Explore nearly 15 years of Seattle bike history through our new @seabikeblog Twitter archive
After 14 and a half years posting on the site once known as Twitter, Seattle Bike Blog stopped using the service this week.
There is a lot of Seattle bike history buried in those Tweets, however, and I did not want to lose it all. For many years, the @SeaBikeBlog account was very active, and I posted many things there that never made it onto this blog. For the sake of historic preservation, I am happy to announce that we are now self-hosting a fully searchable archive of nearly 15,557 tweets (does not include most replies).
Look, they aren't all winners. Is it horribly embarrassing to reread tweets from 2010? Yes, yes it is. But it's history now. For example, this happened at 10:21 a.m. September 8, 2014, and I was there to take a photo and tweet about it. Seattle's first downtown protected bike lane opened, and Madi Carlson and her kids were at the front of the first ride. Feels like a moment in history now, doesn't it?
Or how about this post on December 21, 2010 proposing that we create the hashtag #SEAbikes to track local bike happenings? We're still using that one on pretty much every platform.
Or the moments below from the Move Seattle Levy celebration party in 2015. Less than an hour earlier, a city staffer said they had packed their desk because internal polling had the measure failing and they knew they were getting fired the next morning. They did not get fired, and the measure went on to fund the vast majority of the city's protected bike lane network.
We created the archive using a simple and fast Twitter Archiver tool by Darius Kazemi. This archive also allows people to link to our tweets without linking to x.com, which helps us take ownership of all this past work. If X were to shut down tomorrow, this archive will still function. There are sites that have started blocking links to x.com, including a bunch of subreddits, though I doubt many subreddits are thirsty for old Seattle Bike Blog tweets.
While Musk's Nazi salute this week was a factor in finally making this move, Seattle Bike Blog has been working for years now to transition away from the site formerly known as Twitter. We stuck around on X just because there were still a handful of accounts that only post there and a handful of readers who only followed us there. But activity on tweets has reached a dismal level in recent months as the vast majority of our readers have moved to other platforms. For example, the last headline we posted to X was about the Alki Point Healthy Street. With identical image and text, Bluesky got 74 likes and 8 reposts, Mastodon got 10 likes and 4 reposts, Threads got 26 likes and 1 repost, Facebook got 15 reactions and 1 comment, and we forgot to post it to Instagram. The post on X got 4 likes and one retweet. It's not even worth the headache of opening the page and clicking no on all the pop-ups begging me to voluntarily pay the richest asshole on the planet my own money to use his racist garbage fire of a site ... or at least try using Grok AI! GTFO.
Bluesky has emerged in recent months as the clear favorite for the local social media scene. It's where local news breaks and where our posts get the most interaction from readers. But after this depressing experience with what used to be Twitter, I am now more wary of fully dedicating myself to a single platform I don't own.
Seattle Bike Blog is 100% independent. This work is powered by readers, local advertisers, and sticker and book sales from our shop. Content is never paid for and links are never sold to SEO buyers. Seattle Bike Blog does not load any privacy-invading third party trackers that allow advertising companies to follow you around the web. We don't even use Google Analytics. Our goal is to provide news and opinion about biking in the Seattle area, and that's it. As we approach our 15th anniversary in July, we are also recognizing our role in preserving the history stored in all these posts.
Thank you all for reading and supporting Seattle Bike Blog.