If the thought of losing your content on X is troubling, there’s a way to move your tweets to X rival Bluesky.
If you are considering joining what I like to call the “X exodus” by leaving that platform, one thing may be holding you back. That concern could be about losing all of your content on that platform. What if I told you there’s a way to move your tweets from X to one of its fastest-growing rivals?
The X alternative Bluesky has reported a tremendous jump in members over the past few days. As many as 7 million new used have joined the platform in the past week or so, in fact. Some — though certainly not all — of Bluesky’s new members have not only joined Bluesky, they’ve actually left X for Bluesky. For some of the switchers, X has become too political or too hateful, if not both.
But what if you have a long history on X? What you hate the thought of deleting your account because you hate losing that long line of tweets?
Now, apparently, that doesn’t have to be a possibility
Enter a company called “BlueArk.” It promises, for a fee, to automatically transfer almost all of your posts on X to your Bluesky account.
At the moment, if you’re not on Bluesky — if you’ve chosen Threads or Mastodon, for example — you’re temporarily out of luck. But if you have an X account and a Bluesky account, it will move your tweets from X to Bluesky.
Notice I said “for a fee.” No, Virginia, nothing in this world is free anymore.
I’ve been on X for 15 years, so I hated to think the outraegous fee they’d come up with to transfer my content. But it turns out, considering it’s 15 years worth of content, the price was pretty cheap. It claims it can move my tweets from X to Bluesky for about $31.
Imports start for as low as $4.50. You can get a quote for your X feed by entering your handle and an email address. It will send you the quote within a few minutes.
So what will it import and what won’t it import? It’s important to know: It will move your tweets, your threads and replies on your tweets, photos and videos (up to 60 seconds long) and links to videos that are longer than 60 seconds.
It can’t import your X followers, your retweets or tweet-quotes, your likes, saves, or the number of likes on your tweets. Since Bluesky doesn’t allow (yet) videos longer than 60 seconds, it offers to host longer videos for you, but of course there’s an extra fee for that.
It also won’t import everything from accounts that contain “not-safe-for-work” or adult content. The reason for that is that after the first 3,000 tweets, their system uses X’s search platform which itself doesn’t return results with sensitive content.
I decided to give it a try
I haven’t made a decision about whether to leave X altogether. Fifteen years is a long time. Still, I’ve definitely seen a shift in tone and I’m not a fan of it.
In any event, whether I ultimately decide to leave X or maintain a presence there, I think it’s a good idea to have a reliable backup of your post history. I say that for the same reason I urge bloggers to own their own domain: When you rely on someone else to host all of your content, if that platform fails — or if they have overzealous editors who decide to take drastic action on your content, it’s gone.
And chances are you won’t be able to do anything about it.
The actual transfer process can take up to two weeks. That’s because they’re trying to move a volume of tweets without being stopped cold by Bluesky’s API limits. But still, it’s a lot better than either having to find time to manually move your tweets yourself or just deleting an account and seeing them vanish into the void of cyberspace.
I’ll let you know how it goes in a couple of weeks.
If nothing else, I’ll have that backup, even if I stay on both platforms.
