That’s 2,598 tweets to transmit a single megabyte.

So, if I wanted to tweet the movie Spaceballs, encoded at 4K UHD (20MB/s), I estimate that I will need to make 20,945,455 tweets.

Twitter limits the posts made by nobodys (like me) to 2,400 tweets per day… so, it is going to take me just under 24 years to complete my task.

I’d better get started.

You can fit much more in a single tweet!

You can do that with base64 + gzip + (and that’s the important one) _wrapping the content in a url_.

Here’s pong (3.5kb) stored in a single tweet: https://twitter.com/rafalpast/status/1316836397903474688?s=2...

Source: I was bored, curious if I could turn twitter into a CDN

You can fit much more into a tweet if you consider image data, too.

Problem is that there's no guarantee that twitter won't apply lossy transformations to your data (in fact, it's guaranteed that it does). So either you would have to encode the data with lots of redundancy and/or error correction, or you have to encode in like, QR code or something similar, and rely on image recognition to extract it.

Inside the range of characters support by twitter, your data is "guaranteed" to not change

In 2018 people discovered that Twitter would recompress images but leave the embedded ICC profile, if present, intact, and used that to make a Twitter-surviving JPEG+ZIP polyglot[1], although that got patched out once someone used it as a C&C channel[2]. Apparently that still worked (and was utilized for the same purpose) on Steam user profiles in 2021[3].

[1] https://twitter.com/David3141593/status/1057042085029822464

[2] https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/18/l/cybercriminal...

[3] https://twitter.com/miltinh0c/status/1392944896760238080