Stressing The Protocol

I don’t expect people to fawn over my old tweets. Old tweets are not designed to be looked at in aggregate.

But when I heard last week that there was a tool that could upload your old tweets to Bluesky, gradually, over a months-long period, I was extremely curious. After all, the reason a lot of people are worried about shutting down their Twitter account is that they don’t want to lose their creations. With that in mind, finding a way to keep them online on a social network—any social network—seems desirable.

Do you trust some random new service to handle all your tweets in a mass exodus? If so, BlueArk is available.

But I had a lot of questions when I saw the service, called BlueArk. Do I really want to hand this data to a random third party? I mean, these tweets are public, but am I tempting fate by giving this much control to a random third-party service? Would Elon figure out a way to make this service unviable? And how annoying would it be to import … checks notes 106,000 tweets? (Whoa, I really devoted my life to this thing, huh.)

Fortunately, I had options. As Andy Baio pointed out soon after, there were some existing scripts from folks on GitHub to do this very thing. Marco Maroni developed X/Twitter To Bluesky, the one I ended up using. It’s somewhat imperfect, but workable.

One of the problems I ran into was simply due to my prolific nature. I had so many tweets that my export file was two gigabytes in size and the data was split up over two files, which the script did not account for, which meant that my tweets started in 2016, rather than 2009. I had to make a couple of tweaks to make that work. And currently it runs into an issue where it occasionally hangs on an item with seemingly no rhyme or reason, with no way to account for that. I added a delay to the script to make it so that any tweet that did not get pulled within two minutes got lost to history.

At this point, there are so many that every shred of paper isn’t going to make it.

The legend lives another day.

But thus far, my insane project has been working. I’ve imported over 5,800 tweets to this account. Oh sure, the gem-to-dud ratio is extremely low. There will only be one “Every headline on the internet,” but now I can reference it on Bluesky rather than on Twitter.

I also used CloudFlare workers and some clever redirects to ensure all my old Bitly links work, as do links to old ShortFormBlog posts.

The question you may ask yourself is this: Why? Why put yourself through this just to keep your brain nuggets accessible at all times? For me, I think a big part of it is to say that I was one of the first to really try this, even if it is ultimately of low value to me.

I mean, my early posts are not exactly gems. My main account started as a way for me to take part in Twitter chats (my original account, which was just me talking to my friends circa 2007, I gave up), and for a time, it was a link feed for ShortFormBlog. Not exactly high art there.

But I eventually built it out after (I guess, a dozen years and reams of disruption later, I can say this now!) I did a job interview with BuzzFeed and someone during the interview expressed the concern that my social media presence was too tied up in my side project … which (and this is the reveal) they wanted me to stop doing to take the job. (I never worked there. Honestly, it was for the best.)

Immediately after that, I converted the account into a personal profile. So I guess I can directly blame my Twitter addiction on BuzzFeed.

Anyway, importing these tweets as skeets just highlights how quickly life changes but also how similar my strategies are. I still shout out new Tedium issues the same way as always. But there are things I was doing in 2016 that I’m no longer doing.

But I just want to thank the Bluesky team for making this possible, even if the result is going to be messy and the links are all going to be broken. I think it matters that we can port our content in this way.

Do I think you should do it? Unless you’re dril, probably not. But the nice thing about the internet is I’m not making the decisions for you. That’s all on you. And you can shape your experience however you’d like.

Let me tell you though, the fact that you can even theoretically do this is friggin’ awesome.