I wanted to share a tool I built for saving and viewing a local copy of any Twitter thread. It's called thread-safe and it's designed to do just that - keep your favorite threads safe on your local machine. This way you never have to worry that they might one day disappear...

thread-safe downloads all of a thread's contents including each tweet's text, links, and media attachments (images and videos) and generates HTML that can be used to display the thread locally in a browser at any time. The HTML file, all attachments, and a JSON data file are saved to the local filesystem for any use or simply as an archive.

This provides a simple way to save threads of interest without having to use a third-party app that needs access to your Twitter account (or vice-versa) and forces you to reply to the thread to "unroll" or otherwise save a copy. By using a dedicated directory for all generated files, thread-safe can be used to maintain a local library of saved threads that can easily be searched using standard commandline tooling like (rip)grep, fzf, fd, and any other awesome tool of your choice.

I built thread-safe because I often find myself saving links to informative threads to try to preserve the author's content. This is exactly the use case that thread-safe addresses: generating local copies of these single-authored, consecutive series of informative tweets. Notably, thread-safe intentionally does not save the comments or discussion from other users that follow as its focus is on the saving the author's content.

I hope you might find it useful and I'd love to take any feedback or suggestions that might come to mind!