I stopped using Twitter last December, but with the news of Twitter is restricting its API I got my butt in gear and set up my personal archive of tweets. I pulled an archive pretty much as soon as the whole dumpster fire started, and thought I would always go back at some point and wipe the account. With Elno’s threat of shutting off free access to the API it meant that apps like tweetdelete.net might go away and I would be forced to remove 18,916 tweets by hands.

I used two different systems. @joeycastillo@mastodon.social‘s Twitter Archive Site which takes your Twitter archive and builds a static Hugo site out of it. I uploaded everything to a subdomain here on my site. It was a pretty painless process. You can see it here: twitter.chadkohalyk.com

I also ran Tweetback, which generates a very pretty Eleventy-based site with a search box. You can see this one at tweets.chadkohalyk.com. One cool thing about Tweetback is it generates some interesting stats from your Twitter archive. Some highlights from mine:

Finally, I used tweetdelete.net to remove everything from my Twitter account except a couple of tweets pointing to my Mastodon presence. You too can join me on the Fediverse:

• @chadkoh@indieweb.social for posts
• @chadkoh@bookwyrm.social for books
• @chadkoh@pixelfed.social for pics

(I am experimenting with a number of Fedi services as you can see)

Unexpected benefit of quitting Twitter

Some people have already raised a number of reasons moving away from Twitter has been beneficial for them (less trolls, less pressure to perform, etc etc) but the one thing that I found very refreshing after 15 years on Twitter was the ability to reinvent myself.

Now, this doesn’t apply to everyone. My Twitter was a personal account, not a professional or topic-themed account. During the 15 years I was on Twitter I went through a number of life phases, eg:

• Had 2 kids
• Lived in 5 cities
• graduate school
• Worked at Apple
• Multiple startups
• Iki adventure (see FAQ)
• Many times moving between Canada and Japan during the pandemic
• and now doing whatever it is you call what I am doing now! 😅

That 15-year-long list of followers and followed are like the strata in the earth’s crust underneath which you will find an ancient, fossilized version of me who is pretty much not the same person at all.

Some people like to wipe their social media every year, or month, or week. I get that now. The chance to “move to a new town” and reinvent yourself is valuable. But it is contrary to the pressures of centralized social media to “build a brand” or “an audience.” So moving to Mastodon full time, following a whole bunch of the same people I enjoyed on Twitter but also a whole _new_ set of cool and interesting people has been a lovely side effect of leaving the Bird behind.