[DiggyJohnson]

Cynically, as someone who isn’t on twitter, I have to ask whether that history is as important as you’re making it out to be?

You, yourself, the human being are the real legacy of your past. I feel like your history on twitter pales in comparison. And I know it might not feel that way if you’ve been on the platform for so long.

What actually matters?

[Alphaeus]

There's a lot of information that was only ever posted to Twitter (whether you're a fan of that or not). Even if only 0.1% of it was valuable, that's still an incredible wealth of information lost. Think about how many pages across the internet cite tweets, how many links would be dead if everything was purged.

[bombcar]

Those, too, will be lost in time, like tears in rain, eventually. Archive the tweet or otherwise duplicate the information if it's important.

Even if for nothing other than all accounts are banned, eventually.

[hakfoo]

This demonstrates a real issue: even information you "own" and feel like you can pull the plug on, really becomes part of a global discussion that can only be lessened by removing it.

A tweet you posted 10 years ago might be irrelevant noise to you, but someone else may have quoted it, assuming it's archived on a "too big to fail" platform, effectively eternal, and then from there it spreads into other conversations.

Who's responsible for deciding how and when to archive that?

Aside from that, there's huge historic value in the mundane in the aggregate. We have fine-grained knowledge of the rise and fall of cultural trends and figured-- the sort of stuff that will never make a "formal" historical record but will richly flesh out future understanding of early 21st century life. Much as many of today's historians will get more value out of a Tudor era garbage dump than a perfect statue of Henry VIII, social media will be an unimaginable treasure trove for 2500's historians.

[allarm]

Is there a way to archive the whole twitter history? I think there was a limitation on a number of tweets you can export using their api.

[simonw]

You can request an export and get emailed a link to a zip file full of JSON.