Doug LarkinAug 20, 2023
Julian Day
I'd like to be snarky about this, but it's sad to watch #Twitter's slow death. That stupid, beautiful site has been vital to me in my development as a poet. And as someone who can probably be described as Very Online, I used to find the site good in a bunch of other ways as well. But at some point, you have to go. He's deleting old tweets to save a bit of money on storage space. And meanwhile, all the tweets on the Arab Spring, the Mumbai attacks, etc, are gone. They're just...gone.
Aug 20, 2023 at 2:01amWeb
Show threadAlyson DeckerAug 20, 2023
@juliancday @BlackAzizAnansi This is crazy.
Show threadMeguey-shaped bundle of bitsAug 20, 2023
@juliancday This is a sad and clear example of the museum adage that "digital lasts forever or for 10 years, whichever comes first." What a true loss.
Show threadJulian DayAug 20, 2023
@megueyb Remembering how people would always say that once it's online, it's there forever, though in recent years we've been seeing just how true this is.
Show threadMeguey-shaped bundle of bitsAug 20, 2023
@juliancday It’s another case study in how history gets processed and tidied up. SO much of the last 20 years has been documented extensively by regular people with cell phones, and that will be largely lost to future researchers. 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, all the grassroots movements since 2008. Just an incredible amount of the most ephemeral information about how people lived, the parts that don’t wind up in textbooks or other ‘official reports’, gone.
Show threadCrewman Six, Snack Viking 🪓Aug 20, 2023
@juliancday @megueyb
The only truth in the webiverse:
The things you desperately wish would disappear? Those last forever. The things you're looking for, that you depend on finding, that runs half the world? Those vanish into the ephemera, lost forever.
Show threadCindyGAug 20, 2023
@juliancday Occupy Oakland 🙁
Show threadRichard W. Woodley ELBOWS UP 🇨🇦🌹🚴‍♂️📷 🗺️Aug 20, 2023
@juliancday
Interesting that soon after #Zuckerberg launched #Threads to go directly after #Twitter's customers #Musk converted Twitter to #X to go after F#acebook's customers. Hopefully they will destroy each other without having to enter a cage to do it.
Show threadAlexanderMarsAug 20, 2023
@the5thColumnist @juliancday I don’t know, the schadenfreude junkie in me would have been really happy to watch them(hopefully) kill each other.
Show threadRichard W. Woodley ELBOWS UP 🇨🇦🌹🚴‍♂️📷 🗺️Aug 20, 2023
@AlexanderMars @juliancday
Seeing them alive physically but dead financially would be more rewarding.
Show threadAlexanderMarsAug 20, 2023
@the5thColumnist @juliancday *looks inward in deep reflection, realises personal truths and understanding. Nah, in this case I’ll take the depraved bread and circus.
Show threadladyterukiAug 20, 2023
@juliancday : my friend took her own life in 2010 and it's been great comfort to go back to her account and read her tweets at times, or for anniversaries. Her last tweet was to me.
I just went and check, for now they're still up. But this is probably just a matter of time, and it's very upsetting to me.
Show threadJulian DayAug 20, 2023
@ladyteruki Apparently it was just media tweets. I'd suggest archiving the important stuff, maybe in the Wayback as well as locally.
Show threadladyterukiAug 20, 2023
@juliancday : I've tried locally but I'm not very computer literate. I'll try to look into the Wayback Machine, thank you :)
Show thread@infosec_jcp 🐈🃏 done differentlyAug 20, 2023

@ladyteruki @juliancday

Link : https://archive.org

Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine

Show threadladyterukiAug 20, 2023
@infosec_jcp @juliancday : thank you :) The problem is more to have an actual archive to provide.
https://help.archive.org/help/how-to-archive-your-tweets-with-the-wayback-machine/
How to archive your Tweets with the Wayback Machine – Internet Archive Help Center

Show threadMorgan PeyreAug 20, 2023
@ladyteruki @infosec_jcp @juliancday you can archive any web page (but you will have to do it one by one).
Go there : http://web.archive.org/
Type (or copy-paste) the address of the page you want to save
Press Enter (on desktop) or ✔️ (on mobile)
If the page has already been saved in the past, a calendar with the dates of the existing archives will appear. You can click on one to see the archived version.
If not, a Save button will appear (see attached screenshot) instead. Click it, then click "Save page". Wait a bit. You're done 🙂
Wayback Machine

Show threadcuan_knaggsAug 20, 2023
@ladyteruki would you want a local version or would you want them in something like archive org and is it something you would like help with? there are tools out there for doing this kind of thing but the tend to be quite technical and often require some programming
Show threadAT-AT Assault 🏳️‍⚧️Aug 20, 2023

@ladyteruki @juliancday

Download/archive those tweets ASAP

Show threadJulian DayAug 20, 2023
@atatassault @ladyteruki Got 'em back in April, and then again in July. I knew the site wasn't long, but I was sort of hoping it was one of those things about the internet I'd be wrong about (I was nonplussed the first time I used the web in '94).
Show threadAmanda BeeAug 20, 2023
@juliancday I started autodeleting old posts a few years ago, but we had something complicated and wonderful and also not great, but also great. It is sad to see it go.
Show threadI am Jack's Lost 404Aug 20, 2023

@juliancday

I imagine there go all the news article embeds too... they should have known better.

Show threadfurina 💧⚖️Aug 20, 2023
@juliancday that’s just bullshit at this point
Show threadMA CaitiAug 20, 2023
@juliancday Elmo is literally throwing twitter's legacy and history in the trash. Unbelievable.
Show threadJerameeAug 21, 2023

@MarioMakesStuff @juliancday

I prefer to call him the Muskrat & keep cute little Elmo's name clean.

Show threadDavid W. JonesAug 20, 2023
@juliancday No, he's deleting old tweets so his friends, like Trump and DeSantis will be able to say, "I never said that."
Show threadJordan BiserkovAug 20, 2023
@dancingtreefrog @juliancday There is real precedent for this: "Tesla lawyers claim Elon Musk’s past statements about self-driving safety could just be deepfakes" 😂
https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/27/23700339/tesla-autopilot-lawsuit-2018-elon-musk-claims-deepfakes
Tesla lawyers claim Elon Musk’s past statements about self-driving safety could just be deepfakes

Tesla’s lawyers have attempted to use the ‘deepfake defense’ to discount past statements by Elon Musk about the safety of the automaker’s driver assist software. A judge in the lawsuit said the arguments were ‘deeply troubling.’

The Verge
Show threadDavid W. JonesAug 20, 2023
@jbiserkov
Yes.
@juliancday
Show threadSteve WashingtonAug 21, 2023
@jbiserkov @dancingtreefrog @juliancday If the argument is that Musk’s statements were not actually his, then shouldn’t he have had some responsibility for disavowing them? This is/was a matter of public safety and customer safety, or am I missing something?
Show threadSkrrp Aug 20, 2023
@juliancday oh dear. Someone let him see the S3 bill.
Show threadBlippy the Wonder Slug (MOVED)Aug 20, 2023
@juliancday
The one good thing about Twitter, it honed my brevity.
Show threadKim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷Aug 20, 2023
@juliancday In a way, this is as bad as the burning of the library in Alexandria, and will probably be remembered for as long. Musk has now shown himself to be a philistine as well as incompetent.
Show threadLampAug 20, 2023
@juliancday Wtf
Show threadIan Hecht 🇨🇦Aug 20, 2023
@juliancday That sucks. I'm now very glad I downloaded my archive, even if just to preserve some of those early posts (though if the t.co links are broken, they still won't work properly).
Show threadDec [{()}]Aug 20, 2023

@ianhecht @juliancday
I downloaded my archive, and then I used a Python script to parse all those t .co URLs, save full-size versions of images, etc.

https://github.com/timhutton/twitter-archive-parser

Not sure if it would work properly now. It might run into rate limits.

GitHub - timhutton/twitter-archive-parser: Python code to parse a Twitter archive and output in various ways

Python code to parse a Twitter archive and output in various ways - timhutton/twitter-archive-parser

GitHub
Show threadIan Hecht 🇨🇦Aug 20, 2023
@dec23k @juliancday Does it go back to Twitter to find the original link? If the t.co service is broken for those old links, it might not work even without rate limiting...
Show threadDec [{()}]Aug 20, 2023
@ianhecht @juliancday
Yes, it has to hit Twitter up for pretty much everything, except some of the converting.
As far as I remember, it was very careful about speeding up, then backing off again as soon as it hit a rate limit.
Show threadOfficer-involved poopingAug 20, 2023
@juliancday I'm fairly certain I've seen that the data is there, it's the links that have broken - indicating ineptitude over a desire to erase, to whatever end (it might not be that much data).
Show threadΓιάννης ΕκελδεκερέςAug 20, 2023
@juliancday I don't know... A private company will always do whatever is most profitable in the short term. We should never expect anything more out of them. The corollary is that we never should mistake another twitter (bluesky, threads, facebook or whatever) as a public forum again.
Show threadΓιάννης ΕκελδεκερέςAug 20, 2023
@juliancday I get its importance for you, it has been a very important part of my life as well, but looking back with the benefit of a decade of experience investing emotionally so much in it was a big mistake.
Show threadLewis LuminosAug 20, 2023
@juliancday Damn. I guess the server host finally cut him off for non-payment.
Show threadskryAug 20, 2023
@juliancday That’s just sickening.
Show threadSteven FeldmanAug 20, 2023
@juliancday @cartocalypse Perhaps we invest too much importance in Twitter, we quote it, we research it, we argue about it (myself included). It was a "thing", it became a mega rich child's toy, he broke it, our memory of it will fade and it won't matter
Show threadPetr ŠtědrýAug 20, 2023
@juliancday @Frances_Coppola That is our reminder about our impermanence and the way he runs Twitter (I refuse to call it by the new name) – not as a public resource (e.g. a museum where the exhibits get stored almost indefinitely) but as a for-profit corporation (e.g. a gas station where the items on store shelves get stocked based on what sells best).
Show threadSamAug 20, 2023
@juliancday He doesn't know and doesn't care how other people, that are not him, used Twitter before he arrived. He's ignorance personified.
Show threadBarbaraPittman ☕️💬Aug 20, 2023
@juliancday Even with the ads, I did enjoy it.
Show threadjustintempsAug 20, 2023
@juliancday there was history made on that website, and friendships and communities that might never have existed. What a terrible waste.
Show threadBlueintheSouthAug 20, 2023

@juliancday Yeah, I got in late and still managed to amass over 3K followers somehow, quite a feat for little ole me!

I spent a lot of time muting and being generally disgusted near the end, but quit when Mus(ta)k(e) took over. He's an Apartheid asshole. I've met a few and knew where it was going. It's worse than I imagined .

Show threadLance (Thank you for 11 Views)Aug 20, 2023

@juliancday That's a pretty drastic action. Was there any warning that this purge of old posts was coming?

I quite Twitter after 13 years on the site. I couldn't stand watching the house burn down from within anymore. 😑

Show threadNodamiAug 20, 2023
@juliancday that is digital heritage, digital preservation.
There are some national library projects that have saved some of those tweets. But it depends on each library development policy. The ones I'm aware are the Library of Congress https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-archive-at-the-library-of-congress-2/ and Padicat https://www.padicat.cat/en but probably there are more
Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress | Timeless

An update on the status of the Twitter archives at the Library of Congress.

The Library of Congress
Show threadMichaelAug 20, 2023

@juliancday This is illegal under GDPR laws.

https://www.datenschutz-notizen.de/backups-and-the-right-to-erasure-1434153/

Backups and the Right to Erasure

Discussed many times and yet not less important: In order for processing to be lawful, personal data should be processed on the basis of the consent of the data subject concerned or some other legitimate basis. The same applies if the legal basis ceases to exist. In this case, too, processing must b

datenschutz notizen | News-Blog der DSN GROUP
Show threadtallshipAug 20, 2023

@juliancday

Oh my! That's the funniest thing I've heard all day lolz.

Easy come, easy go! 🤘🤠🤘

Let that be a lesson for all those who swore an oath of fealty to the deprecated, privacy-disrespecting, monolithic silos that has subjugated masses of chattel with their slick and shiney Sunnyvale Syndrome.

They chose the #Borg collective over the #federation.

It's not like #FOSS hasn't always been there for them the whole time...

Because it was, and still is, and will be.

#tallship

⛵

.

Show threadKennerAug 20, 2023
@juliancday make a one hour video and post on Twitter supporting whim and assuring everything will get better
Show threadPRNEAug 20, 2023
@juliancday if it's on a hard drive you don't own you must remember you're an information serf
Show threadLouisa MacAug 20, 2023

@juliancday I thought this might happen, so spent some time over the last few weeks taking screen grabs and deleting.

I'm small fry and not interesting in the grand scheme of things. But still see so much lost

Show threadJulian DayAug 20, 2023
@Changememe I grabbed my archive a month or two back, but can't delete. My time there was too important to me.
Show thread𝔅icyclet𝓽𝓲𝓷𝓰Aug 20, 2023
@juliancday It's Orwell's 1984 basic recipe : erase the past.
Show threadMelindaAug 20, 2023
@juliancday
All evidence of events and social responses just gone? Hope someone has a backup somewhere as future historians will struggle, plus there is the chance that it will be much, much easier to rewrite history.
Show threadApril KingAug 20, 2023
@juliancday I think this is more breaking t.co than deleting, my Twitter archives from that era still have media links that work. But it’s always so hard to tell the difference between incompetence and espionage these days.