Metaweave: Save Any Tweet forever on Arweave

You may have heard of content being deleted on social media platforms because it doesn’t conform with that platform’s views, opinions, or political involvement. Twitter is no stranger to such events, and sometimes entire accounts can get deleted for these very reasons. At the end of the day, Twitter has the final say on what appears on their platform and what doesn’t.

But where there is a will there is a way, and so now Twitter users have an easy and simple way to make any tweet permanent by simply commenting on that tweet using one of three short hashtags.

How you ask? Well it is all thanks to Metaweave’s latest feature, Tweet Archiving.

How it works

Now anyone is able to back up a tweet for permanent storage onto Arweave’s Permaweb via the utilisation of the Metaweave protocol. All you need to do is comment on a tweet using one of the following hashtags:

• #save
• #archive
• #permaweb

The Metaweave Tweet Archiving protocol will in sequence automatically pick up on the tweet and back it up to Metaweave (and hence Arweave). It really is as simple as that. So congratulations, your tweet is now immortalised and can never be deleted by anyone, ever.

Below is one of my own tweets I used to test out the feature.

Hey Arweave Community!

I am testing out Metaweave’s Tweet Archiving feature that will allow this tweet to automatically be stored forever on Arweave’s Permaweb.

All I have to do is comment #save

It really is as simple as that!

— 🐘🔗 az.arweave.dev (@ArweaveAz) July 8, 2022

Notice that I have commented on my tweet with the hashtag #save.

The feature allows users to archive anyone’s tweets, not only their own. So as much as we would love to see Elon Musk himself use the feature (fingers crossed, one day), this tweet was archived by someone other than Elon.

If you visit the Metaweave platform’s website here and click on “Archived Tweets” on the left-hand menu, you will see a timeline of all the tweets archived. It may take some time for the tweet to appear there, as it needs to get mined into an Arweave block.

Even though permanent, it is worth mentioning that individual nodes have the option to decline storing specific data, including archived tweets. This is why you will see a “Do-Not-Store” request button in the upper right corner of each tweet in the Archived Tweets section. Imagine this as a “report” button where, after being pressed, the nodes in the network independently decide whether or not to continue storing the tweet.

Why do we need this?

There are many use cases that could accrue from the protocol and its automatic tweet archiving feature, however, arguably, the most obvious one is censorship resistance. As mentioned above, centralised companies have the ability to dictate what they want shown on their platforms. For whatever reason this might happen, one question should surely be asked: Would we rather live in a society where centralised authorities control what is available to the public, or have a platform on which everyone’s opinion can openly be expressed and read, no matter how good or bad, no matter how controversial.

After all, contradicting opinions are what keep the conversation going and in turn help societies grow and progress.

But what are your thoughts on this? Let us know in the comment section below!

Who is Metaweave?

Metaweave, formerly known as Argora, is a decentralised social media platform built on Arweave’s Permaweb. Anything posted to the platform is permanent, with no option for anyone to ever delete it. On top of this, being built on blockchain tech and specifically Arweave, means that practically Metaweave would never experience any downtime whatsoever.

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