First my Twitter bots that use polls got suspended. No indication why.
Then my Twitter bots with less than 20,000 followers got suspended. No indication why.
Then tonight, just now, my personal account @JoeSondow got suspended. No indication why. I appealed, they emailed to say it was reinstated, then it got suspended again 5 minutes later.
My three most popular active bots are still running for now.
I guess I'll be leaving Twitter sooner than later.
I did it. I turned off all remaining Twitter automation, and announced from my last active accounts that they're done on Twitter and moving to Mastodon. That's @StarTrekHour@EmojiAquarium@PicardTips and @RikerGoogling. My other recently active accounts @JoeSondow@EmojiMeadow@TinyPettingZoo@EmojiPrincesses@EmojiTetra@EmojiSnakeGame@EmojiTetraFast all got permanently suspended recently, without explanation. I can only speculate the reason relates to Twitter automation.
It feels like a loss after 10 years building community there, and being a guy known for making lots of cute fun Twitter bots. Some of my closest friends introduce me as the twitter bot maker. But it was necessary to leave. It lets my last few accounts hopefully avoid getting suspended so I can speak for myself there a little bit, and some of my decade of work can remain available to see.
I still have some poll game bots to finish porting to Mastodon, and I'm looking into porting a few things to Tumblr as well, and maybe Bluesky if I get enough invite codes and if I like the way it works.
My Mastodon bots are all linked in my bio at the moment.
@ygalanter Yes please. In fact, I mentioned that somewhere in this thread. I got one invite so far, so I might try it out. If I like it and I can find enough invites I might port my bots over there as well. It partly depends on how usernames work there. I don't want to buy a bunch of domain names. I did that long ago. It wasn't worth it.
Regarding domains, you can have one domain, and bots running on subdomains. E.g. my main handle there is yuriy.galanter.net, and I have a Pink Floyd bot pinkfloyd.galanter.net. Or you can keep the original handle @<name>.bsky.social if you'd like.
It's kind of a relief to be done with Twitter. My accounts were getting deboosted for weeks, so friends didn't get notified when I replied to them, and no one could read my threads, which made adding to my long interactive fiction poll threads useless. Seeing all my bots getting suspended in batches, and finally my personal account suspended, without a word from the company… I'm just like, okay, if I'm not welcome here I'll head out, and take 100,000 trekkies with me, I guess.
I was getting used to replying to people, knowing that most of them would just not get notified. I was like a ghost there. So it's nice to start exploring Mastodon and Tumblr and other platforms where my accounts aren't cursed for daring to using the platform's automation API. Now I get to watch Twitter fall apart from farther away, with less concern. Not my problem anymore.
@JoeSondow@JoeSondow Shit, man. That sucks. Sorry to see this happened to you. But so glad to see your presence on here is increasing.
Say hi to Nibbler for me. :-)
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