Automated Mastodon <> Twitter cross-postings
The Fediverse is a vastly different place than Twitter. Functions like the Local Timeline and server announcements in Mastodon create communities that do feel way more like real communities than let's say #infosec Twitter.
Things are just more civilized on Mastodon.
However, there are users on Mastodon, who use cross-posting integrations to toot all their Twitter tweets to Mastodon. With that the following issues arise:
- High frequency tweets flood the otherwise civilized Local Timeline of the user's home instance.
- The Mastodon user account becomes more or less a Bot – You cannot interact with it because the actual human never logs into Mastodon to check notifications there.
For the above reasons I have decided to limit such user accounts on the two instances I'm responsible for going forward. Below is a description of the 'Limit' moderation action.
Limit
A limited account is hidden to all other users on that instance, except for its followers. All of the content is still there, and it can still be found via search, mentions, and following, but the content is invisible publicly.
At this moment, limit does not affect federation. A locally limited account is not limited automatically on other servers. Account limitations are reversible.