Request for Comments: Twitter/X Bridges on social.coop

@Sam Whited I don't think that's true for profile searches, unfortunately (that's how limiting still allows you to follow accounts).

@Erik Moeller yes, sorry, I actually checked and I was also wrong about search for messages as well it seems. Looks like posts and the like would show up in search they just wouldn't be visible in the federated timeline (or presumably the local timeline if they were boosted and would otherwise show up on it).

@Sam Whited we should fork so we can fix things like this :) making limits hide accounts wouldnt be too hard

https://www.loomio.com/d/P4rSpyj3/request-for-comments-twitter-x-bridges-on-social-coop/5

@jonny I am not on the tech team, and can't speak for them, but having maintained a lot of software and administered a lot of machines before my opinion is that the only thing you get by forking is regret :) maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon…

As others have said above, limiting seems like the appropriate move, at least as the default policy.

Suspending is both extreme and (it appears) unnecessary in the general case. There may be specific bridges that should be suspended (because they are sucking in the hate speech uncritically), but given the reality that there is still a lot of valuable content on Twitter that (sadly) doesn't yet exist in the Fediverse, and the presence of bridges that seem to be acting responsibly, a blanket ban looks to be counter-productive.

Edit: Please ignore this comment I had misunderstood, and Sam helped me out.

I’ll leave a new comment on the merits of this proposal below.

Do you currently rely on these Twitter/X bridges and would you be impacted negatively if they were limited or suspended?

No, I do not rely on them, and I generally detest them.

Beyond limiting/suspending, are there other options we should consider in a possible vote?

Those options seem sufficient to me, and I look forward to voting to suspend these mirrored posts, which AFAICT are made in search of high engagement over drama over on Twitter, yet where the people that spam Mastodon with them, generally ignore any attempted conversation over there.

@M. Page-Lieberman - jotaemeisocial.coop For what it's worth, I think you're talking about something else, not what this thread is about. These are not people mirroring their Twitter posts onto an account on a fediverse server for engagement and then not checking it or responding. These are normally third parties creating bridges that allow you to subscribe to any public account over on Twitter without that Twitter account having a corresponding account on a "normal" fediverse server. The people who's accounts are being subscribed to by the bridge don't even know it's happening most likely, and do not see any additional follows, likes, or boosts as a result.

People mirroring their posts and not engaging on the fediverse is a separate topic, and you can likely just block them as an individual account action; they'll all be on separate servers and the like and it's not really something we can do anything about as a moderation team except on a case by case basis.

@Sam Whited Hi Sam. You're right, and I was wondering if I was confusing it with that. Thank you. So, yesterday, I sent many messages to people on Twitter to tell them that I was leaving the Nazi (Twitter) site and to ask them if they were on Threads or Mastodon, so I could continue to follow them. Many were not and had no intention of leaving Elon's toxic platform. I'm now considering using this bridge service, so I may continue to follow such folks, but I'm also wondering about privacy and consent concerns.

I follow several X bridges that are for weather or disaster information in my area. So I'm definitely not interested in suspending/defederating/banning or making all of them hard to follow. As someone else said, there's still a lot of valuable content on X that isn't elsewhere.

I'm fine with limiting them, though, if we don't want them cluttering up the federated timeline.

Xitter has become a hate group led by an avowed anti-Semitic fascist. It should be blocked the same as any other such Fediverse server.

If it doesn't exist yet, I would like to see a feature-request for Mastodon that allows a policy that auto-CW's things. I'm basically imagining something where particular patterns or instances can be tagged and treated differently. I'd like to see something where X-bridges are CW'ed with a label that they come from X.

My go-to attitude about things is just generally to bring awareness. So, I'd like most advertising to disappear, but the biggest issue is whether ads are marked clearly and effectively as ads or not. Once that sort of thing is transparent, then it makes it easier to decide what else to do with a policy.

Overall, I lean away from supporting X bridges and towards telling people that if they want their posts to be in the fediverse, they should post them directly (I presume there are tools for posting things in multiple places anyway). I'd rather engage with accounts that choose to participate in the fediverse than with stuff that drags the noise of elsewhere and just brings it to the fediverse.

I feel like this discussion exists because of the two distinct ways Twitter feeds are / have been used:

1. A person micro-blogging, interacting with other people, etc.

2. A person / entity using the platform as a modern replacement for an RSS feed (read: news sites, platforms, etc)

I legitimately have no desire in reading anything from accounts in the #1 camp. If someone has no intention of interacting in the fediverse, and their presence here only serves as a way to boost their notoriety / follow count on the platform they actually care about, I don't feel like we gain anything from them existing (here, in the fediverse).

Accounts in the #2 camp are pretty much harmless in my opinion, as if the content is automated / informative, Twitter is only in the equation as the mechanism in which the information gets propagated, compared to #1 where it is the primary motivating factor.

I don't know if this distinction is valuable in this discussion, but I figured I'd voice it anyway. If it were up to me we'd defederate on the merit of the CEO alone, but I understand if that's not an easy decision to make for people who benefit from the platform despite that.

I currently lean towards the limiting option. I am not currently relying on any such bridges. I am personally not aware of any additional options. Thank you!

My biggest concern with Twitter bridges is that users whose accounts are being bridged may not be aware it's happening, and they can be used to bypass a user's intended limits on distribution of their posts. A year or so ago, when I was a moderator on another Fedi instance, we often received complaints from Twitter users about Fediverse bridge accounts.

Bridge accounts can be used ethically, and I definitely see valid uses described above.

Limiting seems appropriate as a default response.

I am new to this whole topic, but from the comments until now, it seems that limiting will bring potential harm and undesired presences to a minimum, while still allowing the useful bridges to operate.

If this is correct, I'm very happy with limiting for now and after some time (say, 3 months?), we analyze what is happening and see if we need to change something.

In this scenario, the only thing that may be needed to add is what situation (if any) may require some action from our part before the specified time had passed.

Thanks a lot for all the folks that shared their knowledge and understanding of this matters. :)

I think Limit is the most practical choice.

Suspend feels like overkill. Treating them as an ordinary instance does not seem appropriate for a number of reasons.

I would also support a policy that is more benevolent toward bridges that post "followers only" than bridges that post X/Twitter relays as ordinary public posts. BirdsiteLive used to only make followers only posts, and I liked that a lot. You could choose to follow specific Twitter people on Mastodon if you wanted, but you didn't get to clutter your followers' timelines with Twitter content.

@Erik Moeller, can you confirm that posts from mirrored accounts from Twitter on bridges like bird.makeup get posted to the federated timeline?

I’m following hundreds of bird.makeup accounts, and this has resulted first in avalanches of their previous posts (note: not all though and not in any identifiable order) being posted to my home timeline and populating their account pages, but I’ve never seen a bird.makeup post on the federated timeline when these old posts get transferred (or any other time).

AFAICT, we already have a policy that’s equivalent to limiting (except for search results) by virtue of having taken no particular action.

If you spot a bird.makeup account’s post on the federated timeline, can you post a screenshot please?

@M. Page-Lieberman - jotaemeisocial.coop interesting, I don't actually see any with a bit of scrolling and I would assume I would have seen at least one (or maybe it's just low volume compared to all the many other servers we federate with?). I wonder if Mastodon already filters bot accounts or something?

@Sam Whited

I’ve come across a few bots on the federated timeline: “Hacker News”, “Hacker News 50”, “Al Jazeera (unofficial)”, RSS bots hosted on press.coop, “WatchDuty Bot”, “Today I learned”, “The Kyiv Independent”

So, I’ve been wondering if there’s something particular about these bird.makeup bots and the project it was forked from.

@M. Page-Lieberman - jotaemeisocial.coop

Interesting, the bird.makeup software is a fork of BirdSiteLive and has several changes noted here: https://sr.ht/~cloutier/bird.makeup/ - including, crucially, this one:

• Activities are now "unlisted" which means that they won't pollute the public timeline, but they can still be boosted

So that suggests that at least for bird.makeup, those posts should never make it into federated TL. That's great. Does the bridge actually work for you? I tried following a test account and it did not propagate any of its posts.

In researching this further, it looks like a lot of (all of?) the birdsite.live instances are dead and are just polluting our profile search. In my view those should be suspended. In contrast bird.makeup seems to at least be actively maintained.

@Erik Moeller

Does the bridge actually work for you? I tried following a test account and it did not propagate any of its posts.

Yes. It's working for me somewhat, but I've not found the behavior intuitive. It may take an hour or more after you first decide to follow an account until the previous posts are populated to its own account page and dumped on your home timeline. I cannot confirm that all the accounts that I follow have had their previous posts dumped into my home timeline, but I can confirm that various posts will be dropped and not transferred over from Twitter. As for the future posts, ones from an account may be bundled. I'm guessing that fetch jobs are scheduled, and the service gets to them when it gets to them.

There are some other glitches too. Threaded tweets from single authors from the past will be copied over separately (and unthreaded). However, I've found threads with replies from different users copied over correctly (with the threading remaining). One more lamentable issue though is that DeepL generally cannot do translation, as the posts on Mastodon will have their languages misidentified. I've seem Kurdish Kurmanji posts classified as Turkish, and Arabic posts classified as Chinese. This is different than the other issue where DeepL cannot correctly translate posts because of user error on Mastodon, where the language is encoded erroneously at post due to default settings on the Mastodon web client.

I follow a few Twitter accounts from bird.makeup, typically larger accounts who are holdouts, and like being able to get that content without actually having to go to the site myself. Having the option of seeing it on Mastodon makes it easier for me to keep my attention and interactions here. I don't really look at the federated timeline, so I'm neutral on whether they show up there.