IndieWeb

Brid.gy Twitter Support

It was foreseeable that it would happen: Brid.gy is discontinuing its Twitter support at the end of April. Brid.gy is a great service that allows users to bring data from major platforms back to the feediverse, including tweets.

I've been using it for a long time on my website. Some of the comments on my blog posts were replies that came in via Twitter, and Brid.gy helped with that. The service signed in through my Twitter account and regularly scanned for replies. If a reply contained a link to one of my posts, Brid.gy sent that tweet as a webmention to my blog.

Two plugins are used on my site: the IndieConnector Plugin, which can receive and send webmentions, gets the webmention from Brid.gy and distributes it in the CMS. Then the Komment Plugin takes over and saves the webmention as a comment under the appropriate article. This way, people could respond to my posts on Twitter for a long time.

Brid.gy has been using the free Twitter API, which will no longer be available in the future. As stated in this post, switching to the paid API would be too expensive, so tweets will no longer be available as comments.

Since I haven't been using Twitter myself for several months now, and am now focusing exclusively on Mastodon, this change won't affect me as much anymore.

Why am I explaining all of this in so much detail?

Because Brid.gy can do so much more than just Twitter. And it will still be possible to collect responses from other sources, such as Mastodon. Since these responses will also arrive as webmentions, they will appear here (and if you want, also on your own site) as comments under the posts.

By the way, with the IndieConnector plugin, it's not only possible to receive and send Mastodon posts, but also to turn your own website into its own Mastodon instance! This way, people can follow your blog on Mastodon (or other ActivityPub services), and you can also follow other people's blogs. So definitely check it out, I think it's worth it!