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I mean let's be honest, they're using Mastodon which has a high effort barrier to begin with, they can create a Twitter Developer account. The form you fill is

I mean let's be honest, they're using Mastodon which has a high effort barrier to begin with, they can create a Twitter Developer account. The form you fill is only needed for upgraded access, it requires filling multiple pages with minimum character limits (not very Twitter like). It was approved automatically for me, but the basic API is fine for regular users. If you do any kind of analysis though, basic and upgraded Twitter APIs are useless and too rate limited even if it seems generous.

pbronez 4y ago
Hmm I see your point, but I disagree. I think creating a Twitter developer account and getting an API key is MUCH harder than signing up for mastodon. For example, I have a colleague who has been a big twitter user. They’re a passive listener on the site, and want to move to mastodon because people are moving. They created an account on mastodon.social and struggled to find their people. I suggested some tools that would help… and they refused on grounds that they were afraid the tool would abuse their twitter login information. I wound up trying to explain oauth scopes. They didn’t get it and still haven’t tried. There is no way this person would sign up for a twitter dev account. But they are on Mastodon and putting some effort into figuring it out.
vidarh 4y ago
Signups are currently 50k+ people a day, and probably about half of the people I follow on Mastodon are people of a totally non-technical background. It may feel high effort to people, but it's not something which requires any more technical understanding than getting past the "what the heck is an instance?" issue, and I've seen people get comfortable on Mastodon before even understanding that and then had it click once they there. That said, the proportion of people making the move who also want to set up a crossposter might well be much more technically inclined.

pbronez 4y ago

Hmm I see your point, but I disagree. I think creating a Twitter developer account and getting an API key is MUCH harder than signing up for mastodon. For example, I have a colleague who has been a big twitter user. They’re a passive listener on the site, and want to move to mastodon because people are moving. They created an account on mastodon.social and struggled to find their people. I suggested some tools that would help… and they refused on grounds that they were afraid the tool would abuse their twitter login information. I wound up trying to explain oauth scopes. They didn’t get it and still haven’t tried. There is no way this person would sign up for a twitter dev account. But they are on Mastodon and putting some effort into figuring it out.

vidarh 4y ago

Signups are currently 50k+ people a day, and probably about half of the people I follow on Mastodon are people of a totally non-technical background. It may feel high effort to people, but it's not something which requires any more technical understanding than getting past the "what the heck is an instance?" issue, and I've seen people get comfortable on Mastodon before even understanding that and then had it click once they there. That said, the proportion of people making the move who also want to set up a crossposter might well be much more technically inclined.