Taking my toys back

I’ve not used Facebook meaningfully since 2011, I stopped Tweeting in around 2016 on my personal account (and stopped the @basenotes account when Elon took over), and my personal Instagram has always been sporadic.

So, I thought I’d request my archives from these services, and see if I could convert the output into something I could host myself.

It took around 24 hours for X and Meta to prepare the archives. Using a lots of grep-based finding and replacing in BBEdit, I’ve managed to hack away at the .json file from Twitter into an html list, which I can then style with css.

The result can be seen here, and I’ve really enjoyed looking through my years of tweets. Though many are out-of-context replies which leave me bemused!

It has reminded me of why I used to love Twitter. When I attended a perfume event, or a blogger Meetup, and met someone new - you could follow each other on Twitter and build up real friendships. I miss that. I hope between Mastodon and Bluesky, we can try and get some of that back.