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.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.Looking up posts in the Bluesky API
Install the
atprotopackage, construct a client with your username/password, then call theget_post_threadmethod with yourat://URI.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.