So I have found ~50% of the new calls I need to make to make bird.makeup reliable again. I am still somewhat expecting Twitter to roll back the changes they made, but if they do not I’ll start implementing that this week

More specifically I have:

- A new way to read specific tweet
- A new way to pull a profile if they have been followed before

Still missing:
- A way to convert handles to numeric ID
- An alternative way to pull a user timeline

Show thread

Re: converting handle

I’m thinking either I could index them as new users get retweeted (from another api call). Overtime it will become somewhat reliable, but not for niche accounts.

Or I can use actual Twitter accounts to crawl those in an async way after a follow

Show thread

Re: alternate ways of getting timelines

This is a critical call to make bird.makeup work. That’s how I get new tweets to forward to fediverse instances.

If I don’t find another public api call that’s still open to do that, I’ll have to pull out the big guns and use actual Twitter accounts to do the indexing.

I’ll probably do something where people can gift their old accounts to the project via the web UI.

Tbh I was expecting to have to do something like that much sooner

Show thread

Another way you can really help bird.makeup is finding any open source projects that integrates with any parts of Twitter that still work and send those to me. I’ll reverse engineer them and get new ways to crawl Twitter

Show thread

@vincent I've been looking and that's how I found your project, but nothing else that works atm

@vincent I guess you're aware of it - the RIP nitter issue entry is at 330 comments and counting, it contains a lot of approaches. It also looks at bird.makeup - github.com/zedeus/nitter/issue

@vincent I'll repeat myself: Hello Vincent. Can you please delete mirror of my TW account on your bird.makeup? And ban it from recreating. It's @maestrosill@bird.makeup. Thank you.

@vincent Have you considered at all creating a bird.makeup-like solution that uses RSS feeds rather than Twitter accounts? Obviously this isn’t a solution for individual users, but for some accounts (i.e. newspapers) it would be nice if we could just follow their RSS feed on Mastodon instead of their Twitter account.

@smallsco not really, they are other projects out there that do exactly that, and there are many accounts setup for rss feeds especially on botsin.space

Also RSS doesn’t map too well to activitypub, I prefer to focus on other social networks for future expansions

Sign in to participate in the conversation
Librem Social

Librem Social is an opt-in public network. Messages are shared under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license terms. Policy.

Stay safe. Please abide by our code of conduct.

(Source code)

image/svg+xml Librem Chat image/svg+xml