Tag: twitter

My personal Twitter account was banned from Twitter search results and all my tweets were marked as sensitive content. You would typically only find my account in the search if you were following me or I was following you. Additionally, my tweets are not displayed in search results when sensitive content is disabled in settings, which is by default.

This has happened to many Ukrainians and some famous Ukrainian singers have been banned similarly. Some say that it has been done to everyone. Twitter’s user base is divided into bubbles by many criteria. In the leaked Twitter code, you can see that everyone is marked who writes about the war of Russia against Ukraine and then such accounts are hidden automatically and not displayed.

It was especially noticeable by Ukrainians who recently tried to tell the world about the catastrophe caused by the destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant’s dam. At the same time, the CEO of Twitter, Elon Musk, posted on his page a video of pro-Russian propagandists Tucker Carlson, who talks about the destruction of the dam in the first seconds and then almost directly blames Ukraine for blowing it up without any proofs in the second minute of the show.

The automatic posting of the first post via IFTTT went well, more or less. There were several problems but nothing significant. For now, I automatically repost from Medium to LinkedIn, Telegram, Twitter and Friendica. I set up reading Medium’s RSS via IFTTT and then posted its content to the socials.

The first problem was that Medium banned IFTTT’s RSS crawler because of too many requests made by it. More likely, many people set up reading Medium’s RSS feeds by IFTTT, and Medium automatically restricts it.

It was easily fixed by using Google Feedburner. I added the blog RSS there and then specified Feedburner’s RSS address to IFTTT. Google’s service is the most popular, so it’s no wonder that there are no problems with it in this.

For over a month now I've been actively using IFTTT for cross-posting to social networks. I want to share how I got there and what tricks I resorted to in order to achieve cross-posting close to what I need.

I write on social networks for myself, not for work. And it's convenient for me to write from the place where I spend my time, so SMM software didn't suit me — it's expensive, and on top of that it requires writing from a different place.

Mostly I spend my time on Twitter and Telegram, I post photos on Instagram, and recently I also started doing a podcast on Anchor. Some messages are more convenient to write in one network, some — in another. Besides, I'd like to have at least some control over my messages, so as not to lose them in an instant because of some corporation's decision. That's why I also joined the decentralized social network, the Fediverse, and set up my own personal Friendica, where I simply duplicate my posts from other social networks.

When choosing a solution for joining the Fediverse, I settled on Friendica, because it's in PHP, which I work with every day at work, and if needed I can modify the engine to suit me and deploy it on shared hosting. The only thing I don't like about Friendica is that it doesn't allow guests to leave comments, but since it's more of a backup solution, that's not a critical problem. The other apps I tried or looked at had more critical drawbacks for me.

Many people are switching to decentralized social networks because they don't want corporations tracking them, analyzing them, knowing everything about them. That doesn't really bother me, I've come to terms with it, but what bothers me more is that a corporation can at any time delete all my messages, all my history.

Copying messages by hand is too much of a hassle for me and too costly in terms of time, so I started looking in detail at solutions for automatically posting messages between social networks.