Meme image of Walter White and his wife from Breaking Bad standing in front of a massive pile of cash. The text at the top reads "TWITTER IS BREAKING BAD" The text at the bottom reads: "HOW MUCH OF OUR RELATIONSHIPS AND DATA DO YOU THINK WE CAN PACK UP AND TAKE WITH US?"

Your Twitter “Go Bag”

In all the great spy and heist movies and a number of gangster films, characters in the stories that may need to drop everything at a moments notice and disappear “in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner” often have a “go bag” typically filled with jewelry, bundles of cash, and a variety of passports and associated identification.

The Heat’s Around the Corner

Given the seismic shifts in the social media space these past weeks since Elon Musk took over at Twitter, it looks like some people will wish they had their proverbial Twitter go bags ready. 

After reports of an ultimatum and mass exodus tonight at Twitter Headquarters and Musk posting some not so funny remarks, some people are preparing for Twitter’s addition to the IndieWeb wiki’s Site Deaths page.

But after sharecropping content for them for up to 16 years and creating networks of friends on the platform, how can your retain as much value from the dying site as possible? What would you put in your go bag and how can you do it quickly? 

Obviously, doing a full data export would be a wise move, but recent reports are that it is taking three or more days for those to process and get sent out. (What if it doesn’t last that long?) Worse, it’s not always the sort of usable data you’d want to have when moving somewhere else. What can you do to save as much usable data as quickly as possible?

Below are some quick and dirty tools for stocking your go bag:

https://listfollowers.com/ will access the Twitter API to pull out your followers, followees, and mutuals (people you’re following who follow you back). You can save these as a .csv or .json files for use or import to other tools.

 https://opml.glitch.me/ will query Twitter and provide you with the web pages and feeds of your friends so that you can follow them in a feed reader. It also provides you with an .opml file which many feed readers can import so that you can automatically follow all your friends by other methods.

https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ is a tool for tracking where your friends have decamped within the Fediverse. It will allow you to extract the Fediverse handles (where available) of your Twitter followings or list members and import them into Mastodon to follow them all at once. If this is your exit strategy, be sure to add your own Mastodon address to your Twitter profile or bio to help others find you as you all orderly file to the exit while the building burns down behind you.

https://pruvisto.org/debirdify/ is another tool for moving some of your Twitter data over to Mastodon or other parts of the Fediverse.

https://bridge.birb.space/ is an instance for helping to bridge the move from Twitter to an ActivityPub-based site (like Mastodon).

https://twitodon.com/ is yet another tool to help you find your Twitter friends on Mastodon.

One Last Heist

Of course if things continue to devolve, but you have some extra time for one last go, consider carefully your exit strategy and why and what you hope to get out of the experience. 

Many have left to go to Mastodon. I’ve been collecting some rough notes under the tag “Twitter Migration” which may be helpful here. While Mastodon represents a step up in terms of choice, freedom and flexibility over Twitter, I know we can still do better for both user interface as well as a more humane social media experience.

My personal suggestion for a quick and dirty escape is to go IndieWeb and have and use your own domain name and website to become your personal home on the web. If you’ve got the technical chops, our friends at IndieWebCamp have some help and pointers waiting for you. If you’re stuck and have some means, Micro.blog is a great way to go IndieWeb and own all your content while still being able to interact with a large number of other IndieWeb sites as well as Twitter and Mastodon if you choose. Plans there are $5 a month and are an exceptional deal. 

Other options are to move to other blogging platforms like Tumblr, which has shown interest in adding IndieWeb building blocks, WordPress.com, and Blogger.  

Other options?

What export options have I missed? (Keep in mind that we all know there are lots of command line options that dovetail with APIs and require advanced knowledge of programming. We’re specifically looking for quick and dirty options that are immediately usable by the masses, preferably with directions or suggests as to what can be done with the outputs.) 

What other options are there for easy migration that still allow people to stay connected with their friends and family? Hopefully it’s obvious that suggestions for moving to other corporate social silos that practice surveillance capitalism where this viscous cycle will happen again within a decade are now moot. 

Published by

Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

13 thoughts on “Your Twitter “Go Bag””

  5. Today’s Mastodon/Twitter update. The site fediverse.space came out a couple days ago with a nice interactive visualization of the network of Mastodon instances. In this post Miguel Guhlin points to a Mapstodon, from comeetie (“at the link, comeetie also shares the notebook behind the app if you are interested in the code”). In other Mastodon news, here’s a toot bookmarklet you can use while browsing; also, your ‘Twitter go bag‘ to make your escape; also, “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product,” goes the saying, and as Michael Veale says, “right now, it feels like we’re waiting to find out our product status.” Though that said, “Even if you’re paying for the product, you’re the product,” Cory Doctorow wrote on discovering Apple privacy violations. Meanwhile, Dave Truss reflects on fifteen years of Twitter. Finally, after a week on Mastodon Zoe Williams asks, “Could this be Twitter without the toxic slurry?”

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  7. Charlie has been showing more interest in stuffed animals recently and has been very affectionate toward them, giving them hugs and snuggling them. This week he started carrying around a stuffed sloth almost as large as he is. Some times when he gets home from daycare, Sloth is the first thing he picks up.

    Charlie also has a new thing where he takes his sippy cup and hits it against your cup and says “Cheers!” He’ll also do it with whatever food he and you have in your hands at any given time.

    I was a solo dad for a few days this week while Amanda was on a work trip. Totally doable, but it tends to crowd out the possibility of doing anything other than the baseline during that time. Each time I solo parent for a few days, I have a new appreciation for single parents.

    I had to work on Saturday for a quick turnaround project. Thankfully that only happens once a year.

    After I published last week’s post, I spent some time outside sowing some flower seeds that need cold stratification. Then I came in and made dinner. Sitter was sick and we couldn’t find anyone else, so we canceled our dinner reservations for Amanda’s birthday and instead did “NY Steakhouse Night” at home. A 2.5in NY strip cooked in the sous vide and seared in butter, creamed spinach, hash browns, and a bottle of French wine. It was great!

    First big freeze of the season froze all of my jalapeños before most of them turned red, so I had to pick them all and throw them in the smoker to make chipotles, even though they were still green. They seemed to turn out pretty well after 6.5 hours in the smoker, though I haven’t eaten any yet. The plan is to pack most of them in adobo sauce.

    IndieWeb stuff:

    I’m @cagrimmett on Mastodon.

    I installed ActivityPub on this site so you can follow my blog posts at @cagrimmett wherever federated posts are fetched.

    I joined the IndieWeb Webring and set up my representative h-card on my homepage.

    https://indiewebify.me/ is a helpful tool!

    https://github.com/Ryuno-Ki/webmention-tools allows you to send webmentions from the command line.

    You can also send them with curl!

    More to come.

    Two project ideas:

    I like the idea of BookWyrm, but I like keeping my books all on my own site. Perhaps I write a dedicated ActivityPub feed for my books page? Something like @books@cagrimmett.com. What If I make this into a WordPress plugin so others can use it, too? Make book lists and notes available via RSS and ActivityPub. Maybe it extends the existing ActivityPub plugin. We can call it the IndieWeb Book Club.

    A good project for learning how to make WordPress blocks: An easy block to allow WordPress site owners to add a representative hCard to their site. It should optionally support all hcard properties.

    Relevant links:

    about representative hcards: http://microformats.org/wiki/representative-h-card

    hcard properties: http://microformats.org/wiki/h-card

    A couple thoughts on the Twitter debacle:

    If Musk were quietly, diligently making changes internally for the first month and announcing occasional improvements after they were shipped and stable, we’d all have a different outlook and maybe give him the benefit of the doubt. Instead, he chose mass firings and daily public spectacles. Makes me think the real reason that Tesla and SpaceX are so loved is because of incredible PR and comms teams keeping his nonsense reigned in. People he doesn’t have at Twitter.

    How can the remaining staff at Twitter get anything done amidst such radical uncertainty?

    Chris Aldrich on your Twitter Go-Bag.

    Scrape useful metadata about your Twitter archive.

    This week I learned there are tools run by OpenDNS, Google DNS, and Cloudflare DNS where you can request that they update their DNS cache for a particular domain and record type.

    Google’s for 8.8.8.8: https://dns.google/cache

    Cloudflare’s for 1.1.1.1: https://cloudflare-dns.com/purge-cache/

    OpenDNS’s: https://cachecheck.opendns.com/

    Two cocktails we’ve been enjoying this week:

    Scotch hot toddy

    2oz Scotch

    1 tsp honey

    1 star anise

    3 cloves

    1 lemon slice, juice squeezed into the cup

    Top with boiling water

    As an alternative to the scotch toddy, I subbed in an amaro for the scotch, which was pretty good!

    Bobby Burns

    1oz Scotch

    1oz Sweet vermouth

    1/2oz Benedictine

    Stir in a mixing glass with ice, strain into a coupe.

    Like this:Like Loading…

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  9. If you want to go the WordPress route, I would highly recommend a Reclaim Hosting account – they have easy almost one-click installs of WordPress and many other applications (C Panel). Their support is fantastic too. It is only $45 a year.

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  12. Pingback: Week of November 14 – Chuck Grimmett

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