On Saturday evening, I was disturbed to discover that our OpenBenches Twitter Account had been suspended!

Well… this is sub-optimal! Twitter have suspended @openbenches. No idea why. No way I can see to appeal. Grrr! pic.twitter.com/rCkHnMTEOM — ꧁Terence Eden꧂ ⏻ (@edent) May 5, 2018

To be clear, OpenBenches posts photos of benches. That’s it. No porn, no spam, no encouraging malicious behaviour. It’s just pictures like this.

IN LOVING MEMORY OF

BERYL HOOTON

TO WHOM THE GARDEN MEANT SO MUCHhttps://t.co/uIr63hLiQ9

CC BY-SA 4.0 pic.twitter.com/Gzlit7T4jZ — OpenBenches.org (@openbenches) May 4, 2018

I went to appeal the suspension, I quickly got back an automated reply denying the appeal.

This was baffling! The account is connected to a valid email address and working mobile phone number. There were no added apps which could have been used for spamming. Nothing that broke the rules.

I kicked up a bit of a stink on Twitter – and I’m grateful that so many people Tweeted their support. I dropped an email to a few people I know at Twitter, but it is a Bank Holiday weekend, so I didn’t expect any of them to answer.

I filed another appeal the next day, which was also swiftly denied. But, hey, it’s still a long weekend.

And then, without warning, I got this:

I’ve no idea whether a human reviewed it. We were now free from Twitter jail! But it came with a cost. Despite the promises, the followers never returned.

We only had a few hundred, not bad for a parochial project on the psychogeography of memorials, but now we had zero.

So, if you were following us – please follow us again! If you weren’t, now’s a good time to follow us on Twitter! Or, submit a photo of a bench using your mobile phone at https://OpenBenches.org.

Yes, I know. We should redecentralize and put our content on Mastodon, or the BlockChain, or some other convoluted platform which has no users. But that’s just not practical for a small project. We have limited technical resources and have to go to where the people are.

We have a website, and lots of Open Data – if you want to help syndicate us to multiple platforms, please file a pull request!