twitter2nostr messaging bridge

[brenzi]

dropped activity because most likely illegal

Original idea post on nostr

Motivation

How to break winner-takes-all platform monopolies like twitter and decentralize them?

Assuming nostr here. On Mastodon, users don't own and sign their content by means of a keypair, so the concept described her won't be of much use.

The network effect makes it hard to replace twitter. So many people we want to follow and be followed by are on twitter. So, how can we make nostr more attractive UNTIL people move over?

A twitter bridge could listen to tweets from a list of accounts and create shadow identities on nostr which it uses to cross-post all tweets. This way, people could move to nostr but still follow ppl on twitter - without logging in to twitter. And without the annoying ads and the questionable addictive algorithm for the ever-so-fresh timeline.

But how could we authenticate these shadow identites without the initiative or even consent of the original twitter account?

Enter trusted execution environments (TEE):

We could execute the listener inside a TEE and let it create shadow nostr accounts with a name like "POTUS [on twitter]". The keys to these accounts would be managed by the TEE and are not accessible to the operator of the service. Then, we could use NIP-58 badges to indicate verified TEE-managed accounts (remote attestation is possible)

Implementation Options

It should be fairly straightforward to build this including a complete audit trail with the Integritee SDK: integritee.network docs.integritee.network/4-development/4.4-sdk/4.4.2-trusted-off-chain-worker

caveats

• not sure what legal implications apply if we cross-post without consent
• might not comply with Twitter API terms. Need to check
• we probably should offer opt-out to be fair to twitterers who do not want to be cross-posted to nostr
• it may make sense to use a specialized set of relays for this, so people can easily choose to see such cross-posts or not

[brenzi]

This product idea is most likely illegal according to this source: https://research.aimultiple.com/web-scraping-ethics/

Scraping publicly available information on the web in an automated way is legal as long as the scraped data is not

• Used to directly harm the scraped website’s business or operations.
• Including Personally identifiable information (PII)

It can be argued that we would scrape PII and that our use case harms twitters business (That -actually would be the whole point)