The Twitter Shaped Hole in Our Web

The facist¹ takeover of Twitter has (intentionally?) resulted in the destruction of a large part of our shared internet culture.

I never used Twitter very much during its hey-day, but there’s no denying its impact in our culture. Viral tweets became “real-world” news stories, and it served as a platform for people to connect for both good (Arab Spring) and ill (Gamergate).

Those times are over now, with Elon’s purchase of the company leading to tweets being removed, accounts being de-platformed or abanonded, an influx of right-wing bots and Grok, and a mass exodus of people to other platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon.

Now when I click on a Twitter link from a few years ago, it often doesn’t load or has large parts of its surrounding context missing.

To illustrate this, let me recreate an experience I just had when looking up the phrase “milkshake duck”.

I stumbled across the phrase in this Mastodon post by “like jam or bootlaces”:

I hadn’t heard of a “milkshake duck” before, so I popped it into Google:

Wow, there’s a Wikipedia page! lets see what it says:

Ok, so turns out a “milkshake duck” is a person that goes viral online and is then later cancelled once the internet learns more about them. The phrase came from a tweet in 2016 by a user called “pixelatedboat”.

The first time I went to this page, I missed the box on the right that has a copy of the original tweet. I instead clicked the citation link, trying to get to the original tweet that inspired the phrase.

Great, now we have a Twitter link, with (presumably?) the text of the tweet. Let’s click on it:

Womp womp.

The tweet is gone! Along with any other interesting comments or follow-ups in the thread.

At this point I knew what the tweet had said, but any interesting comments or follow-ups were gone.

So I went to Google to try to find a copy of the actual tweet.

Ok, we’ve got the Wikipedia again, and then some news articles from 2017 talking about the apparently incredibly popular phrase.

Let’s check out some of those articles:

Welp, the Guardian is unreadable, moving on!

Yahoo’s got it! Mostly! There’s a big “not found” message on the embed which might be an image that was attached to the tweet? Or might just be the embed code being broken. Who knows?

The New Zealand herald article about it has the same partially working embed.

I gave up at this point, happy to at least have found the text of the tweet.

Milkshake Duck was a viral tweet that spawned international news articles and a wikipedia article – and yet the original tweet and thread have now been lost, even though it’s only eight years old.

We do have copies of it (like the one on the wiki page that I missed), but without the original tweet we lose a lot of the context surrounding it – the twitter threads, the quote tweets, etc.

My Milkshake Duck quest is just one example, I seem to stumble across a dead twitter thread or account every week or so, most of which don’t have a Wikipedia page explaining them.

Our recent collective culture is being deleted. So, let’s talk about what we can do about it.

Can we preserve old tweets?

Firstly, if you have a Twitter account, I recommend using the built-in archival tools to download a copy of your profile.

There’s been some efforts to archive all of public Twitter, but I haven’t found anything that really collects them all into one place.

I have had success finding things on the Wayback Machine and archive.ph. The latter is what Wikipedia used to archive the milkshake duck tweet (see copy edit note above).

Additionally, I recently read Alex Chan’s wonderful article “Hard problems in social media archiving”, in which she breaks down how she built her own personal social media archive. Her whole blog is worth a read – I highly recommend you check it out!

How do we prevent this from happening again?

Going forward, I think moving your online persona onto a website that you control is the best way out of this. I know it’s not feasible for everybody to do this today with the current state of tooling, but I think it’s a good goal to aim for.

It’s not just Twitter that’s a problem – our “content” is increasingly locked into walled garden websites that are all doing evil shit.

For example, Bluesky is an active participant² in the genocide of the Palestinian people, Substack gives a megaphone to Nazis ³, TikTok is dangerously addicting and currently being gobbled up by MAGA, etc etc etc.

But there is a way out. Making a personal website to host your art, your thoughts, your words, is now easier than its ever been.

Free hosting platforms like Neocities make it really easy to get started. Neocities in particular also has an active community where people share their sites and tricks for making them.

And if Neocities ever goes the way of Twitter, your website is just files that you control, that you can move to another hosting provider as you wish.

If you’re ever in Philly and want to learn how to make websites, come to one of my making your first website events at Iffy Books. They’re usually a lot of fun, and you leave with a working website you can tinker with.

Alternatively, just write me at email@ragman.net or on Mastodon and I’d be happy to try and help.

If you have a website and want to get fancier with it, you can try doing POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). You upload your content on your own website, and then you have code that automatically posts it to whatever social media platforms you use.

You don’t preserve the conversations that happen on those platforms, but at least the original article is yours and can’t be deleted at the whim of an oligarch.

I currently do this with my /notes, where each one gets posted to Mastodon. In fact, it’s basically the only way that I post to Mastodon!

See my write-up here for more info on how to do this. I will say that it takes some programming know-how, but it’s a fun project if you’re up for it.

We deserve better than to have our culture trapped and farmed by these ghouls. I believe that together we can break free, and grow up and over these garden walls.