I want to store my social media posts, comments and conversations in a standard format. They should be stored in simple, human-readable formats. I should be able to browse these files without specialised software.
I’ve been using Markdown for my websites and my recipes. I can open them as plain text, or use any of the dozens of Markdown viewers out there. Scripts can also work with those files without much effort. I find it preferable to databases and XML files.
I was wondering if there are common human-readable formats for chat logs, social media posts and social media comments.
So far, the best I can come up with is Markdown for social media content, and IRC chat logs for conversations. Is there anything better out there?
HTML, if you manually want to read it yourself
JSON, if you want a script to read it
a actual database if you want to do a huge analysis about social media trends
Why HTML over Markdown? There is no semantic benefit here. In fact Markdown has much clearer ways to define metadata like post date, user, community, URL etc (the front-matter at the top of the document)
JSON is sort of human-readable, and it’s a decent alternative.