[liberationtech] Use GNU social or similar as static-IP Twitter-proxy (was: when you are using Tor, Twitter will blocked your acc)

[Mikael Nordfeldth]

2014-06-08 23:58 skrev Jacob Appelbaum:
> I've had my twiter account locked half a dozen times (web client,
> using Tails) in the last few weeks. It seems to be some new security
> heuristic where one is still able to login to change the password but
> the account is locked from generating new public (or DM) events.
> 
> It is a super annoying "security feature" to say the least.

It's easily solved by simply not connecting to their service by first-hand. Use a proxy or something similar and this problem will go away. Personally I was using a GNU social instance as sort of a Twitter proxy (posting, importing, replying) until I felt it was time to delete the Twitter account entirely.

Besides GNU social (previously StatusNet, it was running in identi.ca) there's a couple of other alternatives, one of which is Friendica. These software - besides being fully libre and open source - are actually full-blown federating social networks which easily replace many features from the proprietary networks.

But maybe, as the argument usually goes "must be where everyone else are", these free social softwares might act best as a simple static-IP-proxy for tweeting. Benefits are:
   1) Not tracked as easily using IP-based methods.
   2) If using tracking countermeasures, not banned as often. ;)
   3) You can decide yourself to set it up as, say, a Tor hidden service.

Considering how I believe very few on this list actually trust Twitter (nowadays at least), I figured it would be good to introduce the mentioned non-replacing alternatives.

-- 
Mikael Nordfeldth
https://blog.mmn-o.se/
XMPP/mail: mmn at hethane.se