renatolond

TL;DR: you cannot connect new accounts to https://crossposter.masto.donte.com.br starting today. By the end of January, the tool will be shut off.

First, a little explanation

Hi! I'm @renatolond@masto.donte.com.br and I've been the maintainer of https://github.com/renatolond/mastodon-twitter-poster since 2017.

I started working on the crossposter in early August 2017. At the time the idea was to make a tool that people could subscribe to and post their toots from Mastodon to Twitter. It started growing and eventually, I added the inverse direction too, to support posting from places which did not support the Fediverse yet (such as posting screenshots from the Nintendo Switch or other game platforms).

At some time in 2019, the tool was feature-complete for my personal usage. I was able to fine-tune most configurations and it was doing what I wanted. At the same time, other life responsibilities took time away from making new features.

That's how features such as the idea to allow admins to configure the crossposter instance-wide or reducing permissions based on posting directions, both ideas dear to me, never came out of the issue tracker.

Lately, with the whole Twitter change-of-hands, the crossposter went into a semi-functional state. A regular Twitter app can only post 300 statuses every 3 hours, in total. A developer, such as myself, can request elevated limits, which changes the limit to be per-user, instead of being a limit for the whole app.

The crossposter used to have these elevated limits since we had quite a few users for a while, but it was silently revoked and when I requested the increase, it was denied.

The amount of support requests since this change has hit is huge, lots of folks don't understand if they did something wrong and if their posts will ever show on the other side. This requires energy and time which I do not have.

They also got a bit defensive and were blocking Fediverse URLs for a few days, which again causes more posts to fail in a way that the crossposter cannot recover by itself.

These things not only make the overall service worse, but it encourages people that might have otherwise linked their posters from the Fediverse to Twitter to link it the other way around. And oh my, there are some annoying anti-crossposter crusaders out there.

With all that in mind and my reduced usage of Twitter, I don't think it's worth it anymore for me to keep the tool running.

Why not a transfer?

While I do want to transfer the ownership of the crossposter repo to someone more active (see this issue), people gave their credentials to me and I do not intend to pass them on to someone else.

Disconnecting this tool and connecting another is a trivial-enough thing that does not warrant the trouble of transferring ownership to someone else.

The timeline for the shutdown.

Starting today, no new users will be accepted by https://crossposter.masto.donte.com.br. Users which already connected their accounts will have no problem re-connecting.

The tool will keep working for existing users until the end of January. I made it more obvious the links to revoke permissions on Mastodon and on Twitter.

By the end of January, the crossposter instance at https://crossposter.masto.donte.com.br will be permanently shut down.

Alternative tools

I did a call for crossposter instances in the crossposter account and did not get a lot of responses.

I can recommend https://moa.party/, which has been around for as long as I can remember, probably around the same time as the crossposter.

There are also these open crossposter instances that I'm aware of, I do not know personally any of them, so look into them as you would any other before signing off your credentials:

https://crossposter.jaxbeach.social/

I will try to keep this list up-to-date and if you want to include an option here, just ping me @renatolond@masto.donte.com.br

If you want to bring a new instance online, you can check the documentation over at https://github.com/renatolond/mastodon-twitter-poster or the great post by @vito@botta.social at https://vitobotta.com/2022/11/12/setting-up-a-mastodon-twitter-crossposter/