Import following list from account archive

[upthorn]

After twitter's recent change in ownership, I, like many people, downloaded my account archive and deactivated the account.

Many more people have joined or switched since, but it has now been more than 30 days, so my twitter account has been purged.

Would it be possible to allow for import of follower and following lists from the follower.js and following.js json blobs provided in the account archive?

[pruvisto]

Uploading follower.js and following.js is already supported, but it will not work without a Twitter login because Twitter has per-user rate limiting for API requests. Without requiring Debirdify users to log into Twitter we could only have about 1 user every 15 minutes or so, which is obviously impractical.

This is a limitation of the approach Debirdify takes of using the Twitter API. If you want something that works without a Twitter account, you'd have to make some kind of offline database of Twitter–Mastodon connections, which is not something that I personally want to do because then I would have to look into the data protection and privacy implications of storing all that data of random Twitter/Mastodon users (most of whom never agreed to use Debirdify) on my server.

[upthorn]

That is unfortunate. Thank you for your explanation!