It’s been a few years since I used Twitter routinely, having primarily moved to micro.blog a few years ago, and while it was allowed, simply cross posting over there for the followers I had who remained. The last post that went over there was about the 2024 Super Bowl.

Today, given the current ownership, the direction the platform has gone, and the November 15 deadline where xAI can by default without your consent hoover up your data for training, I have exported my data, deleted all my messages, removed my profile photo, bio info, and locked the account. I would delete it outright, but I don’t like the idea that the user name (which matches my domain name) could be recycled and used by a new user. I also did the same for my wife’s account.

I used Micro.blog’s Tweet archiving service that simply allows you to build an archive for your entire corpus of tweets. I have nearly 30,000 tweets from 2007-2024. It seemed to build it all without a problem. The archive is public, you can see the “Tweets” link in the navigation for my site. I’m not saying it’s worth reading, but I enjoyed scrolling through the first year of mine, which date from a time I had a different job, we still had snowy winters, adventures with our past dog (she passed last year), and predating our children.

I think it’s inspired me to export my Tumblr data and my old WordPress site, both of which date to that “early-aughts” time period.

Speaking of Twitter-like services, I’ve observed a massive influx of users from Twitter to Bluesky. I’m briandigital over there, if you prefer. I syndicate my posts from this site there. I ran a service on my Twitter account (before the process I described above) to find folks I followed had migrated to Bluesky, and found a bunch of folks. I ran the same service on my wife’s account two days later, and I feel like there were even more people that we had in common just 48 hours later.

Bluesky is my best hope for a site the general public can join to recreate some of the positives of the Twitter of old. I love my artsy, techie people on micro.blog and Mastodon. But for sports, or breaking news, or general cultural events, it just doesn’t compare to the golden years of Twitter. Let’s hope news and media start migrating soon.