It’s possible to get the earliest followers of a Twitter account without requesting all of them?
If yes, how?
Thanks in advance
No, since results are delivered in roughly reverse chronological order, and as far as i know there’s no way to skip pages - i’d love to know if there is a way though.
I’m happy to announce that it is possible: use the pagination token VRVVVVVVVVVVUZZZ, and an arbitrary amount of max_results.
The last user in the list is the first follower, the second to last is the second, etc.
It will work on any account, even the oldest ones like @/jack (though, on that example, I have some doubts about the three accounts with bigger ids than the ones after them, there is probably some inconsistencies with very old accounts/follows)
You can also go through previous pages using the returned previous_token as pagination_token.
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Oh, awesome! This is super useful, thanks! Did you just try a bunch of pagination tokens and see which ones worked? or are they encoding something?
I had to dig a little into how they are encoded, with the help of a friend who loves those kind of research. The one I gave is the “furthest” we can go while being in reverse pagination mode.
I’m currently trying to figure the ones used in the retweets endpoint, mostly out of curiosity. I fell onto this topic because I think I spotted an issue when using previous_token there (but found nothing related, so I’m going to create a new topic soon)
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What’s the encoding? Is the search pagination token the same?
