Import twitter archive?

Core development Features
#1

I run a private mastodon instance just for myself, and I’ve been thinking about the feasibility of importing all my old tweets from twitter.com into my instance, so that I have a consolidated history. I know there are services which crosspost new posts in both directions, but I haven’t found anything which imports an archive.

Before I start exploring how to actually do this, I thought it might be sensible to get a sanity check. Certainly there’d need to be some rewriting of twitter handles and so on, but are there any ActivityPub-specific pitfalls I should be aware of? Would doing this spam every other server that federates with mine with an unacceptable number of updates?

1 Like
#2

This is discussed over at https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177, but as far as I know there’s no current implemented solution or even a patch for it.

If you are already federating with other instances, if you create the statuses by a regular way (that is, by calling the API and all that), you are going to spam every other server. You could patch some places in your Mastodon codebase to avoid federating status, you can take a look at https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/8427 for some ideas of which parts are those.

Regarding Twitter handles, yes, you have to adapt them somehow, or they will appear as plain text.