[GeckoEidechse]

On the topic of Twiter, Mastodon, and the Fediverse, why do federated FOSS alternatives to popular platforms not offer a read-only version of said platform as one of its instances to augment its lack of content?

In the example of Twitter, Nitter already exists as an alternative front-end. Now what if there's a Mastodon instance that uses Nitter to wrap official Twitter content and serve it as if it where the twitter.com mastodon instance? Again it would need to be a read-only version as Twitter is not Mastodon but it would help fill the content gap for sure.

Now Mastodon might not have a content issue but PeerTube for example very well has and in that case masquerading YouTube as a PeerTube instance would become very interesting.

[remram]

Terms of use? Do you think you can just import content en-masse from any site to your platform and they won't care?

[jeroenhd]

There is a lot of Twitter content out there. Too much for a single instance to proxy. I believe there are projects to mirror specific Twitter accounts to a (personal) Mastodon server so you can switch apps without needing two apps. I'm not sure what the implication would be for privacy/data usage regulations if you open those messages to the public, though; blindly reposting everything may actually violate data privacy laws (yes, even if that information is publicly available).

Engagement with the audience also is a significant factor for making social media enjoyable. A read-only mirror of Twitter would be very boring, because you can respond/tag/whatever you want for all eternity, but the Twitter authors would never notice.

Such a system would work for people primarily using Mastodon that cross-post to Twitter; you could add Twitter replies to the Mastodon replies and get a mixed content stream (that Twitter users might miss half of when discussions respond to as-of-yet unproxied messages).

[jeena]

Interestingly I started using Twitter as a write only medium, which means I didn't have any interactions there with anyone. This led to the subscribers stagnating, everyone who already was subscribed stayed subscribed but no new people would subscribe for years.

[hedora]

None of this addresses the question:

Nitter exists and it is open source. Why not add a mastodon API to it?

The existence of such a thing in no way has anything to do with existing mastodon instances TOS / acceptable use relationship with twitter (if such a relationship even exists).0

[andrewkdinh]

BirdsiteLIVE does this

Source code: https://github.com/NicolasConstant/BirdsiteLive Official instance: https://beta.birdsite.live/