TwitToMast

Bypass paywalled APIs to crosspost from Twitter to Mastodon

Installation:

1. Clone the repo and set up the script's dependencies

git clone https://github.com/pogmom/TwitToMast.git
cd TwitToMast
npm install

2. Install Chrome Webdriver and set up your PATH as outlined in Step 3 here

3. Retrieve your Mastodon API Key

   • From your Mastodon Account, go to Preferences > Development > New Application
   • Enter any name you'd like, press "submit"
   • You should see the application with the name you just gave it in your applications list
   • Click on its name, and copy the string of text to the right of where it says "Your Access Token"

4. Update config.txt with your Mastodon account settings

   • Replace "API_KEY" on line 1 with the Access Token you retrieved in the previous step
   • Replace "API_URL" on line 2 with your Mastodon instance's API URL
     • This will look like "https://mastodon.social/api/v1/", replacing "mastodon.social" with the domain you registered your account through
   • Line 3 determines whether or not quote tweets will be sent to Mastodon
     • true: Quote tweets will be sent to Mastodon
     • false: Quote tweets will not be sent to Mastodon
   • Line 4 determines whether or not tweets that are part of threads will be sent to Mastodon
     • true: Thread tweets will be sent to Mastodon
     • false: Thread tweets will not be sent to Mastodon
   • While they can be independently configured, it's recommended that Lines 3 and 4 are set to the same value

Usage

Single User Scraper

node ./TwitToMast.js [username] [tweet count] [debug level] [disable posts] [print header]

• username (string): the twitter handle of the user whose account will be scraped
• tweet count (integer): the number of enabled tweets that will be scraped from the targeted account
• debug level (0-2): Level of output that will be printed on screen
  • 0 or omitted: the program will to run silently (no output on screen)
  • 1: The program will print what tasks it is working on and errors, but nothing more
  • 2: The program will print what tasks it is working on and errors, as well as various other information necessary for troubleshooting
• disable posts ('write','noWrite'): enable/disable posting tweets to Mastodon, useful for testing
• print header ('printHeader'): enable attaching a header with the user's name, twitter handle, and link to tweet

Example

Multi User Scraper

Configure twitter accounts to be scraped in usernameslist.txt before running the script

node ./multi.js [tweet count] [debug level] [disable posts] [print header]

• Arguments have the same effect as listed above
• Note that username is NOT used in this script

Example

How Types of Tweets are handled

• Self Posts
  • Preserves Text, links, and still images
• Quote Tweets
  • Preserves Text, links, still images, and link to quoted tweet
• Retweets
  • Retweets are not cross-posted at the moment
• Replies
  • To self:
    • Preserves Text, links, still images, but loses continuity (tweets are not stitched together in threads)
  • To others:
    • Replies to others are not cross-posted at the moment

Q&A

Q. why isn't it staying open in the background to monitor my tweets? A. TwitToMast doesn't run perpetually by default. You'll need to set it up yourself to run on a schedule.

• On macos, you can run the script every 10 minutes with the following command in an automator app set up to run at login.
  • zsh -c "cd /path/to/repository/TwitToMast && exec screen -DmS twittercrosspost zsh -c 'while true; do /path/to/node ./TwitToMast.js [username] [tweet count] [debug level] & sleep 600; done'"
  • You can connect to the created screen to monitor the output of the script with screen -ls and screen -r [screenid]
• Windows users, try this
• If you're on linux, you probably already know what you're doing

Q. Doesn't bypassing Twitter's API violate their TOS? A. No, elon musk personally gave me the go-ahead to do this.