This is why I like that project. User cant be disturb as this self hosting service is yours. You are the master on board :) Do what you want ; do what you need ; share or dont etc.
It is a toy that renders service.
The goal of that kind of tool is not to be the future of social network but to provide data that can be consummed without any effort. There are plenty of tools that provide data that are absolutly not related to any social network like weather service, movie store , and so on. For example http://weboob.org/. And i made this one because i like Python and launching challenge to myself. I just provide this project in case someone find it usefull for himself too. Nothing more.
I understand. You are right about how to start the app. When we have a little bit of skill with python/django it's easier.
I'll try to improve that point in the doc but it's not simple ;)
So, once you made a (python) virtualenv (which is recommand) and source it (by doing source bin/activate) and install the whole application, start it by :
python manage.py runserver
On a production environment we use "supervisor" which permits to start everything automatically.
And finally, to avoid all of that glitch, I'm looking at docker.
No the project does not do "RT" at all. Or maybe you call a RT ; a news that come from one of your favorite website. I did not code anything that permits to track tweet on twitter and RT them. It really works from one service source to another target service and not from and to the same one.
you can post things that come from many sources (the sources are the services that the project is able to handle) through your twitter account.
* from twitter to anywhere else :
you can track a hashtag or account or both and the result of that "search" will be posted where you want (the limit of "where" is the limit of the services that the project can handle), you can even build a RSS Feed, a thing that exist at the beginning of twitter but dropped later ;)