Like many people, I have found zombie Twitter — Elon Musk’s X — to be increasingly unusable for the purposes that originally attracted me to it. Among many other degradations of the former Twitter experience, its algorithmic suppression of posts with news links significantly impedes my ability as a journalist to get a broader audience for and engagement with posts about my stories. This has been a problem for a couple of years, but only in the last month has a viable alternative emerged with the explosive growth of Bluesky. So for now I’ve shifted to that place, where my handle @charliesavage.
This move raises the question of what, if anything, to do about my now-dormant X account. I started posting on Twitter in 2009, and even if a lot of that was just ephemeral blather about sports or whatever, it feels weird to just nuke 15 years worth of posts that also contain discussion of news articles, detailed responses to critics whose attacks are still floating around the web, etc. Someone on Bluesky brought to my attention an open-source Github project, Tweetback, that allows one to post one’s downloaded archives. So I’ve done that here. Thanks to Zach Leatherman, the primary creator of that project, and to my son, a computer science major who helped me fix some glitches when rolling it out. (If you are thinking of trying this, here is the list of little problems we encountered, all of which were quick fixes once recognized.)
This is the next step in the ongoing experiment of stepping away from Twitter/X. I may eventually also delete all my posts there and shut down my account, but for now I’m leaving it up for three reasons. First, this will make it harder for anyone to successfully impersonate me on that platform, a real risk since the destruction of its verified identity system. Second, there is utility in keeping some original posts there to show their context — the downloaded archive does not show other people’s posts I was responding to or other people’s replies to my posts, and it cuts off the back ends of other people’s posts that I RT’d. Finally, there are on increasingly rare occasions still newsworthy posts there amid all the dreck, and having an open account can make it easier to see them.