@mandelbrot57 @ralfa @FediFinder Debirdify funktioniert leider schon länger nicht mehr, weil Twitter unserem API-Zugriff kommentarlos gesperrt hat und nicht auf Supportanfragen reagiert. Seit März.

@nomatic @FediFinder The real problem is that there is no pressure for services like Twitter to be interoperable, neither legal nor from their user base. Current doctrine dictates that walled gardens are the way to go, and that is unlikely to change without heavy regulation.

That said, I think it would be tricky to implement such regulation in such a way that it actually works, and without unintended side effects.

@nomatic @FediFinder Well you can still download an archive of all your data. That probably satisfies that requirement.

The problem is that that archive only contains very little information about the people you follow. In order to do the things Debirdify etc. do they need more than that, namely e.g. their bio, homepage, etc. Which is not technically "your" data.

Something like Twitodon probably still works with a Twitter archive in theory. But Twitodon always required more steps to use and was therefore not widely adopted. Adding even more steps, like downloading an archive you have to wait for for several days and then getting a specific file from it and uploading it someplace else, that will mean that basically no one will use that.

Plus it would be difficult to verify whether the person uploading the archive really is the owner of that Twitter account, i.e. someone could trick the system into believing they are, say, BarackObama on Twitter.

@nomatic @FediFinder I don't see how that violates GDPR. I can maybe see an anti-trust angle, but I don't really know anything about law.

Personally I'd be surprised if there were a law that mandates free (or cheap) API access for third parties.

Banning #Movetodon and #Debirdify without explanation and without responding to inquiries was an unfair move from Twitter for sure (although probably not illegal), but since Twitter has been announcing that they would shut down all API access for everyone anyway I think it would be hard to pursue that angle anyway.

@davidslifka Click "Logout" on the Fedifinder page and try again. That worked for me yesterday.

@charlesgaba @scafaria No worries! We knew this could happen. It didn't exactly come as a big shock. 🙂

@charlesgaba @scafaria Just FYI the API access isn't gone yet. #Fedifinder still works.

It's just that they suspended #Movetodon and #Debirdify (without giving a reason) but not #Fedifinder (not yet at least).

@apokrif @maco I don't think that data contains people's bios, pinned tweets, etc. so you'd only find people who have the Mastodon link in their display name, which not many due (and it's discouraged because it messes with screenreaders). (Actually I'm not even sure if the display name is in there; it's been a few months since I looked at the format.)

The server would have to pull that data from Twitter, and then you are back at the exact same API rate limiting problem as before.

Actually, Debirdify did have functionality to process Twitter archives like that, but there wasn't much use for it.

@nafcom No. I'm not convinced there even is such a thing as ‘Twitter support’.

@apokrif @maco If you really want to, you can always get an API key of your own and run the app locally. The only reason why I never built such a standalone tool is that basically nobody would have used it. Creating an API key is a bit of a hassle, especially for non-technical people.

@apokrif @maco Twitter has some very aggressive rate limiting for everything.

Without user authentication, an app like Fedifinder or Debirdify could not query enough users per hour to work for more than a small number of users. Not by a long shot!

Apart from that, the Twitter API permissions system is not as fine-grained as that of Mastodon, so something like ‘this app cannot see my private lists’ is not possible. Read-only access (which is what Debirdify/Fedifinder request) is already the lowest level of access that Twitter offers.

Note also that Debirdify was open source and never saved *any* user data on the server. Not sure about Fedifinder, but I doubt it is any different there.

@dpscifi In brief: Make migration from Twitter to Mastodon easier.

In more detail: it scraped the list of the accounts you follow on Twitter, looked through their name/bio/pinned tweet etc. for things that look like their Mastodon account, and then output a CSV that allows you to bulk-follow all of them on Mastodon.

Plus a few other things (the same thing for lists etc.)

Just a thought: #Debirdify *is* open source, so in principle, other people could host their own Debirdify instances with their own Twitter developer account, but if the original one violated Twitter rules than theirs would, too (probably).

@luca @rstockm #Debirdify wurde von Twitter gesperrt. Siehe unser letzter Toot dazu.

#Debirdify has been suspended by Twitter without warning or explanation. Apparently it violated ‘Twitter rules and policies’, but that is all they told us.

We contacted Twitter support about the situation, but we are not particularly optimistic.

We always knew this could happen; it happened to other services in the past, so we are neither particularly surprised nor sad about it.

In the mean time, Fedifinder still works: https://fedifinder.social

Use it while you still can!

@fingolas @Luca @Tibor @derStandard I (the creator of Debirdify) do follow Der Standard on Twitter and just ran Debirdify & CSV import on my own account again, and it worked without any problems. So that works at least.

Searching for the URL you mentioned in the Mastodon search box also works just fine (only with an https:// in front of it though).

@sarahjelm Jag förstår inte vad Debirdify har att göra med det? Den kopierar inga Tweets från Twitter till Mastodon, och inte omvänt heller.

One week after the announced shutdown of the free Twitter API access, two days after the announced postponed shutdown, but so far #debirdify still works fine.

At this point no one quite knows what will happen and when – so use Debirdify will you still can! 🙂

To reiterate, $100/month is an absurd amount to raise for a small project like #debirdify, so we will not be collecting donations (let alone use ads) to pay for this if it ever comes. Esp. because Twitter could shut us down at any moment without explanation if they so choose.

@tchambers They were up quite a bit between 02 and 09 February, but since 10 February they are, surprisingly, back to what they were before this latest controversy.

@wtwagg Apparently not. I just used it and it worked fine for me.