In ~24 hours my Twitter account is going to stop following all accounts, will force-remove all of its followers, and keep a tool running to remove any new ones.
This will keep existing tweets up to preserve external links and allow other's retweets and favorites to remain. But mine will have a nice clean 0 for followers and following.
The tool I slapped together in an hour is at https://github.com/JakeWharton/singular-solution if you want to do the same, although admittedly its first production test will be tomorrow 🤞
Done after ~18 hours!
Start: 69,666 followers
End: 3 followers(!?)
No matter how hard I try those three don't go away. It was four and then one dropped off. So it'll probably happen eventually.
Had to fix rate limiting check (off-by-one), add support for 404s (followers can return deleted users), add support for 503s (service unavailable).
Never hit a rate limit despite ~4,000 block/unblock calls per hour.
My API keys were inexplicably purged halfway through. Had to make new ones to finish.
@jw we don't need tests if we can just roll to production and see what happens.
@jw Heya Jake, I'm just curious as to why you're going to all the trouble? I didn't see anything about that in the Readme.
Most of the people I know are just using Moa to echo messages back and forth and encourage others to migrate to Mastodon.
@Scott Using moa encourages people to stay on Twitter. That is the opposite of what I would like to do.
@jw You had my respect in as an engineer. And you got my respect as a person now. Thank you for clearly showing showing your stance 🙇
@jw it's working! Cool to watch the follower count go down live.
@yawkat And weirdly it's not being rate limited so it's just very linear. I spent all that time (ok not that much time) adding in logic to handle rate limiting, too.
This is fun to watch in real time
@jw What's the idea behind removing followers? Will make it a lot harder for people to find you using migration tools…
@numist I'm effectively deleting the account without opening the handle to be stolen and without breaking access to past content. I'm okay with those who haven't migrated having to discover me organically again, or potentially just missing out on their follow. It's not a perfect system. Plus it ensures I'm not tempted to keep engaging there.
@jw I'm confused. Did it work? Or did twitter revert your action?
@manuherfurth I went to bed. It hit a 404 trying to block some used that was being returned from the following list and got stuck. Added logic this morning to handle the case and it's back off and running!
69,666
Nice
@cb The tool's on a five minute cron job now so sadly it won't last!
@jw what if I add a corn job to keep following you every 5 mins 😅
@jordan_terry @jw When a corn job pops, it's just the best
@jw wow! This is it then 🥲
Now I gotta set this site as my home page 🥳
@jw did it hit any snag? I checked about an hour ago and again now and numbers are not changing.
@ronaldopace I went to bed. It hit a 404 trying to block some used that was being returned from the following list and got stuck. Added logic this morning to handle the case and it's back off and running!
@jw You can just #LockAndLeave it sitting with zero followers. All requests to follow will just be ignored. But no mater how you do it it’s very smart not to just deactivate, since in 30 days your account could be spoofed & all old @ replies will direct to the fake. 👍
@Pineywoozle Yeah I know, but I don't want to break embeds or regular links by locking. Also would break favorites and unsure what it does to retweets.
@jw Understood. Although at the rate he’s going it’s all gonna be broken soon anyway. I personally want as little useful stuff left there as possible, so it keeps nudging people to leave. I had my tweets & followers sent to me and when I’m done trying to drag people out of the dumpster fire I’m fine if I just leave a husk.
@jw I was just wondering, why? :)
