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/ Treasa Ní Chonchúir

Import all the things!

Last year Elon acquired Twitter and began running it into the ground, so I & stopped posting there. A few months later I also imported all the posts from my Mastodon account. Here are a couple of examples:

This is a static website, and the static site generator I use is home-grown. So in both cases I wrote an importer from scratch. I really half-assed it, to be honest. Neither importer handles media, so any photos in my posts are missing. I told myself I’d get back to that but I have yet to.

The other day I decided to have a go at importing my Bluesky and Threads posts as well. I started with Threads. I’ve only posted there a couple dozen times, so I figured it wouldn’t be that hard.

It turns out you can’t even download your Threads archive without also downloading your Instagram archive, and it was very easy on the same page to also request an archive of my Facebook posts. The archives of all three Meta services are very similar, which I suppose shouldn’t be all that much of a surprise. So instead of writing a Threads importer, I wrote an importer that handles all three archives. It handles media too. Here are some examples:

Having written several importers like this over the last year, here are some disconnected observations about these services’ archive formats:

Twitter

Meta

Mastodon