Archived Tweets

I finally got around to importing my whole historical Twitter archive (just my own original tweets, not replies or retweets) into this WordPress site as a proper Custom Post Type:

https://chriscoyier.net/tweets

I haven’t added it to the navigation or anything else on the site yet. Not sure what I want to do there. Just feels good having my own data. The Tweets show up in the Jetpack-powered search too, which I’ve found nice.

I used this and hacked it up a bit to fit my needs, and so I didn’t have to leave it as a permanently installed plugin.

It’s coming at a weird time, with quite a few people “going back” to Twitter.

It’s actually called X now; I’m aware. It’s named after the hand gesture you do when Elon Musk asks if you’d like to come over for a dinner party: 🙅‍♂️

Casey Newton just saying, “Look, I tried, but X is where the action is,” and John Gruber being like, “Take a whiff; the Elon stench is gone.”

I understand both of those things. I honestly really like both Mastodon and Bluesky, but after years and years, the fun and engagement have never reached old Twitter norms. And I miss that!

But it also feels like you have to ignore a lot of bad behavior to use a platform that Elon Musk not only owns but literally bought to be his megaphone and power center. Do people not remember the horrible shit he would do on a near-daily basis? Tasteless, dangerous, and often both.

I can remind you! Here’s just one straw from a haystack.

Elon loves him some Trump. They are big buddies! Elon shouldered up to Trump for the power, and Trump gave it to him. Elon decided to take this power (granted to him by a scepter touch? apparently?) and created a real government organization called DOGE, which is a joke name, named after a joke cryptocurrency that is inherently corrupt. DOGE’s job was to make the government “more efficient” by eliminating funding for tons of stuff. One of the things they did was entirely get rid of the USDS, which was the organization that did incredible work, ya know, making governmental websites far more efficient. Now, our government makes racist video games on the web instead. Not kidding. That’s a fucking game on our own government’s website, where you play a white dude who walks around a page collecting brown people to deport.

I find it more than a little hard to swallow.