Announcing Pin Tweet to IPFS

David Justice
Announcing Pin Tweet to IPFS
#Pin-Tweet-to-IPFS
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Today we are announcing a Web Extension (opens new window) from the Browsers & Platforms team to enable you to archive tweets in a verifiable way.

# Why?

Journalists and publishers rely on centralized social media sites and publications to cite sources and reference content for articles. What happens when these sites suffer financial trouble, change ownership, or face aquisition? When the original authors are censored or delete their posts? This can cause a domino effect of lost content, leaving us searching across the web for screenshots (which are easily manipulated), quoted text and archives.

If we take a look at some recent studies, this centralized content becomes harder to rely on.

One study estimates that about two percent of the Web disappears from its current location every week
source (opens new window)

The 67.2M collected tweets consist of approximately 65.6M (97.6%) undeleted tweets and 1.6M (2.4%) deleted tweets.
source (opens new window)

Pin Tweet to IPFS aims to help users archive these posts in a verifiable way, publishing to the IPFS network through a pinning service (opens new window) so that the content can live on verbatim.

# Under the hood:

We are using a new tool, "save tweet now" (opens new window), from the WebRecorder (opens new window) team to create verifiable WebArChiveZip (opens new window) files of tweets. We then assist the user in uploading these "WACZ" files to the IPFS network via web3.storage (opens new window). Here users can store all of their archived tweets in one place, and easily access them via their own IPFS node or other pinning services.

# Where is it available?

Pin Tweet to IPFS is currently available in the Chrome web store (opens new window) and Microsoft Edge Add-ons store (opens new window).


Get Pin Tweet to IPFS for Chrome Get Pin Tweet to IPFS for Microsoft Edge

# What's next?

We're continuing to iterate on Pin Tweet to IPFS to make archiving faster and add more verification capabilities. Take a look at our issue tracker (opens new window) to stay up to date on upcoming changes, and submit your feedback (opens new window).