Premise

Did Twitter lose activity since the ElMuskalypse? Is my timeline quieter than it used to be when I was reading it? I mothballed my account around the end of November, after Elon Musk took over. How much activity have I been missing? To what extent have the people I followed also stepped back from Twitter?

How would you measure activity of your Twitter (ex-)timeline? Using the Twitter API, how would you assess whether the people you follow are more or less active? The simplest idea is to download the tweeting history of everyone you followed, and tot up their tweets by day. In principle that’s easy to do, if you have access to the Twitter API (and it still works). But it turns out it’s a bit more complicated than that, if you want to use this data to characterise how your timeline would have behaved in the interim.