Twitter is limiting Mastodon Twitter Crossposter | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is limiting Mastodon Twitter Crossposter

crossposter.masto.donte.com.br

148 pointsdoener60 comments

Haven't looked into the Twitter API in a long time, but this might just be badly implemented. They should have every user user their own API access code and their own rate limiting, not post everything via one account.

At least it sounds as if this is just an issue of generic rate limiting, not specific to Mastodon.

In that sense, this is fake news, as it falsely suggests Twitter has special rules in place to shut out Mastodon.

Or it could just need maintenance but the team that did that was fired

Getting api access at Twitter is probably too involved for many users, and I don't know whether "I want to run that program over there" would be sufficient as a reason. I don't know how it currently is, but some years ago they changed from "sign up and here's your token" to "sign up and explain to us why you need API access". Might have been after Cambridge Analytica, I don't know.

They're not overly inquisitive, but it seemed that a human judged the comment you write, and there was some delay, so it's probably not something most people would do if they want to give a third party service access.

I mean let's be honest, they're using Mastodon which has a high effort barrier to begin with, they can create a Twitter Developer account.

The form you fill is only needed for upgraded access, it requires filling multiple pages with minimum character limits (not very Twitter like). It was approved automatically for me, but the basic API is fine for regular users. If you do any kind of analysis though, basic and upgraded Twitter APIs are useless and too rate limited even if it seems generous.

Hmm I see your point, but I disagree. I think creating a Twitter developer account and getting an API key is MUCH harder than signing up for mastodon.

For example, I have a colleague who has been a big twitter user. They’re a passive listener on the site, and want to move to mastodon because people are moving. They created an account on mastodon.social and struggled to find their people. I suggested some tools that would help… and they refused on grounds that they were afraid the tool would abuse their twitter login information.

I wound up trying to explain oauth scopes. They didn’t get it and still haven’t tried. There is no way this person would sign up for a twitter dev account. But they are on Mastodon and putting some effort into figuring it out.

Signups are currently 50k+ people a day, and probably about half of the people I follow on Mastodon are people of a totally non-technical background. It may feel high effort to people, but it's not something which requires any more technical understanding than getting past the "what the heck is an instance?" issue, and I've seen people get comfortable on Mastodon before even understanding that and then had it click once they there.

That said, the proportion of people making the move who also want to set up a crossposter might well be much more technically inclined.

If the official API requires jumping through hoops, then use the API that Twitter's web interface uses. Run it in Selenium if you have to. No approval for that besides creating an account.

The rate limiting should be done by user id not developer id. That's how the Google APIs work.

it's that way, but twitter limits their API to 300 posts/user/3hours, and some power users hit the limit

"""

there's a little star on the documentation saying that an app can only create 300 Tweets per user or per app for every 3 hours. I believe that the influx caused a lot of new power users from twitter, that post a lot, to come over and that's now causing the crossposter to hit the limit.

"""

If a real person (not a bot) can tweet more than a 100 tweets per hour (i.e. 1 tweet every 36 seconds on avg) I would call them mentally ill, not power users.

True. So if anything, they are being very generous with the rate limit here. I think they should dial it back to 10 tweets per hour.

it doesn't seem badly implemented, and yes, generic API post limit.

some power users are hitting the 300 post/3hours limit according the linked thread.

Those numbers sound more like spammers than "Twitter power users", whatever that could be.

Gotta make full use of that eight dollar checkmark.

This is actually a good thing, for Mastodon. When you actually use Mastodon, those automatic crossposts are not cool: for example mentions are broken even if the concerned people are also on Mastodon and most of the time the authors of these crossposted messages don't really react on Mastodon so the accounts are effectively bots not marked as such.

I also find that the content is not exactly the same on the two networks, and that some of these crossposted messages are a bit out of place.

(Note that what I'm saying here is about Twitter to Mastodon crossposting, but I really rarely saw it used the other way around.)

Someone named this the "bootleg ratio": ie original content vs content not designed specifically for the platform.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/22/23365781/tiktok-youtube-b...

I agree, if you main Twitter, what is even the point of spamming Fediverse with your posts? Anyone that wants to follow you will do it there.

For some it's a way to have a foot both places until they feel secure enough about moving over without losing a lot of connections and engagement.

It'll change. More and more people (and I see it myself too) report far higher engagement even with far fewer followers on Mastodon - our Twitter accounts have acccumulated so much dross and the Twitter algorithm also means a lot of people simply won't see your stuff even if they follow you (as I've run Fedifinder [1] and connected to people I follow on Mastodon, I've many times realised they're someone I haven't seen tweets from in ages, likely because they're people I used to enjoy reading the tweets of but rarely liked or commented on, and so they gradually just fell off my feed).

A lot of the people I follow on Twitter even with quite significant following appears to be tweeting less and less and focusing more and more of their time on Mastodon. Of course this will differ greatly for different interests and demographics.

[1] https://fedifinder.glitch.me/

https://movetoDon.org is also great

Yeah as a mastodon user I actually have the terms 'twitter' and 'RT' filtered, so they don't clog up my timeline. When people want talk about twitter they mostly use the term "birdsite" anyway so that still shows up.

The linked... uh, toot thread contains the following post, dated Nov. 4:

>Yeah, it's what I thought, there's a little star on the documentation saying that an app can only create 300 Tweets per user or per app for every 3 hours. I believe that the influx caused a lot of new power users from twitter, that post a lot, to come over and that's now causing the crossposter to hit the limit

Not sure what is supposedly different a month later.

I’m seeing a lot of that in the Fediverse right now. Stuff that worked just fine for years is suddenly overwhelmed by the usage spike. Lots of volunteers putting in lots of cycles to scale things.

Fortunately it seems to be mostly working. I expect things will stabilize over the coming months without turning too many people off the platform.

People forget how often Twitter’s fail whale showed up in the early days…

> Stuff that worked just fine for years is suddenly overwhelmed by the usage spike. Lots of volunteers putting in lots of cycles to scale things.

To put it in numbers:

8,022,767 accounts as of now, on roughly 3,200 instances.

Vs 5,638,056 accounts on ~1,225 instances on October 26th, the day before the purchase closed and the growth spiked.

On Oct 26th, the last 24 hours of new users was 3,751. Last hour it was 3,626, and last 24 hours 57,286. We're way below the craziest peaks, but the signups appears to be reasonable stable and slowly increasing at the current level - no sign of falling back further towards where it was.

The growth in new instances has been outpacing the growth in new users for some time. Of course many of those are single-person instances, so harder to say exactly how that affects typical instance sizes.

(numbers are from https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount - a bot which posts hourly stats)

This headline appears a bit dishonest.

Actual headline should read, "Mastodon Crossposter hits Twitter's API rate limit".

The story here is the increase in Mastodon users using crossposter, not an artificial limit specific to Mastodon being implemented by Twitter.

The rate limits are clearly stated in the documentation.

https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/rate-limit...

The API apparently could be better: https://twitter.com/CommanderRoot/status/1597068780437647360.

That sounds more like people behind the api having a bit of kneejerk reaction

absolute free speech does not have rate limits.

You cannot type or talk at infinity words per minute, is physics inhibiting your free speech also?

Those limitations were provided by evolution (or god if you please). Human computer interfaces will bypass the rate (bandwidth) limitations of typing or linguistic communication.

You are correct. There's no rate limit specified in the first amendment. Yes, many problems with free speech would be solved if there was. When first drafted, the physical limits were very different than today.

I think it would be a fun SciFi short story to write/read where there was a rate-limit clause added.

Reads like a general rate limit of 100 tweets / hour from apis.

Would have been "limiting Mastodon", as the title claims, had this limit been applied specifically for their API calls, while others enjoy limitless.

How big is the probability that Twitter will implement ActivityPub during the next year or two, and interact with Mastodon natively?

Musks MO seems to be go the opposite direction and make Twitter grow the walls on their garden to disallow most API access only let paid users post.

They'd need the engineering talent to write it after the idea had been planned out. Who at twitter is going to do any of this. Who can?

Twitter has no incentive to allow this, especially now it is owned by Elon.

I agree, twitter sucks

The pledged "absolute free speech" - this is a violation of that principle

He also promised a new team to be established before unblocking any accounts but that didn’t happen either

That's a meaningless buzzword designed to prevent the difficult debate on where to draw the line. But when it comes down to it Elon Musk does agree that there is a line, and that there are rules for speech that the platform does not want to carry. See Kanye West.

And you can be 100% sure that the buzzword will carry 0 weight when the platforms moat is in danger.

so having api limits limits your speech? thats a funny argument to make

But Twitter does allow this, they just rate-limit their APIs.

I was wondering if that was possible actually. Guess that's the answer.

Makes sense from a business point of view. Build a moat and what not.

get a lot of users by building good product, instead of restrictions

This is about locus of control: if twitter wants to do something about users hopping to and using a competitive platform, can they change some settings in twitter? Yes they can. Can they stop users activity on Mastodon or force them back? No, they can not. So they're doing what they can, rather than passively allowing it to continue.

They already have the users. It’s about stopping them from leaving. And Twitter is arguably a better product by miles than Mastodon.

That's a great example of the "business point of view" and usability going in exactly opposite directions.

Usability for people who don't use your product shouldn't really be a concern for someone building a product.

There are some people I would have liked to follow in my Twitter feed that left Twitter for Mastodon.

I wonder what the rules/ethics are on reposting on Twitter without someone's permission.

Since mastodon is just a collection of privately run instances, there's never gonna be an easy answer.

For ethical consent we might just have to ask the actual content creators instead of arguing about legalese to justify our actions

Deleted comment

Twitter used to be a weird word. The verb is "to toot".

I see very few people use "toot" much on Mastodon now, though. It's certainly in use, but "post" seems to be more common, in part I think because it saves is from switching back and forth when talking about Twitter, but also because Mastodon is just one of many applications in the Fediverse. A number of my followers are on Pleroma or Misskey, for example, and a "toot" doesn't have the same connection to their software.

Mastodon is an existing English word, though? Tweets in Mastodon are "toots", so if the platform catched on, I guess they'd say "to toot".

It's not limiting you now, what you mean is that you have just hit a limit that you didn't know existed. I've worked with the twitter api and there always have been strict limits that depend on the app, account and ip address that you post from

All those Mastodon people said they were going to "leave" Twitter and now they're crossposting...

Since you haven't left and don't want to leave, I suggest you build a Twitter Mastodon cross-poster and solve the problem!

We need Elon to drop by HN next and clean up these mess of BS submissions that continue to amass 100+ points and not flagged to oblivion despite them being non-news.

EDIT: and maybe we should penalize users on HN who post these stuff too

Presumably I am allowed to run my own private Mastodon instance, administer it by my own whims, and arbitrarily limit federation with the rest of the Fediverse as it pleases me, right?

So I suppose y'all can pretend twitter.com is using Mastodon on the backend in a similar way. The folks who rage-quitted recently simply disinvited themselves from that particular party. Everybody are within their rights.

Have fun tooting at the cool kids table. :)

Edit: If someone is confused about the word tooting, that is not my term. Elon is a big meanie, and you are very cool.

> Presumably I am allowed to run my own private Mastodon instance, administer it by my own whims, and arbitrarily limit federation with the rest of the Fediverse as it pleases me, right?

Well, yes, Truth Social and Counter Social are examples of that. Gab is (or was?) also Mastodon, though very broadly blocked.

That does however not mean that it's not newsworthy how well interop works or doesn't work because it'll inform users about what choices to make.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com