Twitter users can easily download an archive of their tweets, complete with media, by going to their Twitter account settings and selecting the “Download an archive of your data” option. However, this archive is not useful as a public archive because there are no URLs for the individual tweets. All links point back to Twitter itself, meaning someone who wanted to share a link to a specific archived tweet wouldn’t be able to.
Fortunately, it’s possible to convert the downloaded Twitter archive into a public archive if users have a website and can upload to it via FTP or some other means. The website Tiny Subversions offers a tool called Make Your Own Twitter Archive that can convert the downloaded Twitter archive and upload it to a personal website.
To use the Make Your Own Twitter Archive tool, users need to enter the URL where their archive will ultimately be hosted and upload the .ZIP file they downloaded from Twitter. The conversion happens entirely on the user’s device, and a file named archive.zip will show up in the Downloads folder. Users can then unzip that file and upload it to their web host.
Users can then have a public archive of their tweets on a site that they control. The archive includes all media, and threads made by the user show up as threads. However, conversations with other people, moments, circles, and co-tweets do not show up.
There are few other tools available, such as Twitter archive parser that can download the full-resolution images and videos while making both Markdown and HTML copies of all tweets, but it’s not great as a public archive because individual tweets don’t get their page. There’s also a tool for importing tweets to Mastodon, but it’s not user-friendly.
Therefore, for most users, the Make Your Own Twitter Archive tool is the recommended method as it is easy to use and makes a public archive of their tweets without much effort required.
