the community archive: march ‘25 update
Published on March 4, 2025 by Xiq
let me tell you the story of the archive (tweet)
> be me
> xiq
> jul: be at portal, my 30-person month-long pop-up campus
> brent says “man there’s so much value in our scene’s twitter data, you should make a db to back it all up and serve it to anyone for free”
> xiq agrees, been looking for a project
> quentin says “defender actually prototyped this recently”
> xiq sees flywheel: get data -> build cool apps -> get more data -> more devs build more apps
> there’s so much to do
> xiq starts with help from quentin, emergent, and brent
> aug: portal ends, finish this in NYC at fractal,
> defender makes a discord, ppl join
> sep: launch and get 1M tweets in a couple days thanks to the Power Of Friendship (yay ppl trust me)
> we have data, now we can build cool apps
> community builds cool experiments
> xiq wants a killer app
> there’s so much to do
> xiq ships trends app - as the minimum viable memetics research app
> defender uses the app to find real insights like the coining of “psyop”
> he’s cracked at marketing
> eshear says it’s too much work to keep archives fresh
> iaimforgoat builds an extension that keeps it fresh for you
> there’s so much to do
> xiq ships birdseye - bc he always wanted to see his tweets clustered by topic
> people start donating: estimated annual budget $4k
> more people upload, now at 240 users, 16M tweets
> xiq builds banger bot based on all the bangers
> many ideas: semantic search, matchmaking apps, network visualizations, discourse mapping, digital clones
> there’s so much to do
> get $1.7k in sponsorships from tekne labs and triplicate
> HUGE success
> ivan’s meme contagion dynamics wins 1st prize
> also get infrastructure for embeddings, semantic search, RAG-chat with the archive +more
> hackathon peeps want to keep contributing on discord :’)
> there’s so much to do
> xiq wants a NOOSCOPE
> literally a telescope AND a microscope into the realm of ideas
> see ideologies competing, merging, forking like microbes
> can do this with fancy data science
> raising 100k to hire my best contributors to grow the archive and R&D
> ( there’s so much to do :’D )
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