Convolvger

Local-first, provider-independent archival for public AI conversations.

Convolvger takes a public AI conversation share URL, reconstructs the conversation into a canonical internal model, validates the extracted data, and exports it into portable formats such as Markdown and JSON.

Install

Convolvger needs Python 3.12 or newer. The simplest route is uv, which downloads a suitable Python itself if you do not have one.

macOS, Linux, WSL

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
uv tool install convolvger

Windows (PowerShell)

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"
uv tool install convolvger

Without uv

pipx install convolvger

or pip install convolvger inside a virtual environment running Python 3.12 or newer. Installing with an older interpreter fails with Requires-Python >=3.12, which is the error to expect on a system Python 3.10 or 3.11.

Check the install:

convolvger --help

Usage

Every command begins with convolvger, followed by a subcommand. There are four: providers, inspect, export and verify. Note that a bare export <url> runs your shell's own export builtin rather than this tool.

See which providers are supported

convolvger providers

Look at a conversation without saving anything

convolvger inspect https://chatgpt.com/share/SHARE_ID

Prints the title, provider, message counts and every extraction finding, then exits without writing a file.

Export it

convolvger export https://chatgpt.com/share/SHARE_ID

Writes Markdown to a filename derived from the conversation title, in the current directory. To choose the format or the destination:

convolvger export https://chatgpt.com/share/SHARE_ID -f json
convolvger export https://chatgpt.com/share/SHARE_ID -o mychat.md
convolvger export https://chatgpt.com/share/SHARE_ID -o -

-f json writes the archival record; -f md (the default) writes the reader-facing document. -o - writes to stdout instead of a file.

Parse a snapshot you already saved

convolvger export https://chatgpt.com/share/SHARE_ID --from-file saved-page.html

--from-file parses a saved copy of the share page instead of fetching the URL. The URL is still required: it routes the snapshot to the right provider, and it is the provenance the archive records. Because when a saved file was captured is not knowable from the file, an archive made this way records no retrieval time rather than claiming a false one.

This is how to re-read a capture without asking the provider for it again, which matters because the answer may have changed since. It works with inspect too.

Parse a snapshot you already saved

convolvger export https://chatgpt.com/share/SHARE_ID --from-file saved-page.html

--from-file parses a saved copy of the share page instead of fetching the URL. The URL is still required: it routes the snapshot to the right provider, and it is the provenance the archive records. Because when a saved file was captured is not knowable from the file, an archive made this way records no retrieval time rather than claiming a false one.

This is how to re-read a capture without asking the provider for it again, which matters because the answer may have changed since. It works with inspect too.

Markdown omits provider-hidden messages and deactivated branches by default and reports each omission in its header. --include-hidden and --include-inactive keep them. Both flags are ignored for JSON, which never omits anything.

Check an archive's integrity

convolvger verify mychat.json

Reads a JSON archive and reports what it records, without re-fetching or re-parsing anything. See the Status section below for what the two verdicts mean.

Exit codes

0 clean, 2 completed with warnings or with a failed integrity check, 1 failed.

Goals

• Archive public AI conversations locally
• Support multiple AI providers through isolated adapters
• Preserve conversation structure and exposed content
• Detect incomplete or inconsistent extraction
• Produce deterministic, provider-independent output
• Keep conversion entirely local, with no LLM required
• Avoid account credentials and telemetry

What a snapshot is

Convolvger archives public share snapshots. A snapshot is what a provider chooses to expose at a given URL at a given moment — not the conversation itself, and not a guarantee.

Share pages can change after they are published. While building the ChatGPT adapter we fetched the same share link twice, eight hours apart. Both responses had the same conversation, the same title, and the same 31 message IDs. Four assistant messages addressed to a tool were served the second time with their payload emptied and their content type relabelled from code to text — while their IDs, roles, recipients, statuses, weights and every metadata key stayed identical. A comparison of anything but the content would have called the two snapshots the same file. Nothing about the conversation had changed; the provider's rendering of it had.

That is why every Convolvger export records when it was retrieved, reports every message it could not render, and never silently drops content. An archive is a claim about what was there when you looked. It is only trustworthy if it also says when it looked and what it could not see.

Convolvger does not recover private conversations, hidden model state, chain-of-thought, deleted content, or attachments the provider does not publish. If it is not in the snapshot, it is not in the archive.

Supported Providers

Initial providers:

• ChatGPT
• Claude
• Gemini
• Grok

Additional providers will be added as their public sharing formats are supported and tested.

Status

Convolvger is under active development and not yet ready for general use.

Every command shown under Usage above works today.

ChatGPT share links can be fetched, parsed, and exported. Markdown is a reader-facing document that may omit content and reports every omission in its header; JSON is the complete archival record and omits nothing the model holds. The remaining providers are not implemented yet.

Extraction records structured findings, each with a stable code and a level. A note is recorded but does not change the exit status; a warning does. Both are written into the JSON archive either way, so nothing is withheld from the record because it was judged unremarkable.

convolvger verify PATH reads a JSON archive and reports what it records, without re-fetching or re-parsing anything. It answers two questions separately: whether the provider served everything its own snapshot structure referenced, and whether everything it served could be modelled. Findings that indicate neither are listed in full and counted toward neither answer, so an archive whose messages are mostly empty by design — which is how a public share snapshot normally arrives — is still reported complete. A finding whose code this version does not recognise changes no answer, since an archive may have been written by a later version. An archive declaring a schema version this version cannot read is refused rather than given a verdict.

Exit codes: 0 clean, 2 completed with warnings, 1 failed. For verify, 2 means a check did not pass, and 1 means the file could not be read as an archive at all.

License

MIT