Migrating my Twitter posts to Bsky

I joined twitter all the way back in 2010, and it helped me make friends in a new city. It helped me create a surrogate family of people I like while I was pursuing my PhD, and more than anything the word of mouth got me a lot of freelance work.

But it's been a while since it has been of any use, and the dumpster fire only started burning brighter as Elon took over... Honestly for more than a year I've been wishing for a way to shift my twitter archive to bsky.

When Marco had shared the Twitter to Bluesky tool sometime earlier in the year, I'd given it a try and it failed for me. Even as recently as early last month I'd tried again with a fresh download of my twitter archive and gave it a spin, and I came across errors which I didn't have the time to troubleshoot.

So in mid - October, as I came across this request on the timeline, I offered to beta test:

Is there anyone who’d like to beta test our new tool that lets to port Tweets to Skeets?

Requirement: At least 1000+ tweets made over Twitter. The more tweets account will be more applicable.

Why we are trying to beta test this? • To test how much heavy data that our tool can proceed.

Comment!

— Ankit Bhandari (@anku.bsky.social) Oct 22, 2024 at 11:31 AM

Porto is available as a chrome extension and it was a pretty smooth process for me to migrate about decent chunk of my total tweets. Porto is kind of a black box, but definitely the easiest route if you don't want to bother with command line. (Neither of the tools migrate post that begin with @ or are replies) -- which is a pretty good compromise I felt.

Last week I revisited Marco's Twitter to Bluesky tool and noticed a new update that now allowed importing reply to yourself - which meant I could port some of the threads - specially with art. So I started the process once again to try the tool, expecting to be met with similar errors, but this time I had the bandwidth to try and troubleshoot issues. Funnily, it started without a hiccup -- except when it hit the first issue. The blob size limitation:

so trying out @marcomaroni.it's twitter to bsky importer and noticed a bunch of tweets failing, because "the blob is too big" it seems. file is 1.02mb but max size is 976.56kb.

can @bsky.app allow bigger blobs please... 1.05mb should be good. lol.

— The Doctor (@lucidillusions.in) Oct 29, 2024 at 4:13 PM

There was a very easy hack for troubleshooting this, I just went into my archives and resized all the images which were greater than 1MB and made the file size smaller. Another cool thing about this tool is you can set a start time - so the upload could start from the file that broke the process rather than from the oldest tweet. (p.s. you might want to do this before you start the process for a smoother experience)

Of course I did manage to hit the rate-limit, so after waiting for a day to begin the remaining migration, few hours of upload later:

alright~ I think finally @tweet.lucidillusions.in has all the possible posts I could have ported with the current tools. pretty glad quite a few of my long threads (with art) is now available here.

Really hoping, the retweets of others + replies starting with @ ports in some future update of tool.

— The Doctor (@lucidillusions.in) Nov 1, 2024 at 11:36 PM

I plan to revisit these tools in a month or two when one can also upload videos from archive and update the archive - and I guess I'll update the blogpost too.

Note: everytime you run a tool, there's a duplicate copy of the tweet that's there in your PDS, but if you're scrolling the timeline, you only see the latest version of it (I feel that's a pretty cool design of BlueSky)

As of November, now that twitter has introduced the update to their block function - I felt it was the perfect time to delete all the tweets, and leave a pinned tweet informing how someone can reach out to me. Came across this tool on the timeline - and as I write this post, it has managed to delete half of my tweets. Here's the link if someone else in interested.

While i don't plan to delete the account, and don't want to make it private, this is the next best thing - will leave a pinned post asking people to reach out to me on gmail.

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— The Doctor (@lucidillusions.in) Nov 4, 2024 at 4:38 PM

Note: Twitter locked me out and needed me to reset the password after about 100,000 tweets were deleted. So the plan is to request for a new aarchive and delete the remaining tweets next week.

Update: Nov 8. I finally got to download a new copy of my archive, so I could delete the remaining tweets. And of course twitter has some random bugs...

I cannot see a single tweet in my profile, but obviously twitter doesn't agree...

now need to figure these "hidden posts" -- any suggestions @jayispainting.earthskyart.ca?

#TwitterSaga

>

I opened the archive and noticed a handful of tweets that were posted in the community, which I have deleted. Planning to wait a week or two and then request for a new archive, and might need to manually delete them. Will update once the process is completely done.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who has made it possible for us to backdate our migrated twitter archive! And hope this post helps some of you to migrate your twitter archives as well.

p.s. there's also a paid service to help port your posts.

With BlueArk, you can migrate your tweets from X/Twitter to Bluesky quickly, securely and with the original date of each post. We preserve your stories, your media and your most relevant content on a new platform, without losing anything along the way. 🪽 blueark.app/en-us/

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— BlueArk Global (@en.blueark.app) Oct 19, 2024 at 1:43 AM

p.p.s. Found a script that removes likes: you can check it here

Please Note With 1.94 build update, imported posts will look different. Unlike earlier backdated posts, now they are shown the date they were imported on and a tag informing you of the supposed date it was imported from.

📢 1.94 is rolling out now (3/5)

Some people have been using an import tool to bring over their old posts from other social networks. To avoid confusion caused by old timestamps, we’ve added a new visual tag to imported posts.

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— Bluesky (@bsky.app) November 20, 2024 at 5:41 AM

It's an intereseting choice, but I wish we could have had the post dated ones, and a tag informing when it was imported.