I started using Twitter in 2008. It was a very different place from what it is today. There were no bots, managed accounts for celebrities or marketing team controlled corporate accounts. It was a place to connect with other humans, leave a witty musing or just generally be silly. It still had the “micro-blog” spirit.
Of course, that changed over the years. All social media platforms changed. They all slowly moved toward marketing platforms. Around 2013, I shutdown my Facebook account, but I kept on with Twitter. Not as much as the early days, but I still liked the platform.
With the sale of Twitter in 2022, everything changed. My friend taught me a great term the other day: Enshittification. This perfectly sums up the changes to Twitter.
Much like the rest of the world, I moved away from Twitter to Bluesky/Mastodon. I don’t post that often, but it’s nice to have a place when I feel the urge.
That was all well and good until Twitter changed a policy which really pissed me off. All tweets were walled off behind authentication. That is, you needed to log in to Twitter to read ANY tweet. I don’t want that. I want anyone to read my inane musings barrier free!
I don’t think there is a way to backdate posts in Bluesky or Mastodon, so I needed somewhere else to keep my 10+ years of tweets. So, I made a little thing on this site. It’s an archive of my tweets by year with a do-dad to fetch a random tweet.
There is a link to the tweets in the menu bar as well.
Have a look.