Twitter except hitting 100,000 followers, a dream that seemed within my grasp until I was almost there and my count began to slowly roll backwards. But from the start of the Elon Musk era, using Twitter—I’m done with calling it “X”— has felt like habituating a once-wonderful restaurant whose new chef has been intentionally poisoning the stew.
As Musk wrecked the joint, I tweeted less and less, until my feed consisted of little more than sporadic complaints about Twitter and heartfelt salutes to recently-deceased celebrities. Even tweeting links to my own stories felt increasingly pointless: the site sends few clicks nowadays, which would seem to belie the theory that it’s some sort of essential news source for hundreds of millions of people.
In 2024, Musk’s escalating use of his own account to spread hate and misinformation has been appalling and embarrassing. So has has Twitter’s pivot to being a nearly official arm of the Trump campaign. Election Night broke me. Yet there was one glimmer of heartening news: Just as I was deciding to stop tweeting altogether, a huge percentage of the people who’d kept me clinging to the site were embracing Bluesky, a social networking upstart that’s far more like the Twitter of yore than Musk’s dumpster fire is. This sudden talent migration has been head-snapping and exhilirating.
Instead of lurking on Twitter, which I thought would remain tempting, I’m using an excellent app called Openvibe—I wrote about it here—to smoosh Bluesky, Mastodon, and a dash of Threads into one experience. It’s an infinitely better place to spend time than what Elon hath wrought. Here are links to where you’ll find me these days.
Now, some of the folks who are part of the Twitter exodus are removing all evidence they were ever there by deleting all their tweets. I have no plans to go that far. With rare exceptions, I think everything should remain on the internet forever, with as few broken links as possible. Then again, I also don’t trust Elon Musk to preserve my history. I mean, doesn’t erasing dormant accounts in bulk sound like a genius idea he’d come up with?
Which led me to wonder: Could I make a public collection of my tweets available?
I could—and I have. Twitter has long offered a tool for downloading a browser-based archive of all your activity. It’s pretty cool, actually—it lets you peruse all your tweets from the privacy of your own computer, and there’s a built-in search engine that’s radically better than anything on Twitter itself. It even retains Twitter branding: Musk never got around to X-ifying it.
So I grabbed an archive of my entire Twitter history, figured out how to remove elements such as DMs, and am making it available at Technologizer.com/twitter. It’s not perfect. For instance, links I shared don’t unfurl into cards (one of Twitter’s best features, until Elon decided to ruin it). My replies are in there, but you’ll need to click back to Twitter to see the tweets that prompted them; retweets look kind of like they did back when they involved pasting the original tweet into one of your own. There also doesn’t seem to be any formal way to link to a specific tweet, though there’s an easy workaround.
Flaws and all, this archive is mine. As long as I remember to pay my hosting bill, it’ll remain available no matter what further indignities transpire at Twitter. It’s nice to remember my presence there the way it once was It represents 17 years of my life, and amounts to a public diary of sorts. I’m sure I’ll refer to it periodically, and if I’m the only one who ever does, that’s fine. Still, I do hope that I inspire other folks to liberate their own tweets while it’s still possible. If nothing else, everyone should file theirs away on a hard drive for safekeeping.
One other thing: When you download your Twitter archive, it includes a folder with all the images you’ve ever shared, back to when the platform introduced native image hosting. Using my Mac’s Quick Look feature, I turned mine into a video. Watch all 12,608 images flash by—it’ll take slightly over 13 minutes—and you’ll get as clear a view of the inside of my brain as I ever intend to give anyone. Seriously: An LLM trained on this stuff would render me obsolete.