Birdsite Bridges
Problem: Not all the people or organizations you follow may have migrated from Twitter to open social systems like Mastodon.
One option to follow such accounts are so-called "ethical bridges" from Twitter. These are sites that connect to the Twitter API and create stub accounts for Twitter users, then mirror their content on the Fediverse.
There are a few issues here:
- While some people may intend to follow the stub and understand the limitations, these accounts end up federated and searchable by anyone else in the instance, including on the federated timeline.
- They’re published without the original author's permission or consent.
- Although the bridge might work to make Twitter content visible, it can't create real conversation; your likes and replies with the person running the Twitter account are never seen by the author.
- In fact, there are a variety of backend issues when these stubs are followed, unfollowed, replied to, and so on, and their implementations don’t respond properly.
- These instances are typically overloaded or limited by Twitter API issues.
As such, we have actively been defederating (suspending) Twitter bridge sites, usually powered by a software package called Birdsite Live. We will continue to defederate from such sites in the future, as we discover additional instances.
Exceptions
We have not typically defederated from instances and applications where the bridged content is curated, maintained and clearly identified as a Twitter bot. An example is content from sportsbots.xyz. We may re-evaluate this in the future.
Another exception is crossposting from Twitter, where the content owner is in control of both the source and destination account, and where the Mastodon account is maintained.