24 ms·

Tweetbot. April 2011 – January 2023

727 points by davidbarker 4y ago

seydor 4y ago
Twitter's PR department may have become deliberately obnoxious, but i must say the reactions and shaking fists of twitter users remind me sooo much of the times when facebook was making a major change to their website and everybody was moving to canada or sth
znpy 4y ago
I wonder how much savings in infrastructure is getting musk from this move.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  Driving users away is one good way at lowering hosting costs, that's true.
alexktz 4y ago
[flagged]
- ask_b123 4y ago
  What does this mean?
  - ubermonkey 4y ago
    It means elon musk is a dick.
  - ducktective 4y ago
    Apparently "king" is the new fashion word for cool guy, chad, bro
  - tmpz22 4y ago
    Calling someone "King {adjective}" is saying they are not just {adjective} they are the King of {adjective}s
    - ask_b123 4y ago
      Ha, I was confused as to whether this was a strangely worded compliment or a strangely worded insult.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
olliecornelia 4y ago
The fewer people have access to Twitter the better.
jdoss 4y ago
The question I have with this move is why didn't Twitter just force advertising as part of their API for third party clients? Just change the TOS for using the API so if they didn't show advertising they would be cut off. What am I missing?
- bradgessler 4y ago
  The list of unforced errors is insane. Remember when pg was banned from Twitter for mentioning that he had a link to Mastodon on his website? https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-suspends-account-paul-graham-232754736.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-suspends-account-paul...
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    Move fast and break your $44B investment.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I followed some of that and it was especially funny that he had just been defending Musk and posting some "well he's a super-genius—you know, like all us rich SV types—so we should give him the benefit of the doubt" sort of stuff, right before that happened. The whole thing was truly beautiful. Overall, Musk's acquisition has provided some excellent entertainment.
    - peanuty1 4y ago
      "It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX." - Paul Graham https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        His quick turn around (there was some, "oh, huh, when you put it that way, perhaps he is making some questionable choices" interaction with another poster) right before the ban was maybe the most perfect example of "I never thought the face-eating leopard would eat my face!" I've ever seen. A moment of dawning realization an instant before the face gets eaten. It was perfect.
iameli 4y ago
And so ends my daily use of Twitter. I still haven't been able to get into Mastodon in the same way, but if Ivory is as good as Tweetbot was it might bring me around.
- bradgessler 4y ago
  It is as good as Tweetbot. Using Ivory makes most of the "UX issues" of Mastodon go away ... almost.
  - MBCook 4y ago
    Same. I was having trouble with Mastodon. Nothing felt right from a UI design perspective. With Ivory I feel at home. Can’t wait to start paying for it.
    - rstevens333 4y ago
      SAME
- dawnerd 4y ago
  Honestly some days I forget I'm not using twitter. Same with the normal Mastodon web interface. Once you get into it properly it all kinda blurs away. Way more interactions on there than I had before too.
  - lanstin 4y ago
    Lot more interactions but also less biting wit that makes me laugh. But no Elon so net win.
tills13 4y ago
I don't _really_ get it. Wouldn't it have been easier to work with these platforms and mandate that they show promoted tweets the same as the official app? I imagine Elon also downsized the official app teams so why not outsource some of that work to third parties and let them figure out monetization?
fizx 4y ago
All 3rd party clients shut down is the best case for twitter. All 3rd party clients migrate their users to Mastodon, while simultaneously solving the UX and approachability problems that have hampered Mastodon, sure seems like the worst case scenario for twitter.
mttjj 4y ago
Tweetbot was the only way I interacted with Twitter for years. I refuse to use the website and I refuse to download Twitter's app. When it was finally revealed that this move was intentional I deleted my Twitter account. I was mocked in high school for having a Twitter account (2008) and not a Facebook account. I remember "tweeting" from my flip/dumb-phone. I still don't have Facebook. I don't regret being on Twitter but I am learning to live without it these days. There's something freeing about a cold turkey detox from that increasingly hostile social network. Anyway, I'm just rambling at this point. RIP Tweetbot. Thank you for making Twitter usable. Eagerly awaiting Ivory.
- joezydeco 4y ago
  100% concur, but don't delete your account. Don't let someone else take the username. Delete your tweets and wipe your profile, but let it sit dormant. Forever.
  - Sunspark 4y ago
    It won't be forever. I remember Musk saying awhile back that they were going to flush inactive accounts at some point. I agree with this. Why should a username remain reserved if it hasn't been logged into for years?
    - JoshuaRogers 4y ago
      Mainly because of "Login with Twitter". There isn't a proper way to tell downstream systems who have authenticated against Twitter that "The account JohnDoe is now a different user than they were." Basically the same principle used to hijack accounts by buying an expired domain that had email addresses associated with it.
    - amatecha 4y ago
      probably because my username is my first initial and my last name, and I don't really want someone impersonating me on a platform that I've used as a key social media presence since 2007?
teach 4y ago
I have an old friend who is blind. The official Twitter client is a LOT less accessible than the one she was using. This change impacts her ability to use Twitter considerably. And before you start with the "well, she's probably better off" -- she lives in a small rural town. Twitter and Facebook and the like are one of her few connections to a larger world.
- based_karen 4y ago
  [flagged]
- wstuartcl 4y ago
  The fact that Elon has disbanded the accessibility team at twitter probably already leads them into hot water related to this (It is not uncommon for orgs like twitter to be bound by multiple long term settlements related to accessibility suits that each have obligations of certain deliverables in this area. If your friend truly does have issues navigating the site perhaps she may want to look to a legal remedy -- from all appearances that is really the only knob that seems to have any impact on Musk.
  - NavinF 4y ago
    Has a social media site ever been forced to accommodate blind people? Serious question.
    - JustSomeNobody 4y ago
      When is a good time to start holding them accountable?
      - wstuartcl 4y ago
        It would be mind blowing to me and completely unexpected if twitter was not already under many active settlements related to accessibility lawsuits each with their own ongoing obligations. There are very few large entities that have not been impacted by ADA lawsuits at this point -- even ones that had accessibility as a core value before the lawsuits.
DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
Note this kind of thing happens all the time. VRChat instituted EAC to prevent client modifications late last year. Hundreds of developers and tens of thousands of users all had their mods stop working overnight. Projects that dozens of devs had poured countless hours into became instantly and utterly worthless. It’s insane that this is what the internet has become.
- wstuartcl 4y ago
  While I do get what you are saying VRChat shutdown is a pretty poor match to this scenario. the TOS for that always had a clear verboten against modifying the client and network traffic via 3rd party apps/patches. In Twitters case, the API was shut down (with no warning) and then the TOS was updated to make the integrations verboten only well after there was a fairly huge backlash and late response of "clients were disabled that were violating api 'rules'" did not hold up against the actual rules in place. I really do get the whole move fast and break things model, however this is Musk taking that model to mean put on blinders and run full speed while holding scissors in a crowded room with many walls -- consequences be damned.
Matl 4y ago
A great opportunity Mastodon wouldn't otherwise get. Thanks Elon.
haidev 4y ago
Won't this hurt Elon in the long run? I was never able to stand the official Twitter app it's filled with ads and irrelevant clutter. I think since moving to Android Tweetbot is one of the few apps I miss from having on my phone. I was still enjoying the Mac version. I guess I will stick to Nitter [0] from now on. [0] - https://nitter.net/ https://nitter.net/
- app4soft 4y ago
  There is also Nitter for Android (WebView-app), but source repo not available for a month already.[0,1] [0] https://gitlab.com/Plexer0/Nitter-Android https://gitlab.com/Plexer0/Nitter-Android [1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.plexer0.nitter/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.plexer0.nitter/
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Most people don't use third party clients, so no it won't.
- seydor 4y ago
  By "app" do you mean the twitter website (because that's all i ve used). Why would one need an App to read a list that s basically full of browser links?
  - wvenable 4y ago
    Because the experience is better. That's the only reason anyone needs. Whether or not it's an App is immaterial.
- gfodor 4y ago
  It depends. Probably imo, but this speeds up product development significantly and frees up a ton of resources in exchange for alienating a lot of users and the network effects of an API. Who knows if this kind of analysis was considered, but it’s not obviously a bad move until we see if Twitter starts doing faster product revs that pan out into growth.
- fencepost 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
microtonal 4y ago
I have been a long time TweetBot user, it was a fantastic client. I hope that TapBots can weather the financial turmoil coming from this. Can't wait to try Ivory when it becomes available!
dang 4y ago
Recent and related: Twitterrific has been discontinued - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34445702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34445702 - Jan 2023 (355 comments) Official Twitter Statement on Revoking API Access to 3rd Party Devs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34416416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34416416 - Jan 2023 (11 comments) Twitter kicking off a developer API campaign on January 16, 2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34410624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34410624 - Jan 2023 (107 comments) Tweetbot is back down again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34396664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34396664 - Jan 2023 (210 comments) The Shit Show - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485 - Jan 2023 (312 comments) Twitter API Page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34387834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34387834 - Jan 2023 (98 comments) Twitter's API is down? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34363743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34363743 - Jan 2023 (408 comments)
jmann99999 4y ago
I just don't see the replacement for Twitter as Mastodon -- which it seems the Tweetbot people are targeting. Twitter will likely file for bankruptcy later this year due to the debt burden. However, the replacement for Twitter won't be a Twitter "clone." Things will move on. I'm not smart enough to know what people will move on to... But they will move on.
- abm53 4y ago
  Is there a specific reason you think it won’t be Mastodon?
  - jmann99999 4y ago
    Hi ABM. Good question. Here is my perspective (I could always be wrong). I listen to a number of news podcasts and they still tell people where to find the hosts on Twitter. I have yet to hear someone tell people how to find the author on Mastodon. Never. News personalities are the bread and butter of Twitter. They are normies (compared to most of us). Mastodon had its five minutes of fame when Elon started making changes. I was quietly rooting for it, but I think it will be tough. That's why I don't think Mastodon is going to replace Twitter anytime soon.
    - kennydude 4y ago
      > I have yet to hear someone tell people how to find the author on Mastodon. Never. How does a host say an email address? They might say john@reallycoolpodcast.co.uk How does a host say how to find them on Mastodon (or ANY ActivityPub based platform)? They might say john@reallycoolpodcast.co.uk
      - Nextgrid 4y ago
        > How does a host say how to find them on Mastodon (or ANY ActivityPub based platform)? They might say john@reallycoolpodcast.co.uk Tell a non-techie "@johnsreallycoolpodcast" and there's a good chance they'll figure out it's a Twitter or Instagram username. Tell a non-techie "john@reallycoolpodcast.co.uk" and they'll think it's an email address or at best infer the website URL from that. Tell a non-techie there's a social media platform called "Mastodon" and they'll look at you funny, and after the initial awkwardness they'll dismiss it because they don't understand (nor care!) about the whole decentralisation aspect of it and how to navigate its inherent downsides. Having Mastodon use email-like identifiers is a cute technical detail but is not only completely irrelevant for non-techies but actually hurts adoption as it's less recognisable than an "@username".
w10-1 4y ago
Why am I not surprised that the bots rise again? They will destroy everything that could be good, by empowering a tiny, tiny minority of malicious actors under the cover of serving a few real needs.
- dljsjr 4y ago
  That is not even remotely close to what this article is about. Tweetbot is the name of an extremely popular iOS Twitter Client. This article has nothing to do with bots, at all.
33955985 4y ago
It was always odd to me that entire businesses relied on what was essentially the goodwill of a corporation. I think the same about things like microG in the Android world. They just… use Google’s API without paying and yet we think it’ll all work out?
- barnabee 4y ago
  Acessing APIs from 3rd party clients isn't "goodwill" and should be legally protected.
  - politician 4y ago
    This is a tricky area. Do we legally protect access to unpublished APIs or only published, supported APIs? If there is no API, should we legally require an API? Should the API support 100% of the services operations or may it only support some subset? What if the API is unprofitable, can the business reduce the set of operations supported or remove it entirely? Can they even release a new version of the API and retire an older version? What, exactly, are you asking for when you say that "accessing APIs from 3rd party clients ... should be legally protected"?
    - barnabee 4y ago
      I think a good starting point would be something like a digital right to roam. So you should not be able to enforce contractual terms, ask app stores or platforms to block, or use technical measures to frustrate access to an API. If you expose it to the public internet you should be required to ambivalent about which software an otherwise valid use uses to connect to it. I think there’s also a reasonable argument for some core protocols and services to be treats and regulated as a hybrid between public and private, kind of like the banking system.
  - 33955985 4y ago
    Who built the API and who pays to maintain it? These are not public goods in the traditional sense. The incentives must align or else the benefit is only maintained through benign neglect.
xdfgh1112 4y ago
I wonder what percentage of users use a non-official client. Apparently most creators use a third party client at least, so this seems sure to do some damage to the Twitter experience.
jabroni_salad 4y ago
I hope tweetdeck sticks around. I know it's been officialized, but it has been on life support and doesn't support many of the "excellent features" that the mainsite wants you to "experience".
system16 4y ago
Another short-sighted and bizarre move by a bizarre. fragile, little man. The number of users on third-party clients could not have been significant enough to justify this. At very least, the developers could have been given some notice or an ounce of respect about API access being phased out. Not to mention third-party client users are mostly power users who are responsible for a lot of the content on Twitter that the rest consume. On the bright side, Mastodon has been gaining traction and can't be dismissed anymore. I'm actually using it more than Twitter now. Fantastic clients are coming out like Tapbot's own Ivory and IceCubes, and it's exciting to see what developers can and will do without the confines of Twitter. I'm optimistic this will turn out to be a very good thing for everyone but Twitter and Elon.
- throwaway092345 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - slater 4y ago
    "Yet you participate in society! Curious!"
    - brazzledazzle 4y ago
      For the uninitiated: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
  - jjulius 4y ago
    "Don't criticize if you can't do better," is never a good take.
    - sosodev 4y ago
      Do you think so? Sure, it's usually a dismissive remark but criticism is usually equally low effort. I believe our world would be better off if the millions of critics actually tried to do better than the things they criticize. The vast majority of them would fail but would likely learn to be more understanding. The few that succeed would probably make something that is actually better than the competition!
barnabee 4y ago
I don't think they realise the damage this change has done. I have been on board with or ambivalent about most of the changes. I don't care if there's less moderation, I think Twitter probably did have too many employees, and I like the idea of a paid account with fewer (preferably no) ads. I'd even have happily paid Twitter to continue using Tweetbot. But this has destroyed the trust and the user experience of many of the power users who are most engaged with Twitter and who make it a thing other people want to engage with. I have sent 10,000s of Tweets but I can't see it being much more than a handful more. I don't think Mastodon is a good replacement for Twitter at all, but I am going to have to try it. The fact that Tapbots are enthusiastically supporting it with Ivory is a good sign (though @tapbots, if you're listening, I'd happily donate 10x more to Ivory as an open source project than you'd make from selling it to me as a closed source app ;-).
- wstuartcl 4y ago
  I also do not think Musk understands just who the primary userbase on many of these 3rd party apps were -- many of those pesky advertisers/brands that he seems to be both courting and at war with exclusively use api apps for tracking posting/responding and integrations.
  - karmelapple 4y ago
    Those aren't the same APIs that were turned off for third party clients though, correct?
    - raverbashing 4y ago
      Who knows? Probably someone who got fired on a previous round, that is. Disabling APIs won't win you any friends
    - _rs 4y ago
      My understanding is they didn't turn off the APIs, they disabled API keys for any large clients
  - 4y ago
kemayo 4y ago
Speaking as someone who had mostly been using the first party twitter app in recent years and so wouldn't have been impacted by this even if I was still actively using twitter, this seems pretty poorly done by Musk. Shutting down third party clients? It's arguably a valid decision. They presumably want to consolidate the users into directly controlled clients, where they can be advertised to and can have premium subscription features prominently featured. The former could have been rolled into the API, but the latter would have been basically impossible. But doing it like this is just giving everyone who was a hardcore twitter user (if you use a third party client, particularly one you're paying a subscription for...) a nudge into jumping ship. The alternative approach of announcing the "no more third party clients" API terms change and giving everyone time to wind their apps down would also have generated complaints, but I bet it'd have gotten them better press and user outcomes than this. Hell, just announce "you must have a Twitter Blue subscription to use a third party client" and that might have actually gone well for them.
- bink 4y ago
  Very true. But announcing it ahead of time and providing time for a wind down also would've required a comms team.
  - tzs 4y ago
    How would that require a comms team? PS: let me clarify a bit. I'm not saying that Twitter should not have or does not need a comms team or that getting rid of them was not a stupid thing for Musk to do. What I'm trying to say is that this latest stupid thing (not giving any warning about changing their app API rules so that app developers and users could have some time adjust) doesn't really have anything to do with the lack of a comms team. It's not one of the stupidities that naturally falls out of not having a comms team. In this case all that was needed was for Musk when he decided to change this policy to (1) tell whoever he ordered to implement it to deploy it on $FUTURE_DATE, and (2) tweet that he'd ordered this change and it will go live on $FUTURE_DATE.
    - sonofhans 4y ago
Someone1234 4y ago
Everyone is talking about mobile clients, but what about social media companies and businesses that integrated Twitter into their CRMs? At the very least I know businesses that had Twitter directly into their Salesforce, SAP Cloud Integration, and even Teams via Power Automate.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  They're unaffected; the ban is specific to replicating the Twitter.com / first-party app experience. Exact wording: "a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications".
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    > They're unaffected… This seems plausible, but has there been any official confirmation? If I'm Elon, my next act of ecosystem warfare is to monetize remaining API use cases to within an inch of their life.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      My work involves using those APIs; our keys are still active. We'd rapidly hear if entire apps like Salesforce had lost their access as part of this, too. The new wording in the terms forbids "use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications". If I had a Tweetdeck competitor I'd not be investing too much into it, and I think anyone working with the APIs now has to do a bit of "is it worth the risk?" calculus, but at the moment there's no sign this goes beyond third-party clients to consume/post timeline stuff.
    - ihuman 4y ago
      Buffer and Hootsuite have both said that they are unaffected
      - Kye 4y ago
        Buffer has Mastodon support in beta, so they're at least hedging their bets.
ChuckMcM 4y ago
One of the weird things about ignoring dissent and shutting out "haters" is that you lose the opportunity to learn things, things which people who agree with you and "love" you would never tell you to your face. It took me a long time to appreciate that. When one acts on a world view, untainted by realities that are disliked or fail to penetrate the echo chamber, the results of those actions are never what was expected. Putin attacking Ukraine, Musk buying Twitter, both events provide excellent examples of "reality" not behaving the way the actor wants, and yet to those at a distance with a wider view of things, they seem utterly predictable outcomes.
jslql 4y ago
[flagged]
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  Ngl just join the pro capitalist instance then?? Make your own pro capitalist instance?? It’s not like capitalism is a minority sentiment, you’ll surely be able to find plenty of supporters for your network…
jjcm 4y ago
A part of me is curious what would happen if all of these 3rd party clients banded together to create their own separate backend - surely it wouldn't be that hard to get a clone of Twitter going. There's likely a strong correlation with people who use 3rd party clients and people who are power users, so you'd have a strong social network from the start.
- politician 4y ago
  I agree, it seems like the obvious move since there is an installed base. But, how much of that installed base is able to be monetized to support the ongoing costs of operation of this backend? Aren't most of these clients free?
- mmastrac 4y ago
  I mean, some of them are working on Mastodon clients so it's already happening.
tptacek 4y ago
If you're not paying attention to Mastodon now, a think to know about Tapbots and Ivory, their new ActivityPub client, is that their TestFlight betas, which they release in batches of a thousand or so at a time, last for just a couple minutes before they're all snapped up; there seems to be pretty huge demand for it. With a decent client (I've bounced around a couple of them so far), even in a beta state, the experience of writing and interacting with people on "Mastodon" is better than it was on Twitter. I'm bummed out when I have to talk on Twitter now.
- eddieroger 4y ago
  There are also lots of other interesting clients not from Tapbots. If losing Tweetbot was enough to make you look at Mastodon, keep that open mind and look at all the interesting clients out there.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    I'm test-driving Mammoth right now, and spent a couple weeks in MetaText (which is I think not maintained anymore, but it worked fine).
    - johns 4y ago
      Try Mastoot
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      I remember a few years back when those positions were reversed. Mastodon iOS app devs are mostly doing it out of love or passion and so seem prone to interesting hiatuses. Though Mastodon is usually "stable" enough and "feature complete" enough and not generally a fast-changing target outside of big migratory transitions like this recent one, so those devs I think are generally more than welcome to whatever hiatuses they need. For what it is worth, in my own iOS usage, I used Mammoth for a few months (and still follow its developer) and then eventually settled on Toot! Toot!'s developer was on hiatus just before Mastodon 4 (and the Twitter meltdown) so it got mentioned as "no longer maintained" or ignored/overlooked entirely by a lot of suggestions lists for people coming fresh to Mastodon. But it was rock solid and feature complete with Mastodon 3.x and the developer had earned a hiatus for a job well done. The developer also came back and worked to quickly catch up on Mastodon 4 changes (none of which had been truly a show stopper, mind you), though I think a slight bit late for so many newcomers from Twitter seem to have overlooked Toot!. Anyway, Toot! is great if you need a recommendation from a random HN user who has been Mastodon since a previous era. (I started getting serious about Mastodon round about 2016, myself.)
chc4 4y ago
I've been on twitter since 2009 and have 100k+ tweet. Since they've killed all third-party clients I've basically stopped using twitter, and have no intention of using the (bad) official client. Good job Elon!
- seydor 4y ago
  to all the people who claim this, i wish there was a RemindMe! feature to check back in a few months People who have invested years of their lives writing thousands of tweets aren't giving up investments so easily. This is like real life investments or relationships, it takes a lot to break them
  - gdulli 4y ago
    The difference here is that Twitter had been going downhill for a while before the recent changes. In 2022 people were already using it grudgingly, out of inertia. Not addiction or excitement. Even before Musk, I consciously anticipated that a disruption to my chosen chronological feed client would mean the end of my time on Twitter. I prepared for it. I've started to wean and haven't missed it as much as I assumed I would. It's a relief as much of an imposition. I've tried out other ways of browsing content. There's no one service that will end up being exactly what Twitter was, but neither had Twitter been for a while. The various degradations of the experience over the last few months only had to be bad enough to get us to realize what we already sensed, that Twitter is in its Facebook era. It will still be running in 5 years because it's too big to die quickly. But it's on the downward slope of its cultural relevance. A year from now it will be the equivalent of that-site-your-grandparents-use.
    - seydor 4y ago
      chronological feed exists in twitter's website before and after musk - it's how i use it
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    > People who have invested years of their lives writing thousands of tweets aren't giving up investments so easily. I dunno, my Twitter posting rate has been dropping because there's enough people on the Fediboat now to make it interesting and I only have a certain amount of attention span to go around. 2022-09: 326.00 2022-10: 312.00 2022-11: 241.00 2022-12: 99.00 2023-01: 64.00 Whereas my Fediboat posting has gone up. 2022-09: 3.00 2022-10: 55.00 2022-11: 222.00 2022-12: 296.00 2023-01: 118.00
nachteilig 4y ago
I really wonder if Musk has thought this through. For years it's been a casual habit to use Tweetbot. Now I doubt if I'll download official twitter or go to the website - the platform is essentially dead to me.
tinyhouse 4y ago
Can someone please explain what Twitter blocked exactly? Did they block only 3rs party clients or anyone who is trying to read data from their APIs? From what I know about 15% of their revenue (now probably much more give) is coming from their data services.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  They specifically forbade third-party clients that duplicate the Twitter.com / first-party Twitter app experience; Tweetbot, Twitterific, etc.
  - tinyhouse 4y ago
    I see. Thanks. That makes more sense than blocking all users.
_justinfunk 4y ago
> On January 12th, 2023, without warning, Elon Musk ordered his employees at Twitter to suspend access to 3rd party clients which instantly locked out hundreds of thousands of users from accessing Twitter from their favorite clients. Is the claim that 'Elon ordered his employees" in evidence? I haven't seen Elon say he made the decision or try to explain it. I'm not defending Elon, just can't find the source.
- Finnucane 4y ago
  No, people are probably just assuming because Musk is famously a micromanager, and it doesn't appear there are a lot of other people at twitter making decisions.
- yborg 4y ago
  Who else do you think could make such a decision at Twitter now without Musk's approval? Employee empowerment isn't exactly a thing with Elon. When you are the smartest man in any room, anyone else in there making any kind of a decision is by definition someone dumber than you trying to think for you.
eruci 4y ago
Change is the only constant. Adapt.
dom96 4y ago
Shameless plug: I created a browser extension to help transition to Mastodon[0]. If you don't yet feel like you can leave twitter.com, but want to explore alternatives it's a great way to get started. Essentially it injects Mastodon posts into your Twitter timeline, so you can retain your existing Twitter following while getting exposed to Mastodon. [0] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastodon-chirper/lgiffpmohlpjlkclpmelkkfmjnlpafne?hl=en-GB&authuser=0 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastodon-chirper/l...
- moneywoes 4y ago
  Your extension looks fantastic. Is it cool if i sent you some questions?
  - hk__2 4y ago
    Why you don’t post your questions directly, rather than asking if you can ask?
    - paxys 4y ago
      Reminds me of all the people who will send "hey got a minute?" or "hey I have a question" or simply "hey!" in a work DM and wait for a response. Just ask your damn question!
      - herzzolf 4y ago
        https://nohello.net/ https://nohello.net/, I'm sending that to all of the offenders.
  - dom96 4y ago
    Please feel free. Email's on my website http://picheta.me http://picheta.me
ericzawo 4y ago
The sabre rattling from the VC class of people who roll with (or think they do) Elon is extremely disappointing. Anyone without skin in the game would be hard pressed to characterize this new Twitter as going well by literally any metric.
CharlesW 4y ago
Did this also break Mastodon migration tools like Movetodon? (It's not working for me as I type this.)
- ihuman 4y ago
  I don't think so. Movetodon is still working for me.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  I checked Debirdify a few days ago and it still works. Technically speaking these aren't against the new policy. However, since Musk's Twitter is governed on Maoist[0] principles, who can say if the policy hasn't already changed? [0] Specifically, the sense that the rules governing the platform are never told to you until after you break them, as to encourage overcompliance and obfuscate when or if rules change.
akmarinov 4y ago
Guys, it’s fine, the first party client will follow soon enough Twitter’s revenue fell off a cliff and they have dozens of billions to start paying back soon The platform wasn’t that profitable before and there’s no easy way to make it pay for itself It’ll very likely die in the near future
farco12 4y ago
Was there anything stopping Twitter from charging 3rd party clients and their users for access to the API?
- ssnistfajen 4y ago
  Charging at a rate that makes up the missing revenue from user tracking/ads would kill these 3rd party apps anyways, and I'm not sure if Twitter still has enough of the right people remaining to figure out all that to begin with.
edfletcher_t137 4y ago
So long, and thanks for all the tweets.
ubermonkey 4y ago
I wondered, once Musk bought it, how long I'd stay. He's transparently awful, and clearly has no idea what he's doing -- except when he's being aggressively, deliberately terrible -- but I kept checking my Tweetbot feed anyway because I followed a lot of interesting people there. Then one morning not long ago, Tweetbot wouldn't connect, and I knew immediately what had happened. It seems really, really dumb. I mean, years ago Twitter experimented with trying to force everyone onto their own app, but even then pre-Elon I knew that I didn't want Twitter to become like Facebook. I wanted a chronological feed of the things the accounts I follow posted, and that's all. I don't want to see anything else. I don't want the service to give me shit algorithmically. Tweetbot gave me that. I figured that as long as i could have that, I'd use Twitter. Now that I can't, I'm out. And it seems very, very likely that the most interesting and engaging accounts on the service -- which is to say, the ones that make people want to participate -- likely feel similarly, since so many of them have been very verbal fans of Tweetbot or some other 3rd party tool for so long. The tl;dr here is that axing 3rd party clients is just the latest in a long line of very, very stupid things this guy is doing.
jackdeansmith 4y ago
Honestly a very confusing move for Twitter, third party client users are probably the easiest to monetize users that Twitter has. They have already demonstrated that they get enough value out of the service to go out of their way to use a different client, potentially one that they pay for. Make them pay some monthly fee and everyone is happy?
- yakkityyak 4y ago
  Has any company tried revenue sharing with 3rd party clients? Imagine a free tier of tweetbot got a slice of ads clicked in it. Premium ad free modes could be shared too.
erulabs 4y ago
I mean, I understand the engineer part of me that says hey, it's a widely used public API, don't shut it down all at once you dick. But there is another part of me that wonders if all these folks who say "I have 100k tweets and I'll only use the unofficial clients" aren't betraying more than they think: All the twitterati pro-users who schedule tweets daily... Are they good for the platform? I'd lean towards a soft "maybe?" but that's only intuition and nothing else. It's entirely possible that destroying as much of the automation abilities of more powerful clients is -exactly- what would benefit twitter the most.
- tag2103 4y ago
  Reminds me of a game I played years ago and they made a minor "tweak" to the code and a bunch of plugin mods no longer worked. Yes Turbine- Asheron's Call was much better with the third-party plug ins, but I still was playing AC even with my fancy UI on top of it. But funny when that change was made all of the cheaters that would set their bots to go camp spawns disappeared and the game got that much better. History doesn't repeat but it does rhyme. (Now release AC to the public so I can go back to Eastham)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ssnistfajen 4y ago
I've yet to be disappointed at Elon's ability to wreck things in such a rapid, bizarre fashion.
asenchi 4y ago
Tweetbot was the client that made Twitter fun to use. Now I'm lost and can't stand using the service. Trying to figure out how to maintain my contacts on the platform while navigating the site has been awful. What a terrible experience it is. I'll probably try the Twitter app but I am hopeful I can keep up with everyone on a different platform someday.
- pornel 4y ago
  Use https://www.movetodon.org/ https://www.movetodon.org/ before they block their API key too.
geekifier 4y ago
This is a terrible decision just from the optics perspective - alienating those who are more likely to be power users. But how many people do they seriously expect to install the official Twitter app instead? I, for one, will not; as the privacy page on the App Store basically makes me "steer clear". Whatever percentage of 3rd party clients they get to switch over seems like a rather dubious trade-off to all of the bad press, and the terrible manner in which this was executed.
alixanderwang 4y ago
Why are they having the funeral less than 2 weeks after a "suspension" of the API, after 10+ years of work? Twitter under the new management is making rash decisions but also has been reversing many. I still have Tweetbot app on my phone in hopes that it's temporary. Has there been anything definitive to say that won't be the case?
- MBCook 4y ago
  It’s a two person company. Elon killed off the #1 source of revenue and refused to say anything for days. When they did, it was a lie. Let’s say they reverse course again on Tuesday and say 3rd party clients are back. Would you bet your entire livelihood and business on Elon (or whoever in the future) keeping their word? That sounds ridiculously risky.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- billbrown 4y ago
  Where's the poll?
- Kye 4y ago
  Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. This was likely the last straw after years of worsening API restrictions. They might have hoped things would improve under Elon. This is evidence things will only get worse.
- wartijn_ 4y ago
  Twitter changed their Developer Agreement yesterday, the main change is that it now includes this: > You will not or attempt to (and will not allow others to) ...c) use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34448524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34448524
  - alixanderwang 4y ago
    Ah I see. Thank you. RIP indeed =(
josteink 4y ago
If this doesn’t teach users (and developers) of the risks associated with centralized, closed services… I guess nothing will? It will be interesting to see if this drives users and traffic elsewhere.
- coldpie 4y ago
  There's risks, sure, but it was a successful business model for more than ten years, and it only ended because a sociopathic billionaire spent dozens of billions of dollars in order to promote his favorite neo-nazis and anti-vaxxers. It's hard to blame the devs for not seeing that one coming.
jedisct1 4y ago
Is there a simple way to synchronize tweets (including history) between Twitter and Mastodon?
foresto 4y ago
Nitter doesn't appear to be locked out, at least for now. Here's the list of instances: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances
lucaslee 4y ago
Maybe part of the efforts to fight spam. The spam issue does get better TBH.
- manderley 4y ago
  "The spam issue" demonstrably didn't get better, what are you talking about.
aurelius83 4y ago
Does anyone know if Twitter was losing money for letting these third party clients have access to the firehouse? Are these third party clients paying for the API or sharing revenue with twitter?
- b800h 4y ago
  The third party apps didn't serve ads.
- darnfish 4y ago
  API access is free and the Twitter API does not expose any type of ads
- scarface74 4y ago
  Third party clients didn’t show ads and there was no revenue sharing
- saurik 4y ago
  Third-party clients don't have firehose access.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
linuxftw 4y ago
Surprised all the takes here are so negative. I suspect that the vast majority of people using Twitter won't be affected. The vanishingly small tech population that cares about these things is likely going to have no impact on Twitter's overall user base. Sports and Celebrities, news organizations, normies, they'll all continue to use Twitter and won't be up to date on any of this drama. I don't have a twitter account. Until today, I had never heard of tweetbot. Who installs an app when you can just use the mobile site?
sum1ren 4y ago
Shameless plug: I created a web extension that scrapes from twitter UI directly to a single page. That's one way to get around the api... https://fetcher.page https://fetcher.page
scottdeto 4y ago
Now do Ivory for Android
crossroadsguy 4y ago
And if it hadn’t happened, I doubt such enthusiasm would have been shown by this app to this open platform. But anyway it’s a good development eventually. Now I am looking at all those “Oh, we are only on Apple platforms” apps. If you are a third party app anywhere, it actually helps if the platform you are on has intense competition.
CamelCaseName 4y ago
The official statement is complete bullshit. On Jan 17th Twitter said: "Twitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules. That may result in some apps not working." Then on Jan 19th, they updated their ToS: https://i.imgur.com/YZn7PJY.jpg https://i.imgur.com/YZn7PJY.jpg It's not enough that you need to immediately be on the right side of any ToS changes -- now you get punished for edits that haven't yet been made!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
prvc 4y ago
>we are proud to introduce Ivory for Mastodon On the bright side for them, now that they are starting a new "app", they can double dip on those purchase fees.
- Centigonal 4y ago
  the app does something new and requires a new codebase. Of course it's going to cost extra
- pornel 4y ago
  As a long-time customer I'm happy to pay for the new app. Mastodon has its own API, and own features and conventions, so it's not just a name change.
- wlonkly 4y ago
  Both Tweetbot and Ivory are based on recurring subscriptions. Now I don't love the subscription model, but if users are no longer paying for Tweetbot and some subset of them are paying for Ivory instead, that's no double dip.
pkulak 4y ago
I really like how they have their own Mastadon instance. That's better than any "blue checkmark" ever could be. Wondering if @ivory@tapbots.social is the real Ivory app account? Well... the domain is company domain! A cool business idea would be to host a Mastadon instance for celebrities, where everyone is verified, and there's no open registration at all. It's more of a branding company than a tech company, but then you would know that if you see @barackobama@bluecheck.social, it's the former president.
- jackvalentine 4y ago
  It'd also make it really easy to defederate the 'celebrity' instance, or block the whole domain as an individual user. A win for users by giving them the ability to limit their exposure to celebrity culture but I don't see a huge upside for clients of the 'celebrity instance' if they want to promote themselves.
tacker2000 4y ago
Its so funny (or sad) how Elon is making less and less sense every day. Why? Whats the end game here? No idea.
amatecha 4y ago
Oh hey, where was the poll about this major policy change? "Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won’t happen again." - Elon Musk, Dec 18 2022 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832
blacklight 4y ago
As somebody who tinkered a lot with Twitter's and Facebook's APIs, I'm inviting all my fellow developers to entirely give up these efforts and let those platforms (and their users) rot in their own shit. By building products against these platforms, we're playing the game of someone whose interest is clearly not that of creating a vibrant developer community or having a vast selection of 3rd-party apps and alternative clients. Once users start using a 3rd-party app, they stop using the big platform's official app. The app loses visibility on what the user does, therefore it loses money, because surveillance, data collection, data resale and slamming ads in front of your eyes is the only viable way that these degenerate businesses have found to make money (and they have never been incentivised, for the past two decades, to seek for alternative business models). So, as developers, we're playing a game that we're doomed to lose. We'll have to catch up with whatever unannounced update to the APIs or the T&Cs the platform's company decides to impose. We'll have to walk around all the obstacles that they put on our path. And, most of all, we are always exposed to the risk of the platform suddenly pulling the plug from their own APIs, therefore flushing months or years of hard work from our side down the toilet with a single decision. I've seen Facebook fight against my scrapers for a long time. I've seen Twitter restricting their APIs again and again, forcing me to adapt my bridges every time. I've seen WhatsApp block my phone number in the past because I was using it to reverse engineer their API. I've seen Instagram go after anyone trying to build a 3rd-party client, or an even remotely potential competitor (Biblogram being the last one, and going after Pixelfed for the names of their filters is another recent one). Now I'm done with these motherfuckers. If they don't want our efforts, if they don't respect our work, then they deserve to rot in hell. And their users deserve to use only the proprietary spyware/crapware that is thrown at them, if they don't listen to our calls for using alternatives. If you want a flexible and developer-friendly social network with plenty of APIs, well-documented protocols, plenty of choice when it comes to clients, and even RSS support, use any Fediverse product. If you want a messaging app that you can easily program and extend, and it's even compatible via bridges with virtually any protocol out there, use Matrix. We have open solutions based on open protocols today, which aren't subject to the whims of a random billionaire who likes to enter the server room and unplug whichever machine he finds within reach. Let's just use them, instead of complaining of platforms that aren't aligned with our values and keep shutting down our efforts. Competition is what these companies deserve to make sure that they keep building stuff that people like, and you don't compete with someone by trying to improve their own environment. You compete by building a better product and stealing their user base one unit at the time
hndamien 4y ago
Why not Nostr? Or both even?

727 points by davidbarker 4y ago

Twitter's PR department may have become deliberately obnoxious, but i must say the reactions and shaking fists of twitter users remind me sooo much of the times when facebook was making a major change to their website and everybody was moving to canada or sth

znpy 4y ago

I wonder how much savings in infrastructure is getting musk from this move.

mikeyouse 4y ago
Driving users away is one good way at lowering hosting costs, that's true.

alexktz 4y ago

[flagged]

ask_b123 4y ago
What does this mean?
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  It means elon musk is a dick.
- ducktective 4y ago
  Apparently "king" is the new fashion word for cool guy, chad, bro
- tmpz22 4y ago
  Calling someone "King {adjective}" is saying they are not just {adjective} they are the King of {adjective}s
  - ask_b123 4y ago
    Ha, I was confused as to whether this was a strangely worded compliment or a strangely worded insult.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

olliecornelia 4y ago

The fewer people have access to Twitter the better.

jdoss 4y ago

The question I have with this move is why didn't Twitter just force advertising as part of their API for third party clients? Just change the TOS for using the API so if they didn't show advertising they would be cut off. What am I missing?

bradgessler 4y ago
The list of unforced errors is insane. Remember when pg was banned from Twitter for mentioning that he had a link to Mastodon on his website? https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-suspends-account-paul-graham-232754736.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-suspends-account-paul...
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Move fast and break your $44B investment.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I followed some of that and it was especially funny that he had just been defending Musk and posting some "well he's a super-genius—you know, like all us rich SV types—so we should give him the benefit of the doubt" sort of stuff, right before that happened. The whole thing was truly beautiful. Overall, Musk's acquisition has provided some excellent entertainment.
  - peanuty1 4y ago
    "It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX." - Paul Graham https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      His quick turn around (there was some, "oh, huh, when you put it that way, perhaps he is making some questionable choices" interaction with another poster) right before the ban was maybe the most perfect example of "I never thought the face-eating leopard would eat my face!" I've ever seen. A moment of dawning realization an instant before the face gets eaten. It was perfect.

iameli 4y ago

And so ends my daily use of Twitter. I still haven't been able to get into Mastodon in the same way, but if Ivory is as good as Tweetbot was it might bring me around.

bradgessler 4y ago
It is as good as Tweetbot. Using Ivory makes most of the "UX issues" of Mastodon go away ... almost.
- MBCook 4y ago
  Same. I was having trouble with Mastodon. Nothing felt right from a UI design perspective. With Ivory I feel at home. Can’t wait to start paying for it.
  - rstevens333 4y ago
    SAME
dawnerd 4y ago
Honestly some days I forget I'm not using twitter. Same with the normal Mastodon web interface. Once you get into it properly it all kinda blurs away. Way more interactions on there than I had before too.
- lanstin 4y ago
  Lot more interactions but also less biting wit that makes me laugh. But no Elon so net win.

tills13 4y ago

I don't _really_ get it. Wouldn't it have been easier to work with these platforms and mandate that they show promoted tweets the same as the official app? I imagine Elon also downsized the official app teams so why not outsource some of that work to third parties and let them figure out monetization?

fizx 4y ago

All 3rd party clients shut down is the best case for twitter. All 3rd party clients migrate their users to Mastodon, while simultaneously solving the UX and approachability problems that have hampered Mastodon, sure seems like the worst case scenario for twitter.

mttjj 4y ago

Tweetbot was the only way I interacted with Twitter for years. I refuse to use the website and I refuse to download Twitter's app. When it was finally revealed that this move was intentional I deleted my Twitter account. I was mocked in high school for having a Twitter account (2008) and not a Facebook account. I remember "tweeting" from my flip/dumb-phone. I still don't have Facebook. I don't regret being on Twitter but I am learning to live without it these days. There's something freeing about a cold turkey detox from that increasingly hostile social network. Anyway, I'm just rambling at this point. RIP Tweetbot. Thank you for making Twitter usable. Eagerly awaiting Ivory.

joezydeco 4y ago
100% concur, but don't delete your account. Don't let someone else take the username. Delete your tweets and wipe your profile, but let it sit dormant. Forever.
- Sunspark 4y ago
  It won't be forever. I remember Musk saying awhile back that they were going to flush inactive accounts at some point. I agree with this. Why should a username remain reserved if it hasn't been logged into for years?
  - JoshuaRogers 4y ago
    Mainly because of "Login with Twitter". There isn't a proper way to tell downstream systems who have authenticated against Twitter that "The account JohnDoe is now a different user than they were." Basically the same principle used to hijack accounts by buying an expired domain that had email addresses associated with it.
  - amatecha 4y ago
    probably because my username is my first initial and my last name, and I don't really want someone impersonating me on a platform that I've used as a key social media presence since 2007?

teach 4y ago

I have an old friend who is blind. The official Twitter client is a LOT less accessible than the one she was using. This change impacts her ability to use Twitter considerably. And before you start with the "well, she's probably better off" -- she lives in a small rural town. Twitter and Facebook and the like are one of her few connections to a larger world.

based_karen 4y ago
[flagged]
wstuartcl 4y ago
The fact that Elon has disbanded the accessibility team at twitter probably already leads them into hot water related to this (It is not uncommon for orgs like twitter to be bound by multiple long term settlements related to accessibility suits that each have obligations of certain deliverables in this area. If your friend truly does have issues navigating the site perhaps she may want to look to a legal remedy -- from all appearances that is really the only knob that seems to have any impact on Musk.
- NavinF 4y ago
  Has a social media site ever been forced to accommodate blind people? Serious question.
  - JustSomeNobody 4y ago
    When is a good time to start holding them accountable?
    - wstuartcl 4y ago
      It would be mind blowing to me and completely unexpected if twitter was not already under many active settlements related to accessibility lawsuits each with their own ongoing obligations. There are very few large entities that have not been impacted by ADA lawsuits at this point -- even ones that had accessibility as a core value before the lawsuits.

DoneWithAllThat 4y ago

Note this kind of thing happens all the time. VRChat instituted EAC to prevent client modifications late last year. Hundreds of developers and tens of thousands of users all had their mods stop working overnight. Projects that dozens of devs had poured countless hours into became instantly and utterly worthless. It’s insane that this is what the internet has become.

wstuartcl 4y ago
While I do get what you are saying VRChat shutdown is a pretty poor match to this scenario. the TOS for that always had a clear verboten against modifying the client and network traffic via 3rd party apps/patches. In Twitters case, the API was shut down (with no warning) and then the TOS was updated to make the integrations verboten only well after there was a fairly huge backlash and late response of "clients were disabled that were violating api 'rules'" did not hold up against the actual rules in place. I really do get the whole move fast and break things model, however this is Musk taking that model to mean put on blinders and run full speed while holding scissors in a crowded room with many walls -- consequences be damned.

Matl 4y ago

A great opportunity Mastodon wouldn't otherwise get. Thanks Elon.

haidev 4y ago

Won't this hurt Elon in the long run? I was never able to stand the official Twitter app it's filled with ads and irrelevant clutter. I think since moving to Android Tweetbot is one of the few apps I miss from having on my phone. I was still enjoying the Mac version. I guess I will stick to Nitter [0] from now on. [0] - https://nitter.net/ https://nitter.net/

app4soft 4y ago
There is also Nitter for Android (WebView-app), but source repo not available for a month already.[0,1] [0] https://gitlab.com/Plexer0/Nitter-Android https://gitlab.com/Plexer0/Nitter-Android [1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.plexer0.nitter/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.plexer0.nitter/
charcircuit 4y ago
Most people don't use third party clients, so no it won't.
seydor 4y ago
By "app" do you mean the twitter website (because that's all i ve used). Why would one need an App to read a list that s basically full of browser links?
- wvenable 4y ago
  Because the experience is better. That's the only reason anyone needs. Whether or not it's an App is immaterial.
gfodor 4y ago
It depends. Probably imo, but this speeds up product development significantly and frees up a ton of resources in exchange for alienating a lot of users and the network effects of an API. Who knows if this kind of analysis was considered, but it’s not obviously a bad move until we see if Twitter starts doing faster product revs that pan out into growth.
fencepost 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

microtonal 4y ago

I have been a long time TweetBot user, it was a fantastic client. I hope that TapBots can weather the financial turmoil coming from this. Can't wait to try Ivory when it becomes available!

dang 4y ago

Recent and related: Twitterrific has been discontinued - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34445702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34445702 - Jan 2023 (355 comments) Official Twitter Statement on Revoking API Access to 3rd Party Devs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34416416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34416416 - Jan 2023 (11 comments) Twitter kicking off a developer API campaign on January 16, 2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34410624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34410624 - Jan 2023 (107 comments) Tweetbot is back down again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34396664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34396664 - Jan 2023 (210 comments) The Shit Show - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485 - Jan 2023 (312 comments) Twitter API Page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34387834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34387834 - Jan 2023 (98 comments) Twitter's API is down? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34363743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34363743 - Jan 2023 (408 comments)

jmann99999 4y ago

I just don't see the replacement for Twitter as Mastodon -- which it seems the Tweetbot people are targeting. Twitter will likely file for bankruptcy later this year due to the debt burden. However, the replacement for Twitter won't be a Twitter "clone." Things will move on. I'm not smart enough to know what people will move on to... But they will move on.

abm53 4y ago
Is there a specific reason you think it won’t be Mastodon?
- jmann99999 4y ago
  Hi ABM. Good question. Here is my perspective (I could always be wrong). I listen to a number of news podcasts and they still tell people where to find the hosts on Twitter. I have yet to hear someone tell people how to find the author on Mastodon. Never. News personalities are the bread and butter of Twitter. They are normies (compared to most of us). Mastodon had its five minutes of fame when Elon started making changes. I was quietly rooting for it, but I think it will be tough. That's why I don't think Mastodon is going to replace Twitter anytime soon.
  - kennydude 4y ago
    > I have yet to hear someone tell people how to find the author on Mastodon. Never. How does a host say an email address? They might say john@reallycoolpodcast.co.uk How does a host say how to find them on Mastodon (or ANY ActivityPub based platform)? They might say john@reallycoolpodcast.co.uk
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      > How does a host say how to find them on Mastodon (or ANY ActivityPub based platform)? They might say john@reallycoolpodcast.co.uk Tell a non-techie "@johnsreallycoolpodcast" and there's a good chance they'll figure out it's a Twitter or Instagram username. Tell a non-techie "john@reallycoolpodcast.co.uk" and they'll think it's an email address or at best infer the website URL from that. Tell a non-techie there's a social media platform called "Mastodon" and they'll look at you funny, and after the initial awkwardness they'll dismiss it because they don't understand (nor care!) about the whole decentralisation aspect of it and how to navigate its inherent downsides. Having Mastodon use email-like identifiers is a cute technical detail but is not only completely irrelevant for non-techies but actually hurts adoption as it's less recognisable than an "@username".

w10-1 4y ago

Why am I not surprised that the bots rise again? They will destroy everything that could be good, by empowering a tiny, tiny minority of malicious actors under the cover of serving a few real needs.

dljsjr 4y ago
That is not even remotely close to what this article is about. Tweetbot is the name of an extremely popular iOS Twitter Client. This article has nothing to do with bots, at all.

33955985 4y ago

It was always odd to me that entire businesses relied on what was essentially the goodwill of a corporation. I think the same about things like microG in the Android world. They just… use Google’s API without paying and yet we think it’ll all work out?

barnabee 4y ago
Acessing APIs from 3rd party clients isn't "goodwill" and should be legally protected.
- politician 4y ago
  This is a tricky area. Do we legally protect access to unpublished APIs or only published, supported APIs? If there is no API, should we legally require an API? Should the API support 100% of the services operations or may it only support some subset? What if the API is unprofitable, can the business reduce the set of operations supported or remove it entirely? Can they even release a new version of the API and retire an older version? What, exactly, are you asking for when you say that "accessing APIs from 3rd party clients ... should be legally protected"?
  - barnabee 4y ago
    I think a good starting point would be something like a digital right to roam. So you should not be able to enforce contractual terms, ask app stores or platforms to block, or use technical measures to frustrate access to an API. If you expose it to the public internet you should be required to ambivalent about which software an otherwise valid use uses to connect to it. I think there’s also a reasonable argument for some core protocols and services to be treats and regulated as a hybrid between public and private, kind of like the banking system.
- 33955985 4y ago
  Who built the API and who pays to maintain it? These are not public goods in the traditional sense. The incentives must align or else the benefit is only maintained through benign neglect.

xdfgh1112 4y ago

I wonder what percentage of users use a non-official client. Apparently most creators use a third party client at least, so this seems sure to do some damage to the Twitter experience.

jabroni_salad 4y ago

I hope tweetdeck sticks around. I know it's been officialized, but it has been on life support and doesn't support many of the "excellent features" that the mainsite wants you to "experience".

system16 4y ago

Another short-sighted and bizarre move by a bizarre. fragile, little man. The number of users on third-party clients could not have been significant enough to justify this. At very least, the developers could have been given some notice or an ounce of respect about API access being phased out. Not to mention third-party client users are mostly power users who are responsible for a lot of the content on Twitter that the rest consume. On the bright side, Mastodon has been gaining traction and can't be dismissed anymore. I'm actually using it more than Twitter now. Fantastic clients are coming out like Tapbot's own Ivory and IceCubes, and it's exciting to see what developers can and will do without the confines of Twitter. I'm optimistic this will turn out to be a very good thing for everyone but Twitter and Elon.

throwaway092345 4y ago
[flagged]
- slater 4y ago
  "Yet you participate in society! Curious!"
  - brazzledazzle 4y ago
    For the uninitiated: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
- jjulius 4y ago
  "Don't criticize if you can't do better," is never a good take.
  - sosodev 4y ago
    Do you think so? Sure, it's usually a dismissive remark but criticism is usually equally low effort. I believe our world would be better off if the millions of critics actually tried to do better than the things they criticize. The vast majority of them would fail but would likely learn to be more understanding. The few that succeed would probably make something that is actually better than the competition!

barnabee 4y ago

I don't think they realise the damage this change has done. I have been on board with or ambivalent about most of the changes. I don't care if there's less moderation, I think Twitter probably did have too many employees, and I like the idea of a paid account with fewer (preferably no) ads. I'd even have happily paid Twitter to continue using Tweetbot. But this has destroyed the trust and the user experience of many of the power users who are most engaged with Twitter and who make it a thing other people want to engage with. I have sent 10,000s of Tweets but I can't see it being much more than a handful more. I don't think Mastodon is a good replacement for Twitter at all, but I am going to have to try it. The fact that Tapbots are enthusiastically supporting it with Ivory is a good sign (though @tapbots, if you're listening, I'd happily donate 10x more to Ivory as an open source project than you'd make from selling it to me as a closed source app ;-).

wstuartcl 4y ago
I also do not think Musk understands just who the primary userbase on many of these 3rd party apps were -- many of those pesky advertisers/brands that he seems to be both courting and at war with exclusively use api apps for tracking posting/responding and integrations.
- karmelapple 4y ago
  Those aren't the same APIs that were turned off for third party clients though, correct?
  - raverbashing 4y ago
    Who knows? Probably someone who got fired on a previous round, that is. Disabling APIs won't win you any friends
  - _rs 4y ago
    My understanding is they didn't turn off the APIs, they disabled API keys for any large clients
- 4y ago

kemayo 4y ago

Speaking as someone who had mostly been using the first party twitter app in recent years and so wouldn't have been impacted by this even if I was still actively using twitter, this seems pretty poorly done by Musk. Shutting down third party clients? It's arguably a valid decision. They presumably want to consolidate the users into directly controlled clients, where they can be advertised to and can have premium subscription features prominently featured. The former could have been rolled into the API, but the latter would have been basically impossible. But doing it like this is just giving everyone who was a hardcore twitter user (if you use a third party client, particularly one you're paying a subscription for...) a nudge into jumping ship. The alternative approach of announcing the "no more third party clients" API terms change and giving everyone time to wind their apps down would also have generated complaints, but I bet it'd have gotten them better press and user outcomes than this. Hell, just announce "you must have a Twitter Blue subscription to use a third party client" and that might have actually gone well for them.

bink 4y ago
Very true. But announcing it ahead of time and providing time for a wind down also would've required a comms team.
- tzs 4y ago
  How would that require a comms team? PS: let me clarify a bit. I'm not saying that Twitter should not have or does not need a comms team or that getting rid of them was not a stupid thing for Musk to do. What I'm trying to say is that this latest stupid thing (not giving any warning about changing their app API rules so that app developers and users could have some time adjust) doesn't really have anything to do with the lack of a comms team. It's not one of the stupidities that naturally falls out of not having a comms team. In this case all that was needed was for Musk when he decided to change this policy to (1) tell whoever he ordered to implement it to deploy it on $FUTURE_DATE, and (2) tweet that he'd ordered this change and it will go live on $FUTURE_DATE.
  - sonofhans 4y ago

Someone1234 4y ago

Everyone is talking about mobile clients, but what about social media companies and businesses that integrated Twitter into their CRMs? At the very least I know businesses that had Twitter directly into their Salesforce, SAP Cloud Integration, and even Teams via Power Automate.

ceejayoz 4y ago
They're unaffected; the ban is specific to replicating the Twitter.com / first-party app experience. Exact wording: "a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications".
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > They're unaffected… This seems plausible, but has there been any official confirmation? If I'm Elon, my next act of ecosystem warfare is to monetize remaining API use cases to within an inch of their life.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    My work involves using those APIs; our keys are still active. We'd rapidly hear if entire apps like Salesforce had lost their access as part of this, too. The new wording in the terms forbids "use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications". If I had a Tweetdeck competitor I'd not be investing too much into it, and I think anyone working with the APIs now has to do a bit of "is it worth the risk?" calculus, but at the moment there's no sign this goes beyond third-party clients to consume/post timeline stuff.
  - ihuman 4y ago
    Buffer and Hootsuite have both said that they are unaffected
    - Kye 4y ago
      Buffer has Mastodon support in beta, so they're at least hedging their bets.

ChuckMcM 4y ago

One of the weird things about ignoring dissent and shutting out "haters" is that you lose the opportunity to learn things, things which people who agree with you and "love" you would never tell you to your face. It took me a long time to appreciate that. When one acts on a world view, untainted by realities that are disliked or fail to penetrate the echo chamber, the results of those actions are never what was expected. Putin attacking Ukraine, Musk buying Twitter, both events provide excellent examples of "reality" not behaving the way the actor wants, and yet to those at a distance with a wider view of things, they seem utterly predictable outcomes.

jslql 4y ago

[flagged]

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
Ngl just join the pro capitalist instance then?? Make your own pro capitalist instance?? It’s not like capitalism is a minority sentiment, you’ll surely be able to find plenty of supporters for your network…

jjcm 4y ago

A part of me is curious what would happen if all of these 3rd party clients banded together to create their own separate backend - surely it wouldn't be that hard to get a clone of Twitter going. There's likely a strong correlation with people who use 3rd party clients and people who are power users, so you'd have a strong social network from the start.

politician 4y ago
I agree, it seems like the obvious move since there is an installed base. But, how much of that installed base is able to be monetized to support the ongoing costs of operation of this backend? Aren't most of these clients free?
mmastrac 4y ago
I mean, some of them are working on Mastodon clients so it's already happening.

tptacek 4y ago

If you're not paying attention to Mastodon now, a think to know about Tapbots and Ivory, their new ActivityPub client, is that their TestFlight betas, which they release in batches of a thousand or so at a time, last for just a couple minutes before they're all snapped up; there seems to be pretty huge demand for it. With a decent client (I've bounced around a couple of them so far), even in a beta state, the experience of writing and interacting with people on "Mastodon" is better than it was on Twitter. I'm bummed out when I have to talk on Twitter now.

eddieroger 4y ago
There are also lots of other interesting clients not from Tapbots. If losing Tweetbot was enough to make you look at Mastodon, keep that open mind and look at all the interesting clients out there.
- tptacek 4y ago
  I'm test-driving Mammoth right now, and spent a couple weeks in MetaText (which is I think not maintained anymore, but it worked fine).
  - johns 4y ago
    Try Mastoot
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    I remember a few years back when those positions were reversed. Mastodon iOS app devs are mostly doing it out of love or passion and so seem prone to interesting hiatuses. Though Mastodon is usually "stable" enough and "feature complete" enough and not generally a fast-changing target outside of big migratory transitions like this recent one, so those devs I think are generally more than welcome to whatever hiatuses they need. For what it is worth, in my own iOS usage, I used Mammoth for a few months (and still follow its developer) and then eventually settled on Toot! Toot!'s developer was on hiatus just before Mastodon 4 (and the Twitter meltdown) so it got mentioned as "no longer maintained" or ignored/overlooked entirely by a lot of suggestions lists for people coming fresh to Mastodon. But it was rock solid and feature complete with Mastodon 3.x and the developer had earned a hiatus for a job well done. The developer also came back and worked to quickly catch up on Mastodon 4 changes (none of which had been truly a show stopper, mind you), though I think a slight bit late for so many newcomers from Twitter seem to have overlooked Toot!. Anyway, Toot! is great if you need a recommendation from a random HN user who has been Mastodon since a previous era. (I started getting serious about Mastodon round about 2016, myself.)

chc4 4y ago

I've been on twitter since 2009 and have 100k+ tweet. Since they've killed all third-party clients I've basically stopped using twitter, and have no intention of using the (bad) official client. Good job Elon!

seydor 4y ago
to all the people who claim this, i wish there was a RemindMe! feature to check back in a few months People who have invested years of their lives writing thousands of tweets aren't giving up investments so easily. This is like real life investments or relationships, it takes a lot to break them
- gdulli 4y ago
  The difference here is that Twitter had been going downhill for a while before the recent changes. In 2022 people were already using it grudgingly, out of inertia. Not addiction or excitement. Even before Musk, I consciously anticipated that a disruption to my chosen chronological feed client would mean the end of my time on Twitter. I prepared for it. I've started to wean and haven't missed it as much as I assumed I would. It's a relief as much of an imposition. I've tried out other ways of browsing content. There's no one service that will end up being exactly what Twitter was, but neither had Twitter been for a while. The various degradations of the experience over the last few months only had to be bad enough to get us to realize what we already sensed, that Twitter is in its Facebook era. It will still be running in 5 years because it's too big to die quickly. But it's on the downward slope of its cultural relevance. A year from now it will be the equivalent of that-site-your-grandparents-use.
  - seydor 4y ago
    chronological feed exists in twitter's website before and after musk - it's how i use it
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  > People who have invested years of their lives writing thousands of tweets aren't giving up investments so easily. I dunno, my Twitter posting rate has been dropping because there's enough people on the Fediboat now to make it interesting and I only have a certain amount of attention span to go around. 2022-09: 326.00 2022-10: 312.00 2022-11: 241.00 2022-12: 99.00 2023-01: 64.00 Whereas my Fediboat posting has gone up. 2022-09: 3.00 2022-10: 55.00 2022-11: 222.00 2022-12: 296.00 2023-01: 118.00

nachteilig 4y ago

I really wonder if Musk has thought this through. For years it's been a casual habit to use Tweetbot. Now I doubt if I'll download official twitter or go to the website - the platform is essentially dead to me.

tinyhouse 4y ago

Can someone please explain what Twitter blocked exactly? Did they block only 3rs party clients or anyone who is trying to read data from their APIs? From what I know about 15% of their revenue (now probably much more give) is coming from their data services.

ceejayoz 4y ago
They specifically forbade third-party clients that duplicate the Twitter.com / first-party Twitter app experience; Tweetbot, Twitterific, etc.
- tinyhouse 4y ago
  I see. Thanks. That makes more sense than blocking all users.

_justinfunk 4y ago

> On January 12th, 2023, without warning, Elon Musk ordered his employees at Twitter to suspend access to 3rd party clients which instantly locked out hundreds of thousands of users from accessing Twitter from their favorite clients. Is the claim that 'Elon ordered his employees" in evidence? I haven't seen Elon say he made the decision or try to explain it. I'm not defending Elon, just can't find the source.

Finnucane 4y ago
No, people are probably just assuming because Musk is famously a micromanager, and it doesn't appear there are a lot of other people at twitter making decisions.
yborg 4y ago
Who else do you think could make such a decision at Twitter now without Musk's approval? Employee empowerment isn't exactly a thing with Elon. When you are the smartest man in any room, anyone else in there making any kind of a decision is by definition someone dumber than you trying to think for you.

eruci 4y ago

Change is the only constant. Adapt.

dom96 4y ago

Shameless plug: I created a browser extension to help transition to Mastodon[0]. If you don't yet feel like you can leave twitter.com, but want to explore alternatives it's a great way to get started. Essentially it injects Mastodon posts into your Twitter timeline, so you can retain your existing Twitter following while getting exposed to Mastodon. [0] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastodon-chirper/lgiffpmohlpjlkclpmelkkfmjnlpafne?hl=en-GB&authuser=0 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastodon-chirper/l...

moneywoes 4y ago
Your extension looks fantastic. Is it cool if i sent you some questions?
- hk__2 4y ago
  Why you don’t post your questions directly, rather than asking if you can ask?
  - paxys 4y ago
    Reminds me of all the people who will send "hey got a minute?" or "hey I have a question" or simply "hey!" in a work DM and wait for a response. Just ask your damn question!
    - herzzolf 4y ago
      https://nohello.net/ https://nohello.net/, I'm sending that to all of the offenders.
- dom96 4y ago
  Please feel free. Email's on my website http://picheta.me http://picheta.me

ericzawo 4y ago

The sabre rattling from the VC class of people who roll with (or think they do) Elon is extremely disappointing. Anyone without skin in the game would be hard pressed to characterize this new Twitter as going well by literally any metric.

CharlesW 4y ago

Did this also break Mastodon migration tools like Movetodon? (It's not working for me as I type this.)

ihuman 4y ago
I don't think so. Movetodon is still working for me.
kmeisthax 4y ago
I checked Debirdify a few days ago and it still works. Technically speaking these aren't against the new policy. However, since Musk's Twitter is governed on Maoist[0] principles, who can say if the policy hasn't already changed? [0] Specifically, the sense that the rules governing the platform are never told to you until after you break them, as to encourage overcompliance and obfuscate when or if rules change.

akmarinov 4y ago

Guys, it’s fine, the first party client will follow soon enough Twitter’s revenue fell off a cliff and they have dozens of billions to start paying back soon The platform wasn’t that profitable before and there’s no easy way to make it pay for itself It’ll very likely die in the near future

farco12 4y ago

Was there anything stopping Twitter from charging 3rd party clients and their users for access to the API?

ssnistfajen 4y ago
Charging at a rate that makes up the missing revenue from user tracking/ads would kill these 3rd party apps anyways, and I'm not sure if Twitter still has enough of the right people remaining to figure out all that to begin with.

edfletcher_t137 4y ago

So long, and thanks for all the tweets.

ubermonkey 4y ago

I wondered, once Musk bought it, how long I'd stay. He's transparently awful, and clearly has no idea what he's doing -- except when he's being aggressively, deliberately terrible -- but I kept checking my Tweetbot feed anyway because I followed a lot of interesting people there. Then one morning not long ago, Tweetbot wouldn't connect, and I knew immediately what had happened. It seems really, really dumb. I mean, years ago Twitter experimented with trying to force everyone onto their own app, but even then pre-Elon I knew that I didn't want Twitter to become like Facebook. I wanted a chronological feed of the things the accounts I follow posted, and that's all. I don't want to see anything else. I don't want the service to give me shit algorithmically. Tweetbot gave me that. I figured that as long as i could have that, I'd use Twitter. Now that I can't, I'm out. And it seems very, very likely that the most interesting and engaging accounts on the service -- which is to say, the ones that make people want to participate -- likely feel similarly, since so many of them have been very verbal fans of Tweetbot or some other 3rd party tool for so long. The tl;dr here is that axing 3rd party clients is just the latest in a long line of very, very stupid things this guy is doing.

jackdeansmith 4y ago

Honestly a very confusing move for Twitter, third party client users are probably the easiest to monetize users that Twitter has. They have already demonstrated that they get enough value out of the service to go out of their way to use a different client, potentially one that they pay for. Make them pay some monthly fee and everyone is happy?

yakkityyak 4y ago
Has any company tried revenue sharing with 3rd party clients? Imagine a free tier of tweetbot got a slice of ads clicked in it. Premium ad free modes could be shared too.

erulabs 4y ago

I mean, I understand the engineer part of me that says hey, it's a widely used public API, don't shut it down all at once you dick. But there is another part of me that wonders if all these folks who say "I have 100k tweets and I'll only use the unofficial clients" aren't betraying more than they think: All the twitterati pro-users who schedule tweets daily... Are they good for the platform? I'd lean towards a soft "maybe?" but that's only intuition and nothing else. It's entirely possible that destroying as much of the automation abilities of more powerful clients is -exactly- what would benefit twitter the most.

tag2103 4y ago
Reminds me of a game I played years ago and they made a minor "tweak" to the code and a bunch of plugin mods no longer worked. Yes Turbine- Asheron's Call was much better with the third-party plug ins, but I still was playing AC even with my fancy UI on top of it. But funny when that change was made all of the cheaters that would set their bots to go camp spawns disappeared and the game got that much better. History doesn't repeat but it does rhyme. (Now release AC to the public so I can go back to Eastham)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ssnistfajen 4y ago

I've yet to be disappointed at Elon's ability to wreck things in such a rapid, bizarre fashion.

asenchi 4y ago

Tweetbot was the client that made Twitter fun to use. Now I'm lost and can't stand using the service. Trying to figure out how to maintain my contacts on the platform while navigating the site has been awful. What a terrible experience it is. I'll probably try the Twitter app but I am hopeful I can keep up with everyone on a different platform someday.

pornel 4y ago
Use https://www.movetodon.org/ https://www.movetodon.org/ before they block their API key too.

geekifier 4y ago

This is a terrible decision just from the optics perspective - alienating those who are more likely to be power users. But how many people do they seriously expect to install the official Twitter app instead? I, for one, will not; as the privacy page on the App Store basically makes me "steer clear". Whatever percentage of 3rd party clients they get to switch over seems like a rather dubious trade-off to all of the bad press, and the terrible manner in which this was executed.

alixanderwang 4y ago

Why are they having the funeral less than 2 weeks after a "suspension" of the API, after 10+ years of work? Twitter under the new management is making rash decisions but also has been reversing many. I still have Tweetbot app on my phone in hopes that it's temporary. Has there been anything definitive to say that won't be the case?

MBCook 4y ago
It’s a two person company. Elon killed off the #1 source of revenue and refused to say anything for days. When they did, it was a lie. Let’s say they reverse course again on Tuesday and say 3rd party clients are back. Would you bet your entire livelihood and business on Elon (or whoever in the future) keeping their word? That sounds ridiculously risky.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
billbrown 4y ago
Where's the poll?
Kye 4y ago
Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. This was likely the last straw after years of worsening API restrictions. They might have hoped things would improve under Elon. This is evidence things will only get worse.
wartijn_ 4y ago
Twitter changed their Developer Agreement yesterday, the main change is that it now includes this: > You will not or attempt to (and will not allow others to) ...c) use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34448524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34448524
- alixanderwang 4y ago
  Ah I see. Thank you. RIP indeed =(

josteink 4y ago

If this doesn’t teach users (and developers) of the risks associated with centralized, closed services… I guess nothing will? It will be interesting to see if this drives users and traffic elsewhere.

coldpie 4y ago
There's risks, sure, but it was a successful business model for more than ten years, and it only ended because a sociopathic billionaire spent dozens of billions of dollars in order to promote his favorite neo-nazis and anti-vaxxers. It's hard to blame the devs for not seeing that one coming.

jedisct1 4y ago

Is there a simple way to synchronize tweets (including history) between Twitter and Mastodon?

foresto 4y ago

Nitter doesn't appear to be locked out, at least for now. Here's the list of instances: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

lucaslee 4y ago

Maybe part of the efforts to fight spam. The spam issue does get better TBH.

manderley 4y ago
"The spam issue" demonstrably didn't get better, what are you talking about.

aurelius83 4y ago

Does anyone know if Twitter was losing money for letting these third party clients have access to the firehouse? Are these third party clients paying for the API or sharing revenue with twitter?

b800h 4y ago
The third party apps didn't serve ads.
darnfish 4y ago
API access is free and the Twitter API does not expose any type of ads
scarface74 4y ago
Third party clients didn’t show ads and there was no revenue sharing
saurik 4y ago
Third-party clients don't have firehose access.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

linuxftw 4y ago

Surprised all the takes here are so negative. I suspect that the vast majority of people using Twitter won't be affected. The vanishingly small tech population that cares about these things is likely going to have no impact on Twitter's overall user base. Sports and Celebrities, news organizations, normies, they'll all continue to use Twitter and won't be up to date on any of this drama. I don't have a twitter account. Until today, I had never heard of tweetbot. Who installs an app when you can just use the mobile site?

sum1ren 4y ago

Shameless plug: I created a web extension that scrapes from twitter UI directly to a single page. That's one way to get around the api... https://fetcher.page https://fetcher.page

scottdeto 4y ago

Now do Ivory for Android

crossroadsguy 4y ago

And if it hadn’t happened, I doubt such enthusiasm would have been shown by this app to this open platform. But anyway it’s a good development eventually. Now I am looking at all those “Oh, we are only on Apple platforms” apps. If you are a third party app anywhere, it actually helps if the platform you are on has intense competition.

CamelCaseName 4y ago

The official statement is complete bullshit. On Jan 17th Twitter said: "Twitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules. That may result in some apps not working." Then on Jan 19th, they updated their ToS: https://i.imgur.com/YZn7PJY.jpg https://i.imgur.com/YZn7PJY.jpg It's not enough that you need to immediately be on the right side of any ToS changes -- now you get punished for edits that haven't yet been made!

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

prvc 4y ago

>we are proud to introduce Ivory for Mastodon On the bright side for them, now that they are starting a new "app", they can double dip on those purchase fees.

Centigonal 4y ago
the app does something new and requires a new codebase. Of course it's going to cost extra
pornel 4y ago
As a long-time customer I'm happy to pay for the new app. Mastodon has its own API, and own features and conventions, so it's not just a name change.
wlonkly 4y ago
Both Tweetbot and Ivory are based on recurring subscriptions. Now I don't love the subscription model, but if users are no longer paying for Tweetbot and some subset of them are paying for Ivory instead, that's no double dip.

pkulak 4y ago

I really like how they have their own Mastadon instance. That's better than any "blue checkmark" ever could be. Wondering if @ivory@tapbots.social is the real Ivory app account? Well... the domain is company domain! A cool business idea would be to host a Mastadon instance for celebrities, where everyone is verified, and there's no open registration at all. It's more of a branding company than a tech company, but then you would know that if you see @barackobama@bluecheck.social, it's the former president.

jackvalentine 4y ago
It'd also make it really easy to defederate the 'celebrity' instance, or block the whole domain as an individual user. A win for users by giving them the ability to limit their exposure to celebrity culture but I don't see a huge upside for clients of the 'celebrity instance' if they want to promote themselves.

tacker2000 4y ago

Its so funny (or sad) how Elon is making less and less sense every day. Why? Whats the end game here? No idea.

amatecha 4y ago

Oh hey, where was the poll about this major policy change? "Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won’t happen again." - Elon Musk, Dec 18 2022 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832

blacklight 4y ago

As somebody who tinkered a lot with Twitter's and Facebook's APIs, I'm inviting all my fellow developers to entirely give up these efforts and let those platforms (and their users) rot in their own shit. By building products against these platforms, we're playing the game of someone whose interest is clearly not that of creating a vibrant developer community or having a vast selection of 3rd-party apps and alternative clients. Once users start using a 3rd-party app, they stop using the big platform's official app. The app loses visibility on what the user does, therefore it loses money, because surveillance, data collection, data resale and slamming ads in front of your eyes is the only viable way that these degenerate businesses have found to make money (and they have never been incentivised, for the past two decades, to seek for alternative business models). So, as developers, we're playing a game that we're doomed to lose. We'll have to catch up with whatever unannounced update to the APIs or the T&Cs the platform's company decides to impose. We'll have to walk around all the obstacles that they put on our path. And, most of all, we are always exposed to the risk of the platform suddenly pulling the plug from their own APIs, therefore flushing months or years of hard work from our side down the toilet with a single decision. I've seen Facebook fight against my scrapers for a long time. I've seen Twitter restricting their APIs again and again, forcing me to adapt my bridges every time. I've seen WhatsApp block my phone number in the past because I was using it to reverse engineer their API. I've seen Instagram go after anyone trying to build a 3rd-party client, or an even remotely potential competitor (Biblogram being the last one, and going after Pixelfed for the names of their filters is another recent one). Now I'm done with these motherfuckers. If they don't want our efforts, if they don't respect our work, then they deserve to rot in hell. And their users deserve to use only the proprietary spyware/crapware that is thrown at them, if they don't listen to our calls for using alternatives. If you want a flexible and developer-friendly social network with plenty of APIs, well-documented protocols, plenty of choice when it comes to clients, and even RSS support, use any Fediverse product. If you want a messaging app that you can easily program and extend, and it's even compatible via bridges with virtually any protocol out there, use Matrix. We have open solutions based on open protocols today, which aren't subject to the whims of a random billionaire who likes to enter the server room and unplug whichever machine he finds within reach. Let's just use them, instead of complaining of platforms that aren't aligned with our values and keep shutting down our efforts. Competition is what these companies deserve to make sure that they keep building stuff that people like, and you don't compete with someone by trying to improve their own environment. You compete by building a better product and stealing their user base one unit at the time

hndamien 4y ago

Why not Nostr? Or both even?