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Comment by seancoleman | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of how I hacked twitter 10+ years ago to get free SMS delivery for a web app I built. Before Twilio, custom SMS notification delivery was hard and expensive.

At the time, twitter allowed you to receive SMS notifications of tweets posted to a followed account. I created a private account and used twitter's API to post tweets to with the notification content I wanted to send. I then had "dummy" accounts follow the "notification" account. These dummy accounts had recipient phone numbers with SMS notifications turned on.

The flow was: Web App -> Twitter API -> Tweet from "notification" account -> followers received SMS notifications. Free SMS delivery!

It was clunky and SMS notifications looked like they came from twitter (they did) but it solved my use case perfectly.

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Twitter used to be a wonderful platform to hack on. I feel like the early days of developer and poweruser friendliness helped keep the platform from dying in some niche microblogging category.

It was originally a base for which people made all kinds of neat things like TwitPic. But then Twitter started integrating everything and competing with all the people who made them great; sometimes even suing them.

I started using Twitter via SMS and before the age of modern smart phones (I was on my Palm Treo. The girl in the cube behind me just got an EDGE eyePhone) and for all my university friends, we used it as a big SMS-based group chat room. It was kinda fun, the total opposite of what Twitter is today.

If you want to hack on platforms and build tooling around them, I suggest people look at ActivityPub implementations: Pleroma, Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed and others. ActiviyPub is really where a lot of the neat federated social networking stuff is happening, and having more devs hacking on it and making more implementations can help keep it diverse and falling into the state where modern E-mail is.

I have similar memories from college. It's weird to think that API Craze was an apex for hacking culture, but things haven't felt as exciting since.

Or maybe I'm just reflecting on a younger period with nostalgia and have lost touch. Maybe those Instagram stickers and TikToks are equally as hackworthy as the things we spun up in the ol' days.

They seem like our older geocities pages or myspace profiles or tublr blogs but used by more and offering less but expecting less effort to create.

The experience of people getting their business fucked by platforms when they get traction mean that less people will try it again with those new ones.

I think a key difference is the Twitter API externalized things (people building on top, creating an ecosystem) whereas IG/TikTok stickers are inclusive and focused on people building within

One favorite recollection of the Twitter API usage was this guy who hooked up a pressure sensor to a Twitter account, and placed the sensor under his newly married friend's bed - and the thing would tweet when the couple got in bed. [0]

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/12/12/newlywed-sex-tweets/

A video by Tom Scott exploring that sentiment https://youtu.be/BxV14h0kFs0

That's just how the cooki... er, cloud... crumbles

Lol I may or may not currently be using a Twitter account and cron to broadcast any changes to my (non-static) home ip address, encrypted, so I can ssh into my workstation when I'm on vacation.

Are dynamic DNS services no longer a thing?

It looks like they are, thanks! This is just what I could hack together before I went on Christmas break a couple years back lol.

They've been around for well over a decade.

Some home routers even have a feature to keep your IP address updated with the DDNS service.

Yep, free dynamic DNS still exists, for example NoIP https://www.noip.com/ However, you have to refresh it each month by filling out a "I'm still using it" web form they email you. So, you can't just set it & forget it.

I use Namecheap, but other providers offer it as well: free dyndns service with a domain - no monthly checkin required.

Wait Namecheap has dyndns service as well? Nice, I shall check into this! I have a few domains with them. Thanks :)

it really isn't that hard to set up dynamic dns yourself. like maybe a day of work. just don't forget to upgrade your dns server software when exploits are discovered

Running your own DNS server (if that's what you're suggesting) just for dynamic DNS is extremely unnecessary. Not to mention the case of someone who doesn't have another server with a static IP to host the DNS on.

All but the worst of the worst providers have an API of some sort and if you're savvy enough to set up BIND, you can handle writing a curl command to post your IP to the API and sticking it into cron.

https://freedns.afraid.org/

Works in the free tier as set and forget. As long as you keep updating it (with whatever API), it works. Filling out a form manually makes NoIP sound like a horrible service.

I use Now-DNS.com and you don't have to check in with them.

The big one is gone, but I have good integration between my Asus router and Google domains.

Seems like a strange way to achieve this. Why not just have it send you an email? Or update a DNS record through an API?

I did first try to setup email, but I couldn't figure out how to do that without providing a static ip address. This was a "what can I make work in the two hours before we drive across the country" solution lol.

Cloudflare's API supports this for free; my Ubiquiti router updates my DNS records when/if something changes. But I love your hack :)

Which Ubiquiti router are you using for home use?

A friend of mine convinced me to get us a Fortinet appliance at home - it’s good, I can’t deny - but integration with th rest of our Ubiquiti kit would be nice.

inadyn works well and supports a bunch of services (it’s been around since 2003 at least..).

https://github.com/troglobit/inadyn

A lot of domain registrars offer dynamic DNS for free using the original protocol or variants supported by inadyn. I’ve been using domains.google for the past 5 years and been pretty happy with it.

Hah! I did something quite similar back in the day for text message notifications of server downtime.

The problem was that sometimes Twitter's messages were delayed by hours...

Does anyone remember the drama of failwhale and their Rails issues? Those were the times!

was thinking about the failwhale a few weeks back when github went down and was throwing angry pink unicorns. Different, pre-coronavirus times.

You mean when Michael Arrington used his popular meda outlet to assassinate Blaine Cook's job and reputation?

https://techcrunch.com/2008/04/23/amateur-hour-over-at-twitt...

Heck, if you use Twitter a lot you've probably seen the return of the failwhale over the past several months: https://imgur.com/a/p6mYfIw

I used Clickatell for years before Twilio and it really wasn't hard or mad expensive.

Back then most Canadian cell providers used to (maybe still do) forward SMS from emails sent to a special address that was basically just <phone number>@telus/bell/whatever.ca. They would do the opposite to, as SMS replies would get send back as an email.

I used to SMS friends from my email client and later my iPod touch using email.

I too did almost similar.

A filter in GMail labeled some important incoming mails based on my criteria. My Google App Script checked for this lable every 4 hours, & if found, extracts some info, & post it as a tweet to a private account. The followed account gets a SMS notification

If the phone numbers were of your users you were presumably unauthorized to sign up for a different service using those. That is sketchy.

This was an internal app so all users were known and gave authorization, but I hear your concern.

I originally created a Twitter account back in 2007 for this same reason. To this day it's still my only account. Having great insight and vision, I could foresee no usefulness or future for "social media", except as a way to send free SMS messages, and only Twitter had that.

I did a similar thing with Google Calendar! Sadly they shut down their SMS notifications in November 2018.

“Sadly”

https://usa.kaspersky.com/blog/spam-through-google-services/...

Since Twilio was mentioned for commercial SMS, lets give a shout-out to Plivo too:

https://www.plivo.com/

Was this your own personal setup or part of some product? Because you would have had problem if end user really had a real Twitter account with the same number. right?

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