I keep saying we should be making clients that scrape posts from X. Same for Threads frankly. We should get comfortable with unauthorized interoperability. Interop on our terms.
I want to follow accounts on Threads and X and BlueSky in the same client I use to post on Mastodon. But I don’t mind needing to have accounts with those services in order to interact with posts from them.
I’m less interested in merging my social graphs than in the UX problem of making it manageable to juggle membership in multiple similar but distinct online communities at the same time.
I also think post portability would be wonderful, but post memorialization is a much lighter lift that we could make work really well much more quickly, and it might be sufficient for most people, and even preferable in some ways.
It seems to me that the advantage of ActivityPub is more at the level of helping social networks overcome a cold start problem. Right now, anyone who wants to start a new social network can connect with the Fediverse. That’s pretty cool! But federation is usually pitched mainly for its benefits to users, and I think there are other ways to achieve many of those benefits.
@misc we're big fans of adversarial interoperability
we don't personally care to interoperate with Twitter in particular, but we agree that the premise is a good one, of telling companies fuck you we'll interoperate if we want
@irenes yeah I honestly want to take away people's excuses for using Twitter more than anything. I don't feel a need to use it but other people do. If they can follow what they think they need, in an app that's optimized for the fedi, I'm fine treating that as a nicotine patch. Also I love that Musk would hate it.
@misc I'm personally on the boat of merging graphs but I do use Squawker to get a read-only feed of the odd accounts that are still on X mostly cuz it's impossible in any other form, something like that for Threads is probably only a matter of time.
@misc I agree. Nitter still works. Maybe someone can connect nitter to a bot server like botsin.space so there is a bot reposting any requested account from there and automatically converting any twitter links into local links and images like nitter does?
@osma@franktaber doesn’t work from mastodon.social. I’m glad it exists but there’s room for other solutions. Frankly I don’t feel a need to make public accounts for everything I want to follow. I still have a (almost completely dormant and wiped) X account, and I’m fine using it to retrieve post contents behind the scenes.
@osma@franktaber If I basically have an invisible automated browser logged in to a free X account, I should be able to get any information I could were I using the web interface directly. It would be more private than bird.makeup and arguably more resilient. At a minimum, a variety of methods is more resilient than a single one.
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