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 🤞
@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 🥳
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.