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Birchtree
By Matt Birchler
I've been writing here since 2010! Back when personal blogs were all the rage. Kids, ask your parents.

The Full App.net Archive

Internet good guy Manton Reece has made an accessible archive of all public posts on App.net.

In the final week before App.net shut down, I whipped up a few scripts to download every post on the platform via the API. After that finished, I also attempted to download small versions of many of the photos, but ran out of time.

Why did I bother? At a high level, see my post from 2012 called Permanence. I also hoped to build a tool that would let anyone export their personal archive, or even migrate it to a blogging platform like Micro.blog.

I was able to see that my first post on App.net was on December 29, 2012:

This year's "best of" episode of Tech News Today was one of the most fun clip shows I've wet seen. Good job, guys.

I sent a total of 3.060 messages there and my last one was on May 2o, 2015:

Ad Blocking Is On The Rise birchtree.me

Which is an automated post from my blog through a service called PourOver, which of course doesn't work anymore. I have half a mind to build a basic HTML page to let you seach for your own archive, but I'm not sure how useful that is.

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