[HN Gopher] Tweetbot. April 2011 - January 2023
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Tweetbot. April 2011 - January 2023
Author : davidbarker
Score : 607 points
Date : 2023-01-20 18:39 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tapbots.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tapbots.com)
| _justinfunk wrote:
| > On January 12th, 2023, without warning, Elon Musk ordered his
| employees at Twitter to suspend access to 3rd party clients which
| instantly locked out hundreds of thousands of users from
| accessing Twitter from their favorite clients.
|
| Is the claim that 'Elon ordered his employees" in evidence? I
| haven't seen Elon say he made the decision or try to explain it.
| I'm not defending Elon, just can't find the source.
| yborg wrote:
| Who else do you think could make such a decision at Twitter now
| without Musk's approval? Employee empowerment isn't exactly a
| thing with Elon. When you are the smartest man in any room,
| anyone else in there making any kind of a decision is by
| definition someone dumber than you trying to think for you.
| Finnucane wrote:
| No, people are probably just assuming because Musk is famously
| a micromanager, and it doesn't appear there are a lot of other
| people at twitter making decisions.
| aurelius83 wrote:
| Does anyone know if Twitter was losing money for letting these
| third party clients have access to the firehouse?
|
| Are these third party clients paying for the API or sharing
| revenue with twitter?
| saurik wrote:
| Third-party clients don't have firehose access.
| b800h wrote:
| The third party apps didn't serve ads.
| darnfish wrote:
| API access is free and the Twitter API does not expose any type
| of ads
| scarface74 wrote:
| Third party clients didn't show ads and there was no revenue
| sharing
| eruci wrote:
| Change is the only constant.
|
| Adapt.
| haidev wrote:
| Won't this hurt Elon in the long run? I was never able to stand
| the official Twitter app it's filled with ads and irrelevant
| clutter. I think since moving to Android Tweetbot is one of the
| few apps I miss from having on my phone. I was still enjoying the
| Mac version. I guess I will stick to Nitter [0] from now on.
|
| [0] - https://nitter.net/
| seydor wrote:
| 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?
| gfodor wrote:
| 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.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Do you run nitter self hosted? The most popular server seems
| down for me
| nomel wrote:
| > filled with ads and irrelevant clutter.
|
| 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.
| notwhereyouare wrote:
| 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
| MrOwnPut wrote:
| What service does this? There are very strict rules in
| showing ads.
|
| 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.
| robryan wrote:
| 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.
| MrOwnPut wrote:
| Yeah it can be done with X amount of risk and auditing
| ($)...
|
| 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.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > 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.
| MrOwnPut wrote:
| Certainly, but the second you get a rouge actor, your
| advertisers are going to be pissed.
|
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Twitter can't go forever at a loss.
|
| 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.
| croes wrote:
| Without the debt Musk put on Twitter they could at least go
| longer
| fencepost wrote:
| _Won 't this hurt Elon in the long run?_
|
| 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.
| app4soft wrote:
| There is also _Nitter for Android_ (WebView-app), but source
| repo not available for a month already.[0,1]
|
| [0] https://gitlab.com/Plexer0/Nitter-Android
|
| [1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.plexer0.nitter/
| charcircuit wrote:
| Most people don't use third party clients, so no it won't.
| seydor wrote:
| Twitter's PR department may have become deliberately obnoxious,
| but i must say the reactions and shaking fists of twitter users
| remind me sooo much of the times when facebook was making a major
| change to their website and everybody was moving to canada or sth
| alixanderwang wrote:
| Why are they having the funeral less than 2 weeks after a
| "suspension" of the API, after 10+ years of work?
|
| Twitter under the new management is making rash decisions but
| also has been reversing many.
|
| I still have Tweetbot app on my phone in hopes that it's
| temporary. Has there been anything definitive to say that won't
| be the case?
| billbrown wrote:
| Where's the poll?
| MBCook wrote:
| It's a two person company. Elon killed off the #1 source of
| revenue and _refused to say anything_ for days. When they did,
| it was a lie.
|
| Let's say they reverse course again on Tuesday and say 3rd
| party clients are back.
|
| Would you bet your entire livelihood and business on Elon (or
| whoever in the future) keeping their word?
|
| That sounds ridiculously risky.
| Kye wrote:
| Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. This was likely the
| last straw after years of worsening API restrictions. They
| might have hoped things would improve under Elon. This is
| evidence things will only get worse.
| wartijn_ wrote:
| Twitter changed their Developer Agreement yesterday, the main
| change is that it now includes this:
|
| > You will not or attempt to (and will not allow others to)
| ...c) use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt
| to create a substitute or similar service or product to the
| Twitter Applications;
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34448524
| [deleted]
| jslql wrote:
| [flagged]
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Ngl just join the pro capitalist instance then?? Make your own
| pro capitalist instance?? It's not like capitalism is a
| minority sentiment, you'll surely be able to find plenty of
| supporters for your network...
| foresto wrote:
| Nitter doesn't appear to be locked out, at least for now. Here's
| the list of instances:
|
| https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances
| [deleted]
| sum1ren wrote:
| Shameless plug: I created a web extension that scrapes from
| twitter UI directly to a single page. That's one way to get
| around the api... https://fetcher.page
| danieldk wrote:
| 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!
| scottdeto wrote:
| Now do Ivory for Android
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _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)
| [deleted]
| jmann99999 wrote:
| 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.
| system16 wrote:
| 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.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| 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.
| themagician wrote:
| What is "almost everyone"? Four people? Using it on what
| server?
|
| Mastadon is more like Discord than Twitter. There is no core
| server. There is no core experience. It's just an instanced
| message board.
| Sunspark wrote:
| 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.
| matwood wrote:
| 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.
| scarface74 wrote:
| You mean like rules about what is allowed for third party
| clients and procedures for denying them access?
|
| How is that working out?
| hk__2 wrote:
| > 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.
| rtsil wrote:
| > 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...
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| > 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.
| arrrg wrote:
| 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).
| [deleted]
| matwood wrote:
| 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.
| jrmg wrote:
| 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.
| hiidrew wrote:
| I wonder what happens after that?
|
| 40B acquisition to bankruptcy sounds brutal. I'm sure there's
| some nuanced financial way they can recover and continue but
| wow.
| rurp wrote:
| 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.
| jmann99999 wrote:
| 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.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| 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
| Finnucane wrote:
| 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.
| abm53 wrote:
| Is there a specific reason you think it won't be Mastodon?
| jmann99999 wrote:
| Hi ABM. Good question. Here is my perspective (I could always
| be wrong).
|
| I listen to a number of news podcasts and they still tell
| people where to find the hosts on Twitter. I have yet to hear
| someone tell people how to find the author on Mastodon.
| Never.
|
| News personalities are the bread and butter of Twitter. They
| are normies (compared to most of us).
|
| Mastodon had its five minutes of fame when Elon started
| making changes. I was quietly rooting for it, but I think it
| will be tough.
|
| That's why I don't think Mastodon is going to replace Twitter
| anytime soon.
| kennydude wrote:
| > I have yet to hear someone tell people how to find the
| author on Mastodon. Never.
|
| How does a host say an email address? They might say
| john@reallycoolpodcast.co.uk
|
| How does a host say how to find them on Mastodon (or ANY
| ActivityPub based platform)? They might say
| john@reallycoolpodcast.co.uk
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > 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".
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I wondered, once Musk bought it, how long I'd stay. He's
| transparently awful, and clearly has no idea what he's doing --
| except when he's being aggressively, deliberately terrible -- but
| I kept checking my Tweetbot feed anyway because I followed a lot
| of interesting people there.
|
| Then one morning not long ago, Tweetbot wouldn't connect, and I
| knew immediately what had happened. It seems really, really dumb.
| I mean, years ago Twitter experimented with trying to force
| everyone onto their own app, but even then pre-Elon I knew that I
| didn't want Twitter to become like Facebook. I wanted a
| chronological feed of the things the accounts I follow posted,
| and that's all. I don't want to see anything else. I don't want
| the service to give me shit algorithmically.
|
| Tweetbot gave me that. I figured that as long as i could have
| that, I'd use Twitter. Now that I can't, I'm out.
|
| And it seems very, very likely that the most interesting and
| engaging accounts on the service -- which is to say, the ones
| that make people want to participate -- likely feel similarly,
| since so many of them have been very verbal fans of Tweetbot or
| some other 3rd party tool for so long. The tl;dr here is that
| axing 3rd party clients is just the latest in a long line of
| very, very stupid things this guy is doing.
| w10-1 wrote:
| Why am I not surprised that the bots rise again?
|
| They will destroy everything that could be good, by empowering a
| tiny, tiny minority of malicious actors under the cover of
| serving a few real needs.
| dljsjr wrote:
| 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.
| josteink wrote:
| If this doesn't teach users (and developers) of the risks
| associated with centralized, closed services...
|
| I guess _nothing_ will?
|
| It will be interesting to see if this drives users and traffic
| elsewhere.
| 33955985 wrote:
| It was always odd to me that entire businesses relied on what was
| essentially the goodwill of a corporation. I think the same about
| things like microG in the Android world. They just... use
| Google's API without paying and yet we think it'll all work out?
| barnabee wrote:
| Acessing APIs from 3rd party clients isn't "goodwill" and
| should be legally protected.
| 33955985 wrote:
| 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.
| politician wrote:
| This is a tricky area. Do we legally protect access to
| unpublished APIs or only published, supported APIs? If there
| is no API, should we legally require an API? Should the API
| support 100% of the services operations or may it only
| support some subset? What if the API is unprofitable, can the
| business reduce the set of operations supported or remove it
| entirely? Can they even release a new version of the API and
| retire an older version?
|
| What, exactly, are you asking for when you say that
| "accessing APIs from 3rd party clients ... should be legally
| protected"?
| barnabee wrote:
| 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.
| alexktz wrote:
| King dick move there Elon.
| ask_b123 wrote:
| What does this mean?
| ubermonkey wrote:
| It means elon musk is a dick.
| ducktective wrote:
| Apparently "king" is the new fashion word for cool guy, chad,
| bro
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Calling someone "King {adjective}" is saying they are not
| just {adjective} they are the King of {adjective}s
| ask_b123 wrote:
| Ha, I was confused as to whether this was a strangely
| worded compliment or a strangely worded insult.
| [deleted]
| dom96 wrote:
| Shameless plug: I created a browser extension to help transition
| to Mastodon[0]. If you don't yet feel like you can leave
| twitter.com, but want to explore alternatives it's a great way to
| get started. Essentially it injects Mastodon posts into your
| Twitter timeline, so you can retain your existing Twitter
| following while getting exposed to Mastodon.
|
| [0] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastodon-
| chirper/l...
| moneywoes wrote:
| Your extension looks fantastic. Is it cool if i sent you some
| questions?
| hk__2 wrote:
| Why you don't post your questions directly, rather than
| asking if you can ask?
| jedisct1 wrote:
| Is there a simple way to synchronize tweets (including history)
| between Twitter and Mastodon?
| linuxftw wrote:
| Surprised all the takes here are so negative. I suspect that the
| vast majority of people using Twitter won't be affected. The
| vanishingly small tech population that cares about these things
| is likely going to have no impact on Twitter's overall user base.
| Sports and Celebrities, news organizations, normies, they'll all
| continue to use Twitter and won't be up to date on any of this
| drama.
|
| I don't have a twitter account. Until today, I had never heard of
| tweetbot. Who installs an app when you can just use the mobile
| site?
| ericzawo wrote:
| The sabre rattling from the VC class of people who roll with (or
| think they do) Elon is extremely disappointing. Anyone without
| skin in the game would be hard pressed to characterize this new
| Twitter as going well by literally any metric.
| xdfgh1112 wrote:
| I wonder what percentage of users use a non-official client.
|
| Apparently most creators use a third party client at least, so
| this seems sure to do some damage to the Twitter experience.
| jackdeansmith wrote:
| Honestly a very confusing move for Twitter, third party client
| users are probably the easiest to monetize users that Twitter
| has. They have already demonstrated that they get enough value
| out of the service to go out of their way to use a different
| client, potentially one that they pay for. Make them pay some
| monthly fee and everyone is happy?
| yakkityyak wrote:
| Has any company tried revenue sharing with 3rd party clients?
|
| Imagine a free tier of tweetbot got a slice of ads clicked in
| it. Premium ad free modes could be shared too.
| jjcm wrote:
| A part of me is curious what would happen if all of these 3rd
| party clients banded together to create their own separate
| backend - surely it wouldn't be that hard to get a clone of
| Twitter going. There's likely a strong correlation with people
| who use 3rd party clients and people who are power users, so
| you'd have a strong social network from the start.
| politician wrote:
| I agree, it seems like the obvious move since there is an
| installed base. But, how much of that installed base is able to
| be monetized to support the ongoing costs of operation of this
| backend? Aren't most of these clients free?
| mmastrac wrote:
| I mean, some of them are working on Mastodon clients so it's
| already happening.
| znpy wrote:
| I wonder how much savings in infrastructure is getting musk from
| this move.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Driving users away is one good way at lowering hosting costs,
| that's true.
| system16 wrote:
| 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.
| rtkwe wrote:
| 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.
| bredren wrote:
| It also would have given the devs more time to build and
| migrate users to clients supporting Mastodon.
| throwaway092345 wrote:
| [flagged]
| jjulius wrote:
| "Don't criticize if you can't do better," is never a good
| take.
| throwaway092345 wrote:
| That's not the point at all.
|
| 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?
| jjulius wrote:
| >... 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?
| throwaway092345 wrote:
| So we are in agreement about the OP, glad we found some
| common ground :)
| jjulius wrote:
| 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.
| sosodev wrote:
| 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!
| jjulius wrote:
| Generally speaking, it's OK to see a fault and not always
| have an answer for how to fix it, or to not be the one
| who's capable of fixing it.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| "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
| jjulius wrote:
| 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.
| drcongo wrote:
| I'm impressed that you were so confident in that response
| that you created a new account especially to post it.
| throwaway092345 wrote:
| [flagged]
| wnevets wrote:
| >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!
|
| it already exist, its called Mastodon.
| slater wrote:
| "Yet you participate in society! Curious!"
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| For the uninitiated: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
| [deleted]
| barnabee wrote:
| 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 ;-).
| moneywoes wrote:
| What's wrong with mastodon?
| rtkwe wrote:
| 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.
| ericmay wrote:
| 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 :)
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
|
| [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...
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| No, they really did learn things. For example, consider
| the racist mobbing of Leslie Jones in 2016:
| https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/jul/18/leslie-
| jones...
|
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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?
| qotgalaxy wrote:
| [dead]
| riazrizvi wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >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!!!"
| dualboot wrote:
| Agree 100%
|
| 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.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| 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.
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| What happened to Silicon Valley that was in the same vein
| as Gawker's destruction?
| blowski wrote:
| 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
| graublau wrote:
| ITT comparing 3rd party api limits to nazi germany
| dylan604 wrote:
| what does the International Telephone & Telegraph company
| have to do with this thread?
| labster wrote:
| Twitter needs more lebensraum for its own APIs.
| ericmay wrote:
| That was a good one
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Swizec wrote:
| > 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.
| MandieD wrote:
| All of the drama of the last three months has helped me
| finally kick that filthy habit, so thanks, Elon.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 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!
| Swizec wrote:
| > 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.
| 98codes wrote:
| > 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.
| joegahona wrote:
| > 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.
| barnabee wrote:
| 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.
|
| Pitiful.
| drcongo wrote:
| 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.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| 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.)
| ihuman wrote:
| They just added GoToSocial support [0], and they are adding
| support for more instance types [1]
|
| [0] https://github.com/Dimillian/IceCubesApp/pull/135
|
| [1] https://github.com/Dimillian/IceCubesApp/issues/16
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Good stuff!
|
| (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.)
| akovaski wrote:
| > 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.
| barnabee wrote:
| I would donate $10 per month to a decent open source Mastodon
| client, at least while I was using it regularly (and would
| have done so for Tweetbot).
|
| I donate to a number of open source projects, a decent number
| of them regularly. I am lucky enough to be able to afford to
| buy software when I need to and donate to projects I think
| are worthy of support. It makes me extremely happy every time
| I am able to donate to an open source project instead of
| buying software. It makes me sick every time I capitulate and
| end up _renting_ softare. Software subscriptions can die in a
| fire.
|
| I'd encourage you to donate if you can afford to, but if you
| can't, that's ok.
|
| A world dominated by open computing platforms and software is
| such an exciting prospect that it's worth putting a bit of
| money and effort into. And if that doesn't pan out, at least
| you helped the maintainers a little!
| bcrl wrote:
| Linux Weekly News ended up with this kind of model. A long
| time ago back in 2002, LWN was about to shut down, but those
| of us in the Linux community found it had tremendous value
| and asked for options to pay, as well as options to pay more.
| Here we are 2 decades later and LWN is still around!
| Sometimes it pays to let your users help out financially.
| rrix2 wrote:
| i'm donating 5$/mo to no less than five open source
| patreon/opencollective right now
| [deleted]
| riley_dog wrote:
| > I don't think Mastodon is a good replacement for Twitter at
| all, but I am going to have to try it.
|
| What exactly leads you to believe it's not a good replacement,
| especially considering you haven't tried it?
| MBCook wrote:
| My only issue with Mastodon is the network effect.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| criddell wrote:
| 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.
| wstuartcl wrote:
| 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.
| erk__ wrote:
| One of the big ones Buffer [0] do not believe that they will
| be impacted this may not be an issue [1]
|
| [0]: https://buffer.com
|
| [1]: https://twitter.com/buffer/status/1616418191718207488
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| 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?
| w0m wrote:
| IIRC, FB was originally public-first before (lawsuits).
| Not API, just default privacy settings.
| cmelbye wrote:
| Which 3rd party apps specifically were used by marketers and
| are now banned?
| wstuartcl wrote:
| 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.
| graublau wrote:
| 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
| karmelapple wrote:
| Those aren't the same APIs that were turned off for third
| party clients though, correct?
| raverbashing wrote:
| Who knows? Probably someone who got fired on a previous
| round, that is.
|
| Disabling APIs won't win you any friends
| _rs wrote:
| My understanding is they didn't turn off the APIs, they
| disabled API keys for any large clients
| seydor wrote:
| Interesting, do instgram and facebook etc allow third party
| clients?
| pvarangot wrote:
| No, but unlike Twitter their advertiser tools are at least
| halfway decent.
| erk__ wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]: https://buffer.com
|
| Note: They seem to support "Instagram, TikTok, Facebook,
| Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google Business Profile"
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| rideontime wrote:
| Keep in mind that "fewer ads" is (and likely will forever be)
| "coming soon," because Elon promised it before doing the math.
| jchw wrote:
| 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.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| 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
| treesknees wrote:
| 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].
|
| [1] https://tapbots.social/@ivory/109552637982709508
| riley_dog wrote:
| No more invites. Their TestFlight allocation is full.
| e-clinton wrote:
| Blocking journalists was the last straw for me.
| tptacek wrote:
| If you're not paying attention to Mastodon now, a think to know
| about Tapbots and Ivory, their new ActivityPub client, is that
| their TestFlight betas, which they release in batches of a
| thousand or so at a time, last for just a couple minutes before
| they're all snapped up; there seems to be pretty huge demand for
| it.
|
| With a decent client (I've bounced around a couple of them so
| far), even in a beta state, the experience of writing and
| interacting with people on "Mastodon" is better than it was on
| Twitter. I'm bummed out when I have to talk on Twitter now.
| eddieroger wrote:
| There are also lots of other interesting clients not from
| Tapbots. If losing Tweetbot was enough to make you look at
| Mastodon, keep that open mind and look at all the interesting
| clients out there.
| kennydude wrote:
| Ice Cubes is another great example. Very exciting times!
| https://github.com/Dimillian/IceCubesApp
| thecosas wrote:
| (Unfortunately) related: they were rejected initially:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34444514
|
| Good news: It looks like that's since been resolved shortly
| after Gruber's post. https://mastodon.social/@icecubesapp@m
| astodon.cloud/10971756...
| wnevets wrote:
| what about the official client that everyone hates? The
| Android client seems to work well for me.
| MattDemers wrote:
| Metatext on IOS is good.
|
| https://elk.zone/
|
| https://pinafore.social/
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm test-driving Mammoth right now, and spent a couple weeks
| in MetaText (which is I think not maintained anymore, but it
| worked fine).
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I remember a few years back when those positions were
| reversed. Mastodon iOS app devs are mostly doing it out of
| love or passion and so seem prone to interesting hiatuses.
| Though Mastodon is usually "stable" enough and "feature
| complete" enough and not generally a fast-changing target
| outside of big migratory transitions like this recent one,
| so those devs I think are generally more than welcome to
| whatever hiatuses they need.
|
| For what it is worth, in my own iOS usage, I used Mammoth
| for a few months (and still follow its developer) and then
| eventually settled on Toot! Toot!'s developer was on hiatus
| just before Mastodon 4 (and the Twitter meltdown) so it got
| mentioned as "no longer maintained" or ignored/overlooked
| entirely by a lot of suggestions lists for people coming
| fresh to Mastodon. But it was rock solid and feature
| complete with Mastodon 3.x and the developer had earned a
| hiatus for a job well done. The developer also came back
| and worked to quickly catch up on Mastodon 4 changes (none
| of which had been truly a show stopper, mind you), though I
| think a slight bit late for so many newcomers from Twitter
| seem to have overlooked Toot!. Anyway, Toot! is great if
| you need a recommendation from a random HN user who has
| been Mastodon since a previous era. (I started getting
| serious about Mastodon round about 2016, myself.)
| tptacek wrote:
| I'd use Toot! but (besides the name, gag) it won't run on
| an M1 Macbook the way Mammoth will.
| johns wrote:
| Try Mastoot
| corobo wrote:
| Yeah back when Elon bought the place and everyone was talking
| about moving to Mastodon I was dismissive.
|
| Wasn't expecting Twitter to start switching off systems like a
| ship in Star Trek trying to conserve energy for life support..
|
| Looking forward to Tapbots new client. Don't really care what's
| powering the backend as it turns out, it just needs to stay
| working.
|
| Nice work Mastodon and the rest of the federation, I'll be
| looking into server options over the weekend. Gotta have the
| vanity domain.
| rezonant wrote:
| Welcome! If you are thinking of running it in Kubernetes, I
| have updated some old charts to work better with modern
| Kubernetes and Mastodon, you can find them here:
| https://github.com/rezonant/mastodon-chart
| Klonoar wrote:
| As an FYI you can have the "vanity domain" if you just use
| the webfinger protocol with your own custom domain. Don't
| necessarily need to self-host it.
| eddiegroves wrote:
| Does this method let you move instances "under the hood"?
| rpgbr wrote:
| I joined the beta test, it's truly awesome and, by far, the
| best Mastodon app I've tried.
|
| A humble review: https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2023/ivory-
| mastodon-app-review/
| ipozgaj wrote:
| I took a look and don't see any strong reasons not to use and
| support the official app. Tweetbot was so successful because
| it was competing against the official client which was (and
| still is) truly horrible, but I don't see that in this case
| Ivory has many advantages over the official client.
| rpgbr wrote:
| I used to use the official client prior to Ivory. It's a
| fine app, but it's a far cry from Ivory's polish and
| overall quality -- I mean, it _feels_ snappier and more "at
| home" on iOS than Mastodon 's official app.
|
| Anyway, Mastodon has no reason to stand against third party
| apps. Its official app was released only last year, and by
| no means to threat others nor become the only app in town.
| Experimentation is good, and Mastodon's third apps are
| shining right now. There are dozens of them, each one
| bringing fresh ideas and new concepts.
|
| edit: typos.
| guywithahat wrote:
| I've been on the fediverse for years and while I enjoy it, I
| think it's naive to think it'll replace Twitter. Fundamentally
| it lacks good discovery, features take too long to implement
| (or simply can't be implemented), and verification is
| impossible without setting up your own server which seems like
| too much overhead imo. Further it just doesn't scale, although
| Andrew Torba was never known for his coding ability there's a
| reason he left the fediverse and I think the issues are
| fundamental to a federated site.
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't know what it even means for this to "scale". I think
| people right now are hung up on Mastodon-the-social-network,
| the way it's been principally used until fairly recently,
| where people share servers and servers have a discernible
| culture, moderation, rules, community, that kind of thing. I
| don't think that's going to last long at all.
|
| The Mastodon that stands a very good chance of killing
| Twitter is Mastodon-the-software; "ActivityPub", if we have
| to call it that. This Mastodon isn't a coherent social
| network at all; it's a successor to RSS. People run their own
| servers; "scaling" them means the same thing as scaling a
| blog would. Of course, most people don't want to run their
| own servers, but that isn't going to matter by the end of the
| year, when 10 different providers will boot up a "Mastodon
| instance" for you with a single button push. Nobody is going
| to be thinking about instances at all; they'll just have an
| address, the same way they do for email.
|
| In this world, "Mastodon" is sort of a combination of most of
| the good features of Twitter, Blogger, and Google Reader, all
| at once. Users are as "discoverable" as blogs were ---
| meaning: very discoverable.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Everyone is approaching the social media issue as if it was
| a technical problem - it's not. No amount of
| decentralisation or protocols address (or even attempt) the
| root cause. The closest would be the crypto-based social
| networks, which while they have their own problems at least
| _attempt_ to address the issue of funding the platform. You
| know it 's bad when the closest thing to a solution comes
| from crypto grifters. Same issue with the rest of the
| "alternative" world, whether it's OSes or software. Lots of
| time spent on technicalities or ideologies, zero time spent
| on addressing the actual problem - that's why the "year of
| the Linux desktop" is still a recurring joke.
|
| The problem with social media right now is the lack of a
| non-adversarial, sustainable business model. All these
| changes stem from the fact that advertising-based business
| models are on their last legs and are fundamentally flawed
| because they are adversarial to the users - the Twitter API
| shutdown is at least partly because they want to drive
| everyone to use the official client where it's easier to
| impose user-hostile functionality.
|
| Decentralisation merely side-steps this problem which works
| on a very small scale but not only will break down at a
| larger scale (operating a social media platform costs
| money) but also brings a lot of its own issues. Part of the
| appeal of a social media platform is its popularity,
| network effects and a sense of community where most people
| are happy with or at least tolerate the rules and
| moderation policy.
|
| A Mastodon-powered future will have 2 outcomes:
|
| 1) every instance federates with everyone and the entire
| thing becomes flooded with spam and other unsavoury (or
| outright illegal, at least in some jurisdictions) content
| because there is no common moderation policy. Users
| eventually get fed up and leave to a centralised
| competitor.
|
| 2) instances federate on a case-by-case basis which
| fundamentally breaks network effects and makes global
| conversation and community building impossible. Good luck
| explaining to non-technical users why they can't
| see/interact with the same posts as their friends because
| they happen to be on different instances that don't
| federate with each other, or because the content they both
| want to see is on a separate instance that doesn't federate
| with theirs. Users get fed up & leave or can't get started
| to begin with and sign up on a centralised competitor
| instead.
|
| In both cases I haven't even addressed the issue of funding
| the network itself - there is still no business model (and
| any business model where users pay would require the
| service to have enough value for them to begin doing so -
| chicken & egg problem when the value of a social network is
| in its network effects), and even if there was, it will be
| more expensive because decentralisation requires a lot more
| system resources.
| simonw wrote:
| "verification is impossible without setting up your own
| server"
|
| I don't think that's right. You don't need to run your own
| server in order to add verified links to your profile - but
| you do need to have pages you can link to on trusted domains
| which can rel=me back to your Mastodon page.
| shagie wrote:
| There's different "levels" of trust (for me) on the
| verified.
|
| There's "this random person on a random instance is who
| they say they are" (after clicking on their name and
| checking the verified part).
|
| There is also "this person, by value of the name of the
| instance is who they say they are."
|
| @mfowler@toot.thoughtworks.com - I don't even need to go
| click through to their name to see if they are an employee
| of thought works (and thus _very_ likely Martin Fowler).
|
| (One of the challenges with this is also finding the
| company sites - I'd love an old school yahoo directory of
| them)
| Pxtl wrote:
| Yeah, the big challenge with Mastodon is it's basically Twitter
| as it was like 15 years ago before they added a lot of features
| that define the modern Twitter experience, like
| trending/searching on keywords instead of just hashtags
| (something the leadership has said they do not want to support
| ever - imho a flag on the toot declaring it scrapeable would be
| better), an algorithmic feed that considers your follows
| follows and likes and whatnot to easily-discover interesting
| people, quote-toots, showing tweetthreads in correct order, and
| considering whether you've seen a tweet before before showing
| it over and over as your follows retweet it, muting
| conversations, etc.
|
| Now obviously a lot of these features are also toxic
| engagement-maximizers so you don't want to necessarily _force_
| them onto users the way Twitter does, but they 're also
| positives in their own ways since they provide content
| discoverability and legibility.
|
| Twitter 15 years ago was a home of weirdos and journalists
| mostly. There's a reason it needed changes to take off.
| tedivm wrote:
| >something the leadership has said they do not want to
| support ever
|
| Since Mastodon is decentralized what the leadership wants
| doesn't always matter. There are several instances which have
| patched their code to add full search in.
|
| This is one of the big advantages I see to the fediverse as a
| whole- different instances can experiment around with changes
| and even entirely different software stacks, and if someone
| doesn't like the way the mainline software is being run they
| can fork it (and there are several successful forks already).
| tobylane wrote:
| I suspect I'll move to a server more capable in these ways,
| as I want to know what's most discussed with or without
| tags.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > Twitter 15 years ago was a home of weirdos and journalists
| mostly. There's a reason it needed changes to take off.
|
| Journalists ignored Twitter until the mainstream was on it.
| It was definitely full of a community of weirdos. I was
| there.
|
| I was an early adopter of Twitter and the "no algorithms, no
| engagement metrics" Twitter _was_ something I missed and was
| part of why I left Twitter around about 2016. It is something
| that I like that Mastodon provides a somewhat clean slate on.
|
| Twitter was about ephemeral day to day life. I still remember
| Twitter was _never_ more useful to me than those early days
| during conferences /conventions when you'd turn on SMS
| notifications (!) of a friend or two to help coordinate
| meetups and meals and use the rest of the feed flying by for
| a general zeitgeist of exciting things around the next corner
| to maybe give you a direction to head. If you missed a Tweet
| when it flew by it was probably too late to see the thing it
| was talking about and content "discoverability" didn't
| matter, no one cared.
|
| I know that's not what Twitter has been in a while. I feel it
| fair to say that when a lot of the algorithm stuff came into
| play, especially with its toxic engagement-maximizing, but
| also with its toxic drive-by miscontextualizations, that
| stopped feeling like a useful Twitter to me.
|
| I'm not going to stop instances from exploring some of that
| stuff on Mastodon, but I also am going to use rights to
| silence and block them and otherwise defederate with them at
| my discretion for how useful I think they are to the overall
| community. I think the community is just fine without the
| algorithms and the everything ever tooted is always
| searchable and scrapable for ever and ever and always
| relevant for miscontextualization later. I preferred Twitter
| without those things, those things were stuff that started me
| rethinking my relationship with Twitter and eventually lost
| me to Mastodon because I wanted to _escape_ that.
| japhyr wrote:
| It's funny to focus on the length of a post on a platform, but
| then it is central to the medium.
|
| I was on twitter when it was 140 characters, and appreciated
| the increase to 280. I've always agreed it shouldn't get too
| long, or you lose the character of the platform. But even with
| 280, I'm always wordsmithing my posts just to squeeze in enough
| context to avoid conflict and misinterpretation.
|
| On Mastodon, I haven't once had to reword what I'm trying to
| say, and I have never felt that others' posts are verbose. The
| Mastodon post length limit seems to hit the sweet spot for this
| kind of platform.
| tptacek wrote:
| Yes, this exactly. There are still "threads" on Mastodon, but
| they're broken up on boundaries that make sense: related but
| standing-alone points. Mostly, you just don't have to think
| about it at all, and just write out whatever you're thinking.
| It's pretty great.
| lanstin wrote:
| Twitter writers are sharper in their wit. Funnier or at least
| more pointed. There is more verbose sincerity on Mastodon.
| Maybe that is good but even now, where I only check twitter
| surreptitiously, I laugh more on twitter.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| When is the Ivory iOS app scheduled to come out?
| ahalam wrote:
| In January itself. One of the devs said
| PStamatiou wrote:
| 100%. I definitely found my usage increase when I found a more
| delightful and well-built client with Ivory.
|
| For those new to Mastodon, I wrote a huge 8K word post about it
| recently, from my POV as someone who worked at Twitter for 9
| years: https://paulstamatiou.com/mastodon/
|
| I go over some of the constraints that the federated model
| brings that might be particularly interesting.
| kemayo wrote:
| Speaking as someone who had mostly been using the first party
| twitter app in recent years and so wouldn't have been impacted by
| this even if I was still actively using twitter, this seems
| pretty poorly done by Musk.
|
| Shutting down third party clients? It's arguably a valid
| decision. They presumably want to consolidate the users into
| directly controlled clients, where they can be advertised to and
| can have premium subscription features prominently featured. The
| former could have been rolled into the API, but the latter would
| have been basically impossible.
|
| But doing it like this is just giving everyone who was a hardcore
| twitter user (if you use a third party client, particularly one
| you're paying a subscription for...) a nudge into jumping ship.
| The alternative approach of announcing the "no more third party
| clients" API terms change and giving everyone time to wind their
| apps down would also have generated complaints, but I bet it'd
| have gotten them better press and user outcomes than this. Hell,
| just announce "you must have a Twitter Blue subscription to use a
| third party client" and that might have actually gone well for
| them.
| bink wrote:
| Very true. But announcing it ahead of time and providing time
| for a wind down also would've required a comms team.
| tzs wrote:
| How would that require a comms team?
|
| PS: let me clarify a bit. I'm not saying that Twitter should
| not have or does not need a comms team or that getting rid of
| them was not a stupid thing for Musk to do.
|
| What I'm trying to say is that this latest stupid thing (not
| giving any warning about changing their app API rules so that
| app developers and users could have some time adjust) doesn't
| really have anything to do with the lack of a comms team.
| It's not one of the stupidities that naturally falls out of
| not having a comms team.
|
| In this case all that was needed was for Musk when he decided
| to change this policy to (1) tell whoever he ordered to
| implement it to deploy it on $FUTURE_DATE, and (2) tweet that
| he'd ordered this change and it will go live on $FUTURE_DATE.
| sonofhans wrote:
| 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.
| twelve40 wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| blueblimp wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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?
| zimpenfish wrote:
| The API is still up though - all my things that use the API
| are currently working fine[1].
|
| [1] But none of them "replicate the Twitter experience", just
| bots and archivers.
| masklinn wrote:
| > 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.
| smith7018 wrote:
| > Twitter could have made the validity of these certs / keys
| conditional on subscription integration.
|
| With what staff?
| kemayo wrote:
| 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.
| masklinn wrote:
| > 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.
|
| So did I.
|
| No feature no key, no key no third party client.
| kemayo wrote:
| Sorry, I misinterpreted you -- I thought you were talking
| about gating features to specific clients. :D
| olliecornelia wrote:
| The fewer people have access to Twitter the better.
| chc4 wrote:
| I've been on twitter since 2009 and have 100k+ tweet. Since
| they've killed all third-party clients I've basically stopped
| using twitter, and have no intention of using the (bad) official
| client. Good job Elon!
| seydor wrote:
| to all the people who claim this, i wish there was a RemindMe!
| feature to check back in a few months
|
| People who have invested years of their lives writing thousands
| of tweets aren't giving up investments so easily. This is like
| real life investments or relationships, it takes a lot to break
| them
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > People who have invested years of their lives writing
| thousands of tweets aren't giving up investments so easily.
|
| I dunno, my Twitter posting rate has been dropping because
| there's enough people on the Fediboat now to make it
| interesting and I only have a certain amount of attention
| span to go around. 2022-09: 326.00
| 2022-10: 312.00 2022-11: 241.00 2022-12:
| 99.00 2023-01: 64.00
|
| Whereas my Fediboat posting has gone up.
| 2022-09: 3.00 2022-10: 55.00 2022-11: 222.00
| 2022-12: 296.00 2023-01: 118.00
| gdulli wrote:
| The difference here is that Twitter had been going downhill
| for a while before the recent changes. In 2022 people were
| already using it grudgingly, out of inertia. Not addiction or
| excitement.
|
| Even before Musk, I consciously anticipated that a disruption
| to my chosen chronological feed client would mean the end of
| my time on Twitter. I prepared for it. I've started to wean
| and haven't missed it as much as I assumed I would. It's a
| relief as much of an imposition. I've tried out other ways of
| browsing content.
|
| There's no one service that will end up being exactly what
| Twitter was, but neither had Twitter been for a while. The
| various degradations of the experience over the last few
| months only had to be bad enough to get us to realize what we
| already sensed, that Twitter is in its Facebook era. It will
| still be running in 5 years because it's too big to die
| quickly. But it's on the downward slope of its cultural
| relevance. A year from now it will be the equivalent of that-
| site-your-grandparents-use.
| seydor wrote:
| chronological feed exists in twitter's website before and
| after musk - it's how i use it
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| And if it hadn't happened, I doubt such enthusiasm would have
| been shown by this app to this open platform. But anyway it's a
| good development eventually.
|
| Now I am looking at all those "Oh, we are only on Apple
| platforms" apps. If you are a third party app anywhere, it
| actually helps if the platform you are on has intense
| competition.
| jdoss wrote:
| 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?
| dawnerd wrote:
| Plus didn't the apps have to pay for api access? I know there
| was some contention around that when the push notification api
| changed.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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).
| linuxftw wrote:
| How could they actually enforce that? That'd need to review
| every app, constantly.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| 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.
| pornel wrote:
| 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.
| dwaite wrote:
| > OTOH the first party app can track as much as it wants
| and it'll fly under the radar.
|
| Until you get caught, and Apple/Google decide to boot the
| official app from the stores (if) you broke the respective
| agreements.
| vlunkr wrote:
| 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.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Because Musk shoots from the hip all the time. And he's always
| smartest person in the room.
| robryan wrote:
| The other weird thing is why only some 3rd party clients, was
| it the big ones that got cut? Harpy which I use seems to be
| working fine.
| evan_ wrote:
| (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.
| kemayo wrote:
| 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.
| bradgessler wrote:
| The list of unforced errors is insane. Remember when pg was
| banned from Twitter for mentioning that he had a link to
| Mastodon on his website?
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-suspends-account-paul...
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I followed some of that and it was especially funny that he
| had _just_ been defending Musk and posting some "well he's a
| super-genius--you know, like all us rich SV types--so we
| should give him the benefit of the doubt" sort of stuff,
| right before that happened.
|
| The whole thing was truly beautiful. Overall, Musk's
| acquisition has provided some excellent entertainment.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| "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
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 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.
| hk__2 wrote:
| Twitter is not just a tech company; it's a social
| network.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Move fast and break your $44B investment.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| 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.
| MBCook wrote:
| "Starting Feb 1st using a third part client will require
| Twitter Blue."
|
| 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.
| redox99 wrote:
| That's actually a really good idea
| justinclift wrote:
| 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.
| r00fus wrote:
| 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.
| breput wrote:
| 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.
|
| Still, a very shortsighted move.
| justinclift wrote:
| Wouldn't a WeChat type of approach mean _encouraging_ third
| party clients /integrations/etc?
| breput wrote:
| I don't think so, at least for (mobile) clients, but yes
| for server-side integrations.
| justinclift wrote:
| Good point. :)
| detaro wrote:
| Integrations with third parties? Yes. Clients? No.
| politician wrote:
| The writing has been on the wall for 3rd party clients
| since Twitter restricted API access the first dozen times
| pre-Elon.
| shinratdr wrote:
| Except not really, because they reversed course on that,
| added a bunch of new features, and continued to maintain
| and update it.
|
| It never had feature parity with the site, but it did get
| better over time.
| TuringTest wrote:
| 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?
| wholinator2 wrote:
| 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.
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| What is a 3 star comment?
| mzs wrote:
| >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.
| mike_d wrote:
| They still should. Rather than shutting down third party
| Twitter apps they should all get together and just swap out
| Mastodon for the backend.
| LastTrain wrote:
| 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.
| gfodor wrote:
| 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.
| jupp0r wrote:
| The public API is still there and not going anywhere.
| Twitter is getting the worst of both worlds.
| ttepasse wrote:
| 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.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| This could've been communicated
| gfodor wrote:
| Agree, really bad it wasn't
| sosodev wrote:
| 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.
| gfodor wrote:
| 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.
| Klonoar wrote:
| The APIs for Twitter that they're cutting off aren't
| being cut off for other uses, though. This clearly isn't
| a maintenance issue.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Twitter sets a dangerous precedent on API policy although
| this hasn't been their first time doing so
| (https://nordicapis.com/twitter-10-year-struggle-with-
| develop...)
|
| 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.
| nachteilig wrote:
| I really wonder if Musk has thought this through. For years it's
| been a casual habit to use Tweetbot. Now I doubt if I'll download
| official twitter or go to the website - the platform is
| essentially dead to me.
| lucaslee wrote:
| Maybe part of the efforts to fight spam. The spam issue does get
| better TBH.
| tills13 wrote:
| 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?
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| 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".
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Everyone is talking about mobile clients, but what about social
| media companies and businesses that integrated Twitter into their
| CRMs? At the very least I know businesses that had Twitter
| directly into their Salesforce, SAP Cloud Integration, and even
| Teams via Power Automate.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They're unaffected; the ban is specific to replicating the
| Twitter.com / first-party app experience. Exact wording: "a
| substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter
| Applications".
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _They 're unaffected..._
|
| This seems plausible, but has there been any official
| confirmation?
|
| If I'm Elon, my next act of ecosystem warfare is to monetize
| remaining API use cases to within an inch of their life.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| My work involves using those APIs; our keys are still
| active. We'd rapidly hear if entire apps like Salesforce
| had lost their access as part of this, too.
|
| The new wording in the terms forbids "use or access the
| Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a
| substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter
| Applications".
|
| If I had a Tweetdeck competitor I'd not be investing too
| much into it, and I think anyone working with the APIs now
| has to do a bit of "is it worth the risk?" calculus, but at
| the moment there's no sign this goes beyond third-party
| clients to consume/post timeline stuff.
| ihuman wrote:
| Buffer and Hootsuite have both said that they are
| unaffected
| Kye wrote:
| Buffer has Mastodon support in beta, so they're at least
| hedging their bets.
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| The official statement is complete bullshit.
|
| On Jan 17th Twitter said: "Twitter is enforcing its long-standing
| API rules. That may result in some apps not working."
|
| Then on Jan 19th, they updated their ToS:
| https://i.imgur.com/YZn7PJY.jpg
|
| It's not enough that you need to immediately be on the right side
| of any ToS changes -- now you get punished for edits that haven't
| yet been made!
| [deleted]
| fizx wrote:
| 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.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Can someone please explain what Twitter blocked exactly? Did they
| block only 3rs party clients or anyone who is trying to read data
| from their APIs? From what I know about 15% of their revenue (now
| probably much more give) is coming from their data services.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They specifically forbade third-party clients that duplicate
| the Twitter.com / first-party Twitter app experience; Tweetbot,
| Twitterific, etc.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| I see. Thanks. That makes more sense than blocking all users.
| iameli wrote:
| 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.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Honestly some days I forget I'm not using twitter. Same with
| the normal Mastodon web interface. Once you get into it
| properly it all kinda blurs away. Way more interactions on
| there than I had before too.
| lanstin wrote:
| Lot more interactions but also less biting wit that makes me
| laugh. But no Elon so net win.
| bradgessler wrote:
| It is as good as Tweetbot. Using Ivory makes most of the "UX
| issues" of Mastodon go away ... almost.
| MBCook wrote:
| Same. I was having trouble with Mastodon. Nothing felt right
| from a UI design perspective.
|
| With Ivory I feel at home. Can't wait to start paying for it.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Did this also break Mastodon migration tools like Movetodon?
| (It's not working for me as I type this.)
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I checked Debirdify a few days ago and it still works.
| Technically speaking these aren't against the new policy.
| However, since Musk's Twitter is governed on Maoist[0]
| principles, who can say if the policy hasn't _already_ changed?
|
| [0] Specifically, the sense that the rules governing the
| platform are never told to you until after you break them, as
| to encourage overcompliance and obfuscate when or if rules
| change.
| ihuman wrote:
| I don't think so. Movetodon is still working for me.
| prvc wrote:
| >we are proud to introduce Ivory for Mastodon
|
| On the bright side for them, now that they are starting a new
| "app", they can double dip on those purchase fees.
| Centigonal wrote:
| the app does something new and requires a new codebase. Of
| course it's going to cost extra
| pornel wrote:
| As a long-time customer I'm happy to pay for the new app.
| Mastodon has its own API, and own features and conventions, so
| it's not just a name change.
| akmarinov wrote:
| Guys, it's fine, the first party client will follow soon enough
|
| Twitter's revenue fell off a cliff and they have dozens of
| billions to start paying back soon
|
| The platform wasn't that profitable before and there's no easy
| way to make it pay for itself
|
| It'll very likely die in the near future
| mttjj wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| multjoy wrote:
| 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.
| joezydeco wrote:
| 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.
| coldpie wrote:
| A fine approach. For me personally, I decided to delete my
| account so I wouldn't ever be tempted to log back in.
| Sunspark wrote:
| It won't be forever. I remember Musk saying awhile back that
| they were going to flush inactive accounts at some point. I
| agree with this. Why should a username remain reserved if it
| hasn't been logged into for years?
| JoshuaRogers wrote:
| 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.
| teach wrote:
| 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.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| She's still probably better off, because what happens next to
| Twitter will continue to be less and less pretty.
|
| The sooner people jump off the ship, the better for each of
| them.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Where will she jump to?
| r00fus wrote:
| This discussion thread is rife with options like Ivory,
| Post, etc.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.)
| vlachen wrote:
| 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.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| - 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.
|
| - 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).
| [deleted]
| based_karen wrote:
| [flagged]
| kennydude wrote:
| I'm hoping some of the new Mastodon clients come out have great
| accessibility features.
|
| 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)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _official Twitter client is a LOT less accessible than the
| one she was using_
|
| She should submit an ADA complaint [1].
|
| [1] https://www.ada.gov/file-a-complaint/
| wstuartcl wrote:
| The fact that Elon has disbanded the accessibility team at
| twitter probably already leads them into hot water related to
| this (It is not uncommon for orgs like twitter to be bound by
| multiple long term settlements related to accessibility suits
| that each have obligations of certain deliverables in this
| area.
|
| If your friend truly does have issues navigating the site
| perhaps she may want to look to a legal remedy -- from all
| appearances that is really the only knob that seems to have any
| impact on Musk.
| NavinF wrote:
| Has a social media site ever been forced to accommodate blind
| people? Serious question.
| damon_c wrote:
| Every website accessible to the public has some
| responsibility to accommodate the disabled.
|
| 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.
| wstuartcl wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.facebook.com/help/273947702950567
| geoelectric wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| prvc wrote:
| Youtube to this day allows uploaders to disable automatic
| captions for some reason.
| monkeywork wrote:
| Because sometimes the automatic captions brutally butcher
| the text and can change the presenters meaning.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| When is a good time to start holding them accountable?
| wstuartcl wrote:
| 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.
| nhtsamera wrote:
| Not really social media, but Netflix lost (settled) an ADA
| suit because they weren't providing subtitles consistently:
|
| https://dredf.org/legal-advocacy/nad-v-netflix/
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Has a social media site ever been forced to accommodate
| blind people?_
|
| 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...
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| Note this kind of thing happens all the time. VRChat instituted
| EAC to prevent client modifications late last year. Hundreds of
| developers and tens of thousands of users all had their mods stop
| working overnight. Projects that dozens of devs had poured
| countless hours into became instantly and utterly worthless. It's
| insane that this is what the internet has become.
| wstuartcl wrote:
| 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.
| farco12 wrote:
| Was there anything stopping Twitter from charging 3rd party
| clients and their users for access to the API?
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Charging at a rate that makes up the missing revenue from user
| tracking/ads would kill these 3rd party apps anyways, and I'm
| not sure if Twitter still has enough of the right people
| remaining to figure out all that to begin with.
| erulabs wrote:
| I mean, I understand the engineer part of me that says hey, it's
| a widely used public API, don't shut it down all at once you
| dick.
|
| But there is another part of me that wonders if all these folks
| who say "I have 100k tweets and I'll only use the unofficial
| clients" aren't betraying more than they think: All the
| twitterati pro-users who schedule tweets daily... Are they _good_
| for the platform? I 'd lean towards a soft "maybe?" but that's
| only intuition and nothing else. It's entirely possible that
| destroying as much of the automation abilities of more powerful
| clients is -exactly- what would benefit twitter the most.
| [deleted]
| tag2103 wrote:
| Reminds me of a game I played years ago and they made a minor
| "tweak" to the code and a bunch of plugin mods no longer
| worked. Yes Turbine- Asheron's Call was much better with the
| third-party plug ins, but I still was playing AC even with my
| fancy UI on top of it. But funny when that change was made all
| of the cheaters that would set their bots to go camp spawns
| disappeared and the game got that much better. History doesn't
| repeat but it does rhyme.
|
| (Now release AC to the public so I can go back to Eastham)
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| I've yet to be disappointed at Elon's ability to wreck things in
| such a rapid, bizarre fashion.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| 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.
| edfletcher_t137 wrote:
| So long, and thanks for all the tweets.
| asenchi wrote:
| Tweetbot was the client that made Twitter fun to use. Now I'm
| lost and can't stand using the service. Trying to figure out how
| to maintain my contacts on the platform while navigating the site
| has been awful. What a terrible experience it is. I'll probably
| try the Twitter app but I am hopeful I can keep up with everyone
| on a different platform someday.
| pornel wrote:
| Use https://www.movetodon.org/ before they block their API key
| too.
| geekifier wrote:
| This is a terrible decision just from the optics perspective -
| alienating those who are more likely to be power users.
|
| But how many people do they seriously expect to install the
| official Twitter app instead? I, for one, will not; as the
| privacy page on the App Store basically makes me "steer clear".
|
| Whatever percentage of 3rd party clients they get to switch over
| seems like a rather dubious trade-off to all of the bad press,
| and the terrible manner in which this was executed.
| Matl wrote:
| A great opportunity Mastodon wouldn't otherwise get. Thanks Elon.
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