bird2glass

Introduction

This is a simple command line tool that can be used to turn a Twitter archive into an Obsidian Vault.

[!NOTE] This code was written while working with a Twitter archive created in 2022, in the days before Twitter had the new owner. I've since stopped using Twitter and have no idea if the form of the archive is the same.

Installing

pipx

The package can be installed using pipx:

$ pipx install bird2glass

Homebrew

The package is available via Homebrew. Use the following commands to install:

$ brew tap davep/homebrew
$ brew install bird2glass

Usage

Prepare for the conversion

1. Extract your Twitter archive into a directory.
2. Create a directory that will become the vault.

Do the conversion

bird2glass tweets-file obsidian-vault

where tweets-file is the file that contains all of your tweets (this should be tweets.js within the extracted directory) and obsidian-vault is the directory you created that will be the Obsidian Vault.

Notes and assumptions

This tool was built in part as an experiment in what can be done with Obsidian, in part for fun, and fully for my own needs. As such there might be assumptions and design decisions in here that won't match what you need. Updates to make the code more general are welcome; likewise hacking it to make it work "just so" for you is encouraged.

Some things to note:

• Everything relating to hashtags is left to Obsidian's understanding of hashtags. I don't know if Twitter and Obsidian's "specification" for a hashtag are the same, but I'm working on the assumption they are.
• Every single tweet is turned into its own Markdown file. If you tweeted a lot, expect a lot of files to be created.
• Back in the day, before you could attach media to tweets, I used TwitPic a lot. This tool attempts to detect TwicPic images and tries to embed them using an iframe.
• Where attached media is available and easy to work out, it is stored in the vault as an attachment.
• Currently actual proper videos aren't stored in the archive from Twitter and so aren't easy to grab and handle; this means some video media will be missing. I hope to work on this some more in the future (I seldom attached videos so it's not a huge issue for me).
• This only pulls in Tweets, not DMs, Periscopes, Circles, Moments, etc. I might expand it in the future.

Getting help

If you need help please feel free to raise an issue.