Twitter Issues

WebMention.io is a service that handles the nuts and bolts of webmentions for you. I had considered rolling my own on this, and I still might, but webmention.io works well for what it does and there’s quite a bit more work in setting up webmentions, versus authentication. I think there’s something ideological about it, too. I’m much more concerned about controlling my own identity than I am controlling the comments on this site.

Bridgy is a service that connects “silo” sites like Twitter to Webmentions. If I post a tweet that links to a blog entry here, and someone replies to that tweet, Bridgy will pick that up and convert it to a webmention so it appears as a comment here. Very nice.

But I quickly ran into a problem. Twitter had blocked my account.

This is a perfect example of what’s wrong with the social silo sites. They grow themselves into unmanageable behemoths by luring people with so-called “free” services and netowrk effects, and then they provide zero customer support. Why did Twitter ban me? I have no idea. They wouldn’t say. It was just an automated ban with a link to “The Twitter Rules”. I read through that but couldn’t find anything I might have violated. My Twitter account only had one post on it, for goodness’ sake.

My only recourse was to file an appeal through yet another automated system. A few minutes later, my account was reinstated. If they did it that fast then I’m sure no human ever looked at my appeal. So I have no idea if my account will get blocked again, for whatever reason it was blocked the first time.

What can we do about it? Hope that Twitter collapses under its own weight, eventually. I’m only oning it as a POSSE point, so I won’t ever post anything unique there and I wont have to worry about Twitter unilaterally deciding to delete all my posts.

Now I need to publish this, and see if my Bridgy automation works to make the Twitter post.