From now on, my tweets are ephemeral. Here's why I'm deleting all my old tweets and the AWS Lambda function that does it for free.
Stuff...
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Interesting. I have archivist mindset and obsess about continuity. So I'm doing basically the opposite of what you're doing. For example, I set up IFTTT to post my tweets into Blogger so it's better archived by year and month. This also explain why I have so many old stuff that not being used anymore at my home :(
Great idea! I wish there were better ways to view old tweets :(
You can download all your tweets and search for it locally.
I have completely forgotten what some of my old tweets might have been. I'm pretty sure young Ben was pretty sensible but I really can't remember.
I may just have to make use of this myself.
You know there's a drunk tweet in there, somewhere. :p
Thanks for this.
I've been off Twitter and Facebook for more than a month and although I definitely do not miss FB, I miss Twitter for exactly what you said: keeping tabs on what's happening right now (though sometimes I end up bookmarking links on Twitter because I don't have time to read them :D)
I have way too many tweets (around 12k, I'm not kidding and my account is 9 years old). I'm going to consider everything you said and probably start deleting the first few years. By memory I have no idea what the heck I had been yapping about in 2009 so why keep it there?
On the technical side: thanks for reminding me that I need to get more acquainted with Lambda.
On the personal side: I would love read more about your experience about being a digital nomad and a nomadic developer. I also think it would contribute a lot to dev.to, I guess most people here are not digital nomads :-)
I'm a remote developer. I donated most of my clothes twice already but I can't find myself to go full Marie Kondo on my things. I'm definitely aware of this issue and after having been in the same city for a few years now I look around and see that I own too much stuff.
I find that my perspective is clearest when I'm about to leave one location for another, and when I've just arrived somewhere new. The experience of change really forces you to consider what (more than just tangible things) is really necessary and helpful to your own life.
I blog infrequently about the way I live at herOneBag.com :)
Thank you!
I am a big fan of your writing and storytelling. Excellent article Vicky! I love your philosophy on Twitter and the reasons you have to erase old tweets. After reading it, I feel like all tweets should have an expiration.
Unfortunately, it means that people who have liked or retweeted things you have posted now lose access to that information. I followed one person whose Twitter feed was a gold mine of information and who decided to delete their entire Twitter account. That was a great loss to the software development community. He's back on Twitter now, but I don't follow him anymore.
At risk of sounding cavalier, this is an excellent example of why information controlled by other people/organizations/companies is not a reliable personal bookmarking service. :)
Thankfully there (1) are (2) options (3) for automatically saving things you like on Twitter to accounts in your control. With a little ingenuity, you can also roll your own program to do this (maybe not with Lambda, though).
That said, still my favorite and most reliable form of saving information is taking notes on paper. Writing also helps you internalize the information, so that's a double win.
Not just information but conversations. I have several friends who I used to enjoy a conversation with on social media, which are a strange one-sided affair now they've deleted their accounts. It almost feels like a betrayal that someone gets to veto a shared experience like that.
You make a really good point on the perspective of old tweets. So many celebs, YouTubers, etc that I follow end up having a story on them because of a tweet that they may not even remember, nor agree with now because, yes, we change. All the time.
I really enjoyed your concept. I'd love to be able to search my tweets by month or year to see if I should stick a fork in your code and help myself 😅
Great Post!
Hey Ryan! If you download your twitter data at the link I mentioned, you'll have a local archive of your tweets that you can browse by year and month. I'm glad you like the post!
Awesome! Thanks so much!
Personally I enjoy looking back at old stuff occasionally, and it comes really handy when I can just search for that memory "from somewhere in 2013 that I don't recall precisely but I tweeted about it for sure".
But if I were to do it still, the Mastodon instance Pawoo.jp I use has a feature to expire posts built-in.
This is a very cool idea and for some, likely a much more reasonable one than simply leaving Twitter entirely. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you!
This is fantastic Vicky, thanks so much!
You're very welcome!
Great one, also the reasoning totally makes sense!
I've written a simpler script in python to do the work: gist.github.com/miglen/56ee2bc8a4e...
Also, you may specify a list of Id's to keep.
This is awesome, thanks!!!
I am thinking of doing the same in more places (facebook, instagram for example). Instead of just deleting, backup and delete "just in case"