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Make your own simple, public, searchable Twitter archive

by Darius Kazemi, (source code)

Hello! Hopefully you are here because you want to make an archive of your tweets like this one. There are options for this like Tweetback but you have to have some computer programming knowledge to run that. I wanted to make something very simple. The process for this is:

This even works if you only have access to your website through something like cPanel. Basically if the way you update your website is by uploading files to a web host, then this solution is a good one for you! Once it's uploaded, there is a styles.css file that should be pretty easy to modify if you want to customize things.

Note: your browser will process the whole thing so if it's huge and/or your computer is slow... be prepared to wait a long while. Nothing is uploaded anywhere. You might get a notification that your tab is slowing your browser down. Just wait a while, you'll get an "archive.zip" in your downloads bar. It'll be over soon. Just like Twitter.

In case you need hosting, here is a handy guide written by former Twitter user @ElDuvelle that explains how to get this working via Github Pages! I can't guarantee it works but I thought it was worth linking.

Privacy notice

Known problems

Okay now let's make this archive

(click for more info about one-directory-per-tweet)

Some filesystems (like ext2 specifically) complain if you have more than ~65k subdirectories in a directory, so my original plan of having tweets live at /{username}/status/{id}/index.html (and resolved to /{username}/status/{id}/) doesn't work on those filesystems. Instead all the files live at /{username}/status/{id}.html, so a single directory with thousands of files in it, and you are going to have to provide a .htaccess file or whatever the nginx equivalent directive is to rewrite status/foo/ to status/foo.html. Sorry! This is the .htaccess file I used, if it helps.

Please enter the base URL where this will be hosted. This is required if OpenGraph previews (link previews that unfurl in places like Slack and Mastodon) are going to work properly. So if you want a tweet to live at
https://example.com/mytwitterbackup/USERNAME/status/ID/
, then you'll want the text box to have
https://example.com/mytwitterbackup
in it. If you only plan to host this on your own hard drive, then don't worry about this field. It only matters if you want to share these links online with people.

Now select your .zip file you downloaded from Twitter. Press the "Make my archive" button and the process will begin.