Goodbye X, Hello Open Web

I’m leaving X (formerly Twitter). I’m not deleting my account, though. I’m keeping it inactive so nobody else can grab my handle, but I won’t be posting there anymore.

I don’t want my data serving whatever purposes its new owner has in mind. The platform has also closed itself off: you can’t read tweets anymore without logging in, so everything I posted there is gone from the open web, and search engines can’t find it either. And the feed is now mostly ads, clickbait, and “prioritized” content, which is too much noise for me.

So I requested my full X archive and built a small Hugo site called Y to host it myself. My old tweets stay readable without an account, or X at all. Each tweet keeps its original ID, so turning an old link into a new one only means changing the domain:

Before
https://x.com/pabluk/status/985771969

Now
https://y.seminar.io/status/985771969

I built a custom template to keep the look and feel close to the original:

You can browse the whole archive at y.seminar.io. It’s read-only: that’s where my old tweets live, and nothing new will go there. If you’re curious about how it’s built, I wrote about it in Parsing Twitter archives in Hugo using Content Adapters.

Zach Leatherman’s post on owning your content and the IndieWeb got me thinking about this, especially the idea of POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere).

New content goes here, on seminar.io. I publish on my own site first and share copies on other platforms (Fediverse: @pablo@seminar.io, Bluesky: @pablo.seminar.io), so if one of them disappears or locks its doors, my posts don’t go with it.