It would not surprise me if this is the end of third party clients and the new owner has removed access. Very disappointing if he has, particularly if he's done it with zero notice too.
He has been making significant noise of feature changes in the official client coming in the next couple of weeks. Removing the third party client access would align with that, along with removing the little "posted by ..." note on each tweet a couple of months ago.
I wander if the new policy is that you can't have an app that's main feature is replicating the existing functionality of twitters main app. That seems to be the rumour over there.
Publishing apps like Buffer and Typefully are still working.
Does anything stops devs from using the Web interface instead of the API? Sure it makes it a bit more challenging because parsing is involved but AFAIK it is completely legal to parse and display HTML output however you want. It's essentially like a browser add-on.
I wonder if Twitter can be killed by the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy?
So:
1. Make a client that combines Mastadon/Others and Twitter feeds, making it switching out of Twitter frictionless.
2. Provide extra functionality for non-Twitter posts, encouraging the use of the non-Twitter services.
3. Once have a good traction, penalize Twitter post to further push non-Twitter adoption. Eventually remove Twitter support completely.
1) the law, at least in the US. Laws such as copyright and maybe even the CFAA have been abused to outlaw adversarial interoperability. You'd need to either practice good opsec and operate anonymously or be based out of reach of US-allied law enforcement.
2) Apple (and maybe Google too?) - they will remove any client for a third-party service unless said client has explicit approval from the third-party, all the way up to ridiculous levels such as rejecting an app using the LAN API of smart home devices explicitly designed for this purpose: https://community.lifx.com/t/app-store-rejection-permission-...
Another point to show what Apple's true goal is: To kill general computing. If you buy an iPhone you should be able to run whatever app you want on it. But no, Apple knows best and will not permit you to do anything it doesn't approve of.
As for the APIs being copyrightable see Google vs Oracle.
A phone is no different from a laptop, except that it is smaller and the mouse/keyboard are part of the screen. On my phone, I should be able to:
* Open an IDE and write some code.
* Compile my code (depending on the language).
* Run my code.
The whole concept of "app stores" is absurd. In 10 years, will we be denied sudo rights on our laptops? Will we need to pay a 30% cut to Apple for every program that we install, plus $99/yr if we want the privilege of building code for our own device?
> In 10 years, will we be denied sudo rights on our laptops?
More and more likely. In 10 years' time I'd love to be off the Intel/Apple Mx train and using devices that can run desktop Linux with with RISC-V and Raspberry PI-like SoCs.
In ten years everything will be the same because Andreas Wendker told us that Macs will stay Macs the way we know and love them. He’s neither in marketing nor in sales but an engineer so obviously what he says must be the truth, to put it sarcastically.
«Macs will stay Macs the way you know and love them. They will run the same powerful Pro apps. They will offer the same developer APIs Macs have today. They will let users create multiple volumes on disks with different operating system versions and they will let users boot from external drives. They will support drivers for peripherals and they will be amazing UNIX machines for developers and the scientific community that can run any software they like.»
This is exactly why I bought Librem 5 smartphone, which can do all these things and can even serve as a laptop, if you connect a keyboard and a screen.
Apple ships an app THEMSELVES that enables this (for iPad anyway) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/swift-playgrounds/id908519492 and there are third party apps for general programming as well. I have one for Python (Pythonista) and one for C# and F# (Continuous) on my iPhone right now. There is a HUGE selection of similar apps for general purpose computing on iOS.
These are unique platforms with unique properties in their design. You value them or you don't. Nobody's forcing you to use them for general purpose computing and there are thousands upon thousands of BRAND NEW general purpose computing products with zero restrictions produced every year. People in this thread are being drama queens.
Apple's goal was to kill malware, not general-purpose computing[0] as a whole. Unfortunately it turns out that killing general-purpose computing is an instrumental goal[1] to killing malware: if you want a phone that cannot get a virus then you need someone pre-approving every line of code that hits the processor.
Once you have any entity having control over your device, even if it is for your own benefit and you completely trust that entity, a whole bunch of other competing business considerations come into play. In the case of adversarial interoperability, that means business risks that Apple doesn't want to take on. Let's say that tomorrow Elon Musk goes absolutely insane[2] and decides that third-party Twitter clients are hacking as defined by the CFAA. If Apple knowingly distributes those clients, then they could be held criminally liable for signing and distributing the app.
Less dramatically, adversarial operability implies a lot of support headaches. Apple wants to sell working software, not stuff that needs updates every few hours to keep ahead of updates done on Twitter's side to kill it. Even if they wanted to fight for adversarial interop in court, the underlying constraint of "pre-approve software updates to keep malware away" makes updating the software in real time to work around Twitter's workaround to the software untenable.
For a non-Apple, pre-everything-being-locked-down example of how much of a pain adversarial interoperability is in practice, there's the time Microsoft tried to make MSN speak to AIM. They stopped once AOL started using buffer overflow exploits to validate that you were running AIM[3]. AOL did not need to actually sue Microsoft with a spurious application of the CFAA. They just needed to wrap their API and client in enough garbage to make interop monetarily painful to support.
[0] In the Cory Doctorow sense
[1] AI safety term for "thing you need to do to get to other things you want".
Malware/app security is always the excuse when it comes to app stores, though.
But there's no excuse that their OS can't sandbox apps as best it can to prevent issues like this. Sure there will still be scam apps, but it should be a lot easier to install apps from outside of an app store.
It's just a blatant money grab otherwise; Spotify for example is extremely trusted and unlikely to be malware - why can't they have an "install" button on their site to install their app? Because companies that run the app stores want a cut.
Why aren't mobile OS' more like desktop OS'? Everyone acts like it's about security but then we get things like Pegasus and Google's Project Zero which is constantly finding stuff anyway.
Even now the granularity on permissions and the main problem of user apathy towards this stuff are solvable. I'm on Android and I still don't understand why an app can only ask for gallery permission/access to all files and why I'm not able to only grant it read access to a particular folder in a streamlined way.
All of this stuff should be designed around a user's intentions.
> If you buy an iPhone you should be able to run whatever app you want on it.
I hear this sentiment quite often on HN. Maybe I’m missing something but was this tacked onto the end of those stone tablets that Moses brought down from the mountain?
If not, then it seems like people want this to be a statement of fact when the reality is much closer to:
> If I buy an iPhone I wish I could run whatever app I want on it.
Don't know about Moses, but here's what iJesus had to say:
> The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today..
Regarding point 1, recent judicial decisions on scraping seemed to have entrenched it as legal.
On two, it seems like they are concerned with trademark to me. A workaround could be making a website that parses and displays Twitter content and call it something else. Then, in an app, make no mention of Twitter and only the website.
Apple might not be such a big issue because they allow reader apps. I guess they can ban you to improve their relationship with Twitter but you can also throw a subscription service as an IAP to improve your odds :)
While it's quite possible to build an app that way, using scraping. The danger is that users of that app will get suspended from Twitter (users have explicitly agreed not to scrape), once thats happened to a couple of users, thats the end of your app.
Obviously you can try to obscure that you are scraping, but that is difficult to get right and there is no way back once you get it wrong.
On Apple devices that wouldn’t be an issue because you you can load the Twitter Web interface into a real Safari and get the markup from there for processing. Twitter can try things like CAPTCHA but this will degrade the experience for all Twitter users and you can simply delegate this CAPTCHA to your user to solve anyway.
While for reading that works, there is an easy why via posting to spot people use that app. They can change at any moment the input names so that when posting a tweet you are exposing that you are using the scrapping client.
Yes, but the app is not a human and will likely interact with the website in a more predictable (and thus, detectable) way than the human itself would.
I’ve done this recently. Essentially created a browser extension that combines Mastodon and Twitter on twitter.com. It works surprisingly well, but I’m guessing catching up with Twitter.com changes is bound to be painful.
Doing this requires a fair amount of development time, especially when you can break something else with this and you previously removed all the guardrails.
Fair point. Maybe have a paid subscription with features that benefit social media professionals? There are some popular and profitable services economy built around social media.
I don't think they'll force a specific API, but the DMA forces messaging companies to interoperate and I wouldn't think Twitter would be exempted.
I wouldn't be surprised if the EU would force Twitter to interoperate with ActivityPub if they go so far as to disable API access. The EU already has their own Mastodon server so some people already have knowledge of the possibilities of decentralised social media and they also have a huge anti-big-tech stance.
> Can't we have the EU force them to provide an API and thus interoperability with competitors?
Maybe, but it took them over 4 years to rule that Facebook was breaching the GDPR even though a just a casual reading of the legislation would've given you this answer.
Maybe they'll "force" them... in so long that Twitter may not even exist anymore.
It's clear that it's not a general API outage, specific "reader" apps have been removed/blocked, including from peoples "authorised apps" in their accounts.
This is not an "API Outage", I think we can be 99.9% sure it's a removal of specific apps.
Could it just be an anti-abuse system going wrong, and reader apps are targeted because they exceed some threshold?
Even with Musk's antics I don't see what would they gain by blocking API clients without announcing it - it would take Musk 30 seconds to tweet "oh btw third-party clients are done for" and would at least give everyone clarity.
Ok, so you may be right and my estimate of 99.9% is probably over zealous.
But to play devils advocate, say you are thinking of removing third party apps. You want to test the waters and see if users who use them continue to visit at the same rate when forced to use the official client. You schedule a quite "blocking" of the apps for the evening PT, your team can happily sleep through the noise generated and have the data in the morning from Asia/Europe of how people reacted.
In the morning you make the call as to whether to stick with the plan or say it was an errant moderation bot.
That is why companies should always stay vigilant about platform risk. In general, own your platform, don't built your business on someone else's platform, it is too easy for them to deplatform you on their whim.
"pay us a ton of money for full data if you meet these internal requirements that assuredly mean we will monitor to make sure you don't compete with us"
Oh sure, I feel incredibly sorry for small business and indi-developers who may loose their income from this. I hope they have contingency plans for this eventuality and have started to diversify.
There is also a whole ecosystem of "publisher" apps like Buffer and Typefully that haven't been blocked yet, if I was them I would be very worried right now.
> You can't announce anything if you've fired the comms team.
Elon fired the Tesla PR team and yet announcements still are made, usually as Tweets from him. It sucks, but a comms team isn’t necessary assuming you are ok with substandard communication.
Elon's tweets aren't the same as announcements from Twitter. He tweets as an individual. Twitter, the company, is a blackhole as far as comms goes. There is no news in any official capacity from the company any more.
Why are people jumping to a ridiculous conclusion about the API being removed, especially because it's literally in the middle of the night in California? Like why assume the much more reasonable opinion that it's simply an outage.
It's worth noting that we've been here before; back in 2012 Twitter attempted to curtail third party clients (albeit in a far more organised, less haphazard way): https://thenextweb.com/news/twitter-4
Eventually, they stepped back from the brink, presumably after realising that it was a phenomenally stupid idea (while the fraction of Twitter users using third party clients is likely small, anyone who's anyone uses a third party client; this will vastly disproportionately hit influential users). We'll see if new leadership learns the same lesson.
I was the creator of Twidroyd (First and biggest Android Twitter app w/ ~70% marketshare) and there was a larger story behind the first big anti-3rd party move. Basically we had some plans to bring users over to a new network after we got acquired by Idealab — and Twitter got wind of it. Think Mastodon 2010 style.
I wrote a paper on you and a couple of other third-party Twitter clients in undergrad on the importance of modern day brand preservation and protection for an integrated marketing class while this was playing out. In a roundabout way, you kind of helped me get an A in that class! :D
Has there been any interest in telling this story in any rich medium (podcast, long form article, 30 minute youtube video, documentary, netflix series). Not only does that sound super interesting, but now that most/all of Twitter Execs have moved on - I wonder if you'd be able to get Twitter's side of the story as well.
Twitter was a different shop back then — You could literally jump on a call with Ev et al (and even humans at Google when it came to Android) but while significant decisions were made at the time, it's nothing more than a melancholic blip in tech history.
Strangely enough, I'm working on a new product in this space but it won't touch Twitter's API for sure :)
there have been a handful of App.nets created in the last couple of months (Post, Spoutible, Hive, T2, et cetera). they'll all probably suffer the same fate too.
I wouldn't be surprised if Elon blocks access to apps like Tweetbot since they don't serve ads and therefore provide no revenue to Twitter (and users are unlikely to quit Twitter altogether because of it). An alternative route would be to allow third-party apps as one of the "features" of a paid Twitter account--that actually makes some sense. In fact, I'd be surprised if Musk didn't do something like this.
In 2012 Twitter did not have as established a user base as it does today esp among media, companies, politicians, influencers, celebrities, so there's less risk of dropping third-party clients than there was back then.
> users are unlikely to quit Twitter altogether because of it
I don’t think this is true at all. If Tweetbot doesn’t come back I doubt I’ll ever use Twitter again; the website is unusable garbage by comparison. And I think a lot of the most influential power users who drive engagement feel the same way.
I already gave up after the jounopurge (well, I returned for one final poorly-received joke after mentioning prehistoric elephant-like things became thoughtcrime), but if I hadn’t left for ethical reasons, I’d be gone now; I’ve been using Tweetbot for about a decade and find the official web and mobile client borderline unusable.
A lot less than you think. There's no such thing as "on Mastodon" and I picked https://tapbots.social quite carefully, as it's the instance where discussions about TweetBot are most likely to be replicated, given that it's the instance run by Tapbots. One has to pick the right communities, in the FediVerse.
https://know.me.uk/tags/tweetbot is a very different story, to pick an example. It's another Mastodon WWW server in the FediVerse but as can be seen almost none of today's news about TweetBot can be found there. One of the things about the FediVerse is that one cannot generalize about the entire FediVerse from what is visible from a single instance.
It is not pedantic, as "Mastodon" is massively misnomered, and used where either the Fediverse or its open standard protocol ActivityPub is actually referred to. And as that happens more and more people get confused about this, so it prolongs if not pointed out at any opportunity.
Twitter allowing ban evasion and discussions about it had been a real clever move IMO. Users make a lot of noises and calls for exodus, none working, because it always happens inside the very platform.
It was real clever how they revoked the only means I was willing to access their service. Good for them, really sticking to their guns and committing to that “burn it all down and let God sort it out” approach.
I pay for Twitter Blue even though I use Tweetbot; instead of shutting it down maybe require Blue if you want to use a third party app? I'm willing to pay for services that provide some utility.
It's not really "none working". It's different from community to community. Some of them did close to a mass migration. Enough that my plain Twitter timeline is extremely quiet now. Not everyone will see the same effects though.
Indeed, never discount network effects. The amount of people that moved to Mastodon (and crucially, have actually continued posting there and haven't moved back) is miniscule compared to Twitter's overall userbase.
The apps disappeared from users’ authorized apps lists and are showing as suspended in developers’ accounts. That can’t plausibly be explained by API being down, although it could be by e.g. a trigger-happy banbot.
The developers are saying their apps have been suspended in the Twitter app center, due to rule violations. Other, non-client apps (like Movetodon) using the API work fine.
Yeah, same here. I actually only follow a handful of active feeds, so it won’t be the end of the world either way.
But one thing I’ll miss are the HN feeds, since I otherwise stay off HN. I may have to find an alternative for that, at least, since I don’t want to get (back) in the habit of visiting the HN homepage.
The Twitter app just got an update that makes it easier to switch to the chronological timeline, and it appears to actually stick now. (At least it has so far).
Doesn't avoid the ads though, which are still ubiquitous.
What they can fix in an update, they can take away in another update.
The only safe solution is competition between multiple service providers. If third-party clients are dead... looks like even more of a reason to switch to alternatives like Mastodon?
https://deadbird.singlepane.io shows the API up but a trace of iOS Twitterific, Tweetbot, and Birdie shows an EoF response when api.twitter.com is called.
I’d wager a backend issue over a policy change as a 403/401 isn’t returned.
I disagree, the day he took over twitter people were saying "it wont be up this weekend" "it will be down in a week" "it will be offline in 2 weeks"... yet the reality is, its up and running well.
The system is running as good as before. The only thing I've noticed is theres more ad's than usual.
----
Edit: Currently there isn't any outage of Twitter as far as anyone knows. It looks like 3rd party apps have been kicked to the curb.
A ~16hr regional outage in AU/NZ is not indicitive of anything. In 2021 Facebook had a global ~7hr outage.
Since Musk took over we haven't had all the downtime and disruption everyone kept claiming we would have. Big companies haven outages too, but so far the death of Twitter isn't in sight.
Also: I hate Musk since his comments on Ukraine and Taiwan. So don't take my comments as trying to stick up with Musk. I'm not, I hope he loses all his money and becomes broke.
A regional outage of that size is embarrassing whatever way you slice it.
Leaving all that aside, he’s driving a massive subset of his users away at a time when he really needs all the users he can get.
You can spin this however you like, this is not a good situation for him. He’s said as much outright and implied it repeatedly.
Since this time last year he’s said that both Twitter and SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy, and Tesla has been flat out told FSD, the feature they’ve been selling all their cars based on (which he has said himself the company is worthless without), just isn’t happening.
Not to disagree with your general point, I just want to nitpick this:
Half an order of magnitude bigger, at most
I think you're overestimating Twitter and underestimating Facebook.
I don't know the best source for official stats, but a quick google suggests Twitter is ~300M users and Facebook is ~3B, so one order of magnitude.
And of course the new Twitter CEO used the interesting bargaining tactic of talking down his own purchase by implying many of those 300M users are bots... Joking aside, you could argue that very few of those 3B Facebook users are active, and you'd be right; but exactly the same can be said of Twitter and there's no good reason to think the ratio is any better or worse there.
> Since this time last year he’s said that both Twitter and SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy, and Tesla has been flat out told FSD, the feature they’ve been selling all their cars based on (which he has said himself the company is worthless without), just isn’t happening.
As much as I hope Elon loses everthing. This isn't even related to downtime of Twitter. Volentarly shutting down twitter due to it being bankrupt is not the same as it falling over and having outages.
So I'm really not trying to spin anything. You're trying to take something unrelated and use it as justification as to why big bad billionaire do bad.
This is a fair comment, I'll clarify why I mentioned that.
Bringing up Tesla and SpaceX was only to point out that he doesn't really have any way to bail out bad Twitter decisions despite it being a (relatively) smaller company. There's nowhere to pull extra finances from to bail this out, and it's known he already went into debt to make the purchase.
I really don't want him to lose anything. I'd like him to go back in time to when he first installed Twitter on his phone and slap the thing out of his own hand and scream "NO! THAT'S A BAD ELON!"
I can assume one of the primary reasons for cutting staff and offices is to reduce costs and hopefully get cash flow positive asap even if it’s $1 positive. That puts him in a better position to stop incurring debt.
SpaceX is a great company, worth investing into, because of their ISP + phone telco business (lot of people are ready to pay a high price for that) and a very difficult space technology to reproduce, nobody is going to compete soon.
Twitter is different, it's more like MySpace.
StarLink isn’t profitable, so that’s the kiss of death in a down market. Doesn’t matter how good the product is or how much people will pay if the replacement satellites to keep it running cost more.
StarLink is the right out of the book case for VC investment. One should expect several years before it gets profitable, and with very large initial investment. It's also very difficult to replicate, so whatever market there is there is a high likelihood for it to capture.
That means that it should be judged like a startup. Did it demonstrate a market? If so, it's valuable, if not, it's not. Current cash flow isn't very relevant.
Why do we care so much though? Given the outsized influence Twitter has over politics and society, is it so bad if it shuts down and we have a few years reprieve? Musk has just lost an ungodly sum of money and has loans to repay. He’s not going to be running things for the benefit for humanity.
Musk needs to care because if his little site is not online when people want to post, they won't use it. I applaud that he doesn't though, makes it so much funnier watching this unfold.
Do you remember July 08,2022 when Rogers Communications went down for about 19 hours and services like 911 and Interac a payment service almost all Canadians use was interrupted? I guess it can happen to even the most critical of services.
16h is an awful lot for a social media site, even if region-specific.
Single digit number of hours happen from time to time, but double digits are not really a thing anymore. Maybe in early days of social media, not in the past decade.
You get what? Anything close to that long? Don't leave me hanging!
I did the same and found a Guardian article that claims no Twitter outage lasted even an hour since 2016, but I thought it was irrelevant because articles about outages aren't exactly top-notch in quality.
Did you find anything better? If so, do share! I'd be happy to be proven wrong!
How is that against what I said? I said no outage lasted over an hour since 2016 and you disprove that by posting a 2016 article of an outage that lasted maybe two hours? (I don't know, the article doesn't specify.)
Is let's say five hours and sixteen hours within the same ballpark? I'm not interested in a couple of hours, my claim is not one lasted 10 or more in the past decade. If such a thing actually happened, I'm sure someone would've posted it by now.
Twitter used to be extremely unreliable, and in fact back on the late noughties this was commonly seen as a reason that Twitter was doomed and would be replaced by other microblogging platforms (there was precedent; a number of early social media sites had already died essentially due to unreliability).
Eventually, it became fairly rock solid, and has stayed like that since. A reversion to "oh, yeah, essential features are down for hours, that's just Twitter being Twitter" definitely feels like going back to the noughties.
Nobody said "absolutely no outages happened [..] for decades" and the fact that they did doesn't refute what you're replying to.
You're not being downvoted for not being irrationally angry at Musk. You're being downvoted for being disingenuous in a very obvious way and then pretending the downvotes prove you right.
I feel that my downvote won’t accurately express my dislike of this comment, so to provide a further explanation: you’re making absolutely zero effort to engage with this conversation. You’ve completely fabricated a point of view to oppose. Nobody here can be construed as being on the opposing side of “things have downtime sometimes”. I’ve every right to believe that you’re an Elon Musk fanboy because your reaction seems incredibly emotionally driven.
If anything is emotionally driven, it's your reply.
I am also interested to know if outages happened before or is a recent phenomenon. I don't have a stake for electric car space man, or furiously despise him for god knows what as per above.
> Is 16h of downtime acceptable for a $44b business?
After a 70% reduction in headcount, is a 16 hour downtime acceptable in a 5% market? I'm going with yes, executives from all major corporations are itching to press that button if only they could get away with it.
The problem with Twitter is not, was not, and will never be a technical one. It's a simple site with a simple tech stack, using standard technology to scale.
The problem with Twitter, and what Musk doesn't seem to understand, is a sociological and political one. Social networks are the crack cocaine of tabloid media, left to the whims of bad actors they can destroy democracies, incite lynchings, distribute hate and misinformation on scales without historical precedent. "Free speech" just doesn't cut it, social networks are publications not mediums, they chose what people get to see and react to, and the fact that the choice is made by an algorithm does not absolve them of responsibility for the consequences, especially if the algorithm is tuned for revenue maximization and easily gamed by bad actors to spread their content.
By firing the watchers, Musk is setting Twitter up as an menace to stable democracies around the world.
At the scale twitter exists right now it is anything but simple. Had it been built from scratch it could have run fine with its current staff.
But the current staff needs to maintain code from a MUCH larger staff. That's hard. Especially with microservices where every team did "their own thing" and some teams just vanished completely. You have "dark areas" where no one knows how stuff works and what's going on.
Normally when you downsize at this scale you do this in an orderly way. Every person hands off their work and responsibility. Spends a couple of weeks writing docs and instructions and then leaves. This was done quickly and violently. I'm sure there's many repercussions we don't see simply because the systems are simply running. Once the team looks at some containers and decides to pull the plug to "see what happens" we'll find out...
> Had it been built from scratch it could have run fine with its current staff.
So you are essentially saying Twitter has an over-complicated architecture with regards to its real technical needs, so Musk was right to axe the microservice zealots. Good we can agree on that.
The next step is to acknowledge that code and data-centers continue to work long after their original designers have left the company, that's what computers are, tools for automation. Keeping the lights on and services in a roughly functional state is an activity that requires much less people of relatively lower qualification, even if they couldn't have engineered it themselves.
Yes, there is a long term risk of code rot and entropy if Musk does not plan for a gradual transition to a better engineered architecture with competent maintainers. But we are not there yet, far from it.
Meanwhile, schadenfreude people have rooted for a twittocaplipse from day one, nay, predicted it as inevitable. There is absolutely no sign it's going to happen, and Twitter turned out sufficiently simple after all on the technical side.
People choose to use social media, as they choose all media. People are individually responsible for the physical actions they make, even if a little bird told them what to do. It may be easier to control people by limiting what thoughts they're exposed to, but a people isn't free if that's done.
It's all fun and games until you are slain in the street because people chose to regard you as subhuman after a little bird told them so.
Disseminating politically extreme misinformation kills people - look no further than Russia, where a state run propaganda campaign has made people no more stupid or immoral than you or me support a vicious war of aggression against their neighbors.
They don't have the scale to sway large parts of the public opinion, so they are irrelevant. Also, what you call "left" might simply be the truth, and it's very hard to fight against that.
For an example of toxic ideological delusion in the left camp you can see the harm done to adolescents by the gender nuts, it's absolutely out of control on Reddit and there will be reckoning day with its many victims.
>They don't have the scale to sway large parts of the public opinion
According to some infographic in a thread on HN yesterday, reddit is currently the most viewed site in the US, Australia and a few other countries, so it seems like it could have a sway on large parts of public opinion
Reddit's usage is heavily oriented toward silos though, being the subreddits that people subscribe to, and the most controversial are excluded from the All feed.
It doesn't have the same dynamics as Facebook and Twitter in terms of how posts/tweets/ideas get spread out all over the network.
He haphazardly ordered turning off "bloated" microservices, including the one responsible for sending auth codes via SMS for 2FA... Learning through mistakes is a thing particularly for newbies, but a CEO should absolutely have a clue about not micromanaging, especially in areas he practically doesn't understand and after firing most people who do.
I would from personal experience disagree on the "well" part.
I'm suddenly following accounts I recently unfollowed again. Previously blocked accounts show up. The search doesn't find stuff it used to find anymore - posts that are definitely not deleted because I can usually find them via other references.
I have noticed that the explore page, and my timeline are way staler than they used to be. Tweets I have seen or even interacted with keep popping to the top all day, and trends on the explore page can be there for days at a time. It can take hours for major world events don't show up on the explore page for me sometimes.
Consider the quality of engineer of the departed team that allowed Twitter to run without incidents for so long. Also, change is the most frequent cause of incidents, as no one was pushing new changes there were fewer chances of an incident.
Reading that article, I am actually impressed that after that 45-minute outage in 2022, the next major outage was all the way back in 2016. I would say that is actually quite an endorsement for the quality of engineers they had.
It’s running well because the old guard built it so well. Musk threw them all out, so it will slowly but surely degrade. There was a reason Twitter had such a large workforce.
This is roughly my feeling, but I'm a little less sure of the absolutely/undoubtedly part. Someone below is asking for evidence but I don't think any one of us could produce evidence for or against this. It all boils down to either "Twitter had ~7500 employees and..."
1. ... that feels like a huge amount for a company that has basically a single product
2. ... that feels entirely appropriate for a company operating at their scale
What we've observed is that they've kinda managed to keep going despite Elon axing an enormous number of employees, but they've also had a few high-profile outages like this one today, the 2FA issue and 16hr Aus outage. I don't know if these are enough for either side to declare that they're correct.
One thing I would like to say - even though I had a feeling Twitter was probably overstaffed, I was in no way celebrating the redundancies. Similarly even though I'm not a fan of Elon Musk, I'm not delighting in all these little goofs he's doing and how it's impacting him personally - every little embarrassment he suffers and every dip in Tesla stock makes it more likely he'll just call it quits or fuck up Twitter more. For all its faults, I quite like Twitter and I don't want it to just disappear.
Yeah, this is closer to the mark for me. It's been some years since I worked at Twitter, but if I had been suddenly made CEO, I wouldn't have gone on a mass firing spree. I would have tried to figure out how to more effectively use the people that Twitter had. As with many big companies, I suspect the problem is much more bad management than bad workers.
So? WhatsApp had 35 developers and 350 million users. By that measure, every other company is grossly overstaffed.
Personally, I could argue that every social network is grossly understaffed by the measure of how lax they are about what they are supporting. E.g., in 2017, that company you say is more appropriately staffed contributed to a genocide that left tens of thousands dead: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
WhatsApp wasn’t a social network with public posts of rich media. It’s trivial from an architectural perspective because there isn’t anything that needs to be sent to millions of users.
Exactly. It's very hard to know from the outside where the headcounts are or should be. E.g., Twitter had a ton of ML people. One could argue that was totally unnecessary, because Facebook didn't need that at date X. Or one could argue that they needed more of them, because it's the only way to wrangle the challenges of a large social network, and that hiring an ML person ends up being a net reduction in headcount because of the customer support/moderation people they replace.
> By that measure, every other company is grossly overstaffed.
Recent layoffs across a big chunk of the tech industry suggest this argument may have at least some truth in it.
> that company you say is more appropriately staffed contributed to a genocide that left tens of thousands dead
Contributing to a genocide has nothing to do with staffing levels and all to do with unhealthy incentives - the company makes its money on "engagement", and it turns out polarizing/divisive/violent/outrageous content generates a lot more of it than friends/family/cat pictures, so effectively moderating toxic content is actually against their bottom line and is only needed in extreme cases where the toxic content's negative PR impact outweighs what it will bring in "engagement".
> Contributing to a genocide has nothing to do with staffing levels
Unless we just want to outlaw online forums, any provider is going to need to track and moderate harmful content. Note that even something as small as HN has a full-time moderator. That's just part of the business model these days.
You're correct that moderation can run counter to short-term revenue gains. But it's much less clear that's true in the long term; as Facebook's reputation has worsened, its growth has slowed and its revenue has declined. Or on the other end of the scale, look at how the less restricted sites are doing. E.g., the 'chans are never going to move beyond a very small niche, and despite Twitter's troubles, nobody's expecting Gab to take the lead.
I would say you are overstaffed if A) you can't afford them and / or B) you've grown so fast, you don't know how to make use of the staff you have. Perhaps there is a C) which is a variant of B) the business model you are running only requires so much staff and you hit a ceiling in growth.
I would not claim to have enough information about twitter being overstaffed? They might have a lot of technical debt, which can cause the need for more people to run it. But that is not "overstaffing".
The question is also how overstaffing is measured. If adding another person reduces the average productivity, you might define that as the cut-off due to the declining ROI for every other person added. But you probably also want some level of redundancy (aka reducing the bus factor) in order to account for the ongoing global health situation and general churn.
Of course repeated waves of mass layoffs, demanding a pledge of allegiance to the company and revocation of all employee privileges at the threat of being fired and publicly throwing your employees repeatedly under the bus are also ways to reduce churn, so the bar for "overstaffing" might have actually lowered.
Is this the same twitter who almost died trying to scale when they started? They have been in worse spots. They will be fine and much of the old guard still works there.
Really don't know why this is downvoted. We had relentless articles like this [0] expecting the complete and total shutdown of Twitter, globally. That never happened and everyone knows that it was pure hysteria.
> Since Musk took over we haven't had all the downtime and disruption everyone kept claiming we would have. Big companies haven outages too, but so far the death of Twitter isn't in sight.
So because [0] did not happen most of the critics are setting a new standard for Twitter uptime to be 1000% globally 24/7, absolutely zero outages of any kind and never down for one person. If one outage somewhere happens, it is immediately the end of the world.
It wasn't the end of the world when Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok had worldwide outages, but 1 regional outage on Twitter and it is somehow the end of times? Please.
The fact is, You are getting downvoted because Twitter is still up and running and many of the replies here cannot stand that predictions like this [0] did not come true and will point at any intermittent issue to show the 'Twitter is dying' narrative.
The death of Twitter has been greatly exaggerated. If you really wanted it to die, just ignore it. Simple.
His comments on Taiwan were prompted comments in request to a question buried in some interview. He didn't rant about it. He hasn't ever mentioned it on Twitter. And how he was quoted was very different from what he actually said.
If you’re going to argue against what “people” say, you’re always going to look like you’re the smart one and the person you’re disagreeing with is the stupid one.
Unsurprisingly, the outage hasn't affected twitters own client.
Roll on May 2023. Unless twitter want to block the EU, they will have to provide the same level of access to 3rd party clients as they do their own. If the API is down for 3rd parties, but not for twitters own client, that will be considered a breach.
The "API" isn't "down", these specific apps have been suspended in the developer center, citing a violation of the Twitter rules. Other, non-client apps still work fine.
The question is: is blocking the EU a flex that Twitter could successfully achieve? Would there be sufficient backlash against regulators to grant an exemption?
Speaking of which, I wonder if the DMA would finally let us get decent RSS bridges for Instagram and Facebook. At least we already have that for Twitter.
Sadly, I suspect (while not having read the DMA myself) that what it would require is some kind of published format for interoperability...meaning that Facebook would publish the FacebookStream API and Instagram would publish the InstaStream API, neither of which would actually look like any existing formats (or each other).
Would this work to get the EU to say they've fulfilled the DMA's terms? No idea. But Facebook has yachtloads of cash to throw at legal battles, especially where it sees a potential existential threat.
Does it even apply to something like Twitter? If it applies to Twitter then surely that means it also applies to Youtube? Does that mean youtube-dl must be officially supported? I thought it only applied to digital markets (stuff like amazon, google's advertising platform, etc)
Actually, no, it doesnt apply to twitter right now (turnover and market cap is too low). But EC can assign status anyway following market investigation.
It absolutely does apply to Youtube (finally some way to challenge youtube!), but im not sure how that affects the use of youtube-dl.
The word 'market' here is being used in the same sense it's used in 'common market' or 'free market', not as in literally a place that directly sells things to consumers.
Allowing 3rd parties to interoperate with the gatekeepers own services is one of the core obligations...
> Gatekeepers should ensure interoperability for third-party providers of number-independent interpersonal communications services that offer or intend to offer their number-independent interpersonal communications services to end users and business users in the Union. To facilitate the practical implementation of such interoperability, the gatekeeper concerned should be required to publish a reference offer laying down the technical details and general terms and conditions of interoperability with its number-independent interpersonal communications services.
> ‘interoperability’ means the ability to exchange information and mutually use the information which has been exchanged through interfaces or other solutions, so that all elements of hardware or software work with other hardware and software and with users in all the ways in which they are intended to function;
Maybe you are thinking of something other than the DMA?
More like 2027. Keep in mind the GDPR became effective in 2018 and it took just now for Facebook's blatant breach of it to finally be ruled in breach despite this being obvious with just a casual reading of the regulation.
Other API apps like Movetodon and Tweetdelete still work, it looks like it's only third-party clients like Tweetbot and Twitterific that have stopped working.
I checked my Connected Apps list and can still see Tweetbot there, but it said I approved those permissions back in 2011, is ”Tweetbot for iOS” the same as the current Tweetbot available in the App Store?
I've been active on Twitter for the past 15 years, thanks to its API and nice clients such as Echofon and TweetBot.
I never understood anything to their website nor app, and will certainly not use Twitter any more if that becomes the only way to use it. What made Twitter great is its API and ecosystem around it.
Is this potentially retaliatory to negative responses to recent Twitter Blue changes?
I saw that Twitter started displaying Blue subscriber tweets in a rather obnoxious way, which resulted in non-subscribers removing and blocking subscribers. I’ve also seen that some users were subscribing Blue expecting their deboosting penalties to clear, only for it to be worsened.
That weakly suggests to me that Blue subscriber demographic is split between undesirable users, either undesirable to other users or to Twitter itself. If so, …
I don't think that would have any impact on API downtime.
The issue with the new Twitter Blue users is one of adverse selection. Those that are 'verified' pre-takeover usually understand how Twitter works, in terms of how to drive engagement, likes etc.
Those that are new Twitter Blue-verified, are not as experienced, and it's pretty clear from the content of their tweets that they have recently purchased their status.
Basically replies of subscribers get pushed to the top, so if you do a quick scroll you’ll see as if everyone is subscribed. If you expand, you’ll see everyone else.
Same thing is happening with Twitteriffic - I’m assuming Twitter’s API is down, or worse: the new owner has decided that 3rd party clients are not desirable anymore
That is a very sensible proactive move on the part of the team, they must have both been concerned about the future viability of third party twitter clients, and the potential of Mastodon as a new market. From what I've heard the Mastodon client they are building is very good, it's in closed beta right now.
I don't post to Twitter, but I still sometimes use Twitterrific to read it since not everybody I enjoy there has successfully moved to Mastodon.
(Although tbh it is only William Gibson, David Frum, and Grady Booch that keep me reading Twitter.)
I too thought the 'garch might have abruptly pulled the plug on the API. But then, I installed the Twitter iOS app and tried that, and it emitted a cascade of error screens, too.
So if I had to bet a dollar, I'd bet on "shit malfunctioning".
I know, but (like a lot of people) he didn't end up posting there after signing up. Although Mastodon ended up being "about as good" for me (who just reads it when e.g. waiting in a line or something) as Twitter, there are these few people like him who made my Twitter feed something special who aren't really active on Mastodon.
(BTW indie dev world, I've paid money for years for Twitterrific and would definitely pay money for a client that did a reasonable job of showing me people I follow on various social brainfart networks, all in one place).
Hope this is a good old fashioned outage. However, after the “sent from” feature was recently removed, I have a hard time believing the owner has a positive opinion on the existence of the API. A shame how much it has been pared down already.
Since third-party clients don't make Twitter any ad revenue, I could see them making API access a feature of Blue in order to get revenue from those users.
The rationale is to control the narrative and align Twitter’s politics with his own. It’s just like the hundred other rich dudes who bought newspapers over the years.
Admittedly there being a big right wing social media would be an interesting change. Curious to see how it goes (from a distance as I don't use twitter).
Twitter was that big right wing social media site, in that it was extremely useful for a large number of right wing organisations and people to amplify their messaging and get many followers. That's what made it far more attractive to those on the right than Parler, Truth Social, Gettr, and all the others.
For instance Trump owed much of his popularity to his Twitter account and the way it allowed him to communicate much more effectively in a completely unfiltered way with both his existing supporters and undecided potentials. The same pattern has repeated with right wing politicians in other countries.
Those who were banned or otherwise de-amplified tended to be very fringe or extreme, and were never a significant chunk of the right wing. That's one reason why the alternatives never took off, as the kinds of people they attracted were those that few people really wanted to deal with or associate with.
I feel like kicking 3rd party apps off the platform must be at least nominally illegal in some of these countries. Aside from the US, these are countries with strong consumer protections with real teeth.
Fenix also got removed from my connected apps and can no longer update its timeline. Feels like they're intentionally removing authorization for third party clients
I noticed an error on Twitter an hour ago. It looks like there are old school radio buttons peeking out from behind Twitter-style checkboxes that are (I think) supposed to cover them entirely: https://imgur.com/a/HCWmfgS
This might be the last straw. I flat out refuse to use their horrible app with its nonsense algorithmic timeline. Give it a few hours to see if it's permanent but if it is, I expect a huge wave of new mastodon users..
Let's be real, if your "last straw" moment wasn't several weeks ago it's unlikely this is gonna be it.
But if it is, shame on you. All the silencing of journalists, banning accounts for saying "mastodon", or saying anything negative about Tesla, or criticizing Musk in any way, that didn't do it.
But now you have been mildly inconvenienced and it's the last straw. Really?
There's two reasons to leave a service, you can make a political statement - you leave because you disagree with their politics and you don't want to endorse them by associating with them. That's a legitimate reason to leave (although extremely often people declare they're doing this and then don't). But it's also perfectly legitimate to say "I'm leaving because the product got worse". It's sort of orthogonal to the political reason. Some people don't buy from Nestle because of Nestle's terrible track record, but I don't buy from Nestle because they're not selling anything I want. The second reason, generally is the thing that actually kills services. Digg didn't die because it conducted business unethically, it died because they fucked up the product, and that's what's happening here.
This is an excellent reply. Microblogging lends itself to absolutist statements. I guess sometimes people forget that the black and white thinking on twitter is a function of the medium and not a fact of reality.
I left Twitter nearly two months ago. Ultimately, I just couldn't stomach supporting Musk by continuing to view ads, contribute content, and give people positive feedback (via likes and retweets) that helped them stay: https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/1593662348568326151
But I don't think that people who stayed are necessarily morally defective. There have always been reasons to quit Twitter and reasons to stay. Most people stayed either because they decided Twitter was a net positive for them or because Twitter is a habit-forming drug, or a bit of both. It's not only unsurprising to me that some take longer to quit than others, that's part of what made me leave: to undermine, ever so slightly, the rewards for staying.
If this disruption to their usual method of consumption is what pushes them over the line, great. We live in an age where it's impossible to live an ethically pure life, so I'm happy to celebrate steps forward as people take them. Good job, Twitter quitters! Welcome to the club.
Ha, fair response. But the truth is I haven't much cared, you're right. Twitter is a private company, they agreed to sell and Musk bought it, if he wants to screw up his asset and his reputation by doing ridiculous things, that's his prerogative. I don't really follow much of that drama, nor do I regard twitter as some kind of indispensable public utility.
But yes, now it is personally inconveniencing me, and so I'm looking at alternatives.
I mean, I think there are going to be a lot of people who _don't_ care about Saint Car's antics, but do care about Saint Car making the site unusable. And killing third party clients will make it unusable for many people.
Personally, my last straw was the journalists, but if I hadn't cared about that or other ridiculous Musk behaviours, _this_ would still drive me away; I haven't really used Twitter by any means besides Tweetbot in about a decade.
They're essentially different issues. The journalists, and the Fauci stuff, and the unbanning of various Nazis, are all, essentially, content/moderation issues, whereas this is a usability issue.
> All the silencing of journalists, banning accounts for saying "mastodon", or saying anything negative about Tesla, or criticizing Musk in any way, that didn't do it.
Not all of this is accurate. Sure, hating on Musk for banning linking to Mastadon is legit, but there isn't a ban on criticising Musk, there are countless accounts with tens of thousands of followers happily ranting about how evil Musk is. Similarly Tesla.
Also, if you're talking about the Thursday Massacre aren't they all reinstated?
Yes, if this inconvenience is the case, this is definitely the last straw. Despite yours, and apparently the new owner's perspective, not everyone on twitter talks about or cares much for Tesla and metadrama, it's the people we follow, and how.
But half of my timeline, and most of my colleagues have left, the only thing that has kept me on so far is that the Tapbots Mastodon app https://tapbots.com/ivory/ isn't ready yet, because I like their UIs. Meanwhile I've collected lists and screenshots of where the people leaving said they were going. I've not had an actual reason to physically move over yet though; forced to use the site would be that.
I've been using third-party clients for over a decade, every time I've had to use the site directly it has been a nightmare. With a client app you never saw people you didn't follow anyway, and so as long as it's more effort to leave than stay... you don't have to think about it. Even if it is only specific third-party clients - then even the job of searching for and finding a different client is more effort than I want to put towards this site and its new ownership..
Silencing of journalists, banning accounts for saying mastodon, for saying anything negative about tesla or criticizing Musk in any way is a net positive to my twitter experience. I'm on twitter because some people that I follow and some friends are on twitter, and I want to see what they say. Meta commentary about the platform or the owner is noise to me. I do not feel any shame about it, just like I don't feel any shame because I don't contribute to most software that I use, or that I don't help every single person that is going through a hard time.
I've met a lot of wonderful people that do lots of things to help other people, and try generally to improve the world in their own way. They all objectively do more than me, and yet not a single one of them wasted time trying to shame me because I "didn't do enough". If I had to guess, that would be because it's not effective at all, maybe even detrimental to what you're fighting for. It's your ego being in the way, caring more about being right than doing good.
God forbid someone stops using a product because it’s no longer nice to use. No no no, every commercial interaction must be driven by a deep political alignment strategy.
For a few days now on the iOS app I have "For You" and "Following" on the top and I can swipe between them, left and right. It has a tendency to keep switching back to the "For You" that I don't like but at least it's quick to switch back to who I'm actually following. Am I being A/B tested?
Tweets flowing at 250kbps or more 24/7, of course…
Edit: the way “chronological” timeline works is, Twitter decides on your social graph and hide posts until it fits your serving. Shadowbans, Boosting and Deboosting are factored in as well. That is technically chronological, only technically.
>the way “chronological” timeline works is, Twitter decides on your social graph and hide posts until it fits your serving. Shadowbans, Boosting and Deboosting are factored in as well. That is technically chronological, only technically.
Source? The thing is I compare chronological timeline with lists (of users I follow) all the time, and I didn't notice any missing tweets. "Shadowbanned" tweets always were visible in lists, I personally checked that.
Yeah, unless something has changed drastically in the couple of months since I stopped using Twitter, I believe the web-based chronological timeline is exactly as you say. As soon as you click on a tweet to see replies you're getting things ranked, of course. But one's home timeline should be fine.
I'd say just leave twitter, bookmark those people's direct twitter feeds or use something like fetchrss or feedcreator to integrate them to your favorite rss client.
Wait, what? Since when? I'm regulary reading using the chronogical timeline and I'm not seeing anything like you describe (I only see that using the "for you" algo timeline). Very concerning anyway. :(
What do you mean by "reload" ? I just tried on iOS to "exit" the app (swipe up in task manager), restart the app: it kept showing me the chronological timeline, like I picked last time.
Also- this random behavior is totally different on my couple of alts on the same iOS app.
I have had the exact same discussion as we're having now many times since Twitter released the For You timeline. Never managed to pin-point to a specific behavior, everyone seems to get a different one.
Not surprised than Elon's Twitter's isn't better. In one hand I welcome their revert to tabs for "For you / Timeline", at least, it's easy to know you aren't reading the correct timeline…
Elon is a fan of the chronological timeline, so I
would take a pause there and consider. He even tweeted out instructions on how to switch to it and away from algorithmic.
I remember him saying that, but I'm pretty sure that was way back before he completed the purchase and the site was still perpetuating what he calls "the woke mind virus". Now that's he's fixed the algorithm so that it is instead pushing right-wing ideology he may have changed his mind.
I’m the same, I don’t really mind ads but I do not like the “algorithmic” timeline. Will find a way that doesn’t involve using their official iOS app, even if it means falling back to mobile web
Agreed. I can't speak for iOS but the Android app is terrible. The font is too big and the scrolling is incredibly janky on high refresh rate displays. Mobile web is the only way to use Twitter on Android, and the PWA behaves mostly like a real app.
>In a change rolling out to iOS users first, the company has taken away the star button at the top right that let you switch between two feeds. In its place are two tabs — one labeled “For You” and the other “Following” — and when you open the app, you’ll see the For You tab first.
Pretty sure my Twitter bot is still happily tweeting via API (on a periodic cron job, doesn't seem to have missed it's post schedule). I'm not at my computer right now but I'll check my logs later and see if I got any errors.
This. I immediately checked my IRC/IM bots and other tools that uses the API, they still work perfectly. So it looks like it's a sort of crackdown against third-party clients, and not API wind-down or technical issue (why would a technical issue only block some?).
True but they still managed to communicate the new timeline changes somehow. One would hope that someone could at least acknowledge an issue seven hours or so after it’s happened.
If that is their intent, then yeah - bit ruthless and self-defeating but I sort of get it. But it is a possibility that there was a fuckup, some clients got deleted, and they’re either working on resolving it (and failing) or the only people left who can fix it are in a time zone where they’re still asleep. eh we will see I suppose
In case anyone is interested I made a browser extension which helps you transition to Mastodon. What it does is it injects Mastodon posts into your Twitter.com timeline so you can slowly but surely get exposure to more and more of the Fediverse while keeping the familiar Twitter UI.
I can only see Twitter beginning to monetize third-party API access with some subscription plan whilst keeping the Twitter app free of charge (and protected with captchas, anti-botting tools, etc)
Either way, this demonstrates that it makes no sense to build an entire company soley on someone else's API.
Someone should have told Slide, "the creators of SuperPoke!" Besides that tagline about making a useless Facebook add-on feature that already existed, their recruiters never did explain what they did beyond like 3 Facebook API calls.
I saw that too and I highly doubt Google bought the company for their SuperPoke routine but rather for their suite of products like the Pets and the data that comes along with it. Those 3 API calls may have put them on the map but that's probably not what made them valuable.
It's been 16 hours and there's been no communication from Twitter on this. Do they not know what's going on? Not care? Have no respect for their third party partners?
Whew I hope this isn’t permanent. I was just starting really like using Echofon to digest my twitter feed. Somehow I have a much more positive experience when I’m not being constantly suggested inflammatory tweets by people I don’t follow and third party apps allowed me what felt like more control there.
Sigh. How do I even use the official client in a reasonable way? I want to start over where I left off, with unread tweets left chronologically to scroll.
The official client all seem to show the most recent tweets so I have to scroll down backwards in time?
No, sorry, I closed my account a month or two ago. Prior to that I used Tweetbot on iOS, which it sounds like they have also nuked. I've since moved to Cohost and Discord, and I continue to post on the Something Awful forums. None of those are Twitter replacements, but I don't miss Twitter at all.
I wished everyone who Tweets would also post to the Fediverse. Because fediverse nodes like Mastodon support RSS out of the box.
Twitter is my only news source that I cannot consume via RSS. So if you publish something on Twitter, you miss most of my attention and only catch it if I log into Twitter that day.
Or post to your personal website and have it support RSS or Atom. It is super easy to implement. Or if you use a ready made cms like Wordpress, it usually supports it out of the box.
I do the reverse. My primary is now Mastodon, and I use a relay. I do have to pop into the birdsite to check replies, though. That's about all I do with it now.
Twitterrific users are currently unable to access the service via the iOS app. As of this writing we have heard nothing officially from Twitter and are trying to learn more. This may just be a temporary bug; it may be more a more serious issue.
As soon as we know more we'll update this message. We thank you as always for your support and patience as we work through this problem.
Don't worry, Clownlon will quickly rewrite the Twitter API service this weekend, make it as "beautiful as Niagra Falls", and hand it off to the Twitter engineers to maintain.
Good lord people... Why is everyone jumping to "this is the end of the Twitter API" when in reality it's late at night in California and is much more likely a simple outage. Everyone needs to cool their jets. I don't understand the hyperbole. Every new thing that happens at Twitter is a new "this is the end of Twitter" even though it never is.
Well, yes, obviously. Why did you think he had all those weird defenders on Twitter? That's why they had to build those cars in a tent; factory was being used for horse payment logistics purposes.
I have seen a handful of “this is it” comments out of ~180 in total and they were all downvoted to 0 or less. Most of the rest of the comments are people trying to figure out wtf works and doesn’t or people speculating if Twitter are moving to kill off 3rd Party apps (and whether they’d have to move to Twitter mobile web).
Top: speculating about 3p clients “It would not surprise me if this is the end of third party clients …”
Second: about lack of comms, “Ironically, we can know about this through posts to the FediVerse from the developer of Tweetbot, and ensuing discussion.”
Third: list of banned clients
Fourth: link to API status visualisation
Fifth: your comment
Sixth: someone saying that they don’t want to use Twitters own app so they’ll just quit
They've reshuffled a bit since I posted. The second was the top. The sixth was father down. My comment isn't in the top posts.
Top is fine, second is one of them, third is one of them (nothing's banned as far as we know), fourth has several top level posts saying it, seventh that you don't list is another "this is it".
I am not seeing these. In second place, you're referring to samwillis' post? They are speculating if it's the end of third party clients not Twitter the organization.
He has been making significant noise of feature changes in the official client coming in the next couple of weeks. Removing the third party client access would align with that, along with removing the little "posted by ..." note on each tweet a couple of months ago.
I wander if the new policy is that you can't have an app that's main feature is replicating the existing functionality of twitters main app. That seems to be the rumour over there.
Publishing apps like Buffer and Typefully are still working.