Preserving social media
Social media is modern culture, but it’s very difficult to preserve. Social media platforms strongly resist being archived or preserved.
I spent two years working on this problem while at the Flickr Foundation, where I focused on preserving a single social media network.
This topic has my notes on preserving social media, including my current personal practice.
Meeting my younger self
I reviewed 150,000 fragments of my online life, and I was reminded of the friends I found, the mistakes I made, and the growth I gained.
Hard problems in social media archiving
Preserving social media is easier said than done. What makes it so difficult for institutions to back up the Internet?
The Internet forgets, but I don’t want to
I don’t trust platforms to preserve my memories, so I built my own scrapbook of social media.
10 articles
Creating a personal wrapper around yt-dlp
I’ve written a new script which calls yt-dlp with my preferred options, so I don’t have to copy my configuration across different projects.
The surprising utility of a Flickr URL parser
I made a library that knows how to read lots of different forms of Flickr.com URL, and I used
hyperlinkto do it.Saving your alt text from Twitter
Twitter’s archives don’t include the alt text you wrote on images, but you can save a copy with their API.
How to do parallel downloads with youtube-dl
Downloading the AO3 fics that I’ve saved in Pinboard
A script that downloads the nicely formatted AO3 downloads for everything I’ve saved in Pinboard.
Saving a copy of a tweet by typing ;twurl
Reversing a t.co URL to the original tweet
Twitter uses t.co to shorten links in tweets, so I wrote some Python to take a t.co URL and find the original tweet.
Getting a transcript of a talk from YouTube
Using the auto-generated captions from a YouTube video as a starting point for a complete transcript.
A script for backing up Tumblr posts and likes
Since Tumblr users are going on a mass deletion spree (helped by the Tumblr staff), some scripts to save content before it’s too late.
Backing up content from SoundCloud
9 notes
Get the avatar URL for an Instagram page
Use
gallery-dl --get-urls "https://www.instagram.com/{page_name}/avatar".Ignore AI upscaled YouTube videos with yt-dlp
Filter for formats that don’t include
-sr(“super resolution”) in their format ID.Using the Tumblr v1 API doesn’t require auth
You can get information from
https://{username}.tumblr.com/api/read.Downloading avatars from Tumblr
There’s an API endpoint that lets you download avatars in a variety of sizes.
Get the avatar URL for a Bluesky user
Make a request to the
app.bsky.actor.getProfileendpoint, passing their handle as theactorparameter.Bitly will delete your account if you don’t use it for three years
Google will delete your account if you don’t use it for two years
Open a Safari webarchive from Twitter/X without being redirected
Disabling JavaScript when you open the webarchive file will prevent you from redirecting you to twitter.com.
My config for running youtube-dl
The flags and arguments I find useful when I’m using youtube-dl.