Further to my last post, it turns out that I was reading the wiki wrongly or – more accurately – not reading the whole of the wiki:
Import my Friends Timeline.
Currently StatusNet software can fetch directly from Twitter, but this is not enabled on identi.ca as it’s not yet functional for a high-load site.
What that means is that the Status.net software can import tweets from twitter into my timeline, but this is not implemented for Identi.ca.
Bugger.
I did take a look at the Feed mirror settings in the Identi.ca comtrol panel but it appears that Twitter also started playing silly buggers with their RSS feeds at some point over the past 12 months. Workarounds exist, but I’m not sure I want to waste my time faffing around with a service that I haven’t missed for over a year – especially if they are this determined to make life difficult for me.
I could federate and start running my own Status.net instance. This is something I have thought about in the past but have yet to find the motivation to abandon the convenience that Identi.ca provides. And Twitter deciding to make things difficult simply makes me less inclined to faff around any further with the site.
I am also aware that clients exist that can merge Twitter and Identi.ca streams. I even use some of them. But relying on external clients to merge these streams means that I then lose the convenience of having a single stream of conversation that is the same regardless of which device/application combination I happen to be using at the time.
It is also worth bearing in mind that the existence of cross-platform clients now is no guarantee that Twitter won’t start blocking them at some point in the future.
Twitter, it seems, are building a walled garden. It’s not (yet) as annoying as Facebook, but they’re working on it.
And I will leave them to it.





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