Upload to the Community Archive!

Towards data sovereignty, and a backup of the twitter canon.

The Community Archive is a public database and API of the full twitter history of everyone who uploads their archive. It is also open source.

We believe there is immense value in preserving the history of subcultures on twitter. While Twitter charges exorbitantly for convenient access to our own data, we are getting people to request and download their data, and upload it to a common archive!

Benefits:

• Preserve the canon of important threads and discussions

• Enable cool applications like:

  • Semantic search over tweets

  • Producing books from tweet collections

  • Dashboards of your interests and takes

  • LLM-based digital anthropology

  • Tracing the diffusion of ideas over time

  • Migrating the canon to alternative platforms like Bluesky

  • And much more!

We've got the archive and API up and running, but that's just step one. Now comes the legwork: we're personally reaching out to old school and central accounts and walking them through requesting and uploading their archives.

If you have any questions or need support, please reach out to me on twitter, and go request your archive!

FAQ

Uploading

• How do I upload my archive?

  1. Request your Twitter archive (you'll need to log in and verify via email)

  2. Wait 1-2 days for the download link

  3. Upload to our archive

  Thank you for your persistence!

• What can I do with it now? For now, only search across all the archives. The plan for this website is to let you upload, and to serve as a dashboard for the effort of gathering community archive. We’re hoping other neat and complex applications will come from others building on this data, or from our own side-projects.

• What about my private data? Your private data never leaves your computer. We only access profile information, tweets, likes, and follows. Our code is open source and can be verified by anyone. For extra peace of mind, you can unzip your archive, delete the data/direct-messages.js file, and re-zip before uploading.

• Can I filter which of my tweets are added to the archive? Not currently, but we're planning a UI to filter by date or keyword.

• How can I support the archive? We have a monthly donation you can subscribe to, and a one-time donation link!

Thanks for reading and go request your archive today!