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Twittotage

I left Twitter in 2022. With every day that has passed since then, that decision has proven to be correct.

(I’m honestly shocked that some people I know still have active Twitter accounts. At this point there is no justification for giving your support to a place that’s literally run by a nazi.)

I also used to have some Twitter bots. There were Twitter accounts for my blog and for my links. A simple If-This-Then-That recipe would poll my RSS feeds and then post an update whenever there was a new item.

I had something something similar going for The Session. Its Twitter bot has been replaced with automated accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky (I couldn’t use IFTTT directly to post to Bluesky from RSS, but I was able to set up Buffer to do the job).

I figured The Session’s Twitter account would probably just stop working at some point, but it seems like it’s still going.

Hah! I spoke too soon. I just decided to check that URL and nothing is loading. Now, that may just be a temporary glitch because Alan Musk has decided to switch off a server or something. Or it might be that the account has been cancelled because of how I modified its output.

I’ve altered the IFTTT recipe so that whenever there’s a new item in an RSS feed, the update is posted to Twitter along with a message like “Please use Bluesky or Mastodon instead of Twitter” or “Please stop using Twitter/X”, or “Get off Twitter—please. It’s a cesspit” or “If you’re still on Twitter, you’re supporting a fascist.”

That’s a start but I need to think about how I can get the bot to do as much damage as possible before it’s destroyed.

Adactibots

I post a few links on this site every day—around 4 or 5, on average. If you subscribe to the RSS feed, then you’ll know about them (I also push them to Delicious but I don’t recommend relying on that).

If you don’t use RSS—you lawnoffgetting youngster, you—then you’d pretty much have to actually visit my website to see what I’m linking to. How quaint!

Here, let me throw you a bone in the shape of a Twitter bot. You can now follow @adactioLinks.

I made a little If This, Then That recipe which will ping the RSS feed and update the Twitter account whenever there’s a new link.

I’ve done same thing for my journal (or “blog”, short for “weblog”, if you will). You can either subscribe to the journal’s RSS feed or decide that that’s far too much hassle, and just follow @adactioJournal on Twitter instead.

The journal postings are far less frequent than the links. But I still figured I’d provide a separate, automated Twitter account because I do not want to be that guy saying “In case you missed it earlier…” from my human account …although technically, even my non-bot account is auto-generated: my status updates start life as notes on adactio.com—Twitter just gets a copy.

There’s also @adactioArticles for longer-form articles and talk transcripts but that’s very, very infrequent—just a few posts a year.

So these Twitter accounts correspond to different posts on adactio.com in decreasing order of frequency: