birddotmakeup

Introducing the alpha of kilogram.makeup

I've been working on this for a while and I'm happy to make the first public release of a bridge for Instagram: kilogram.makeup. Just like bird.makeup allows you to seamlessly follow accounts on Twitter from the Fediverse, kilogram.makeup allows you to do the same with Instagram.

Note this is an alpha, which means not everything works, but what works is ready for testing. Right now, you can:

- Search for accounts,

- See their profile

- Follow them

but note that p...

New perk for subscribers

I'm pleased to announce that the Mastodon instance I've been running for myself in the last few months is now going to be open to all past and present Patreon supporters!

It's a general purpose instance with memorable domain name: r.town

Just like bird.makeup, it is powered by 100% renewable energy. They are cohosted together in the hydro electricity-rich Québec where I'm from.

And of course, my other fediverse projects, like bird.makeup, are never going to be blocked, so w...

A call for a special kind of donation

As you may have heard, Twitter disabled the endpoint Nitter was using, breaking the application. Its maintainer, Zedeus, subsequently declaired the project dead. It's a bit unfortunate, as we were using nitter instances to fetch the list of new tweets for an account.

So it's a bit of a setback for us, but I have a new design that seems to work so far: using real twitter accounts via twscrape. There is a new server component to bird.makeup: 2024-02-09 18:09:49 +0000 UTC View Post

Where bird.makeup is at

As you may have noticed in the last few weeks, Twitter imposed new restrictions on what data is given to logged out visitors. Now you can only see the top 100 post by likes of a user, but not necessarily  the recent stuff. 

This has had a big impact on bird.makeup ability to reliably forward new posts. I made changes so that if a post makes it to the top 100, it will be forwarded, but this is much less useful. 

Additionally, I noticed that pinned tweets are still th...

We crossed 40k!

I am very happy to announce that we crossed the 40k user mark this week! I had no idea this project I initially started for myself would get so big, so thank you all. It means a lot that you all find my work useful.

Server stuff

Since my last post, I added a new server to handle the load and just like the previous one, it is 100% powered by renewable energy. I also made a change so that multiple servers can now answer web requests, which did bring down the errors ...

The (bumby) road to 20k users

Hello everyone!

As you might have noticed since my last update, bird.makeup has gotten quite a bit more popular, and we have since crossed the 20k users mark! It's been quite a ride though, with multiple cycles of reaching the limits of what the code could achieve, crashing, improving it, then repeating that whole cycle again. Thank you all for your patience while the site has been down or lagging behind by a few hours in the last weeks.

On the plus side there as been a lot of imp...

Updates from the last few weeks

Hello everyone!

Thought it would be nice to write a quick post with all the improvements I did in the last few weeks.

Scaling

People are continuing to subscribe to replicated account en masse! A least a thousand users sign up every week and current users create a least a thousand subscriptions every day. bird.makeup is also running from a rather small server (2 cores 4gb of ram) to keep costs under control. 

So that means I have ...

What should I improve next?

As you might have noticed, I just finished making retweets work, and I'm not sure what I should work on next. I have some ideas below, but what do you all think?