Lately I’ve become obsessed with the idea of becoming uncancellable.
Many of us use twitter, but we all live under the fear of censorship. I think this affects us more than we realize and (to quote our favorite prime minister) “it has to stop.” Besides that, many of us are essentially all just in one big circle talking to each other; why let twitter control this conversation? Of all the existing tyrannical platforms, Twitter seems to me a good place to start fixing this, especially as yet another round of purges begins.
The problem is making the transition. There is no way to get everyone to “jump” (say to Gab) in a coordinated fashion. I think any new platform (including whatever New Founding is cooking up, unless they have a solution that I’m not aware of) is going to face this challenge So we need seemless integration with Twitter. I propose something like the following:
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We’re going to need to get some dev accounts created to power our backend. Could be existing RW twitter users or new burner accounts.
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Create a public facing web application, which will:
(a) Allow people to create accounts, with their twitter handle as username.
(b) Autofollow (on Twitter, with one of the above dev accounts) anyone who is followed on Twitter by someone with an account created in (a)
(c) Continually pull down (via API) all tweets from all accounts being followed. -
Allow users to log in to this app and view their own Twitter feeds, served to them using the data acquired in (2)
- will have to be better than the original feed for this whole thing to work.
- it WILL be better if we implement it half decently because it will have all their feed content but no ads and no stupid “fact check” stuff showing up all the time.
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Get a whole bunch of RW twitter users to start viewing their feeds our way, rather than going straight to twitter.
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Make it so that whenever a tweet is published via our application, it is published to twitter but also published another way, say via ActivityPub.
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Display these ActivityPub “tweets” directly inline with Twitter tweets in people’s feeds (while filtering for the duplicates created - if something comes in via ActivityPub then no need to display the twitter version, although we’ll need to do a little thinking about how to link the ActivityPub version back to twitter for the sake of retweeting, commenting, etc).
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Be uncancellable! Imagine that some user, let’s call him “Defiant” has been doing this for a while and has told a bunch of his followers about it, and now say 1/3 of them have started viewing their own feeds using our app. For that 1/3, Twitter’s cancelling Defiant does literally nothing! He just keeps tweeting the same way he was before, and they keep reading it the same way they were before, seemlessly in their existing twitter feed, the only difference is that his stuff is no longer published by twitter, and is coming to them via ActivityPub.
Am I crazy? I’ve already done much of step 2 above, took me like 2 hours. Is there something else I’m missing?