Collection of helpful tools for leaving Twitter, enhancing the Twitter archive, deleting your data and moving over to Mastodon.
Feel free to suggest other tools by creating an issue or pull request.
- Use and enhance your Twitter archive
- Back up information not included in your twitter archive
- Mastodon
- Clean up your Twitter profile and DMs
Download your Twitter archive in your account settings. Here are some tools that can help to enhance the downloaded archive or make better use of it.
twitter-archive-parser is some python code to parse a Twitter archive and output in various ways. Takes your archive and converts it to markdown with embedded images, videos and links. Replaces the obfuscated t.co-links with their original links. Comes with a second script that can help you downloading the original size of the images you've posted.
Your Twitter archive does not include tweets you bookmarked. get-twitter-bookmarks intakes JSONs of your bookmarked tweets and saves them in a markdown file. You need to be familiar with using your browser's dev tools in order to collect the JSONs as they are not included in the official Twitter archive. The script's author has also written a short tutorial on how to collect everything you need.
twitter-archive-browser lets you browse your Twitter archive and bulk-delete tweets in a certain timeframe or containing certain keywords with your browser's console.
The easiest way to export your twitter lists is by using Tweetdeck and following this guide.
Your Twitter archive does not contain information about your followings, especially not their profiles' bio or websites. Download this information in case you want to stay connected outside of Twitter or follow their blog. Twitter Followings OPML Export helps you to get websites and RSS Feeds of the people you follow on Twitter.
Luca wrote a script that can export all your bookmarks as a JSON.
You first need to collect JSONs of your bookmarks which then can be converted to a Markdown file with the help of this Python script. The instructions and a link to the script can be found here.
Tools that match your Twitter followings' accounts with their Mastodon account(s) and enable you to bulk-follow all of them.
- Debirdifiy authorises with your Twitter account and scans your followings' accounts (display name, bio, website, pinned tweet) for Fediverse account names
- Fedifinder works just like Debirdifiy but results may vary between the two services. Give them both a try.
- Movetodon scans your Twitter followings' profiles just like Fedifinder and Debirdify but lets you selectively follow their respective Mastodon account right outside of your browser without the need for a .csv download & upload
- Twitodon takes a different approach by authorising with both your Twitter and Mastodon account and display people of your Twitter followings who have done the same
Who To Follow runs locally in your browser. First it collects all your followings, then looks for all the people your followings follow and sorts them by who's followed the most.
Followgraph does a similar job but was a bit quicker in my tests.
I don't suggest or even recommend deleting your Twitter profile as this makes your handle (the @username-thingy) available again for anyone to take over. If you want to leave Twitter and clean up behind yourself it's a good idea to first inform your followers where else they may be able to contact you. Also it is better to leave the account active but - depending on your likes - delete some or all contents. Find some recommendations with increasing "severity" below.
The easiest way to quickly prevent new users, search engines and other crawlers to read your content. Your followers will of course still be able to read your profile's contents. Your bio will still be visible to anyone.
To prevent (some of) your followers from reading your past tweets, soft-block them by going to their profile, blocking and (if you wish) unblocking them again. For a large follower count this may be rather time consuming so you could use an automated tool like Redblock.
Update 2023-10-12: Semiphemeral does not work any longer because of Twitter's API restrictions. However, deleting your Tweets by hand in your browser is still possible and therefore you can automate this task. Luca Hammer wrote a script that does exactly this.
Semiphemeral is a hosted service (though you could also set it up yourself) that connects to your Twitter account and automatically deletes your old tweets, except for the ones you want to keep. Can also be used to delete all of your DMs - though that will only delete them on your end.
Keep in mind that there are limits to the number of tweets and DMs Twitter exposes via their API. Without academic access you can only retrieve and therefore delete the last 3200 tweets and 30 days of DMs.
In case you have more than 3200 tweets there are some paid tools but I am not comfortable sharing them here because I haven't tested them (yet).
There are services like the Internet Archive that anyone can use to create snapshots of webpages - and yes, that includes Twitter profiles. Getting a profile page deleted from the Internet Archive takes some steps on its own and I published a step-by-step guide on Twitter and Mastodon.