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 platfor

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