Bluesky allows to backdate their posts with their API, so I made this tool to copy your twitter (X) profile to Bluesky keeping the backdated dates of your tweets, showing as if they were posted back then
Interesting tool, but I'm very surprised that they allow backdating posts.
Backdating posts opens up a world of social engineering scams. You can create an account that appears to have predicted a lot of past events, sports scores, or stock prices with timestamps prior to those events occurring. The scam is to create an account that appears to have great stock advice or sports betting predictions and then charge people for it.
I believe this is possible because of how the AT Protocol works. Bluesky shows a warning[1] on these posts and displays both times, but sorts them by the backdated time.
I think the reason it works that way is because they want strong guarantees for the future portability of your skeets. It's sort of a correction for Mastodon's reliance on server admins' goodwill.
nope. post here from 9/11 2001, no warning [0]. it's fine if they added a check recently to flag backdated posts, but there's no telling how many incorrectly-timed things went up before they added that ([0] is from about a year ago, fwiw). the whole early history of the platform is questionable, and it's just shoddy protocol design.
You can still do that even without changing the timestamp. Back in the old days of the internet, people used to get famous by claiming they predicted all the results of the FIFA World Cup by posting every possible outcome and then deleting those where they were wrong. Then, they would publicize their account just before the final match, and people would go wild.
before this people used to send out stock predictions by mail to power of 2 people with each prediction and its opposite, eventually you get down to a person who you have always sent the correct prediction.
Just realized the French lottery is only 19 068 840 combinations. You could send spam to 19 millions people, each with a number saying you can predict the lottery, and if they send you 10 000 euros in BTC, you could give them the next one.
You cannot do whatever you want on someone else's hosted website. They don't allow you to delete other users and edit other people's posts because everyone agrees that would make it useless.
Surprised why? A culture based around systems with privileged "root" and "admins" was always going to be fundamentally hierarchical. It was an accident of history that the network layer ended up getting developed in locations with a more horizontal culture (which partly explains why our network protocols are so loose and insecure). It took a big, conscious effort (Free Software) to force open at least some elements of it.
Without strong and deliberate efforts to maintain a culture of openness and freedom, IT is a heartless cager of men.
This is neat but I choose not to do this when it was clear the API allowed it. I was on Twitter for over 17 years and I think 99% of what I posted is useless and not noteworthy.
Incidentally, I'm kind of surprised or maybe dissapointed that people want to move onto an alternative after being on what seems like a largely pointless platform from probably their teens well into their 30s or equivalent timespan. It's nice to have a clean break and let the past be the past when it comes to social media. When Facebook died, I was quite happy to just let my account rot, checking in occasionally to see if I got any messages from my Gen X relatives or whatever. When I first deleted my Twitter account, I used the 't' cli and their built-in export to backup my account in case I ever wanted to re-activate it, and the urge has never come up. I'm still on Instagram but barely post, it's just brainrot, I'll let it die when it dies. Proor to deleting the Twitter account nearly 10 damn years ago, I'd been convincing myself it was useful, so much so that I'd be a pariah if I weren't on there, but I realized I didn't need any of it, and tossed it away. Much like high school friends, it seems important to let life carry on without dragging all the baggage of past me along for the ride.
I was on Twitter briefly despite knowing better. It was great to connect with fellow programmers doing creative things, and having blocked the sidebar and all political hashtags, it was a net positive for a while. Ultimately though, it incentivizes people to post every "clever" thought that pops into their brains, and after posting hundreds of your own clever thoughts and reading tens of thousands of other people's, it instills in one the urge to live alone in the mountains under a vow of silence.
Though… it occurs to me that my cursed "cleverness" may have followed me to HN.
I like the blank slate analogy. I'm in the same boat.
I have tens of thousands of tweets (why, oh why) but personally have no desire to move them over. I realize that's important for some people. For me, it's enough to just download the archive and save it somewhere, in case I ever need to reference it again.
This is something I don't understand either. Why is everyone so eager to move from one centralized platform to another? Sounds counterproductive to me.
Btw do you have any good suggestions for distributed platforms? Would Mastodon be considered a distributed platform?
> Why is everyone so eager to move from one centralized platform to another?
Personally, I'm eager because it's not just another centralized platform but a sufficiently distributed one. Most of the infrastructure you need for ATProto, you can run yourself today.
Mastodon/ActivityPub is neat too, but personally I don't find it as easy to find interesting stuff there, especially if you try to run your own solo instance and need to make sure you connect to interesting parts of the ActivityPub-net.
There are couple of things going on in that question.
1. There's a contingent that does not like the management of X, so they want to move elsewhere.
2. The technology aspect of it is irrelevant in the decision making, because most people don't understand it.
3. Moreover, a truly free, federated system doesn't alleviate any of their complaints about the platform, because, in that case, they would be unable to effectively quarantine the others.
Because X was (initially) good, while every attempt to make something distributed has been relatively bad.
I don't really care how the platform works so long as the content is the content I want. Nor does 99% of users. And that's the precise reason the centralized platforms are the good ones: that's where people are.
If a truly distributed platform could be created that had the content/people/appearance of the centralized one, then great. I'd want that. But if it would be slightly slower or harder to use, or lack the people/content of a centralized platform then I'm not interested.
Decentralized could be fine for communicating with a _community_ of some kind. But that's not why I'm on X/Bluesky. It's to drink from the firehose of the current times. If something happens in the world I want to see the actual people who drive those events. Read the instant comments of the biggest most famous commenters of the same events.
> Why is everyone so eager to move from one centralized platform to another?
There's good content there. Distributed is better than centralized, but it doesn't matter if the people I'm interested in talking to and hearing from aren't there.
Mastodon and nostr are two good alternatives with pro and cons of course.
nostr is probably and imho the best implementation, but at the moment it’s a bitcoiner echo chamber.
People want something that feels as much like Twitter as possible, without the enshittification. Both in terms of stupid UX features and stupid political features.
Having been interested in how people use social communication systems since the BBS era, I'm pretty confident that most people don't really want fully distributed systems, they want a single system with good governance. Because governance is hard work and anarcholibertarianism makes it everyone's problem. However, "Exit, Voice, And Loyalty" applies here: by providing a theoretical Exit option in some sort of decentralization, even if someone never takes that option, they feel a benefit from having the option.
In terms of centralization, if you are in the tech sphere, you should have learned by now from the crypto fiasco that decentralization leads to abuse by people with money to game the system.
But in general, if you don't understand why people are moving to Bluesky, you probably need to be more in tune with US politics and realize we have a nazi in the white house who also happens to own Twitter.
It's even worse... you move from a centralized platform that has reach and is highly relevant to one that has zero reach and is a closed off and completely irrelevant echo chamber.
What is the appeal of Bluesky? I'm surprised to see how much traction it has, when Mastodon already exists and works quite well technically - it seems that Bluesky is simply better at marketing?
It's a much better protocol in practice, in my view.
Mastodon is server/instance centric and permanently anchors your identity to a given server. On Bluesky, you can use any domain you control DNS for as your handle, since content hosting and identity management are decoupled at the protocol layer.
On top of that, hosting is also decoupled from aggregation/discovery, which allows for things like global search that are intrinsically hard on Mastodon.
> Mastodon is server/instance centric and permanently anchors your identity to a given server. On Bluesky, you can use any domain you control DNS for as your handle, since content hosting and identity management are decoupled at the protocol layer.
What does this mean? I can host my own fediverse instance, and have, three times.
Had enough of shitty self hosted mastodon servers getting linked, makes me wary to click any mastodon link because they are so likely to be dead
Imo that's a complete killer to adoption. The vibe people get from it is that it's always down, they don't care that "oh just switch to another shard" that's too much effort
Yeah, it should be content addressable and replicated by Favourite (Like) similarly how IPFS pining works, then your post would die when the last hoarder forgets about it.
Bluesky/AT Protocol hits a much better balance of mostly decentralized while having an intuitive user experience.
On the other hand, ask the average social media user to try to do the below tasks on Mastodon/ActivityPub, and you'll quickly see how half-baked and disjointed of a user experience it is.
- Search for posts or a user.
- Interact with a Mastodon post that's on a different instance than the one they're registered to.
- Figure out what to do if one day, they wake up and their instance has shut down.
I also find Bluesky's underlying tech interesting. The more i looked into Mastodon the less interesting it felt. I especially didn't like that as a small Mastodon instance i'd struggle to get my updates fed into the larger instances and struggle to get updates as quickly. Instances prioritized updates to/from larger instances.
This was all quite early though and i'm sure i misunderstood things. Just answering the question as i personally perceived Mastodon.
On the non-tech side, i find Bluesky's model for moderation to be really neat. I hope it continues to expand in features/implementations.
Now, Bluesky has this great API that allows you to do cool automated things on top of it.
Twitter had it too, but they decided in the last 2, maybe 3 years, to play with the API so many times that there are no new coding tutorials that use Twitter API as an example. So except social media platforms, there are probably no more tools built on top of Twitter API as they damaged their reputation among developers. And they deserve it being so unfriendly towards developers.
Mastodon is fragmented by design, federation is mostly theoretical even if mastodon.social displays many other instances' content and lets you interact with it.
You can't search across instances nor can you (afaik) maintain identity across them.
Bluesky implements algorithmic feeds so content is easier to find. Mastodon mostly is original Twitter model - you have to follow accounts yourself. It's significant friction and filters 90% of normal people.
Centralised so easy to use. Why don't more people use PGP and web of trust? Convenience and security rarely align, and people will choose convenience every time.
This is very cool. These features would be useful:
- If it isn't possible to transfer the video, I'd rather skip them than just posting a thumbnail
- A way to mass-delete posts after a migration if I regret it
- The option to add text (e.g. [Migrated from X]) to each post if it fits
As far as competitors, go https://blueark.app/ seems like the most complete. I remember seeing another one, a desktop app, but I can't remember what it was called.
Much appreciated, but wouldn't this allow anyone to "migrate" somebody else's tweets over to bluesky, basically impersonate them with 1-click ?
What's missing is some sort of verification.
Unreliable datetimes is just part of AT and something you need to deal with. The moment you start ingesting the firehose you'll see plenty of backdated or forward dated traffic. If you build feeds you need to be careful when using posted timestamps to sort feeds because of backdating and because there's no real centralized way to verify your timestamps. For my feeds I just reject posts that are beyond a certain delta from now and sort my feed by ingestion time rather than post time.
There's probably some sort of blockchain-based time-attestation like [1] that could help but this is beyond the scope of AT and something that probably needs a lot more thought before a serious proposal comes forth.
PS: I had a similar migration idea when bsky came out, but never thought they would allow backdating.
I came to the conclusion that it would make sense to confirm a user's identity on the platform to migrate from (egress) by giving them a random word or sentence for them to post over there, so you can verify that their original profile is really theirs.
Well, if the source is publicly available, anyone can copy it anyway. So, you need anyway to announce on the original account where it has been migrated to.
this can be done, and it’s suspect when someone’s done it to build a following and it’s not clear if they own the tweets.
I tail the firehose sometimes , filtering for post dates that don’t contain 2025. Bottom line this has been happening since day one and backdated/imported posts were about 1/16th or so of the overall post volume in any random sampling I’ve taken. It’s a lot.
But the few I spot checked , all checked out. The people importing their posts were all mentioning their new bluesky on LinkedIn or Twitter . I haven’t caught a spammer yet. It’s something I look at when I am extremely bored.
Readit News
Backdating posts opens up a world of social engineering scams. You can create an account that appears to have predicted a lot of past events, sports scores, or stock prices with timestamps prior to those events occurring. The scam is to create an account that appears to have great stock advice or sports betting predictions and then charge people for it.
[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/bluemigrate.com/post/3lc3r4fqen62l
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/lul4.bsky.social/post/3kgaesbxs7f25
(if you work for bsky please don't add a flag to that, it's my favorite party trick)
You can do whatever you want with the the software. It's right here: https://github.com/bluesky-social
You cannot do whatever you want on someone else's hosted website. They don't allow you to delete other users and edit other people's posts because everyone agrees that would make it useless.
Without strong and deliberate efforts to maintain a culture of openness and freedom, IT is a heartless cager of men.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/02/how-to-become-a-fake-...
Dead Comment
I welcome the blank slate that Bluesky provides.
Though… it occurs to me that my cursed "cleverness" may have followed me to HN.
I have tens of thousands of tweets (why, oh why) but personally have no desire to move them over. I realize that's important for some people. For me, it's enough to just download the archive and save it somewhere, in case I ever need to reference it again.
Btw do you have any good suggestions for distributed platforms? Would Mastodon be considered a distributed platform?
Personally, I'm eager because it's not just another centralized platform but a sufficiently distributed one. Most of the infrastructure you need for ATProto, you can run yourself today.
Mastodon/ActivityPub is neat too, but personally I don't find it as easy to find interesting stuff there, especially if you try to run your own solo instance and need to make sure you connect to interesting parts of the ActivityPub-net.
1. There's a contingent that does not like the management of X, so they want to move elsewhere.
2. The technology aspect of it is irrelevant in the decision making, because most people don't understand it.
3. Moreover, a truly free, federated system doesn't alleviate any of their complaints about the platform, because, in that case, they would be unable to effectively quarantine the others.
I don't really care how the platform works so long as the content is the content I want. Nor does 99% of users. And that's the precise reason the centralized platforms are the good ones: that's where people are.
If a truly distributed platform could be created that had the content/people/appearance of the centralized one, then great. I'd want that. But if it would be slightly slower or harder to use, or lack the people/content of a centralized platform then I'm not interested.
Decentralized could be fine for communicating with a _community_ of some kind. But that's not why I'm on X/Bluesky. It's to drink from the firehose of the current times. If something happens in the world I want to see the actual people who drive those events. Read the instant comments of the biggest most famous commenters of the same events.
There's good content there. Distributed is better than centralized, but it doesn't matter if the people I'm interested in talking to and hearing from aren't there.
Having been interested in how people use social communication systems since the BBS era, I'm pretty confident that most people don't really want fully distributed systems, they want a single system with good governance. Because governance is hard work and anarcholibertarianism makes it everyone's problem. However, "Exit, Voice, And Loyalty" applies here: by providing a theoretical Exit option in some sort of decentralization, even if someone never takes that option, they feel a benefit from having the option.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
But in general, if you don't understand why people are moving to Bluesky, you probably need to be more in tune with US politics and realize we have a nazi in the white house who also happens to own Twitter.
If it allows polling static pages, then everyone can host their timeline on Github Pages or something. That would be much better decentralized.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Mastodon is server/instance centric and permanently anchors your identity to a given server. On Bluesky, you can use any domain you control DNS for as your handle, since content hosting and identity management are decoupled at the protocol layer.
On top of that, hosting is also decoupled from aggregation/discovery, which allows for things like global search that are intrinsically hard on Mastodon.
What does this mean? I can host my own fediverse instance, and have, three times.
Imo that's a complete killer to adoption. The vibe people get from it is that it's always down, they don't care that "oh just switch to another shard" that's too much effort
On the other hand, ask the average social media user to try to do the below tasks on Mastodon/ActivityPub, and you'll quickly see how half-baked and disjointed of a user experience it is.
- Search for posts or a user.
- Interact with a Mastodon post that's on a different instance than the one they're registered to.
- Figure out what to do if one day, they wake up and their instance has shut down.
This was all quite early though and i'm sure i misunderstood things. Just answering the question as i personally perceived Mastodon.
On the non-tech side, i find Bluesky's model for moderation to be really neat. I hope it continues to expand in features/implementations.
But, now they have network effects; > 30 million users -- that's a big market to build for.
Has a great and free API.
Now, Bluesky has this great API that allows you to do cool automated things on top of it. Twitter had it too, but they decided in the last 2, maybe 3 years, to play with the API so many times that there are no new coding tutorials that use Twitter API as an example. So except social media platforms, there are probably no more tools built on top of Twitter API as they damaged their reputation among developers. And they deserve it being so unfriendly towards developers.
You can't search across instances nor can you (afaik) maintain identity across them.
There's probably some sort of blockchain-based time-attestation like [1] that could help but this is beyond the scope of AT and something that probably needs a lot more thought before a serious proposal comes forth.
[1]: https://opentimestamps.org/
Who is the "you" here?
I came to the conclusion that it would make sense to confirm a user's identity on the platform to migrate from (egress) by giving them a random word or sentence for them to post over there, so you can verify that their original profile is really theirs.
I tail the firehose sometimes , filtering for post dates that don’t contain 2025. Bottom line this has been happening since day one and backdated/imported posts were about 1/16th or so of the overall post volume in any random sampling I’ve taken. It’s a lot.
But the few I spot checked , all checked out. The people importing their posts were all mentioning their new bluesky on LinkedIn or Twitter . I haven’t caught a spammer yet. It’s something I look at when I am extremely bored.