A new way to leave Twitter — without losing your tweets

Over the past two weeks, as Elon Musk has carved out a central role for himself in the Trump administration, people have been fleeing X in droves. More than a quarter million users deleted their accounts after Election Day — and more than a million people joined the site's upstart competitor Bluesky. Like worried liberals threatening to decamp for Canada or Europe, ex-Xers are heading for bluer pastures.

It's not the first mass migration away from the site formerly known as Twitter. But this one included a lot of elite tastemakers. "We've had a lot of writers, politicians, artists," says Emily Liu, a software engineer and Bluesky spokesperson. "We had a lot of Swifties."

But as anyone who has ever packed up a U-Haul knows, the problem with moving is what to do with all your old stuff. Social networks come and go, and none has ever made it easy — or even possible — to bring your old content to the new place. Even Bluesky, founded in part on the idea that a user's content belongs to them and not the company, doesn't offer that service.

That's where Nicolas Castellani and Amos da Silva Bezerra come in. Their Brazilian startup, BlueArk, is essentially operating as a moving company for Twitter expats. They've only been in business a month, yet they've already helped thousands of people move their old tweets from X to Bluesky — a millions of posts, representing 2 terabytes worth of messages.

Castellani, a software engineer, and Bezerra, a communications student, hit on the idea back in September, when X was briefly banned in their native Brazil. The couple had chronicled their romance on the platform, and they hated the idea of losing those memories when they moved to Bluesky. So they came up with a way to scrape their X accounts and export the tweets to the rival social network. And thanks to Bluesky's unusually open tech, the tweets would retain their original date stamps — even if they predated Bluesky's opening in 2022. In other words, Castellani and Bezerra could give Bluesky something it didn't have: a past.

"One of the things we actually wanted to do is make it seem like a person, that all of us, were actually on Bluesky the whole time," Bezerra says. "We don't want to pretend that Twitter doesn't exist. But we want to give the sensation that you've been on Bluesky for a long time."

The churn of people leaving Twitter after Musk bought the company created an opening for rivals like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Meta's Threads. But while Mastodon felt technically difficult and Threads felt engagement-baiting, Bluesky opted for creating an experience that's fun and friendly. Its interface is Twitter-like to the point of flattery, but unlike X, it's easy to shape the experience to reflect your own needs and preferences. Block someone on Bluesky and it's "nuclear" — they don't see you anymore, or anything referring to you, and you don't see them. You can retroactively stop someone from embedding one of your posts in one of theirs, to short-circuit the kind of mass harassment campaigns that have become common on X. And Bluesky has promised never to use your posts to train AI bots — something X just changed its terms of service to permit. Over the past three months, Bluesky has added 13 million users — and it's now the No. 1 social network on many app stores.

Bezerra and Castellani aim to capitalize on Bluesky's feel-good vibe. "That's the thing we want to sell," Castellani says. When the couple first started dating, they watched the TV show "The Good Place" — and when they founded BlueArk, they discovered that lots of people called X "the Bad Place" and Bluesky "the Good Place." Now, given Musk's full-on bromance with Donald Trump, they're racing to keep up with demand: Given the backlog of requests, full ports are taking nearly two weeks.

For a lot of folks, it's worth the wait. David Shiffman, a marine biologist, was a self-proclaimed "power user" on Twitter before it devolved into what he sees as a "cesspool of bigotry and pseudoscience and conspiracy theory." So Shiffman used BlueArk to move his 300,000 tweets over to Bluesky. "I jumped at the chance," he says. "It feels like a lifeboat that lets me carry some of my most prized possessions off the sinking ship."

The process itself is easy. The BlueArk website asks for your Bluesky account and password, and your Twitter ID. Then the team verifies your identity in both places. They charge a bit for the Twitter scrape and their time; moving my tens of thousands of tweets, dating back to 2009, cost about $17.

From a technical perspective, that's possible only because of Bluesky's open tech. Its "AT Protocol," the company says, is designed for "account portability" going forward. "We know lots of people are importing their old posts, and we're excited about that," Liu says.

That said, Bluesky's developers are also on the lookout for ways people might try to cheat — say, by backdating an old tweet to create misinformation. You don't want people implanting false memories into the new ecosystem. A friendly developer actually sent Bluesky an example of what could go wrong: a faked Bluesky post with a hacked time stamp of September 11, 2001. It read: "Sure hope nothing bad happens today!"

To be honest, I've found it a bit weird to see my old tweets in my new home. The other day, someone threw a Bluesky like at a tweet I wrote in 2013. To fix that — and to minimize the potential for tampering with old tweets — Bluesky is planning to label posts that are moved over from other platforms. "We're about to ship an update to show old posts that are imported with an archival tag," Liu says.

For me, there's one more step to the move. Once I've got all my old tweets unpacked on Bluesky, I'm going to head back over to X and torch my entire archive. A lot of people who are fleeing X are setting up that process to happen automatically, to make sure their words aren't the property of a transnational megacorporation with ties to the new administration and a willingness to feed the AI beast.

It's a bittersweet bonfire. Deleting your back catalog on Twitter also disembowels whatever conversations those tweets were part of. And no matter how you feel about Musk and X, that's kind of sad. The best part of Twitter was always the social aspect of the network, the way it brought people together in all sorts of delightful and unexpected ways. When you leave, your absence leaves a hole in the relationships you left behind.

"People have some mourning about the loss of the conversations, the emergent thing that was Twitter," says Joe Bak-Coleman, a researcher who studies collective behavior and social networks. "Maybe it's just a false belief — that parts of the internet are permanent."

They're not. Like so many others, I'm taking my tweets and striking out for new territories. We can finally carry our histories with us. But the internet will move on.

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.