Logan Five (aka John)I have to admit, I have never met so many nice, caring, funny, interesting people as I have on Mastodon. What a waste of time Twitter was. I mean this is also wasting time, but in a much more positive way!
Semi Sentient AI Cooling Water@loganfive I thought I had an anxiety disorder. Turns out I was just using Twitter. Mastodon is a lovely, undemanding space.
Finch@sentient_water @loganfive Every time I check in on Twitter now, I have to quickly stop as it raises my anxiety levels alarmingly. I've found that basically not going on there is one of the best things I can do to help my mental health.
@Finch @loganfive Exactly this! It's so much more noticeable now that I'm calm & happy how it truly messes with my mental health. Mastodon serves every need I wanted out of #ThatShiteBirdSite but none of the tracking, ads, bigots & Nazis.
@sentient_water @Finch We’re on the same page.
Grinning Cat 
@sentient_water @Finch @loganfive Extra favorite ⭐️ for #ThatShiteBirdSite!
I left my #Twitter account up as an empty shell with a Mastodon redirect. Wanted my join date to remain visible. "Elon Musk's sociopathic shitshow doesn't get to profit from my tweets anymore."
We'll see how long that profile is allowed to stay up... 
(And yes, I used my Twitter archive and a deep delete tool.)
@sentient_water @Finch @loganfive
Tools like TweetDelete that are only given access to your account and told “delete all my tweets” can only access the last 3200 tweets (deleted or not), similarly to how your timeline won’t show older tweets. That’s a limitation of the Twitter API.
With your downloaded #Twitter archive (anyone leaving the #BirdSite should get theirs first!), a website or app can delete ALL your tweets.
That’s a paid feature for many tools, so… (cont.)🧵
@sentient_water @Finch @loganfive
To delete all of my ~6000 tweets, I thought I’d see if I could do it without paying for a premium feature.
YuriTweetDeleter ( https://github.com/fellipec/YuriTweetDeleter ) is a Windows app that lets you use your Twitter archive to select and delete unwanted tweets, even old ones.
Unfortunately it uses tweets.csv from the OLDER format of the Twitter archive, not the tweets.js JSON file I got.
(cont.)🧵
@sentient_water @Finch @loganfive
https://tweetjstocsv.glitch.me/ (web page that does everything locally, client-side) will convert the .js file to a basic CSV file… which is still in the wrong format.
(Updated instructions; I did it the long way.)
Specifically, three things are wrong with it:
- The timestamps are in the wrong format
- The columns are in the wrong order (might not matter)
- The column labels are wrong.
Fixable with regular expression search-and-replace.
(cont.)🧵
@sentient_water @Finch @loganfive
On my Windows box, I used the amazing Swiss army knife plaintext editor Notepad++ ( https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ ) to do the regex replacements.
Find what: ^\w{3} (\w{3} \d+ )([0-9:]+) \+\d+ (\d+),(\d+,)
Replace with: $4$1$3 $2,
Also change “created_at,id,full_text” at the beginning of the first line to “tweet_id,timestamp,text”.
(Geeks: I know, those regexps aren’t 100% general or bulletproof, but they’ll do.)
(cont.)🧵
@sentient_water @Finch @loganfive
YuriTweetDeleter has rough edges. It throws lots of exceptions; hit “Continue” and it’ll still work.
You’ll first need to “Authorize with Twitter”. Log in to the Twitter page you’ll get, copy or type the resulting numeric code into YuriTweetDeleter, hit Save.
In the main window that appears, hit Load Archive and choose your hacked CSV file. You can leave the text filter blank; just choose an appropriate date range, then hit Select Tweets.
(cont.)🧵
@sentient_water @Finch @loganfive
Once you have tweets selected, Delete Tweets does what it says, sending the delete requests to Twitter one by one. YOU CAN’T UNDO THIS.
(If you have #OldTwitterPosts you want to copy and repost somewhere else, it’s probably easier to do it before deleting them. The archive can still let you see what you tweeted; not sure how it handles pictures or links.)
Hope this helps someone; glad to hear about better ways to do this!
@grinningcat @Finch @loganfive This is interesting but a bit beyond me. I just downloaded the archive then deleted my account & waited the 30 days. I was assuming this meant they were all deleted?
@sentient_water @Finch @loganfive
Deleting your account altogether is even better!
(They say you can create a new one with the same name, after the 30 days, if you’re concerned about someone else grabbing the name and impersonating you.)
@grinningcat @Finch @loganfive Reassuring & good to know about firing up with the same name. I don't think it's likely tho.