Vincent Cloutier @vincent@librem.one

New cool feature on bird.makeup this morning: pinned tweets!

They show as native pinned toots and they are not affected by the 100 top tweets limitation.

To fix the crawling, I'm going to need to start using Twitter accounts to fetch new posts. This is getting complicated for the time I can put on this as a side project, so I'm going to rely on Nitter implementing this, then I'm going to use that. You can track progress here: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983

There is another thing I can fix natively in bird.makeup though. I noticed pinned tweets are there in user lookups. I can forward this, and the top 100 limitation doesn't apply to that.

2/2

I'm getting a lot of question about what's currently working with bird.makeup, so here it is:

The system is mostly back online, but there are some major limitation when crawling new posts.

- To be forwarded, a post has to be in the top 100 of an account as measured by likes
- There are no retweets being forwarded right now

1/2

@troy except hitting that triggers Nitter to do a request, consuming some of the precious quota. I was thinking of having a way to make another use of requests that are being done anyway

One really useful thing Nitter could do is to log the id of new tweets (and their author) as it encounters them during normal operation. Bird.makeup could simply hook into that byproduct and it can already figure out the rest on its own.

I’ll sleep on it and if I still like it I’ll propose it to the nitter dev

And no retweets, but I did notice I can get pinned tweets though

And we are back*, baby!

* with the limitation on popular tweets for now

@troy I figured it out, it was because I hand rolled my nginx config, and I didn't pass the remote IP like I should: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/dist/nginx.conf#L146

So mastodon added an artificial rate limit

@troy it’s an empty server without federation yet. All request are exactly 20.2 to 20.5 seconds which makes me think there is an artificial delay of 20s added somewhere

Currently setting up a mastodon instance and it looks like all requests have a 20 second delay added. It's driving me crazy!

Anyone knows what's up? My google-fu is giving me nothing

#MastoAdmin

So they are all green right now, and the fetching tweets part works from my computer and CI, but not from any of the servers... The approach of fetching tweets from the embeds doesn't seem to work....

FML, and back to the drawing board!

I will continue with something homegrown for users and individual tweets, but I'm thinking if I should add a dependency on nitter to fetch timelines 🤔

The lead dev has timelines working again already: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983#issuecomment-1684070343

While having everything built-in is neat, strategies to crawl are getting more complicated and it's starting to take a lot of time to re-implement things in C#

More checkmarks are green today!

I have also been prototyping bird.makeup for Instagram, which will be called kilogram.makeup.

Should I focus my energy on that instead?

Having said that, with the new restrictions, I can make bird.makeup work again but with severe limitations: only posts with lots of likes will be forwarded.

Is that worth doing?