@vincent I am working on a twitter-to-bird.makeup importer and I have some questions:
1) Are you okay with that? Would it be too bad if you suddenly have some hundreds of users, each of them importing hundreds to thousands of twitter profiles?
2) What would be a reasonable request rate? Is something like Mastodon's built-in rate limits (300 requests / 5min window) ok?
@raphael That would be okay with me. Not importing accounts that are not active anymore would be great, but an optimization that fetches accounts that almost never posts or that are followed by a single person less often is something that is needed on my end anyway!
The error rate on accounts lookup is also high right now, so keep that in mind
@raphael One simple heuristic that would prevent bird.makeup from going down with the load is a heuristic in your project that would only auto-import accounts that have let's say 100k+ followers, that would avoid creating a long tail of proxy
@vincent for example, my wife still is following ~700 people on Twitter, the overwhelming majority of them have no more than 10k followers. My hope would be that I could bring all these people to bird.makeup so that she could follow them on Mastodon.
@raphael Then just do it! It will probably break stuff, but I will fix those things when they break, and bird.makeup will be more resilient as a result 😁
@vincent i did already - on a small scale - and when this is why I wrote to you. :)
I tried importing my wife's follows (if your logs show someone trying to add a bunch of Greek accounts, that's me) and I got only 13 out of the 700 accounts imported.
@vincent and I should have prefaced this conversation by thanking you for all you've done already and I don't mean to put any stress on you, it's just that I personally need to find a way to make this happen as fast as possible. I'm out of work since last month and I gave myself until end of summer to make something (anything!) that can validate communick as a viable business. It seems that not many are keen of paying for access, so I'd like to see if this changes if I add integrations.
@vincent that makes sense, but the problem I'm trying to tackle is *precisely* in the long tail.
My working hypothesis is that there are a good amount of people still on Twitter because they are following a bunch of "popular-but-not-too-popular" profiles, and if they could follow these people on Mastodon they would be able to painlessly move away from Twitter.