@shadow8t4 actually, yeah

@shadow8t4 ah, nope... this is distinct from the "I can't find Lars Ulrich" thing

@shadow8t4 (I'm quite familiar with the meme; I was there ^^)

@shadow8t4 okay, so Twitter doesn't support ActivityPub.

BUT, Twitter DOES have an API, to some extent, and it is (currently) possible to pull in statuses from it. If growth of Mastodon is the big huge goal, and the "my friends aren't there" is seen as the reason people don't switch to Mastodon-based instances, then why isn't Mastodon making this easier?

@shadow8t4 @rey I’d argue the opposite way about the cause of lack of progress: progress doesn’t get made on the Masto half because people are too willing to give into community pressure to prevent forking. Gargron should have kept some kind of trending section (or, better yet, a tag cloud for long-term tag use rather than momentarily-trending topics) and forced a fork on his terms.

@rey @shadow8t4 the short answer is "Twitter will ban you if you try".

@shadow8t4 @rey Just the fact that seamless interoperation from the masto side will be an existential threat to Twitter if it gets big enough, and they will rewrite the rules to get their way.
Facebook did this with Frendica, Google with GChat/XMPP, it's a long and old story

@riking @shadow8t4 oh indeed it is

but that would turn the problem from "we don't want to let you talk to your Twitter friends unless they come to our differently-walled garden" to "Twitter doesn't want to let you talk to your friends any more"

@rey @shadow8t4 force the issue, then? I think that might be a valid strategy, actually

@adamk678 they do have an API, though

@rey Yes but Twitter doesn't allow federation, hence being called a "walled garden".

@rey @adamk678 That API doesn't have what's needed to interconnect the two services. They'd need to support ActivityPub from their side, which they sadly don't.

@teradyne @adamk678 Mastodon already supports two incompatible standards (ostatus and activitypub), so the basic concept of supporting multiple interop protocols is there

@rey @adamk678 Yeah, but oStatus and ActivityPub are also open standards. Twitter's APIs aren't all that open. And with API rate limits keeping an application from constantly pulling down the data, as well as Twitter API tokens making hard limits on how many people can use one instance of the service... It's a clusterfornicate of a problem that Twitter itself has created.

I was around on the StatusNet/OStatus federation when this very thing was attempted--before the API tokens were limited. Even then, it was a constant fight to keep things running against Twitter's constant attempts to stop it.

@teradyne @rey I think it's pretty safe to say the simple answer is "because twitter doesn't want it"

@adamk678 @rey Pretty much. Their constant culling of third-party clients is proof enough of that.

@teradyne @rey Unfortunately at the end of the day Twitter really doesn't want anyone interacting with the site through something they didn't make themselves. What's nice is that the fediverse is growing so if you want to follow your twitter friends, your goal is less to get them "on mastodon" and more "off twitter", since you as a masto user can follow them on a number of other platforms like Friendica, Pleroma, PixelFed, etc.

(Also this is not necessarily a GOOD idea, and the answer may very well be "because Twitter forbids it and it'll be API whack-a-mole once they figure out what's happening", but it's a question I've been wondering for over a year now.)

@rey i mean you pretty much covered the reasons why not

@soft_chomps i'm honestly surprised nobody has done it yet. i've thought about it, but i am not a web dev and this shit is confusing as fuck

@hoodieak @rey yeah theres lots of more and less practical reasons to not do it

@rey i made a proof of concept last year (that doesn't even require the api) it's just no one (well not me) wants to actually deploy such thing because it could be pretty awful for the fediverse

@CobaltVelvet this i don't disagree with one bit.

the "how to make it not terrible and awful and destructive" part is... something requiring a lot of attention and discussion

@rey yeah i mean my conclusion was basically "let's just not"

Also, I can safely ask this question because the only person who can answer it authoritatively still has me blocked ^^

@rey Twitter doesn't like people using it's API to make another social network. They ask that you "Avoid Replicating the Core Twitter Experience" and they specifically say don't...

"Use Twitter Content or other data collected from users to create or maintain a separate status update, social network, private messaging or live broadcasting database or service"

@gulfie it's not being used to create or maintain, strictly speaking; merely to augment :)

but yeah, that's a pretty solid reason

@memnus @rey I don't really see an insurmountable obstacle—a backend that can pull in tweets can also find @username@twitter.com in posts and route that stuff appropriately.

I'm sure it's complex though, don't mean to minimize it—it's just… I wouldn't sign up for it. 😓

@rey Isn't Twitter about to turn off the API that all the third party clients use?

@kurtm @rey IIRC it's the streaming API, so it would kill notification setups that currently use that.

That said, I think they're replacing them with webhooks? I really am out of the loop on all of this.