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BirdBridge

A tiny server written using Deno and Express which allows Mastodon clients to access Twitter.

This app doesn't store any data, it just acts as a proxy that rewrites requests in cool ways.

Tested with: Pinafore, Elk, Ivory for iOS

⚠️ This software is provided for educational purposes. You shouldn't actually use this to post on Twitter - after all, there are long-standing API rules against third-party clients. Please don't make Elon Musk upset. :(

Requirements

  • Deno (developed and tested with version 1.29.4)
  • A server with a SSL certificate and a subdomain
  • API keys that have fallen off the back of a truck

Acknowledgements

Twitter Features

Feature Status Notes
View Home Timeline
View Mentions Timeline
View Notifications 🔶 Push not supported. Notification type filters are currently ignored. Quote tweets, favs/RTs of mentions and favs/RTs of your RTs not shown.
View Tweet 🔶 Quoted tweets in threads are incorrectly displayed as top-level members of the thread.
View Profile 🔶 Profiles and tweets can be viewed, but following/followers lists don't work yet. "No RTs" view missing. Some profile metadata missing.
View List Timeline ✅* May need pagination fixes.
View Lists ✅* Mastodon doesn't let you view other people's lists, so this metadata isn't exposed
Edit Lists May be impractical
Create Tweets 🔶 Text-only tweets and replies supported. No reply controls or scheduling yet
Delete Tweets
Retweet
Fav/Like Tweets
View Media Images, videos, fake-GIFs all supported
Quote Tweets 🔶 Quote tweets are rewritten to internal URLs (which Ivory is able to show when tapped), but something nicer would be REALLY cool...
Polls 🔶 Polls can be viewed but cannot yet be created or voted on
Bookmark Tweets Twitter API doesn't seem to expose bookmarked status properly
Pinned Tweets 🔶 Pinned tweets will appear on profiles, but you cannot pin or unpin a tweet
Circle Tweets 🔶 Circle tweets have a CW/spoiler attached to denote that they're special. Circle tweets cannot be posted yet
Reply Controls Not sure how to translate this to Mastodon - I'm using the toot privacy flag to denote protected accounts
Verified Display Verification status is shown as custom emoji
Follow/Unfollow
Block/Unblock Blocks will be respected but cannot be modified yet
Disable Retweets Setting respected (this is handled by Twitter's servers) but cannot be modified yet
Search
Direct Messages ❌❌❌ Mastodon's DM paradigm is just too different to ever support these, honestly
Follow Requests Not yet sure if this would fit into Mastodon's UI cleanly

TODO

  • Reorganise the codebase
  • Implement more features
  • Sort threads correctly
  • Implement more Twitter Card types as Mastodon cards where I can
  • Implement entities for profile descriptions (e.g. clickable @ names)
  • Implement missing bits in existing features (alt text, voting in polls, etc)
  • Find out why Elk is unhappy with my implementation of pagination
  • Forward info about the API rate limits
  • Redirect web browsers from the bridge's fake profile/tweet URLs to the real URLs on twitter.com
  • Add TypeScript types for more things (Twitter API and Mastodon API entities?)

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