vincent

@vincent@librem.one

Open source developer. Wikidata, IPFS, Linux, Ethereum. /r/fuckcars enthusiast. I tend to boost funny stuff.

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vincent, to random

Looks like Twitter has removed the endpoint bird.makeup was using to fetch profiles...

I'll do another reverse engineering round to figure out another way

vincent,

@eg the cat in question

vincent, to random

Just hooked up bird.makeup to tracing software for the first time and it's really fascinating!

For exemple, this is an histogram of how fast Twitter answers queries for recent posts by an account.

Look how slow it is! There are a few speedy one at 50~ms, but most are >300ms, which would indicate that they are not cached.

I would have thought it was the other way around, most accounts cached a few that have posted recently that are not cached

vincent, to random

I'm testing stuff regarding authorized_fetch, but I would need a mastodon server that has it turned on. Know any?

vincent,

@experiencer @FediThing seems to be! Thanks!

RL_Dane, (edited ) to random
@RL_Dane@fosstodon.org avatar

Hey ,

Is anyone out there using FOSS for accounting?

I'm struggling with Quickbooks desktop (which you can only get as a subscription now, unless you pay four figures for an enterprise license).

comes highly recommended to me, but I'm loathe to go "" for accounting. Very loathe indeed.

?

Edit: Thanks for all of the feedback so far, updates and clarification following in a reply...

...

vincent,

@RL_Dane I’m using Odoo for my business and I’m quite happy with it. It’s open core though

raphael, to random
@raphael@communick.com avatar

@vincent I am working on a twitter-to-bird.makeup importer and I have some questions:

  1. Are you okay with that? Would it be too bad if you suddenly have some hundreds of users, each of them importing hundreds to thousands of twitter profiles?

  2. What would be a reasonable request rate? Is something like Mastodon's built-in rate limits (300 requests / 5min window) ok?

vincent,

@raphael I get rated limited on profiles lookup right now. I'll have to figure out an alternative way to get the information I want, or add more servers to spread the crawling on more IPs. I have some ideas for profiles especially, but people figuring things out about the twitter internal api and sending me them is always useful

Demand is very high for bird.makeup, I optimize things almost every weekend, but by the end of the week, more optimizations are needed! 🙃

vincent,

@raphael That would be okay with me. Not importing accounts that are not active anymore would be great, but an optimization that fetches accounts that almost never posts or that are followed by a single person less often is something that is needed on my end anyway!

The error rate on accounts lookup is also high right now, so keep that in mind

vincent,

@raphael I have some things I want to tweak this weekend that I think will allow me to squeeze more work out of the servers I have right now, but yes I think I will have to add another server this month with the current growth.

Also I have a kubernetes cluster now, so adding more servers got much easier!

vincent,

@raphael Exactly! I am not considering that kind of architecture right now, as there are a lot of simpler options to scale this.

Scaling it is mostly just time I have to put in the project, but time is limited since I also have a programming job during the day

vincent,

@raphael One simple heuristic that would prevent bird.makeup from going down with the load is a heuristic in your project that would only auto-import accounts that have let's say 100k+ followers, that would avoid creating a long tail of proxy

vincent,

@raphael Then just do it! It will probably break stuff, but I will fix those things when they break, and bird.makeup will be more resilient as a result 😁

vincent, to random

Some interesting fediverse stuff from the BBC! https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2023-07-mastodon-distributed-decentralised-fediverse-activitypub

admin, to mastodon
@admin@hear-me.social avatar

Like mastodon.social, I had suspended (blocked) bird.makeup because mastodon.social did. When I created the server it seemed a safe idea to match their server blocks.

But I have since unblocked bird.makeup by request.

It is a Twitter to ActivityPub bridge. It works. I follow emptywheel at bird.makeup and I, surprisingly, see her posts from Twitter.

Does anyone know how bird.makeup is bridging Twitter posts to ActivityPub given that the Twitter API was essentially shut down? How are they doing this? I can't find any technical information at their website. What's the secret sauce?

vincent,

@ThaMunsta @admin Just to correct a thing: all the code is 100% open-source, and everything is there, but it's true I haven't done a walk-through of how it works exactly

vincent, to random

Getting lots of errors from infosec.exchange on follow requests on bird.makeup, have they changed something recently?

vincent, to random

Deploying new versions of bird.makeup is starting to take a while with so many boxes, I think it's time I move it to a kubernetes cluster

vincent,

@mijndert That looks pretty great!

Once I have a cluster for bird.makeup, I'll definitely add a mastodon instance in the same cluster

Synergy! woot woot

vincent,

I did it! I now have a kubernetes cluster!

Here is the config for bird.makeup, for those curious: https://git.sr.ht/~cloutier/bird.makeup/tree/master/item/k8s/dotmakeup.yaml

I'll see how it behaves in the next week or so, and then I'll start consolidating the various servers I have to it.

Also it's only in web server mode, it doesn't crawl yet. I will use the ordinal of the statefulset as the shard ID to enable crawling. Right now it has to be manually set per node

vincent,

Also I'm going to make it deploy automatically from sourcehut when I push new changes, this is going to save me so much time!

vincent,

@GeekMeSpeakStef I wish there were, but Twitter is closed platform, so only twitter to fediverse

vincent,

@compuguy OVH, with the region in Québec, Canada. Powering bird.makeup with renewables is very important to me, and I have to say I'm very happy with OVH so far

vincent, to random

I get asked from time to time “why not GitHub for your projects?” and here’s a good answer from a fellow sourcehut user

https://ntietz.com/blog/moving-off-github/

vincent, to random

Many new people on the fediverse this week, and thus many discovering bird.makeup for the first time!

I wrote a thing this week in response to all the questions I got asked, about why (surprisingly) opt-outs would be counter-productive, and other stuff:

https://git.sr.ht/~cloutier/bird.makeup/tree/master/item/faq-opt-out.md

vincent,

English is a second language to me, feedback on the writing is always appreciated!

vincent, to random

New little feature on bird.makeup this weekend: the account page will now display the number of followers a user has, and also in which server that account is the most popular.

Hope this will help users find more niche servers that host the communities they want to be part of! Also if you are on a server like mastodon.social that bans bird.makeup and you want to move, this is now my recommended way to find a new home

image/png

vincent,

@TSG @ayetsg https://git.sr.ht/~cloutier/bird.makeup/tree/master/item/faq-opt-out.md

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