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?
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.
"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
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.
This was probably easier and the decision was probably made on a whim - no time plan and execute a transition like you're suggesting. I think this theory is supported by the fact that API access was cut with no notice, the ToS was only changed after-the-fact, and some smaller apps - like Twitterific for MacOS - were initially missed.
If they did some kind of revenue share (from Twitter Blue) with the third party clients their users are using, it might even provide useful funding for some of the otherwise non-commercial ones.
Twitter could think of this as a kind of lead-generation / user retention system.
Of course, Blue is essentially a bandaid of $8/mo/user over the gaping chest would that is the cost of the leveraged buyout ($13B) so I doubt Musk would consider tearing of pieces of that bandaid for goodwill or lead gen.
I can't say I totally saw this coming, but when Elon started talking about the WeChat/Everything App/X, the writing was on the all for 3rd party clients.
That's what I thought as well. They need money badly, and they have an obvious way to get it - monetize the API so that third party clients can continue using Twitter while building a business on top of it.
Yet instead of supporting the strong ecosystem they already have and nurturing a symbiotic relationship with it, they burn it all?
What are these 3 star comments I keep seeing? Bots? Is it the same kind of thing as when redditors comment "this" instead of just upvoting? It keeps cropping up with no explanation or context.
I think that is right. A public API radically slows down product iteration since each feature needs to be considered in terms of its blast radius to third party clients. It probably burned the bridge for good this time, but killing the API to speed up product velocity isn’t an insane move if you value that more than the existing 3rd party ecosystem.
That's not really true. Many websites version their API and/or release new features without providing support (at least initially) via the API.
That's the route Reddit has taken. There are several features that only work through the official app or website. It can be frustrating as a user of a third party client but it's a much better alternative to cutting everybody off.
With feature iteration at Reddit accelerating since 2019, they may opt to do the same eventually should a desperate squeeze of user metrics/ad revenue becomes necessary down the road. Public APIs helped Reddit rapidly grow its userbase on a lean crew. It'd be a shame to see that goodwill being burned in the never-ending chase for quarterly performance results.
What I said is definitely true - supporting that old version isn’t free - it needs to be maintained and all new features need to not inadvertently break it. I’m not saying this was necessarily a good move, but the upside to killing an API is you are able to cut any need to support any of it, including old versions.
How many people use third-party Reddit clients versus using third-party Twitter clients as a percentage of total users on each site? (I don't know—not a rhetorical)
3rd party clients were the only usable mobile clients for quite a while. Reddit acquired one of them and has been pushing it but AFAICT as a Reddit Sync user nothing has changed. I imagine they are still pretty popular.
In the last seven years Twitter already did not expose features like polls with their public API. Still, even with a less capable API many preferred the experience of 3rd party clients.
While in general that may make sense, in the specifics of Twitter it’s just another unnecessary bad decision in a chain of unnecessary bad decisions.
The biggest issue isn’t what they’ve done but how they did it: dismissively, without warning, justified days later with a flimsy provably false excuse.
> A public API radically slows down product iteration since each feature needs to be considered in terms of its blast radius to third party clients.
Twitter’s public API was already lacking. There are several features, like polls, third-party clients never had access to. No one would be surprised if the API remained static forever.
> killing the API to speed up product velocity isn’t an insane move if you value that more than the existing 3rd party ecosystem.
The API wasn’t completely disabled, it’s still working for smaller clients.
As has been pointed out many times, Twitter Blue will never be able to replace Twitter ad revenue, which was at > 1B per quarter at the time of the acquisition. I think this move is a reflection of someone at Twitter realizing that.
>This is 100% a control move. He wants full control over how everyone experiences Twitter (not sure why).
The only thing I can think of is Musk was concerned the two largest 3rd parties would create their own network seeded with something like 66% of the most influential users.
No, that was for firehose access when Twitter bought Gnip.
There was a big fuss over third-party clients being limited to 100k users. Twitter fairly quickly walked back that limit (with additional verification and rules specific to clients reaching that size being required).
Twitter had a decade to implement something simple like this and didn't. I assume that there are technical reasons that it's hard to do with their codebase and it's simply not worth the time and money to do so.
Ads come with tracking, so there's probably an issue of trusting all the data that apps would have to send back. Twitter would have to document just how much tracking their ads require, and 3rd party developers could balk at it and cause a stink. OTOH the first party app can track as much as it wants and it'll fly under the radar.
I think there’s a pretty wide delta between tracking that is against App Store rules and tracking that would be controversial when written up on the Twitterific/Tweetbot blogs.
They could change the TOS, but actually enforcing would be difficult. You'd have to have something like the app store review process. And another goal here is probably to get everyone using the same clients so they have more control over the experience.
The absence of ad-tweets inserted into the API feed with an API term of "you must display these or we'll ban your app" was always weird.
That said, I bet that the real thing they want is the control to be able to push the Twitter Blue premium features, which I'm sure third-party apps would just sideline as much as possible even if they made them all available through the API.
(speculation) they want to push everyone to use the official app so they can get as much user info as possible to sell. They want persistent location and all the other juicy stuff you can't get if a third party is standing in the way.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
Right, but if I delete my account, and someone takes my username, people who have known me over the past 15 years will probably think that's me (and whoever takes the username can very easily exploit that fact). Username reuse enables impersonation.
I literally cannot use the official app. It is absolutely dire, and I've basically stopped using twitter as a result. I've got a lot more time on my hands now, I'll give Elon that.
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.
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.
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.
There are a lot of opportunistic/good hearted compassionate lawyers making a good business of shaking down smaller website operators for ADA compliance.
I believe just meta has encountered many dozens of ADA related lawsuits for everything from their use of disability information for ad targeting to web accessibility -- both government instantiated and civil cases.
I am fairly sure much of their accessibility work was instantiated by these lawsuits and settlements.
I think a recent court decision in CA determined that unless the website is a front for a brick & mortar real world place, they're not subject to the CA version of those laws (Unruh). How that would play with the ADA rules, I don't know, but this article mentions both. I'm not sure this issue is at all settled nationwide, but my take is bringing that lawsuit in CA won't get you very far.
Kind of a shame, because it was my first thought too--losing the accessibility team and then removing all the accessible clients definitely won't make Musk many friends among disability advocates.
I do wonder, as a late afterthought, though, whether the legal principle behind making your accessibility worse via negligence or deprioritization (the internal team) or lack of due diligence (these apps) could be different than whether the government could require you to include it in the first place.
That is the challenge. Musk's tantrum has made an already-solved problem for a lot of people something they now have to re-solve. I'm generally recommending Mastodon to people (and can recommend a handful of specific nodes), but nothing auto-replaces Twitter.
Point is, unfortunately, Twitter's dying and its prognosis is poor. We can imagine it'll get better but the realistic strategy is to bail.
(My previous post lacked empathy, and I apologize for that. Some billionaire asshole spent a lot of money to break something that worked for a lot of people. That's not fair to them.)
I would take those node recommendations. I've dipped my toes in, but don't have the wherewithal right now to really figure out how to find what's worth following.
- mastodon.social is the closest thing Mastodon has to a "main" node. With the pros and cons associated with that. Given the relative youth of the experiment, I'd be a little concerned about whether admins can keep up with the growth, but it's probably the best of the "no opinion" options.
- qoto.org: member of United Federation of Instances. Relatively inclusive (and has some interesting extensions running on the base Mastodon service), but not necessarily federated to all the instances mastodon.social is federated to because they don't have a strict "Nazis fuck off" policy.
- infosec.exchange: InfoSec-focused Mastodon node, but pretty open with a pretty regular policy.
I think the strategy I'd probably recommend for a new user is something like "Join at mastodon.social, follow some people, and lurk. If you see many people you like who live at a particular node, migrate to that node."
(And honestly, unless a defederation fight breaks out, 90% of nodes are pretty interchangeable with each other; you can follow anyone the node federates to so it doesn't matter over-much which node you're on unless you want some specific features or you want admins who have a particular attitude towards your bugbear-topics).
What I did was use fedifinder to find all the people I already followed on Twitter and bootstrapped my account that way. It shows you what the most common instance is among the people you follow which is a good recommendation to choose that for signup, and then you can naturally find other people to follow through their boosts.
Also you don't have to fret about what instance you start off on. I started with one of the generic instances and then after a week of lurking I migrated my account to an instance that I wanted to join (which moves over all your followers/followings but not your posts)
> This makes me so sad. Your iPhone app allowed me as a blind person to use Twitter so much better than the app that they themselves produce. Sorry for the hostility you are receiving from them, but know that you are appreciated for the hard work you’ve done.
> Maybe the best thing anyone's ever told us. Thank you for this, truly. It is everything. Please take care.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Maybe, but compared to the rest of the damage he's done to his brand this is a relatively tiny droplet. This may drive away power users (or drive them to a Twitter-owned option?), but many of them are probably already looking at how much priority they should keep on Twitter. Twitter client issues for many may be a second place to Twitter content issues as a driving factor.
I always assumed the third party clients just provided a better interface. I didn't realize they circumvented the income stream.
If the third party clients were removing the means of monetization, for a company who struggles to profit, then it seems obvious that requiring paid access on its way, regardless of the owner. Twitter can't go forever at a loss.
I think it's more that the API didn't return the ads to the client. If they required 3rd party clients to include the ad's in the feed and grounds for termination of the API key if they weren't that would be a different story
> Making sure you're not showing them by nsfw content, etc. or your advertisers will pull out.
Which you can control by just returning the ads as part of the API response for the feed, which I'm sure how the official client does it. Making the client classify NSFW content and hide ads based on that seems like a stupid idea.
Enforce it on clients over a certain number of users where they are big enough to manage following a bunch of rules around the ads. Then they can be audited to make sure they get doing it correctly.
But for nonrecurring expenses, Twitter was profitable before Musk’s buyout both torpedoed ad revenue (when it was announced, before it was even completed) and saddled it with massive expenses to finance the buyout.
The acquisition is literally the only reason it is any concern how long Twitter can operate at a loss.
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!
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.
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.
> 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".
If I borrow one from Sirius XM...I listen to POTUS... and a host named Julie Mason who is on early in the mornings will say "for more information follow me @ Julie Mason on Twitter."
I said the same thing even a few weeks ago, but the momentum for Mastodon is growing rapidly and it's really impressive to see, and Ivory is a very impressive client even in beta.
Almost everyone I followed on Twitter is using it now, and I actually prefer the experience. It's like Twitter but without all the bots/spam/hate, at least for now.
Server fragmentation is still kind of a pain point for Mastodon, but perhaps a better thing in the long term as it also gives us the ability to have a feed with more focused topics.
The good thing is most people I follow on Mastodon have stopped talking/complaining about Twitter unlike the first few weeks of the migration wave. The platform can only thrive when it hatches original content.
I don't know why Mastodon is hyped up so much. I do not have an account on it as I have some concerns. My understanding at the current time is that a server can be run by a single random individual, they can read your DMs as they are not encrypted, and they can kick you off the server if you write anything the server operator does not agree with.
At least with Twitter, it was a corporation with rules and procedures.
I don't really understand this argument. DMs on Twitter aren't encrypted. Now Elon can go read them. Same with kicking you off. With Twitter you're done. At least with Mastodon you can go to another server.
You can even run your own server if you want. But, if you're being a jerk your server might get de-federated.
> At least with Twitter, it was a corporation with rules and procedures.
I would submit that was is a load-bearing word in that sentence. Twitter as it exists now effectively is run by a single random individual who can read your DMs and kick you off the server if you write anything he does not agree with. Bans have gotten weirder, stupider, and more mercurial since Musk's takeover (the Tweetbot/Twitterrific bans arguably being a particular case of it), and the "Twitter Files" are a result of him giving activist-journalists access to unencrypted DMs without permission. (I'm not interested in debating whether the subjects covered in the Files prove some kind of malfeasance on Twitter's part; that's orthogonal to the point I'm making here.) Twitter may have had rules and procedures a few months ago. Now it has Elon Musk making decisions by polls he pinky-swears to abide by the results of.
In practice, major, established Mastodon instances with tens of thousands of users may well be less likely to treat their users (and developers) as badly as current Twitter is.
>Twitter as it exists now effectively is run by a single random individual who can read your DMs and kick you off the server if you write anything he does not agree with.
I wouldn't count it as a benefit for Mastodon that its servers basically have the same form of management as Elon Musk Twitter.
> My understanding at the current time is that a server can be run by a single random individual, they can read your DMs as they are not encrypted, and they can kick you off the server if you write anything the server operator does not agree with.
Yes, just like any service on the Internet. I really don’t understand how the fact that anybody can run a Mastodon/Web/email/whatever server makes the whole thing not reliable; you just have to choose a server that suits you.
> At least with Twitter, it was a corporation with rules and procedures.
"Rules and procedures" that didn't prevent a teen from hacking them a couple of years ago. The teen tricked Twitter employees to give their credentials, and the employee credentials gave him access to actual twitter accounts.WHich shows a singular lack of process and lax permissions practices from such a big company. And I'm not sure they'll fare better now that most of their workforce has been fired...
Among tech-folk, it's hyped up because it's federated, with the hope that if it succeeds it brings us back to the original design of internet services like E-mail and Usenet where everything isn't centralized and owned by a single corporation where you have to live by the whims of it's advertisers.
> they can read your DMs as they are not encrypted
I have yet to send or receive a DM on Mastodon, I'm not even sure how you do it. As long as you know this fact, just don't send sensitive info in DMs? It's not a core feature of the platform so I don't understand why it's looked at as such a deal-breaker.
> they can kick you off the server if you write anything the server operator does not agree with
But, with Mastodon, you can just join another server with different rules if that happens. On Twitter, if you offend Elon, he kicks you off and now you have no recourse. Mastodon is strictly better in this regard.
I use the standard mastodon client and follow people on many different servers. I was surprised, but most everyone I followed on Twitter moved - even the non-techies.
It feels exactly like Twitter to me now, except less noise.
From your description I’m not sure you understand Mastodon. People who don’t know about it and read your description will get the wrong impression, at least.
You can follow someone on any Mastodon server from your account on any server. It’s not siloed like Discord (which, ironically, actually is a centralized service!) - it’s much more like Twitter than Discord in real use.
There may be no official ‘core experience’, but there is a de-facto ‘core experience’: a stream of posts from people you follow, from any server, in chronological order.
I agree with everything you said, and also want to point out Twitter doesn't really have much of a "core experience" shared across its entire userbase either. Trending topics and promoted tweets on Twitter are largely determined by your language, location, who you follow, and interests Twitter has determined you have. You and another Twitter user are going to see very different content shown to you even beyond the things you subscribe to.
There’s a way to migrate your account to another server, including keeping follower relationships intact (so people don’t need to follow you again - they’ll automatically follow the new account). Past posts don’t get migrated though. If the old server is still running your past posts remain there.
If the server just suddenly shuts down with no notice, though, there’s nothing you can do.
That’s not my experience at all. I follow all kinds of people I followed on Twitter before. And they use all kinds of instances (some even migrated from instance to instance – I wouldn’t have noticed if they hadn’t mentioned it).
Using Ivory my experience is eerily similar to Twitter. Why do you think it wouldn’t be? If a critical mass of interesting people is there it just works.
I don’t really use the local timeline at all, that‘s just not relevant to me.
Obviously this will be wildly different for everyone depending on how many people made the move. For me personally and how I used Twitter it just works (and Twitter proper was getting more and more deserted and uninteresting anyway).
On twitter I followed 1004 people, and was followed by 680. Mastodon: following 381 and followed by 202. They're across lots of instances; it doesn't make a significant difference.
I'm finding Mastodon generally better than Twitter a few months ago, and far better than Twitter today. The "For You" thing Twitter keeps shoving at me is just _nonsense_, and the "Following" section is a bit of a howling wasteland a this point.
> Mastadon is more like Discord than Twitter. There is no core server. There is no core experience. It's just an instanced message board
Have you ever actually _used_ it? This seems like a peculiar view of it.
Elon had backers for the twitter purchase, they're going to be left holding the bag. They're probably desperately hoping he'll leave and install a permanent CEO as promised ASAP
At over a billion a year in interest payments to just service the debt is going to be hard. Twitter, before Elon, was already losing a couple hundred million a year. It has to be worse now.
I do agree that Morgan Stanley and the other financiers are going to be the kids without a chair when the music stops.
> Twitter, before Elon, was already losing a couple hundred million a year
Twitter's business was making a profit in 2018 and 2019, but then 2020 happened (because 2020), and in 2021 they had a $800 million class action settlement to pay (without that it would have been $600m profit), and then in 2022 Elon tanked the company in the 4th quarter.
The core business was (just about) profitable before Elon. It was just far below the FAANG-level expectations from a tech company.
Elon almost certainly has enough money to keep funding Twitter until he gets bored with it and moves onto something else; which, granted, might not even take a year. It's hard to say what happense at that point but my guess is that he sells it for a fraction of the purchase price. Twitter has a big enough network that there will be something left in the wreckage that someone can try to rebuild from.
Bankruptcy could still happen of course, even if Elon still has the money. He might think that completely shutting down Twitter is less embarrasing than selling it for a 90% loss, Elon is still pretending to be a business genius after all.
> Bankruptcy could still happen of course, even if Elon still has the money. He might think that completely shutting down Twitter is less embarrasing than selling it for a 90% loss, Elon is still pretending to be a business genius after all.
We do not know the reality. He has cut the payroll significantly (despite the severance since that is a 1 time burden), he has added paying customers with Blue, and by killing the API, he increases those paying customers. He can also browbeat or schmooze some large customers like Apple to advertise more. It may not be enough but a smaller profitable or cash flow positive twitter could still run for a while before he feels the pinch.
Not sure if he can make the billion dollar interest payments, but imagine if twitter can make 800M, and his Tesla stock goes up double, he would not feel a pinch bridging the remaining 200M although he may try to get someone else (or the company) to pay for it.
It may very well be that there is not a single 'replacement' for Twitter. One might argue that this is actually a good thing. Monolithic services pretending to be some kind of 'public' space is a lie.
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.
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?
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"?
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.
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.
Who cares? Making the world meaningfully better will probably break some business models.
Fact is if you expose an API publicly, at that boundary you [should] lose the right to control what software interacts with it. Web browsers are called user agents for a reason.
If a service is valuable, people will pay for it directly and more than cover the cost of hosting an API. If a company can’t make money without hijacking people’s attention and tricking them into doing things that profit them by controlling the software running on their users’ computers then maybe it shouldn’t exist.
Not saying this is your view, but it amazes me how many people think companies should be able to write anything they like in terms of service and/or that “they wouldn’t be profitable if they weren’t allowed to do bad things” is a good reason not to ban companies from doing bad things.
I believe the same thing! It's rare to see someone hold this view. I got quite a lot of pushback when I argued the same concept a couple months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33016155 On the upside it spawned a ton of discussion with lots of people other than myself, which was nice to see.
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.
Regarding the personal attack - is Zuckerberg also a "bizarre, fragile, little man" since Instagram doesn't allow 3rd party clients?
Regarding the validity of this move by Twitter - a private company is making changes which they believe are in line with their business goals. Who cares? Why get so riled up about it?
Thank you for putting words in my mouth. Your inability to have a constructive, healthy conversation throughout this thread demonstrates why you've chosen a throwaway account for this. Enjoy your weekend.
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!
"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
It's remarkable how tone deaf one (Graham) can be. The crux of my comment remains the same - people are perfectly free to criticize a decision they disagree with, even if they don't run a company. Many people doing the criticizing are Twitter users themselves, the very people impacted by Musks's decisions. They have every right to be unhappy with a decision he makes that impacts how they use the product.
>If it truly is such a blunder of a move, build your own Twitter-like service and allow API access for 3rd party clients. You'll dominate Twitter in no time!
Giving people time would have given time for pressure to actually change the outcome on top of actually requiring planning which doesn't seem to be Musk's forte when it comes to Twitter decisions. The bid more and more seems to have been weird tech bro shitposting that somehow ended in him signing a hilariously one sided contract that's come to this.
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 ;-).
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.
Having worked with many PR/Marketing/Media brand teams I do not know of one group that utilized twitter client in any of their workflows -- they all used a mix of third party clients for reading and other integrations/clients for posting and managing conversations and ad work. Sure much of the API surface area for latter still works but there was a goodly portion of impacted folks on these clients that were the same people that were on the same teams that impact ad spend and brand usage.
I've never seen a PR/Marketing tweet from any of the bespoke artisanal apps (tweetbot, twitterific etc) Hootsuite, buffer are web apps, not for "ride or die" iOS nerds
One of the tools used is Buffer [0], and they seem to support both Instagram and Facebook, and it seems that they are going to continue with Twitter as well.
Buffer's not a third-party client (in the sense of Tweetbot etc.), though.
You can't consume or publish to a personal Facebook profile or an individual Instagram account; it's restricted to Facebook Business Pages, Groups, and Instagram Business accounts.
It does compete with the Meta Business Suite, though.
Buffer's support for non-business Instagram is "set a reminder for you to post by hand" because Instagram removed scheduled posting ability a good long while back. I suspect their non-business Facebook support is similar.
I know I was a heavy user until (uh) 5? years ago when Instagram and Facebook posting was nerfed into uselessness.
It would appear that Elon understands his paying customer's after all. Cynical interpretation would be that he just made Twitter API access more scarce and therefore valuable.
Still, mine is just a guess.
edit: Come to think of it, didn't FB eventually moved from super open API to.. friend and family model?
He also complained pretty bad about the "algorithmic" feed when he was in the process of acquiring Twitter. In the past the Twitter website would periodically switch you to it, with some kind of backoff, presumably hoping deeply that you would not notice. Now, it doesn't do that... there is just no URL that goes to the latest feed, you need to select it every time you load the page.
I'm not really a Twitter user, but I can only assume that he thought "I'm going to do things right" until seeing the balance sheet.
Sidenote, as an Ivory user i'm quite pleased with it. Getting an invite can be a bit challenging, currently. Following @ivory@tapbots.social for invites is how i got mine, fwiw.
edit: https://tapbots.social/@ivory/109683219720510229 though it seems they intend to get Ivory out ASAP due to how this decision has impacted their business. So maybe waiting for Invites won't be needed for long
Challenging is an understatement. The beta invites are sent out in waves of 1000 every so often. It takes less than 15 seconds for all 1000 to be claimed[1].
What's the saying? First they came for the moderation, but I didn't care because they weren't moderating me. Then they fired employees so as to not have to pay severance or whatever but I didn't care because I don't work at Twitter. Then they came for the API and there was noone left to speak for me...
Twitter and Elon have already done quite a bit of damage to the company, platform, and reputation. This is just a continued pattern, and it is disappointing.
-edit-
Just to be clear with the original comment I'm just giving OP a little bit of a hard time on a Friday :)
It’s not like people didn’t speak out for the moderators or employees, just that Musk didn’t listen. If you’re looking for Nazi Germany analogies, perhaps Blitzkrieg is better - quickly destroying its entire userbase.
Some spoke out. But many were in the sickos-yes-yes.png camp of being absolutely gleeful. And a much larger number were indifferent or in the wait-and-see camp.
I agree that people have held out way too long. My more nihilistic interpretation is that taking any of Twitter's functionality for granted was a mistake. It's a publicly traded business, and if you didn't want big money to ruin the experience, you shouldn't have put faith in money in the first place.
YouTube is on a similar precipice. People think it's irreplaceable because YouTube displaces every competitor. In truth, Google has simply monetized the distribution of video content so well that nobody else has a reason to compete. Streaming video on a competing platform is almost always a shitshow. But, eventually YouTube will fail or implement a heartbreaking change that forces everyone off. Maybe Larry Ellison will make a bid for it, and we'll complete the Lex Luthor arc for American billionaires. Either way, it's another "too big to fail" service that is sure to fall apart at some point.
If you want to avoid situations like this, take ownership of the media you like and don't let your voice rely on other people's platforms.
Honestly, it was partly my faith in money that made me comfortable with Twitter as a public company. They (gradually and often reluctantly) learned that if they wanted to be a viable business, they had to provide a reasonably safe place for a lot of people. For purely pecuniary reasons, they also thought they needed to be a good partner to people building things related to Twitter.
All that has gone by the wayside, of course. Part of the problem here is that Musk had so much money he could afford to burn tens of billions of dollars on a weird personal fixation. [1] A problem that the market has happily started to correct, [2] but perhaps not soon enough to save Twitter.
They didn't learn much of anything, though. Twitter lost money when they played nice, and they lose less money when they play mean and lean. Either way Twitter was bloated and overvalued, but anything bought with wealth leveraged against Tesla shares can't be worth much in the first place.
Twitter learned that they really had to take harm reduction more seriously if they didn't want to be known for things like that. I believe that their improvements there were part of what set them on the path to their later profits: https://www.netcials.com/financial-net-profit-year-quarter-u...
And as far as losing money goes, their "lean and mean" approach isn't doing so well. Ad revenues are reportedly down ~40% as the same time Musk is going to have to come up with billion-dollar interest payments.
Ad revenue can be down 40% if your overall paid workforce was reduced by ~85%. It wasn't working out for Twitter either way, if they wanted to be profitable then something had to change.
As an impartial non-Twitter user, I think it's safe to say that neither version of Twitter was healthy for it's platform or users.
Twitter has been profitable in the recent past and could be again. Drama was not necessary.
I think your claim on profitability is flat out wrong. If you think that's the case, what are the exact numbers you are imagining that would make Twitter profitable?
This feels like the same thing with Gawker and the HBO show Silicon Valley.
It feels like people with money are shutting down, neutering, avenues where they receive criticism.
Since much of the money for the buyout came from the Saudis and the Chinese, it feels like the people behind this are more concerned with subduing Twitter than turning a profit. Maybe why they had to make it private, it’s illegal to run a public company into the ground.
Social media has been the driver of an enormous level of democratic empowerment, an unprecedented new degree of bottom-up communication. I think society hasn't experienced such a structural shift to political power distribution since the printing press's arrival in the West. Unlike China, the West had no central authority, so what was printed and distributed could not be properly suppressed.
The counter-reaction to this, I believe, is the increased concentration of wealth and push toward monopoly and control.
If democracy prevails, I believe social media, like Youtube, Reddit etc will drive a level of cultural, scientific and technological enlightenment to equal the Renaissance.
If autocracy prevails, if the whole world falls under the dominion of a single authority, we will all end up in one single shithole country.
>Since much of the money for the buyout came from the Saudis and the Chinese,
ooooo, I like the dark place you're taking this. I didn't give one iota about Twitter before the Musk debacle, but I have been enjoying the shit show since it started. I can't stop paying attention into just how much of a future Business 101 case study this will become. I remember when everyone said how Reed Hasting navigated the Netflix debacle of trying to separate the DVD side of the business as a future case study. I feel like Musk saw that and said, "hold my beer! I'll show you how to ruin a company's brand!!!"
> I'd even have happily paid Twitter to continue using Tweetbot.
I had thought since they first started locking down 3rd party apps years ago that if/when they ever had a "Twitter Pro" or whatever, that allowing subscribed users to use a third party app would be part of it. After all, lots of online service subs eliminate ads in the product, so why not Twitter?
I assumed rational thinking on their part, I suppose.
Yeah, that would have been so incredibly obvious that this whole episode is surely final and clinching proof to anyone still on the fence that he doesn't have a clue what he's doing.
> After all, lots of online service subs eliminate ads in the product, so why not Twitter?
Lots of online service subs are eliminating the ad-free thing now, because they know they can prove more value of paying users to their advertisers. I don't think the NY Times subscription was ever ad-free, and many publishers are now removing that perk.
But I agree with you. I would've paid for Twitter Blue if it were completely ad-free. This is the main value of YouTube Premium to me.
There's a truly excellent, open-source Mastodon client called Ice Cubes which hit the App Store yesterday. The very first thing I did was donate the maximum possible IAP.
Annoyingly, seems to be Mastodon-specific - can't OAuth to GotoSocial and flat-out refuses to even consider an Akkoma instance. Let's hope they sort that out soon (since both of them support enough of the MastoAPI that other clients work fine.)
(I wish the FediActivityPub people had spec'd up an API to avoid this kind of multi-implementation-who-supports-what shambles.)
EDIT: Amusingly, I fixed the "cannot login to Pleroma" problem for `madon` this week - Pleroma/Akkoma require form data in the body, not the URL, for POST requests (which is fair since the HTML spec suggests this is the Right Way.)
> 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
Tweetbot apparently cost $6/year, so are you saying you would donate $60/year if they released an open source Mastodon client? Are there other open source apps you donate to?
I'm genuinely curious how people approach payment/donations for open source software, I'm not trying to pull some gotcha on you. I don't donate to any open source projects, but I feel that I probably should.
I would donate $10 per month to a decent open source Mastodon client, at least while I was using it regularly (and would have done so for Tweetbot).
I donate to a number of open source projects, a decent number of them regularly. I am lucky enough to be able to afford to buy software when I need to and donate to projects I think are worthy of support. It makes me extremely happy every time I am able to donate to an open source project instead of buying software. It makes me sick every time I capitulate and end up renting softare. Software subscriptions can die in a fire.
I'd encourage you to donate if you can afford to, but if you can't, that's ok.
A world dominated by open computing platforms and software is such an exciting prospect that it's worth putting a bit of money and effort into. And if that doesn't pan out, at least you helped the maintainers a little!
Linux Weekly News ended up with this kind of model. A long time ago back in 2002, LWN was about to shut down, but those of us in the Linux community found it had tremendous value and asked for options to pay, as well as options to pay more. Here we are 2 decades later and LWN is still around! Sometimes it pays to let your users help out financially.
It wasn't just pay for fewer ads though it was supposedly going to be pay for algorithmic upranking, extra say with reports and in polls, and many other things.
> But this has destroyed the trust and the user experience of many of the power users who are most engaged with Twitter
As the "author" of some 80,000+ tweets (can't find number anymore), their mobile app was unusable. I've been on TweetBot for close to 10 years I think. TweetBot2 was my first mobile twitter client iirc.
No more mobile twitter for me. Shame. But probably better this way. It really hasn't felt like a fun place for the last 3 or 4 years. More like a cigarette habit you can't shake.
Between this and the blue-check thing it's like he doesn't get that the primary draw of the site is high-volume posters and/or famous people who(se PR teams) post. Like, ease of finding and reading (plus interacting with—responding, rewteeting, et c) posts by famous (or at least Internet-famous) power users is the main reason Twitter's a bigger draw than, say, Mastodon. If people just wanted to read their non-famous pals' posts, they could do that on any chat app.
It'd be like YouTube charging top creators for access (sure, the blue checks aren't "access", but they're a huge discovery-aid and solve problems for Twitter) then also cutting off any 3rd-party tools those creators use to make their jobs easier, which would obviously be a giant WTF. Why on earth would you make things more difficult for the very people providing the content that makes your site worth anything to begin with!
> just wanted to read their non-famous pals' posts
I suspect Elon lives in a bubble where all of his friends are famous or highly desirable in some way. He doesn't understand that most people's friends _aren't_ a brand.
My main entry point to Twitter is their search box (I’m basically a read-only user). Mastodon seems to be resisting multi-instance searching and that makes it more cumbersome for me to use.
If Mastodon isn’t interested in this functionality, it would be cool to see Google add a “mastodon:” search operator that works like their “site:” operator.
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.
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.
One of the many values of a good communications team is that they communicate in both directions. They’re not just mouthpieces for the company, they know the customers and users and market as well. A good comms team will tell the company when users are confused about something; a great comms team will tell the company _before_ users get confused at all.
By shutting down the comms team, Musk isn’t just saying that he doesn’t want to play by corporate communications rules, he’s saying that he doesn’t want to _listen_ to anyone, either.
comms teams are great, but how hard is it to post a simple straightforward writeup about the upcoming change? heck he even announced a bunch of other stuff from his personal account before, even promising to put stuff like this up for voting. confused
Musk could have just tweeted "As we focus on increasing the velocity of developing new features we don't want the baggage of maintaining the legacy API for clients so we're going to wind down support for third-party clients in a month from now." and it would have headed off like 70% of the hate. You don't need a comms team for that.
> 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.
Not so, clients have exclusive keys (whose supply has been highly restricted since they were introduced a few years ago, making gaining any sort of grounds with new clients a challenge).
Twitter could have made the validity of these certs / keys conditional on subscription integration.
Oh, I didn't mean letting the clients support them, I meant making the clients support them and feature them how Twitter wanted them to.
E.g. if they wanted to change the notifications defaults everywhere to showing the "verified" notifications first, as a way to promote sales of Twitter Blue... good luck getting the third party clients to go along with that without some serious coercive micromanagement.
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".
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.
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".
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.
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.
426 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadThe whole thing was truly beautiful. Overall, Musk's acquisition has provided some excellent entertainment.
That’s all it would have taken. Probably would have made a huge increase in subscribers too.
This is 100% a control move. He wants full control over how everyone experiences Twitter (not sure why). So this was pulled.
Of course you can NEVER go back from this move.
Of course, Blue is essentially a bandaid of $8/mo/user over the gaping chest would that is the cost of the leveraged buyout ($13B) so I doubt Musk would consider tearing of pieces of that bandaid for goodwill or lead gen.
Still, a very shortsighted move.
It never had feature parity with the site, but it did get better over time.
Yet instead of supporting the strong ecosystem they already have and nurturing a symbiotic relationship with it, they burn it all?
That's the route Reddit has taken. There are several features that only work through the official app or website. It can be frustrating as a user of a third party client but it's a much better alternative to cutting everybody off.
With feature iteration at Reddit accelerating since 2019, they may opt to do the same eventually should a desperate squeeze of user metrics/ad revenue becomes necessary down the road. Public APIs helped Reddit rapidly grow its userbase on a lean crew. It'd be a shame to see that goodwill being burned in the never-ending chase for quarterly performance results.
The biggest issue isn’t what they’ve done but how they did it: dismissively, without warning, justified days later with a flimsy provably false excuse.
> A public API radically slows down product iteration since each feature needs to be considered in terms of its blast radius to third party clients.
Twitter’s public API was already lacking. There are several features, like polls, third-party clients never had access to. No one would be surprised if the API remained static forever.
> killing the API to speed up product velocity isn’t an insane move if you value that more than the existing 3rd party ecosystem.
The API wasn’t completely disabled, it’s still working for smaller clients.
The only thing I can think of is Musk was concerned the two largest 3rd parties would create their own network seeded with something like 66% of the most influential users.
There was a big fuss over third-party clients being limited to 100k users. Twitter fairly quickly walked back that limit (with additional verification and rules specific to clients reaching that size being required).
Until you get caught, and Apple/Google decide to boot the official app from the stores (if) you broke the respective agreements.
That said, I bet that the real thing they want is the control to be able to push the Twitter Blue premium features, which I'm sure third-party apps would just sideline as much as possible even if they made them all available through the API.
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.
With Ivory I feel at home. Can’t wait to start paying for it.
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.
Basically the same principle used to hijack accounts by buying an expired domain that had email addresses associated with it.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/
There are a lot of opportunistic/good hearted compassionate lawyers making a good business of shaking down smaller website operators for ADA compliance.
I am fairly sure much of their accessibility work was instantiated by these lawsuits and settlements.
https://www.facebook.com/help/273947702950567
https://dredf.org/legal-advocacy/nad-v-netflix/
Social media? Not to my knowledge.
But not having a website that's usable by the blind cost Target $6 million: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/target-settl...
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/california-court-appeal...
Kind of a shame, because it was my first thought too--losing the accessibility team and then removing all the accessible clients definitely won't make Musk many friends among disability advocates.
The sooner people jump off the ship, the better for each of them.
Point is, unfortunately, Twitter's dying and its prognosis is poor. We can imagine it'll get better but the realistic strategy is to bail.
(My previous post lacked empathy, and I apologize for that. Some billionaire asshole spent a lot of money to break something that worked for a lot of people. That's not fair to them.)
- qoto.org: member of United Federation of Instances. Relatively inclusive (and has some interesting extensions running on the base Mastodon service), but not necessarily federated to all the instances mastodon.social is federated to because they don't have a strict "Nazis fuck off" policy.
- mastodon.lol: antifa / LGBTQ+ / hacker-friendly node. Strict "Nazis fuck off" policy.
- infosec.exchange: InfoSec-focused Mastodon node, but pretty open with a pretty regular policy.
I think the strategy I'd probably recommend for a new user is something like "Join at mastodon.social, follow some people, and lurk. If you see many people you like who live at a particular node, migrate to that node."
(And honestly, unless a defederation fight breaks out, 90% of nodes are pretty interchangeable with each other; you can follow anyone the node federates to so it doesn't matter over-much which node you're on unless you want some specific features or you want admins who have a particular attitude towards your bugbear-topics).
Also you don't have to fret about what instance you start off on. I started with one of the generic instances and then after a week of lurking I migrated my account to an instance that I wanted to join (which moves over all your followers/followings but not your posts)
At the very least, one of the core features of the platform is it (at least on web) highly encourages captions on images for accessibility :)
(I know there is the issue of where people she was following on Twitter may not move over etc, sadly)
She should submit an ADA complaint [1].
[1] https://www.ada.gov/file-a-complaint/
> This makes me so sad. Your iPhone app allowed me as a blind person to use Twitter so much better than the app that they themselves produce. Sorry for the hostility you are receiving from them, but know that you are appreciated for the hard work you’ve done.
> Maybe the best thing anyone's ever told us. Thank you for this, truly. It is everything. Please take care.
https://mobile.twitter.com/RustyHilliard77/status/1616174474...
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.
[0] - https://nitter.net/
[0] https://gitlab.com/Plexer0/Nitter-Android
[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.plexer0.nitter/
Maybe, but compared to the rest of the damage he's done to his brand this is a relatively tiny droplet. This may drive away power users (or drive them to a Twitter-owned option?), but many of them are probably already looking at how much priority they should keep on Twitter. Twitter client issues for many may be a second place to Twitter content issues as a driving factor.
I always assumed the third party clients just provided a better interface. I didn't realize they circumvented the income stream.
If the third party clients were removing the means of monetization, for a company who struggles to profit, then it seems obvious that requiring paid access on its way, regardless of the owner. Twitter can't go forever at a loss.
The "surprise" is surprising.
Making sure you're not showing them by nsfw content, etc. or your advertisers will pull out.
I can't think of a single service that provides ads for 3rd party clients to use.
Most are hostile to 3rd party clients due to threatened ad revenue, that's why there's invidious, nitter, etc. whackamole.
Which you can control by just returning the ads as part of the API response for the feed, which I'm sure how the official client does it. Making the client classify NSFW content and hide ads based on that seems like a stupid idea.
At the very best the rouge app won't display ads.
At the worse, they'll ignore a nsfw tag and won't show the spoiler overlay, angering your advertiser.
Audits can catch it, but only after the damage is done.
I don't think there's any service that lets their ad supported plan be in the hands of a 3rd party client.
I was mainly asking has it been done by any service?
Risking your advertisers is not wise and audits will be expensive and reactive not proactive.
But for nonrecurring expenses, Twitter was profitable before Musk’s buyout both torpedoed ad revenue (when it was announced, before it was even completed) and saddled it with massive expenses to finance the buyout.
The acquisition is literally the only reason it is any concern how long Twitter can operate at a loss.
My mistake. Last I looked was 2020, when they were down about $1B.
Twitterrific has been discontinued - 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 - Jan 2023 (11 comments)
Twitter kicking off a developer API campaign on January 16, 2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34410624 - Jan 2023 (107 comments)
Tweetbot is back down again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34396664 - Jan 2023 (210 comments)
The Shit Show - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485 - Jan 2023 (312 comments)
Twitter API Page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34387834 - Jan 2023 (98 comments)
Twitter's API is down? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34363743 - Jan 2023 (408 comments)
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.
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.
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
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".
If I borrow one from Sirius XM...I listen to POTUS... and a host named Julie Mason who is on early in the mornings will say "for more information follow me @ Julie Mason on Twitter."
People figure it out.
They would look at you funny before Twitter was a thing too.
Or Instagram. Or Facebook.
People will figure it out. It becomes popular. It's not unknown.
Almost everyone I followed on Twitter is using it now, and I actually prefer the experience. It's like Twitter but without all the bots/spam/hate, at least for now.
The good thing is most people I follow on Mastodon have stopped talking/complaining about Twitter unlike the first few weeks of the migration wave. The platform can only thrive when it hatches original content.
Mastadon is more like Discord than Twitter. There is no core server. There is no core experience. It's just an instanced message board.
At least with Twitter, it was a corporation with rules and procedures.
You can even run your own server if you want. But, if you're being a jerk your server might get de-federated.
How is that working out?
I would submit that was is a load-bearing word in that sentence. Twitter as it exists now effectively is run by a single random individual who can read your DMs and kick you off the server if you write anything he does not agree with. Bans have gotten weirder, stupider, and more mercurial since Musk's takeover (the Tweetbot/Twitterrific bans arguably being a particular case of it), and the "Twitter Files" are a result of him giving activist-journalists access to unencrypted DMs without permission. (I'm not interested in debating whether the subjects covered in the Files prove some kind of malfeasance on Twitter's part; that's orthogonal to the point I'm making here.) Twitter may have had rules and procedures a few months ago. Now it has Elon Musk making decisions by polls he pinky-swears to abide by the results of.
In practice, major, established Mastodon instances with tens of thousands of users may well be less likely to treat their users (and developers) as badly as current Twitter is.
I wouldn't count it as a benefit for Mastodon that its servers basically have the same form of management as Elon Musk Twitter.
Yes, just like any service on the Internet. I really don’t understand how the fact that anybody can run a Mastodon/Web/email/whatever server makes the whole thing not reliable; you just have to choose a server that suits you.
"Rules and procedures" that didn't prevent a teen from hacking them a couple of years ago. The teen tricked Twitter employees to give their credentials, and the employee credentials gave him access to actual twitter accounts.WHich shows a singular lack of process and lax permissions practices from such a big company. And I'm not sure they'll fare better now that most of their workforce has been fired...
Among tech-folk, it's hyped up because it's federated, with the hope that if it succeeds it brings us back to the original design of internet services like E-mail and Usenet where everything isn't centralized and owned by a single corporation where you have to live by the whims of it's advertisers.
> they can read your DMs as they are not encrypted
I have yet to send or receive a DM on Mastodon, I'm not even sure how you do it. As long as you know this fact, just don't send sensitive info in DMs? It's not a core feature of the platform so I don't understand why it's looked at as such a deal-breaker.
> they can kick you off the server if you write anything the server operator does not agree with
But, with Mastodon, you can just join another server with different rules if that happens. On Twitter, if you offend Elon, he kicks you off and now you have no recourse. Mastodon is strictly better in this regard.
It feels exactly like Twitter to me now, except less noise.
You can follow someone on any Mastodon server from your account on any server. It’s not siloed like Discord (which, ironically, actually is a centralized service!) - it’s much more like Twitter than Discord in real use.
There may be no official ‘core experience’, but there is a de-facto ‘core experience’: a stream of posts from people you follow, from any server, in chronological order.
So what happens when a server gets deleted? Isn’t your account bound to that server?
There’s a way to migrate your account to another server, including keeping follower relationships intact (so people don’t need to follow you again - they’ll automatically follow the new account). Past posts don’t get migrated though. If the old server is still running your past posts remain there.
If the server just suddenly shuts down with no notice, though, there’s nothing you can do.
Using Ivory my experience is eerily similar to Twitter. Why do you think it wouldn’t be? If a critical mass of interesting people is there it just works.
I don’t really use the local timeline at all, that‘s just not relevant to me.
Obviously this will be wildly different for everyone depending on how many people made the move. For me personally and how I used Twitter it just works (and Twitter proper was getting more and more deserted and uninteresting anyway).
I'm finding Mastodon generally better than Twitter a few months ago, and far better than Twitter today. The "For You" thing Twitter keeps shoving at me is just _nonsense_, and the "Following" section is a bit of a howling wasteland a this point.
> Mastadon is more like Discord than Twitter. There is no core server. There is no core experience. It's just an instanced message board
Have you ever actually _used_ it? This seems like a peculiar view of it.
40B acquisition to bankruptcy sounds brutal. I'm sure there's some nuanced financial way they can recover and continue but wow.
I do agree that Morgan Stanley and the other financiers are going to be the kids without a chair when the music stops.
Twitter's business was making a profit in 2018 and 2019, but then 2020 happened (because 2020), and in 2021 they had a $800 million class action settlement to pay (without that it would have been $600m profit), and then in 2022 Elon tanked the company in the 4th quarter.
The core business was (just about) profitable before Elon. It was just far below the FAANG-level expectations from a tech company.
Didn't Elon basically ruin almost the entire 2022 since the buyout offer was in April and caused uncertainty throughout the year?
Bankruptcy could still happen of course, even if Elon still has the money. He might think that completely shutting down Twitter is less embarrasing than selling it for a 90% loss, Elon is still pretending to be a business genius after all.
We do not know the reality. He has cut the payroll significantly (despite the severance since that is a 1 time burden), he has added paying customers with Blue, and by killing the API, he increases those paying customers. He can also browbeat or schmooze some large customers like Apple to advertise more. It may not be enough but a smaller profitable or cash flow positive twitter could still run for a while before he feels the pinch.
Not sure if he can make the billion dollar interest payments, but imagine if twitter can make 800M, and his Tesla stock goes up double, he would not feel a pinch bridging the remaining 200M although he may try to get someone else (or the company) to pay for it.
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.
What, exactly, are you asking for when you say that "accessing APIs from 3rd party clients ... should be legally protected"?
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.
Fact is if you expose an API publicly, at that boundary you [should] lose the right to control what software interacts with it. Web browsers are called user agents for a reason.
If a service is valuable, people will pay for it directly and more than cover the cost of hosting an API. If a company can’t make money without hijacking people’s attention and tricking them into doing things that profit them by controlling the software running on their users’ computers then maybe it shouldn’t exist.
Not saying this is your view, but it amazes me how many people think companies should be able to write anything they like in terms of service and/or that “they wouldn’t be profitable if they weren’t allowed to do bad things” is a good reason not to ban companies from doing bad things.
Apparently most creators use a third party client at least, so this seems sure to do some damage to the Twitter experience.
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.
Regarding the personal attack - is Zuckerberg also a "bizarre, fragile, little man" since Instagram doesn't allow 3rd party clients?
Regarding the validity of this move by Twitter - a private company is making changes which they believe are in line with their business goals. Who cares? Why get so riled up about it?
Someone you don't know doesn't like a move that a private company made, or it's CEO. Who cares? Why get so riled up about it?
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!
it already exist, its called Mastodon.
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 ;-).
Disabling APIs won't win you any friends
[0]: https://buffer.com
Note: They seem to support "Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google Business Profile"
You can't consume or publish to a personal Facebook profile or an individual Instagram account; it's restricted to Facebook Business Pages, Groups, and Instagram Business accounts.
It does compete with the Meta Business Suite, though.
I know I was a heavy user until (uh) 5? years ago when Instagram and Facebook posting was nerfed into uselessness.
[0]: https://buffer.com
[1]: https://twitter.com/buffer/status/1616418191718207488
Still, mine is just a guess.
edit: Come to think of it, didn't FB eventually moved from super open API to.. friend and family model?
I'm not really a Twitter user, but I can only assume that he thought "I'm going to do things right" until seeing the balance sheet.
edit: https://tapbots.social/@ivory/109683219720510229 though it seems they intend to get Ivory out ASAP due to how this decision has impacted their business. So maybe waiting for Invites won't be needed for long
[1] https://tapbots.social/@ivory/109552637982709508
Twitter and Elon have already done quite a bit of damage to the company, platform, and reputation. This is just a continued pattern, and it is disappointing.
-edit-
Just to be clear with the original comment I'm just giving OP a little bit of a hard time on a Friday :)
YouTube is on a similar precipice. People think it's irreplaceable because YouTube displaces every competitor. In truth, Google has simply monetized the distribution of video content so well that nobody else has a reason to compete. Streaming video on a competing platform is almost always a shitshow. But, eventually YouTube will fail or implement a heartbreaking change that forces everyone off. Maybe Larry Ellison will make a bid for it, and we'll complete the Lex Luthor arc for American billionaires. Either way, it's another "too big to fail" service that is sure to fall apart at some point.
If you want to avoid situations like this, take ownership of the media you like and don't let your voice rely on other people's platforms.
All that has gone by the wayside, of course. Part of the problem here is that Musk had so much money he could afford to burn tens of billions of dollars on a weird personal fixation. [1] A problem that the market has happily started to correct, [2] but perhaps not soon enough to save Twitter.
[1] One possible explanation is here: https://defector.com/i-was-almost-elon-musks-twitter-voice
[2] He even set a record! https://www.npr.org/2023/01/12/1148634966/elon-musk-guinness...
Twitter learned that they really had to take harm reduction more seriously if they didn't want to be known for things like that. I believe that their improvements there were part of what set them on the path to their later profits: https://www.netcials.com/financial-net-profit-year-quarter-u...
And as far as losing money goes, their "lean and mean" approach isn't doing so well. Ad revenues are reportedly down ~40% as the same time Musk is going to have to come up with billion-dollar interest payments.
As an impartial non-Twitter user, I think it's safe to say that neither version of Twitter was healthy for it's platform or users.
I think your claim on profitability is flat out wrong. If you think that's the case, what are the exact numbers you are imagining that would make Twitter profitable?
It feels like people with money are shutting down, neutering, avenues where they receive criticism.
Since much of the money for the buyout came from the Saudis and the Chinese, it feels like the people behind this are more concerned with subduing Twitter than turning a profit. Maybe why they had to make it private, it’s illegal to run a public company into the ground.
Elon has always slashed customer service and PR in the companies he runs.
Twitter for all it's warts, was still a haven for public accountability when traditional customer service avenues fell short.
Not surprising that following an unprecedented consolidation of wealth (2020), we see someone take that opportunity to dismantle that.
The counter-reaction to this, I believe, is the increased concentration of wealth and push toward monopoly and control.
If democracy prevails, I believe social media, like Youtube, Reddit etc will drive a level of cultural, scientific and technological enlightenment to equal the Renaissance.
If autocracy prevails, if the whole world falls under the dominion of a single authority, we will all end up in one single shithole country.
ooooo, I like the dark place you're taking this. I didn't give one iota about Twitter before the Musk debacle, but I have been enjoying the shit show since it started. I can't stop paying attention into just how much of a future Business 101 case study this will become. I remember when everyone said how Reed Hasting navigated the Netflix debacle of trying to separate the DVD side of the business as a future case study. I feel like Musk saw that and said, "hold my beer! I'll show you how to ruin a company's brand!!!"
I had thought since they first started locking down 3rd party apps years ago that if/when they ever had a "Twitter Pro" or whatever, that allowing subscribed users to use a third party app would be part of it. After all, lots of online service subs eliminate ads in the product, so why not Twitter?
I assumed rational thinking on their part, I suppose.
Pitiful.
Lots of online service subs are eliminating the ad-free thing now, because they know they can prove more value of paying users to their advertisers. I don't think the NY Times subscription was ever ad-free, and many publishers are now removing that perk.
But I agree with you. I would've paid for Twitter Blue if it were completely ad-free. This is the main value of YouTube Premium to me.
[0] https://github.com/Dimillian/IceCubesApp/pull/135
[1] https://github.com/Dimillian/IceCubesApp/issues/16
(I wish the FediActivityPub people had spec'd up an API to avoid this kind of multi-implementation-who-supports-what shambles.)
EDIT: Amusingly, I fixed the "cannot login to Pleroma" problem for `madon` this week - Pleroma/Akkoma require form data in the body, not the URL, for POST requests (which is fair since the HTML spec suggests this is the Right Way.)
Tweetbot apparently cost $6/year, so are you saying you would donate $60/year if they released an open source Mastodon client? Are there other open source apps you donate to?
I'm genuinely curious how people approach payment/donations for open source software, I'm not trying to pull some gotcha on you. I don't donate to any open source projects, but I feel that I probably should.
I donate to a number of open source projects, a decent number of them regularly. I am lucky enough to be able to afford to buy software when I need to and donate to projects I think are worthy of support. It makes me extremely happy every time I am able to donate to an open source project instead of buying software. It makes me sick every time I capitulate and end up renting softare. Software subscriptions can die in a fire.
I'd encourage you to donate if you can afford to, but if you can't, that's ok.
A world dominated by open computing platforms and software is such an exciting prospect that it's worth putting a bit of money and effort into. And if that doesn't pan out, at least you helped the maintainers a little!
As the "author" of some 80,000+ tweets (can't find number anymore), their mobile app was unusable. I've been on TweetBot for close to 10 years I think. TweetBot2 was my first mobile twitter client iirc.
No more mobile twitter for me. Shame. But probably better this way. It really hasn't felt like a fun place for the last 3 or 4 years. More like a cigarette habit you can't shake.
It'd be like YouTube charging top creators for access (sure, the blue checks aren't "access", but they're a huge discovery-aid and solve problems for Twitter) then also cutting off any 3rd-party tools those creators use to make their jobs easier, which would obviously be a giant WTF. Why on earth would you make things more difficult for the very people providing the content that makes your site worth anything to begin with!
I suspect Elon lives in a bubble where all of his friends are famous or highly desirable in some way. He doesn't understand that most people's friends _aren't_ a brand.
What exactly leads you to believe it's not a good replacement, especially considering you haven't tried it?
There are many accounts I follow on Twitter, relatively popular accounts not friends with 5 followers, that aren’t on Mastodon.
So I’m missing a bunch of what I had. I found new things too, which is great. But it’s still never going to be a 1:1 replacement.
If Mastodon isn’t interested in this functionality, it would be cool to see Google add a “mastodon:” search operator that works like their “site:” operator.
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.
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.
By shutting down the comms team, Musk isn’t just saying that he doesn’t want to play by corporate communications rules, he’s saying that he doesn’t want to _listen_ to anyone, either.
Not so, clients have exclusive keys (whose supply has been highly restricted since they were introduced a few years ago, making gaining any sort of grounds with new clients a challenge).
Twitter could have made the validity of these certs / keys conditional on subscription integration.
With what staff?
E.g. if they wanted to change the notifications defaults everywhere to showing the "verified" notifications first, as a way to promote sales of Twitter Blue... good luck getting the third party clients to go along with that without some serious coercive micromanagement.
So did I.
No feature no key, no key no third party client.
I've been wondering too why they didn't do this. That would at least get them some quick revenue.
Could it be that they didn't want to keep supporting the API?
[1] But none of them "replicate the Twitter experience", just bots and archivers.
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.
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.
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.