Track twitter unfollows in 2023

June 28, 2023 7:19 AM

Work colleague needs to track unfollows from their twitter account. low-cost service “unfollow” does not work. What does work for this in 2023, now that API access is now much more costly to developers?
posted by The Last Sockpuppet to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

You've gotten no answers so I'll just chime in and say it's possible this service no longer exists, at least at low cost. It looks like IFTTT is still able to support the Twitter API (albeit no longer for free). But while they have a trigger for "new follower" they don't have one for "lost follower".

It's possible one of the high end marketing platforms can do this.
posted by Nelson at 8:04 AM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's possible there is code out there that you would run yourself, with your own Twitter API credentials, that would do this. Or that it's possible to create such code (I'm not that familiar with the v2 API, which is the current one). If so, this would get around the "costly" bit of the problem because it would only be running occasionally for a single user, so not doing many queries.

The costly bit is if someone's running a service that – using its own single API credentials – does this kind of thing for all of the service's users, and so requires a large number of queries. That's what Twitter charges lots for, now.

But (a) any such solution would require some technical skills and (b) even if it was possible, you may find Twitter randomly changes its mind about API limits and charges, or just bans your account for vague reasons, as has happened to many automated Twitter accounts.
posted by fabius at 6:59 AM on June 30, 2023

Response by poster: Which high end marketing platforms will do this?
posted by The Last Sockpuppet at 9:09 AM on June 30, 2023

Further to my answer it looks like as of a few days ago this might not be possible via the API on the lower tiers at all, because I think it’s no longer possible to get a list of who an account follows and who follows it. From the changelog:

June 26, 2023
Today, we are removing the Follows and List Follows endpoints from the Basic and Pro tiers of the Twitter API v2.

(Although it’s tagged “Twitter API 1.1” which suggests the level of competence and attention to detail currently brought to bear on these matters.)

Here’s a thread of people wondering why their code suddenly stopped working when this change happened with no notice.
posted by fabius at 9:27 AM on June 30, 2023