twastosync: Synchronize Mastodon Toots to Twitter
Ever since I built up my own Mastodon instance and created my own account I wanted to be able to cross-post messages between the two platforms. I searched for different solutions like IFTTT but I never got them to work properly - until I found dlvr.it which worked right out of the box for me. Well, at least at the beginning...
I have to admit that I did not use Mastodon regularly for quite some time and even thought about deleting my instance, but I wanted to give it another try now and wanted to use the synchronization feature - which did not work anymore. So I checked my dlvr.it account and found out that the synchronization had silently broken when Mastodon switched from providing Atom feeds to providing RSS feeds. So I reconfigured the synchronization, just to find out that dlvr.it now has limited the free tier to three posts per day. Think about it: three. posts. per day.
Looking at the pricing of dlvr.it I just had to laugh. They want me to pay $8.29 per month for an unlimited amount of messages. In comparison, the server that my Mastodon instance is running on is cheaper than that. My next step was to look for alternatives: circleboom also allows only three posts from an RSS feed per day and for an unlimited number of posts they want to charge you $17.00 per month or $5.99 per month if you are on an annual subscription. socialoomph does not even provide RSS feed synchronization in the free tier and comes at $15.00 per month or $162.00 per year. Finally, I also looked at Hootsuite, which is the strangest of them all. In order to auto-publish posts from an RSS feed you actually have to subscribe to the paid RSS AutoPublisher app which wants to charge you $5.99 per month.
That was the point where I decided to build something on my own. Because, what is better than writing code? Writing code and saving money by doing so. I took one of my previous Twitter tools as a basis and created twastosync. The tool uses the TwitterOAuth library to communicate with the Twitter API and the simplexml_load_string() function of PHP to parse the RSS feed that you can find at the URL https://mastodon-instance-url/@username.rss. Finally, it uses my unchroot library to prevent concurrent executions.
When you installed and configured the script you can use something like CRON to call the twastosync script regularly. Thanks to the concurrency prevention you can even call it every minute. One step that might be a bit scary is to use the app registration page of Twitter to register your own bot. I did this myself and there did not pop up any problem.
There we are: With a small script we are able to synchronize our Mastodon toots to Twitter without relying on a third party platform and by doing it ourselves we are even saving real money. 🤑
Update
As you may have heard, Elmo Tusk as bought Twitter, gave it a single-letter name and turned it into an alt-right shithole. Due to that I have stopped improving twastosync and have archived the sourcecode of the project. I will not support the Twitter platform any longer.
