Same thing is happening with Twitteriffic - I’m assuming Twitter’s API is down, or worse: the new owner has decided that 3rd party clients are not desirable anymore
I don't post to Twitter, but I still sometimes use Twitterrific to read it since not everybody I enjoy there has successfully moved to Mastodon.
(Although tbh it is only William Gibson, David Frum, and Grady Booch that keep me reading Twitter.)
I too thought the 'garch might have abruptly pulled the plug on the API. But then, I installed the Twitter iOS app and tried that, and it emitted a cascade of error screens, too.
So if I had to bet a dollar, I'd bet on "shit malfunctioning".
I know, but (like a lot of people) he didn't end up posting there after signing up. Although Mastodon ended up being "about as good" for me (who just reads it when e.g. waiting in a line or something) as Twitter, there are these few people like him who made my Twitter feed something special who aren't really active on Mastodon.
(BTW indie dev world, I've paid money for years for Twitterrific and would definitely pay money for a client that did a reasonable job of showing me people I follow on various social brainfart networks, all in one place).
Hope this is a good old fashioned outage. However, after the “sent from” feature was recently removed, I have a hard time believing the owner has a positive opinion on the existence of the API. A shame how much it has been pared down already.
That is a very sensible proactive move on the part of the team, they must have both been concerned about the future viability of third party twitter clients, and the potential of Mastodon as a new market. From what I've heard the Mastodon client they are building is very good, it's in closed beta right now.
Twitterrific users are currently unable to access the service via the iOS app. As of this writing we have heard nothing officially from Twitter and are trying to learn more. This may just be a temporary bug; it may be more a more serious issue.
As soon as we know more we'll update this message. We thank you as always for your support and patience as we work through this problem.
Since third-party clients don't make Twitter any ad revenue, I could see them making API access a feature of Blue in order to get revenue from those users.
The rationale is to control the narrative and align Twitter’s politics with his own. It’s just like the hundred other rich dudes who bought newspapers over the years.
Admittedly there being a big right wing social media would be an interesting change. Curious to see how it goes (from a distance as I don't use twitter).
Twitter was that big right wing social media site, in that it was extremely useful for a large number of right wing organisations and people to amplify their messaging and get many followers. That's what made it far more attractive to those on the right than Parler, Truth Social, Gettr, and all the others.
For instance Trump owed much of his popularity to his Twitter account and the way it allowed him to communicate much more effectively in a completely unfiltered way with both his existing supporters and undecided potentials. The same pattern has repeated with right wing politicians in other countries.
Those who were banned or otherwise de-amplified tended to be very fringe or extreme, and were never a significant chunk of the right wing. That's one reason why the alternatives never took off, as the kinds of people they attracted were those that few people really wanted to deal with or associate with.
I feel like kicking 3rd party apps off the platform must be at least nominally illegal in some of these countries. Aside from the US, these are countries with strong consumer protections with real teeth.
https://deadbird.singlepane.io shows the API up but a trace of iOS Twitterific, Tweetbot, and Birdie shows an EoF response when api.twitter.com is called.
I’d wager a backend issue over a policy change as a 403/401 isn’t returned.
I disagree, the day he took over twitter people were saying "it wont be up this weekend" "it will be down in a week" "it will be offline in 2 weeks"... yet the reality is, its up and running well.
The system is running as good as before. The only thing I've noticed is theres more ad's than usual.
----
Edit: Currently there isn't any outage of Twitter as far as anyone knows. It looks like 3rd party apps have been kicked to the curb.
A ~16hr regional outage in AU/NZ is not indicitive of anything. In 2021 Facebook had a global ~7hr outage.
Since Musk took over we haven't had all the downtime and disruption everyone kept claiming we would have. Big companies haven outages too, but so far the death of Twitter isn't in sight.
Also: I hate Musk since his comments on Ukraine and Taiwan. So don't take my comments as trying to stick up with Musk. I'm not, I hope he loses all his money and becomes broke.
Consider the quality of engineer of the departed team that allowed Twitter to run without incidents for so long. Also, change is the most frequent cause of incidents, as no one was pushing new changes there were fewer chances of an incident.
Reading that article, I am actually impressed that after that 45-minute outage in 2022, the next major outage was all the way back in 2016. I would say that is actually quite an endorsement for the quality of engineers they had.
16h is an awful lot for a social media site, even if region-specific.
Single digit number of hours happen from time to time, but double digits are not really a thing anymore. Maybe in early days of social media, not in the past decade.
You get what? Anything close to that long? Don't leave me hanging!
I did the same and found a Guardian article that claims no Twitter outage lasted even an hour since 2016, but I thought it was irrelevant because articles about outages aren't exactly top-notch in quality.
Did you find anything better? If so, do share! I'd be happy to be proven wrong!
Is 16h of downtime acceptable for a $44b business?
After a 70% reduction in headcount, is a 16 hour downtime acceptable in a 5% market? I'm going with yes, executives from all major corporations are itching to press that button if only they could get away with it.
The problem with Twitter is not, was not, and will never be a technical one. It's a simple site with a simple tech stack, using standard technology to scale.
The problem with Twitter, and what Musk doesn't seem to understand, is a sociological and political one. Social networks are the crack cocaine of tabloid media, left to the whims of bad actors they can destroy democracies, incite lynchings, distribute hate and misinformation on scales without historical precedent. "Free speech" just doesn't cut it, social networks are publications not mediums, they chose what people get to see and react to, and the fact that the choice is made by an algorithm does not absolve them of responsibility for the consequences, especially if the algorithm is tuned for revenue maximization and easily gamed by bad actors to spread their content.
By firing the watchers, Musk is setting Twitter up as an menace to stable democracies around the world.
At the scale twitter exists right now it is anything but simple. Had it been built from scratch it could have run fine with its current staff.
But the current staff needs to maintain code from a MUCH larger staff. That's hard. Especially with microservices where every team did "their own thing" and some teams just vanished completely. You have "dark areas" where no one knows how stuff works and what's going on.
Normally when you downsize at this scale you do this in an orderly way. Every person hands off their work and responsibility. Spends a couple of weeks writing docs and instructions and then leaves. This was done quickly and violently. I'm sure there's many repercussions we don't see simply because the systems are simply running. Once the team looks at some containers and decides to pull the plug to "see what happens" we'll find out...
Had it been built from scratch it could have run fine with its current staff.
So you are essentially saying Twitter has an over-complicated architecture with regards to its real technical needs, so Musk was right to axe the microservice zealots. Good we can agree on that.
The next step is to acknowledge that code and data-centers continue to work long after their original designers have left the company, that's what computers are, tools for automation. Keeping the lights on and services in a roughly functional state is an activity that requires much less people of relatively lower qualification, even if they couldn't have engineered it themselves.
Yes, there is a long term risk of code rot and entropy if Musk does not plan for a gradual transition to a better engineered architecture with competent maintainers. But we are not there yet, far from it.
Meanwhile, schadenfreude people have rooted for a twittocaplipse from day one, nay, predicted it as inevitable. There is absolutely no sign it's going to happen, and Twitter turned out sufficiently simple after all on the technical side.
People choose to use social media, as they choose all media. People are individually responsible for the physical actions they make, even if a little bird told them what to do. It may be easier to control people by limiting what thoughts they're exposed to, but a people isn't free if that's done.
It's all fun and games until you are slain in the street because people chose to regard you as subhuman after a little bird told them so.
Disseminating politically extreme misinformation kills people - look no further than Russia, where a state run propaganda campaign has made people no more stupid or immoral than you or me support a vicious war of aggression against their neighbors.
A regional outage of that size is embarrassing whatever way you slice it.
Leaving all that aside, he’s driving a massive subset of his users away at a time when he really needs all the users he can get.
You can spin this however you like, this is not a good situation for him. He’s said as much outright and implied it repeatedly.
Since this time last year he’s said that both Twitter and SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy, and Tesla has been flat out told FSD, the feature they’ve been selling all their cars based on (which he has said himself the company is worthless without), just isn’t happening.
Since this time last year he’s said that both Twitter and SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy, and Tesla has been flat out told FSD, the feature they’ve been selling all their cars based on (which he has said himself the company is worthless without), just isn’t happening.
As much as I hope Elon loses everthing. This isn't even related to downtime of Twitter. Volentarly shutting down twitter due to it being bankrupt is not the same as it falling over and having outages.
So I'm really not trying to spin anything. You're trying to take something unrelated and use it as justification as to why big bad billionaire do bad.
This is a fair comment, I'll clarify why I mentioned that.
Bringing up Tesla and SpaceX was only to point out that he doesn't really have any way to bail out bad Twitter decisions despite it being a (relatively) smaller company. There's nowhere to pull extra finances from to bail this out, and it's known he already went into debt to make the purchase.
I really don't want him to lose anything. I'd like him to go back in time to when he first installed Twitter on his phone and slap the thing out of his own hand and scream "NO! THAT'S A BAD ELON!"
Not to disagree with your general point, I just want to nitpick this:
Half an order of magnitude bigger, at most
I think you're overestimating Twitter and underestimating Facebook.
I don't know the best source for official stats, but a quick google suggests Twitter is ~300M users and Facebook is ~3B, so one order of magnitude.
And of course the new Twitter CEO used the interesting bargaining tactic of talking down his own purchase by implying many of those 300M users are bots... Joking aside, you could argue that very few of those 3B Facebook users are active, and you'd be right; but exactly the same can be said of Twitter and there's no good reason to think the ratio is any better or worse there.
SpaceX is a great company, worth investing into, because of their ISP + phone telco business (lot of people are ready to pay a high price for that) and a very difficult space technology to reproduce, nobody is going to compete soon.
Twitter is different, it's more like MySpace.
Why do we care so much though? Given the outsized influence Twitter has over politics and society, is it so bad if it shuts down and we have a few years reprieve? Musk has just lost an ungodly sum of money and has loans to repay. He’s not going to be running things for the benefit for humanity.
Musk needs to care because if his little site is not online when people want to post, they won't use it. I applaud that he doesn't though, makes it so much funnier watching this unfold.
Do you remember July 08,2022 when Rogers Communications went down for about 19 hours and services like 911 and Interac a payment service almost all Canadians use was interrupted? I guess it can happen to even the most critical of services.
It’s running well because the old guard built it so well. Musk threw them all out, so it will slowly but surely degrade. There was a reason Twitter had such a large workforce.
Is this the same twitter who almost died trying to scale when they started? They have been in worse spots. They will be fine and much of the old guard still works there.
I would say you are overstaffed if A) you can't afford them and / or B) you've grown so fast, you don't know how to make use of the staff you have. Perhaps there is a C) which is a variant of B) the business model you are running only requires so much staff and you hit a ceiling in growth.
I would not claim to have enough information about twitter being overstaffed? They might have a lot of technical debt, which can cause the need for more people to run it. But that is not "overstaffing".
The question is also how overstaffing is measured. If adding another person reduces the average productivity, you might define that as the cut-off due to the declining ROI for every other person added. But you probably also want some level of redundancy (aka reducing the bus factor) in order to account for the ongoing global health situation and general churn.
Of course repeated waves of mass layoffs, demanding a pledge of allegiance to the company and revocation of all employee privileges at the threat of being fired and publicly throwing your employees repeatedly under the bus are also ways to reduce churn, so the bar for "overstaffing" might have actually lowered.
So? WhatsApp had 35 developers and 350 million users. By that measure, every other company is grossly overstaffed.
Personally, I could argue that every social network is grossly understaffed by the measure of how lax they are about what they are supporting. E.g., in 2017, that company you say is more appropriately staffed contributed to a genocide that left tens of thousands dead: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Yeah, this is closer to the mark for me. It's been some years since I worked at Twitter, but if I had been suddenly made CEO, I wouldn't have gone on a mass firing spree. I would have tried to figure out how to more effectively use the people that Twitter had. As with many big companies, I suspect the problem is much more bad management than bad workers.
This is roughly my feeling, but I'm a little less sure of the absolutely/undoubtedly part. Someone below is asking for evidence but I don't think any one of us could produce evidence for or against this. It all boils down to either "Twitter had ~7500 employees and..."
1. ... that feels like a huge amount for a company that has basically a single product
2. ... that feels entirely appropriate for a company operating at their scale
What we've observed is that they've kinda managed to keep going despite Elon axing an enormous number of employees, but they've also had a few high-profile outages like this one today, the 2FA issue and 16hr Aus outage. I don't know if these are enough for either side to declare that they're correct.
One thing I would like to say - even though I had a feeling Twitter was probably overstaffed, I was in no way celebrating the redundancies. Similarly even though I'm not a fan of Elon Musk, I'm not delighting in all these little goofs he's doing and how it's impacting him personally - every little embarrassment he suffers and every dip in Tesla stock makes it more likely he'll just call it quits or fuck up Twitter more. For all its faults, I quite like Twitter and I don't want it to just disappear.
He haphazardly ordered turning off "bloated" microservices, including the one responsible for sending auth codes via SMS for 2FA... Learning through mistakes is a thing particularly for newbies, but a CEO should absolutely have a clue about not micromanaging, especially in areas he practically doesn't understand and after firing most people who do.
I would from personal experience disagree on the "well" part.
I'm suddenly following accounts I recently unfollowed again. Previously blocked accounts show up. The search doesn't find stuff it used to find anymore - posts that are definitely not deleted because I can usually find them via other references.
I have noticed that the explore page, and my timeline are way staler than they used to be. Tweets I have seen or even interacted with keep popping to the top all day, and trends on the explore page can be there for days at a time. It can take hours for major world events don't show up on the explore page for me sometimes.
If you’re going to argue against what “people” say, you’re always going to look like you’re the smart one and the person you’re disagreeing with is the stupid one.
Really don't know why this is downvoted. We had relentless articles like this [0] expecting the complete and total shutdown of Twitter, globally. That never happened and everyone knows that it was pure hysteria.
Since Musk took over we haven't had all the downtime and disruption everyone kept claiming we would have. Big companies haven outages too, but so far the death of Twitter isn't in sight.
So because [0] did not happen most of the critics are setting a new standard for Twitter uptime to be 1000% globally 24/7, absolutely zero outages of any kind and never down for one person. If one outage somewhere happens, it is immediately the end of the world.
It wasn't the end of the world when Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok had worldwide outages, but 1 regional outage on Twitter and it is somehow the end of times? Please.
The fact is, You are getting downvoted because Twitter is still up and running and many of the replies here cannot stand that predictions like this [0] did not come true and will point at any intermittent issue to show the 'Twitter is dying' narrative.
The death of Twitter has been greatly exaggerated. If you really wanted it to die, just ignore it. Simple.
His comments on Taiwan were prompted comments in request to a question buried in some interview. He didn't rant about it. He hasn't ever mentioned it on Twitter. And how he was quoted was very different from what he actually said.
I can only see Twitter beginning to monetize third-party API access with some subscription plan whilst keeping the Twitter app free of charge (and protected with captchas, anti-botting tools, etc)
Either way, this demonstrates that it makes no sense to build an entire company soley on someone else's API.
Someone should have told Slide, "the creators of SuperPoke!" Besides that tagline about making a useless Facebook add-on feature that already existed, their recruiters never did explain what they did beyond like 3 Facebook API calls.
I saw that too and I highly doubt Google bought the company for their SuperPoke routine but rather for their suite of products like the Pets and the data that comes along with it. Those 3 API calls may have put them on the map but that's probably not what made them valuable.
This might be the last straw. I flat out refuse to use their horrible app with its nonsense algorithmic timeline. Give it a few hours to see if it's permanent but if it is, I expect a huge wave of new mastodon users..
Tweets flowing at 250kbps or more 24/7, of course…
Edit: the way “chronological” timeline works is, Twitter decides on your social graph and hide posts until it fits your serving. Shadowbans, Boosting and Deboosting are factored in as well. That is technically chronological, only technically.
the way “chronological” timeline works is, Twitter decides on your social graph and hide posts until it fits your serving. Shadowbans, Boosting and Deboosting are factored in as well. That is technically chronological, only technically.
Source? The thing is I compare chronological timeline with lists (of users I follow) all the time, and I didn't notice any missing tweets. "Shadowbanned" tweets always were visible in lists, I personally checked that.
Yeah, unless something has changed drastically in the couple of months since I stopped using Twitter, I believe the web-based chronological timeline is exactly as you say. As soon as you click on a tweet to see replies you're getting things ranked, of course. But one's home timeline should be fine.
Agreed. I can't speak for iOS but the Android app is terrible. The font is too big and the scrolling is incredibly janky on high refresh rate displays. Mobile web is the only way to use Twitter on Android, and the PWA behaves mostly like a real app.
In a change rolling out to iOS users first, the company has taken away the star button at the top right that let you switch between two feeds. In its place are two tabs — one labeled “For You” and the other “Following” — and when you open the app, you’ll see the For You tab first.
I’m the same, I don’t really mind ads but I do not like the “algorithmic” timeline. Will find a way that doesn’t involve using their official iOS app, even if it means falling back to mobile web
Wait, what? Since when? I'm regulary reading using the chronogical timeline and I'm not seeing anything like you describe (I only see that using the "for you" algo timeline). Very concerning anyway. :(
I'd say just leave twitter, bookmark those people's direct twitter feeds or use something like fetchrss or feedcreator to integrate them to your favorite rss client.
For a few days now on the iOS app I have "For You" and "Following" on the top and I can swipe between them, left and right. It has a tendency to keep switching back to the "For You" that I don't like but at least it's quick to switch back to who I'm actually following. Am I being A/B tested?
Elon is a fan of the chronological timeline, so I
would take a pause there and consider. He even tweeted out instructions on how to switch to it and away from algorithmic.
I remember him saying that, but I'm pretty sure that was way back before he completed the purchase and the site was still perpetuating what he calls "the woke mind virus". Now that's he's fixed the algorithm so that it is instead pushing right-wing ideology he may have changed his mind.
Let's be real, if your "last straw" moment wasn't several weeks ago it's unlikely this is gonna be it.
But if it is, shame on you. All the silencing of journalists, banning accounts for saying "mastodon", or saying anything negative about Tesla, or criticizing Musk in any way, that didn't do it.
But now you have been mildly inconvenienced and it's the last straw. Really?
There's two reasons to leave a service, you can make a political statement - you leave because you disagree with their politics and you don't want to endorse them by associating with them. That's a legitimate reason to leave (although extremely often people declare they're doing this and then don't). But it's also perfectly legitimate to say "I'm leaving because the product got worse". It's sort of orthogonal to the political reason. Some people don't buy from Nestle because of Nestle's terrible track record, but I don't buy from Nestle because they're not selling anything I want. The second reason, generally is the thing that actually kills services. Digg didn't die because it conducted business unethically, it died because they fucked up the product, and that's what's happening here.
This is an excellent reply. Microblogging lends itself to absolutist statements. I guess sometimes people forget that the black and white thinking on twitter is a function of the medium and not a fact of reality.
Ha, fair response. But the truth is I haven't much cared, you're right. Twitter is a private company, they agreed to sell and Musk bought it, if he wants to screw up his asset and his reputation by doing ridiculous things, that's his prerogative. I don't really follow much of that drama, nor do I regard twitter as some kind of indispensable public utility.
But yes, now it is personally inconveniencing me, and so I'm looking at alternatives.
I left Twitter nearly two months ago. Ultimately, I just couldn't stomach supporting Musk by continuing to view ads, contribute content, and give people positive feedback (via likes and retweets) that helped them stay: https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/1593662348568326151
But I don't think that people who stayed are necessarily morally defective. There have always been reasons to quit Twitter and reasons to stay. Most people stayed either because they decided Twitter was a net positive for them or because Twitter is a habit-forming drug, or a bit of both. It's not only unsurprising to me that some take longer to quit than others, that's part of what made me leave: to undermine, ever so slightly, the rewards for staying.
If this disruption to their usual method of consumption is what pushes them over the line, great. We live in an age where it's impossible to live an ethically pure life, so I'm happy to celebrate steps forward as people take them. Good job, Twitter quitters! Welcome to the club.
God forbid someone stops using a product because it’s no longer nice to use. No no no, every commercial interaction must be driven by a deep political alignment strategy.
All the silencing of journalists, banning accounts for saying "mastodon", or saying anything negative about Tesla, or criticizing Musk in any way, that didn't do it.
Not all of this is accurate. Sure, hating on Musk for banning linking to Mastadon is legit, but there isn't a ban on criticising Musk, there are countless accounts with tens of thousands of followers happily ranting about how evil Musk is. Similarly Tesla.
Also, if you're talking about the Thursday Massacre aren't they all reinstated?
I mean, I think there are going to be a lot of people who _don't_ care about Saint Car's antics, but do care about Saint Car making the site unusable. And killing third party clients will make it unusable for many people.
Personally, my last straw was the journalists, but if I hadn't cared about that or other ridiculous Musk behaviours, _this_ would still drive me away; I haven't really used Twitter by any means besides Tweetbot in about a decade.
They're essentially different issues. The journalists, and the Fauci stuff, and the unbanning of various Nazis, are all, essentially, content/moderation issues, whereas this is a usability issue.
Yes, if this inconvenience is the case, this is definitely the last straw. Despite yours, and apparently the new owner's perspective, not everyone on twitter talks about or cares much for Tesla and metadrama, it's the people we follow, and how.
But half of my timeline, and most of my colleagues have left, the only thing that has kept me on so far is that the Tapbots Mastodon app https://tapbots.com/ivory/ isn't ready yet, because I like their UIs. Meanwhile I've collected lists and screenshots of where the people leaving said they were going. I've not had an actual reason to physically move over yet though; forced to use the site would be that.
I've been using third-party clients for over a decade, every time I've had to use the site directly it has been a nightmare. With a client app you never saw people you didn't follow anyway, and so as long as it's more effort to leave than stay... you don't have to think about it. Even if it is only specific third-party clients - then even the job of searching for and finding a different client is more effort than I want to put towards this site and its new ownership..
Silencing of journalists, banning accounts for saying mastodon, for saying anything negative about tesla or criticizing Musk in any way is a net positive to my twitter experience. I'm on twitter because some people that I follow and some friends are on twitter, and I want to see what they say. Meta commentary about the platform or the owner is noise to me. I do not feel any shame about it, just like I don't feel any shame because I don't contribute to most software that I use, or that I don't help every single person that is going through a hard time.
I've met a lot of wonderful people that do lots of things to help other people, and try generally to improve the world in their own way. They all objectively do more than me, and yet not a single one of them wasted time trying to shame me because I "didn't do enough". If I had to guess, that would be because it's not effective at all, maybe even detrimental to what you're fighting for. It's your ego being in the way, caring more about being right than doing good.
Other API apps like Movetodon and Tweetdelete still work, it looks like it's only third-party clients like Tweetbot and Twitterific that have stopped working.
I checked my Connected Apps list and can still see Tweetbot there, but it said I approved those permissions back in 2011, is ”Tweetbot for iOS” the same as the current Tweetbot available in the App Store?
Fenix also got removed from my connected apps and can no longer update its timeline. Feels like they're intentionally removing authorization for third party clients
Don't worry, Clownlon will quickly rewrite the Twitter API service this weekend, make it as "beautiful as Niagra Falls", and hand it off to the Twitter engineers to maintain.
Pretty sure my Twitter bot is still happily tweeting via API (on a periodic cron job, doesn't seem to have missed it's post schedule). I'm not at my computer right now but I'll check my logs later and see if I got any errors.
This. I immediately checked my IRC/IM bots and other tools that uses the API, they still work perfectly. So it looks like it's a sort of crackdown against third-party clients, and not API wind-down or technical issue (why would a technical issue only block some?).
I noticed an error on Twitter an hour ago. It looks like there are old school radio buttons peeking out from behind Twitter-style checkboxes that are (I think) supposed to cover them entirely: https://imgur.com/a/HCWmfgS
It would not surprise me if this is the end of third party clients and the new owner has removed access. Very disappointing if he has, particularly if he's done it with zero notice too.
He has been making significant noise of feature changes in the official client coming in the next couple of weeks. Removing the third party client access would align with that, along with removing the little "posted by ..." note on each tweet a couple of months ago.
I wander if the new policy is that you can't have an app that's main feature is replicating the existing functionality of twitters main app. That seems to be the rumour over there.
Publishing apps like Buffer and Typefully are still working.
It's clear that it's not a general API outage, specific "reader" apps have been removed/blocked, including from peoples "authorised apps" in their accounts.
This is not an "API Outage", I think we can be 99.9% sure it's a removal of specific apps.
Could it just be an anti-abuse system going wrong, and reader apps are targeted because they exceed some threshold?
Even with Musk's antics I don't see what would they gain by blocking API clients without announcing it - it would take Musk 30 seconds to tweet "oh btw third-party clients are done for" and would at least give everyone clarity.
Ok, so you may be right and my estimate of 99.9% is probably over zealous.
But to play devils advocate, say you are thinking of removing third party apps. You want to test the waters and see if users who use them continue to visit at the same rate when forced to use the official client. You schedule a quite "blocking" of the apps for the evening PT, your team can happily sleep through the noise generated and have the data in the morning from Asia/Europe of how people reacted.
In the morning you make the call as to whether to stick with the plan or say it was an errant moderation bot.
Oh sure, I feel incredibly sorry for small business and indi-developers who may loose their income from this. I hope they have contingency plans for this eventuality and have started to diversify.
There is also a whole ecosystem of "publisher" apps like Buffer and Typefully that haven't been blocked yet, if I was them I would be very worried right now.
You can't announce anything if you've fired the comms team.
Elon fired the Tesla PR team and yet announcements still are made, usually as Tweets from him. It sucks, but a comms team isn’t necessary assuming you are ok with substandard communication.
Elon's tweets aren't the same as announcements from Twitter. He tweets as an individual. Twitter, the company, is a blackhole as far as comms goes. There is no news in any official capacity from the company any more.
Does anything stops devs from using the Web interface instead of the API? Sure it makes it a bit more challenging because parsing is involved but AFAIK it is completely legal to parse and display HTML output however you want. It's essentially like a browser add-on.
I wonder if Twitter can be killed by the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy?
So:
1. Make a client that combines Mastadon/Others and Twitter feeds, making it switching out of Twitter frictionless.
2. Provide extra functionality for non-Twitter posts, encouraging the use of the non-Twitter services.
3. Once have a good traction, penalize Twitter post to further push non-Twitter adoption. Eventually remove Twitter support completely.
Doing this requires a fair amount of development time, especially when you can break something else with this and you previously removed all the guardrails.
While it's quite possible to build an app that way, using scraping. The danger is that users of that app will get suspended from Twitter (users have explicitly agreed not to scrape), once thats happened to a couple of users, thats the end of your app.
Obviously you can try to obscure that you are scraping, but that is difficult to get right and there is no way back once you get it wrong.
On Apple devices that wouldn’t be an issue because you you can load the Twitter Web interface into a real Safari and get the markup from there for processing. Twitter can try things like CAPTCHA but this will degrade the experience for all Twitter users and you can simply delegate this CAPTCHA to your user to solve anyway.
While for reading that works, there is an easy why via posting to spot people use that app. They can change at any moment the input names so that when posting a tweet you are exposing that you are using the scrapping client.
Yes, but the app is not a human and will likely interact with the website in a more predictable (and thus, detectable) way than the human itself would.
1) the law, at least in the US. Laws such as copyright and maybe even the CFAA have been abused to outlaw adversarial interoperability. You'd need to either practice good opsec and operate anonymously or be based out of reach of US-allied law enforcement.
2) Apple (and maybe Google too?) - they will remove any client for a third-party service unless said client has explicit approval from the third-party, all the way up to ridiculous levels such as rejecting an app using the LAN API of smart home devices explicitly designed for this purpose: https://community.lifx.com/t/app-store-rejection-permission-...
Apple might not be such a big issue because they allow reader apps. I guess they can ban you to improve their relationship with Twitter but you can also throw a subscription service as an IAP to improve your odds :)
Another point to show what Apple's true goal is: To kill general computing. If you buy an iPhone you should be able to run whatever app you want on it. But no, Apple knows best and will not permit you to do anything it doesn't approve of.
As for the APIs being copyrightable see Google vs Oracle.
If you buy an iPhone you should be able to run whatever app you want on it.
I hear this sentiment quite often on HN. Maybe I’m missing something but was this tacked onto the end of those stone tablets that Moses brought down from the mountain?
If not, then it seems like people want this to be a statement of fact when the reality is much closer to:
If I buy an iPhone I wish I could run whatever app I want on it.
Don't know about Moses, but here's what iJesus had to say:
The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today..
Apple's goal was to kill malware, not general-purpose computing[0] as a whole. Unfortunately it turns out that killing general-purpose computing is an instrumental goal[1] to killing malware: if you want a phone that cannot get a virus then you need someone pre-approving every line of code that hits the processor.
Once you have any entity having control over your device, even if it is for your own benefit and you completely trust that entity, a whole bunch of other competing business considerations come into play. In the case of adversarial interoperability, that means business risks that Apple doesn't want to take on. Let's say that tomorrow Elon Musk goes absolutely insane[2] and decides that third-party Twitter clients are hacking as defined by the CFAA. If Apple knowingly distributes those clients, then they could be held criminally liable for signing and distributing the app.
Less dramatically, adversarial operability implies a lot of support headaches. Apple wants to sell working software, not stuff that needs updates every few hours to keep ahead of updates done on Twitter's side to kill it. Even if they wanted to fight for adversarial interop in court, the underlying constraint of "pre-approve software updates to keep malware away" makes updating the software in real time to work around Twitter's workaround to the software untenable.
For a non-Apple, pre-everything-being-locked-down example of how much of a pain adversarial interoperability is in practice, there's the time Microsoft tried to make MSN speak to AIM. They stopped once AOL started using buffer overflow exploits to validate that you were running AIM[3]. AOL did not need to actually sue Microsoft with a spurious application of the CFAA. They just needed to wrap their API and client in enough garbage to make interop monetarily painful to support.
[0] In the Cory Doctorow sense
[1] AI safety term for "thing you need to do to get to other things you want".
Malware/app security is always the excuse when it comes to app stores, though.
But there's no excuse that their OS can't sandbox apps as best it can to prevent issues like this. Sure there will still be scam apps, but it should be a lot easier to install apps from outside of an app store.
It's just a blatant money grab otherwise; Spotify for example is extremely trusted and unlikely to be malware - why can't they have an "install" button on their site to install their app? Because companies that run the app stores want a cut.
Why aren't mobile OS' more like desktop OS'? Everyone acts like it's about security but then we get things like Pegasus and Google's Project Zero which is constantly finding stuff anyway.
Even now the granularity on permissions and the main problem of user apathy towards this stuff are solvable. I'm on Android and I still don't understand why an app can only ask for gallery permission/access to all files and why I'm not able to only grant it read access to a particular folder in a streamlined way.
All of this stuff should be designed around a user's intentions.
A phone is no different from a laptop, except that it is smaller and the mouse/keyboard are part of the screen. On my phone, I should be able to:
* Open an IDE and write some code.
* Compile my code (depending on the language).
* Run my code.
The whole concept of "app stores" is absurd. In 10 years, will we be denied sudo rights on our laptops? Will we need to pay a 30% cut to Apple for every program that we install, plus $99/yr if we want the privilege of building code for our own device?
In 10 years, will we be denied sudo rights on our laptops?
More and more likely. In 10 years' time I'd love to be off the Intel/Apple Mx train and using devices that can run desktop Linux with with RISC-V and Raspberry PI-like SoCs.
This is exactly why I bought Librem 5 smartphone, which can do all these things and can even serve as a laptop, if you connect a keyboard and a screen.
Apple ships an app THEMSELVES that enables this (for iPad anyway) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/swift-playgrounds/id908519492 and there are third party apps for general programming as well. I have one for Python (Pythonista) and one for C# and F# (Continuous) on my iPhone right now. There is a HUGE selection of similar apps for general purpose computing on iOS.
These are unique platforms with unique properties in their design. You value them or you don't. Nobody's forcing you to use them for general purpose computing and there are thousands upon thousands of BRAND NEW general purpose computing products with zero restrictions produced every year. People in this thread are being drama queens.
In ten years everything will be the same because Andreas Wendker told us that Macs will stay Macs the way we know and love them. He’s neither in marketing nor in sales but an engineer so obviously what he says must be the truth, to put it sarcastically.
«Macs will stay Macs the way you know and love them. They will run the same powerful Pro apps. They will offer the same developer APIs Macs have today. They will let users create multiple volumes on disks with different operating system versions and they will let users boot from external drives. They will support drivers for peripherals and they will be amazing UNIX machines for developers and the scientific community that can run any software they like.»
Regarding point 1, recent judicial decisions on scraping seemed to have entrenched it as legal.
On two, it seems like they are concerned with trademark to me. A workaround could be making a website that parses and displays Twitter content and call it something else. Then, in an app, make no mention of Twitter and only the website.
Fair point. Maybe have a paid subscription with features that benefit social media professionals? There are some popular and profitable services economy built around social media.
I’ve done this recently. Essentially created a browser extension that combines Mastodon and Twitter on twitter.com. It works surprisingly well, but I’m guessing catching up with Twitter.com changes is bound to be painful.
I don't think they'll force a specific API, but the DMA forces messaging companies to interoperate and I wouldn't think Twitter would be exempted.
I wouldn't be surprised if the EU would force Twitter to interoperate with ActivityPub if they go so far as to disable API access. The EU already has their own Mastodon server so some people already have knowledge of the possibilities of decentralised social media and they also have a huge anti-big-tech stance.
Can't we have the EU force them to provide an API and thus interoperability with competitors?
Maybe, but it took them over 4 years to rule that Facebook was breaching the GDPR even though a just a casual reading of the legislation would've given you this answer.
Maybe they'll "force" them... in so long that Twitter may not even exist anymore.
Why are people jumping to a ridiculous conclusion about the API being removed, especially because it's literally in the middle of the night in California? Like why assume the much more reasonable opinion that it's simply an outage.
That is why companies should always stay vigilant about platform risk. In general, own your platform, don't built your business on someone else's platform, it is too easy for them to deplatform you on their whim.
"pay us a ton of money for full data if you meet these internal requirements that assuredly mean we will monitor to make sure you don't compete with us"
Twitter allowing ban evasion and discussions about it had been a real clever move IMO. Users make a lot of noises and calls for exodus, none working, because it always happens inside the very platform.
Indeed, never discount network effects. The amount of people that moved to Mastodon (and crucially, have actually continued posting there and haven't moved back) is miniscule compared to Twitter's overall userbase.
It's not really "none working". It's different from community to community. Some of them did close to a mass migration. Enough that my plain Twitter timeline is extremely quiet now. Not everyone will see the same effects though.
It was real clever how they revoked the only means I was willing to access their service. Good for them, really sticking to their guns and committing to that “burn it all down and let God sort it out” approach.
I pay for Twitter Blue even though I use Tweetbot; instead of shutting it down maybe require Blue if you want to use a third party app? I'm willing to pay for services that provide some utility.
The apps disappeared from users’ authorized apps lists and are showing as suspended in developers’ accounts. That can’t plausibly be explained by API being down, although it could be by e.g. a trigger-happy banbot.
The developers are saying their apps have been suspended in the Twitter app center, due to rule violations. Other, non-client apps (like Movetodon) using the API work fine.
Is this potentially retaliatory to negative responses to recent Twitter Blue changes?
I saw that Twitter started displaying Blue subscriber tweets in a rather obnoxious way, which resulted in non-subscribers removing and blocking subscribers. I’ve also seen that some users were subscribing Blue expecting their deboosting penalties to clear, only for it to be worsened.
That weakly suggests to me that Blue subscriber demographic is split between undesirable users, either undesirable to other users or to Twitter itself. If so, …
Basically replies of subscribers get pushed to the top, so if you do a quick scroll you’ll see as if everyone is subscribed. If you expand, you’ll see everyone else.
I don't think that would have any impact on API downtime.
The issue with the new Twitter Blue users is one of adverse selection. Those that are 'verified' pre-takeover usually understand how Twitter works, in terms of how to drive engagement, likes etc.
Those that are new Twitter Blue-verified, are not as experienced, and it's pretty clear from the content of their tweets that they have recently purchased their status.
I wished everyone who Tweets would also post to the Fediverse. Because fediverse nodes like Mastodon support RSS out of the box.
Twitter is my only news source that I cannot consume via RSS. So if you publish something on Twitter, you miss most of my attention and only catch it if I log into Twitter that day.
Or post to your personal website and have it support RSS or Atom. It is super easy to implement. Or if you use a ready made cms like Wordpress, it usually supports it out of the box.
I do the reverse. My primary is now Mastodon, and I use a relay. I do have to pop into the birdsite to check replies, though. That's about all I do with it now.
True but they still managed to communicate the new timeline changes somehow. One would hope that someone could at least acknowledge an issue seven hours or so after it’s happened.
If that is their intent, then yeah - bit ruthless and self-defeating but I sort of get it. But it is a possibility that there was a fuckup, some clients got deleted, and they’re either working on resolving it (and failing) or the only people left who can fix it are in a time zone where they’re still asleep. eh we will see I suppose
Good lord people... Why is everyone jumping to "this is the end of the Twitter API" when in reality it's late at night in California and is much more likely a simple outage. Everyone needs to cool their jets. I don't understand the hyperbole. Every new thing that happens at Twitter is a new "this is the end of Twitter" even though it never is.
I have seen a handful of “this is it” comments out of ~180 in total and they were all downvoted to 0 or less. Most of the rest of the comments are people trying to figure out wtf works and doesn’t or people speculating if Twitter are moving to kill off 3rd Party apps (and whether they’d have to move to Twitter mobile web).
Top: speculating about 3p clients “It would not surprise me if this is the end of third party clients …”
Second: about lack of comms, “Ironically, we can know about this through posts to the FediVerse from the developer of Tweetbot, and ensuing discussion.”
Third: list of banned clients
Fourth: link to API status visualisation
Fifth: your comment
Sixth: someone saying that they don’t want to use Twitters own app so they’ll just quit
They've reshuffled a bit since I posted. The second was the top. The sixth was father down. My comment isn't in the top posts.
Top is fine, second is one of them, third is one of them (nothing's banned as far as we know), fourth has several top level posts saying it, seventh that you don't list is another "this is it".
I am not seeing these. In second place, you're referring to samwillis' post? They are speculating if it's the end of third party clients not Twitter the organization.
Well, yes, obviously. Why did you think he had all those weird defenders on Twitter? That's why they had to build those cars in a tent; factory was being used for horse payment logistics purposes.
It's worth noting that we've been here before; back in 2012 Twitter attempted to curtail third party clients (albeit in a far more organised, less haphazard way): https://thenextweb.com/news/twitter-4
Eventually, they stepped back from the brink, presumably after realising that it was a phenomenally stupid idea (while the fraction of Twitter users using third party clients is likely small, anyone who's anyone uses a third party client; this will vastly disproportionately hit influential users). We'll see if new leadership learns the same lesson.
I was the creator of Twidroyd (First and biggest Android Twitter app w/ ~70% marketshare) and there was a larger story behind the first big anti-3rd party move. Basically we had some plans to bring users over to a new network after we got acquired by Idealab — and Twitter got wind of it. Think Mastodon 2010 style.
I wrote a paper on you and a couple of other third-party Twitter clients in undergrad on the importance of modern day brand preservation and protection for an integrated marketing class while this was playing out. In a roundabout way, you kind of helped me get an A in that class! :D
Has there been any interest in telling this story in any rich medium (podcast, long form article, 30 minute youtube video, documentary, netflix series). Not only does that sound super interesting, but now that most/all of Twitter Execs have moved on - I wonder if you'd be able to get Twitter's side of the story as well.
Twitter was a different shop back then — You could literally jump on a call with Ev et al (and even humans at Google when it came to Android) but while significant decisions were made at the time, it's nothing more than a melancholic blip in tech history.
Strangely enough, I'm working on a new product in this space but it won't touch Twitter's API for sure :)
there have been a handful of App.nets created in the last couple of months (Post, Spoutible, Hive, T2, et cetera). they'll all probably suffer the same fate too.
I wouldn't be surprised if Elon blocks access to apps like Tweetbot since they don't serve ads and therefore provide no revenue to Twitter (and users are unlikely to quit Twitter altogether because of it). An alternative route would be to allow third-party apps as one of the "features" of a paid Twitter account--that actually makes some sense. In fact, I'd be surprised if Musk didn't do something like this.
In 2012 Twitter did not have as established a user base as it does today esp among media, companies, politicians, influencers, celebrities, so there's less risk of dropping third-party clients than there was back then.
users are unlikely to quit Twitter altogether because of it
I don’t think this is true at all. If Tweetbot doesn’t come back I doubt I’ll ever use Twitter again; the website is unusable garbage by comparison. And I think a lot of the most influential power users who drive engagement feel the same way.
I already gave up after the jounopurge (well, I returned for one final poorly-received joke after mentioning prehistoric elephant-like things became thoughtcrime), but if I hadn’t left for ethical reasons, I’d be gone now; I’ve been using Tweetbot for about a decade and find the official web and mobile client borderline unusable.
Whew I hope this isn’t permanent. I was just starting really like using Echofon to digest my twitter feed. Somehow I have a much more positive experience when I’m not being constantly suggested inflammatory tweets by people I don’t follow and third party apps allowed me what felt like more control there.
I've been active on Twitter for the past 15 years, thanks to its API and nice clients such as Echofon and TweetBot.
I never understood anything to their website nor app, and will certainly not use Twitter any more if that becomes the only way to use it. What made Twitter great is its API and ecosystem around it.
In case anyone is interested I made a browser extension which helps you transition to Mastodon. What it does is it injects Mastodon posts into your Twitter.com timeline so you can slowly but surely get exposure to more and more of the Fediverse while keeping the familiar Twitter UI.
Unsurprisingly, the outage hasn't affected twitters own client.
Roll on May 2023. Unless twitter want to block the EU, they will have to provide the same level of access to 3rd party clients as they do their own. If the API is down for 3rd parties, but not for twitters own client, that will be considered a breach.
Does it even apply to something like Twitter? If it applies to Twitter then surely that means it also applies to Youtube? Does that mean youtube-dl must be officially supported? I thought it only applied to digital markets (stuff like amazon, google's advertising platform, etc)
Actually, no, it doesnt apply to twitter right now (turnover and market cap is too low). But EC can assign status anyway following market investigation.
It absolutely does apply to Youtube (finally some way to challenge youtube!), but im not sure how that affects the use of youtube-dl.
The word 'market' here is being used in the same sense it's used in 'common market' or 'free market', not as in literally a place that directly sells things to consumers.
Speaking of which, I wonder if the DMA would finally let us get decent RSS bridges for Instagram and Facebook. At least we already have that for Twitter.
Sadly, I suspect (while not having read the DMA myself) that what it would require is some kind of published format for interoperability...meaning that Facebook would publish the FacebookStream API and Instagram would publish the InstaStream API, neither of which would actually look like any existing formats (or each other).
Would this work to get the EU to say they've fulfilled the DMA's terms? No idea. But Facebook has yachtloads of cash to throw at legal battles, especially where it sees a potential existential threat.
The question is: is blocking the EU a flex that Twitter could successfully achieve? Would there be sufficient backlash against regulators to grant an exemption?
More like 2027. Keep in mind the GDPR became effective in 2018 and it took just now for Facebook's blatant breach of it to finally be ruled in breach despite this being obvious with just a casual reading of the regulation.
Allowing 3rd parties to interoperate with the gatekeepers own services is one of the core obligations...
Gatekeepers should ensure interoperability for third-party providers of number-independent interpersonal communications services that offer or intend to offer their number-independent interpersonal communications services to end users and business users in the Union. To facilitate the practical implementation of such interoperability, the gatekeeper concerned should be required to publish a reference offer laying down the technical details and general terms and conditions of interoperability with its number-independent interpersonal communications services.
‘interoperability’ means the ability to exchange information and mutually use the information which has been exchanged through interfaces or other solutions, so that all elements of hardware or software work with other hardware and software and with users in all the ways in which they are intended to function;
Maybe you are thinking of something other than the DMA?
The "API" isn't "down", these specific apps have been suspended in the developer center, citing a violation of the Twitter rules. Other, non-client apps still work fine.
Sigh. How do I even use the official client in a reasonable way? I want to start over where I left off, with unread tweets left chronologically to scroll.
The official client all seem to show the most recent tweets so I have to scroll down backwards in time?
No, sorry, I closed my account a month or two ago. Prior to that I used Tweetbot on iOS, which it sounds like they have also nuked. I've since moved to Cohost and Discord, and I continue to post on the Something Awful forums. None of those are Twitter replacements, but I don't miss Twitter at all.
The Twitter app just got an update that makes it easier to switch to the chronological timeline, and it appears to actually stick now. (At least it has so far).
Doesn't avoid the ads though, which are still ubiquitous.
What they can fix in an update, they can take away in another update.
The only safe solution is competition between multiple service providers. If third-party clients are dead... looks like even more of a reason to switch to alternatives like Mastodon?
Yeah, same here. I actually only follow a handful of active feeds, so it won’t be the end of the world either way.
But one thing I’ll miss are the HN feeds, since I otherwise stay off HN. I may have to find an alternative for that, at least, since I don’t want to get (back) in the habit of visiting the HN homepage.
It's been 16 hours and there's been no communication from Twitter on this. Do they not know what's going on? Not care? Have no respect for their third party partners?
Re-authorization Failed Failed to request token from Twitter.com:: service unavailable
Same thing is happening with Twitteriffic - I’m assuming Twitter’s API is down, or worse: the new owner has decided that 3rd party clients are not desirable anymore
As Sean Heber, a Twitterific developer, posted it’s now a game of wait and see if this is policy or just an outage.
If it’s not an outage, I guess I expected more ceremony around this.
Elon's Twitter is the exact opposite of ceremony.
I don't post to Twitter, but I still sometimes use Twitterrific to read it since not everybody I enjoy there has successfully moved to Mastodon.
(Although tbh it is only William Gibson, David Frum, and Grady Booch that keep me reading Twitter.)
I too thought the 'garch might have abruptly pulled the plug on the API. But then, I installed the Twitter iOS app and tried that, and it emitted a cascade of error screens, too.
So if I had to bet a dollar, I'd bet on "shit malfunctioning".
FWIW, William Gibson is on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@GreatDismal
I know, but (like a lot of people) he didn't end up posting there after signing up. Although Mastodon ended up being "about as good" for me (who just reads it when e.g. waiting in a line or something) as Twitter, there are these few people like him who made my Twitter feed something special who aren't really active on Mastodon.
(BTW indie dev world, I've paid money for years for Twitterrific and would definitely pay money for a client that did a reasonable job of showing me people I follow on various social brainfart networks, all in one place).
Hope this is a good old fashioned outage. However, after the “sent from” feature was recently removed, I have a hard time believing the owner has a positive opinion on the existence of the API. A shame how much it has been pared down already.
Maybe Melon saw how nice Ivory is looking https://tapbots.com/ivory/
Tweetbot for Mastodon.
“You’re either with us or against us”.
Hahaha first I've heard this nickname.
My agua fresca would like a word with whoever came up with this.
I’m believe the full nickname is Melon Husk.
I wish Twitterific made a Mastodon client, its great UX compared to the official Twitter app is one of the major reasons I was still using Twitter.
And events like this shows they shouldn't put all their eggs in one basket.
The makers of Tweetbot are making a Mastodon client!
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/29/tapbots-ivory-mastodon-...
https://tapbots.com/ivory/ and they just released a roadmap :) looks very promising
maybe this is the culprit then
I'm looking forward to trying it when more Testflight spots open up, it will be a day one purchase when released.
They’ve said they expect to release publicly by the end of the month. I don’t Mastodon much, but the beta is my only client and slick to use.
That is a very sensible proactive move on the part of the team, they must have both been concerned about the future viability of third party twitter clients, and the potential of Mastodon as a new market. From what I've heard the Mastodon client they are building is very good, it's in closed beta right now.
Shouldn't Tweetbot be in my Connected apps? It's not anymore.
I’m seeing others report the same thing. I have a Tweetbot in my connected app list, but that could be an old version somehow.
Tweetbot won't authorize, but Twitteriffic does
Here’s what I see:
Something Bad Has Happened At Twitter
Twitterrific users are currently unable to access the service via the iOS app. As of this writing we have heard nothing officially from Twitter and are trying to learn more. This may just be a temporary bug; it may be more a more serious issue.
As soon as we know more we'll update this message. We thank you as always for your support and patience as we work through this problem.
- The Iconfactory Team
Tweetbot can't authorize, but Twitteriffic authorizes and works
Many many people on social media reporting Twitterriffic down too
From the source: https://twitter.com/Twitterrific/status/1613755585727447040
Hmm, 7 minutes after your post, my Twitteriffic still fails and is stuck on the "Sign in with Twitter" screen.
You were probably using an auth token that hadn't yet expired. If you reauthorize, it will probably fail.
Can confirm: Tweetbot suddenly stopped working for me, on macOS, a couple hours ago.
Since third-party clients don't make Twitter any ad revenue, I could see them making API access a feature of Blue in order to get revenue from those users.
That would be actually great - I don't mind paying to avoid annoying ads
It'd be very Elon-like to ignore that there are countries other than US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the UK.
Given that his entire [claimed] rationale is “restoring free speech in America” you can scratch countries 2-6 off that list.
The rationale is to control the narrative and align Twitter’s politics with his own. It’s just like the hundred other rich dudes who bought newspapers over the years.
Sure. I should have said “claimed rationale”.
Trying to be the new Rupert Murdoch, but failing.
Admittedly there being a big right wing social media would be an interesting change. Curious to see how it goes (from a distance as I don't use twitter).
Twitter was that big right wing social media site, in that it was extremely useful for a large number of right wing organisations and people to amplify their messaging and get many followers. That's what made it far more attractive to those on the right than Parler, Truth Social, Gettr, and all the others.
For instance Trump owed much of his popularity to his Twitter account and the way it allowed him to communicate much more effectively in a completely unfiltered way with both his existing supporters and undecided potentials. The same pattern has repeated with right wing politicians in other countries.
Those who were banned or otherwise de-amplified tended to be very fringe or extreme, and were never a significant chunk of the right wing. That's one reason why the alternatives never took off, as the kinds of people they attracted were those that few people really wanted to deal with or associate with.
Is that the Commonwealth and its major colonies…
I feel like kicking 3rd party apps off the platform must be at least nominally illegal in some of these countries. Aside from the US, these are countries with strong consumer protections with real teeth.
https://deadbird.singlepane.io shows the API up but a trace of iOS Twitterific, Tweetbot, and Birdie shows an EoF response when api.twitter.com is called.
I’d wager a backend issue over a policy change as a 403/401 isn’t returned.
The hard part for Twitter is figuring out who's left that can fix it.
I disagree, the day he took over twitter people were saying "it wont be up this weekend" "it will be down in a week" "it will be offline in 2 weeks"... yet the reality is, its up and running well.
The system is running as good as before. The only thing I've noticed is theres more ad's than usual.
----
Edit: Currently there isn't any outage of Twitter as far as anyone knows. It looks like 3rd party apps have been kicked to the curb.
A ~16hr regional outage in AU/NZ is not indicitive of anything. In 2021 Facebook had a global ~7hr outage.
Since Musk took over we haven't had all the downtime and disruption everyone kept claiming we would have. Big companies haven outages too, but so far the death of Twitter isn't in sight.
Also: I hate Musk since his comments on Ukraine and Taiwan. So don't take my comments as trying to stick up with Musk. I'm not, I hope he loses all his money and becomes broke.
Consider the quality of engineer of the departed team that allowed Twitter to run without incidents for so long. Also, change is the most frequent cause of incidents, as no one was pushing new changes there were fewer chances of an incident.
Surely you're writing this in jest?
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/14/twitter-e...
Reading that article, I am actually impressed that after that 45-minute outage in 2022, the next major outage was all the way back in 2016. I would say that is actually quite an endorsement for the quality of engineers they had.
It's not like the employees are some gnomes running the system by pulling levers so it is not surprising that rhe system seems to be running ok.
The problem arises at the point when there are bugs or other incidents and there is nobody who can fix them.
Australia and NZ experienced a 16h outage last week.
Was there someone to fix it eventually? Sure. Is 16h of downtime acceptable for a $44b business? I'm going with no.
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2023/01/twitter-down-australia/
They've likely learned a lot from that incident already.
No, Twitter isn't gonna "blow up" overnight. That's nonsense.
If they hadn't purged the entire staff they wouldn't need to relearn the same lessons
It's also not something any of the parent comments claimed.
I take it no such outages occurred in the prior history of twitter?
16h is an awful lot for a social media site, even if region-specific.
Single digit number of hours happen from time to time, but double digits are not really a thing anymore. Maybe in early days of social media, not in the past decade.
Well, RIP twitter I guess. Although strangely if I search the news archives for outages with date set to before 2022..
You get what? Anything close to that long? Don't leave me hanging!
I did the same and found a Guardian article that claims no Twitter outage lasted even an hour since 2016, but I thought it was irrelevant because articles about outages aren't exactly top-notch in quality.
Did you find anything better? If so, do share! I'd be happy to be proven wrong!
After a 70% reduction in headcount, is a 16 hour downtime acceptable in a 5% market? I'm going with yes, executives from all major corporations are itching to press that button if only they could get away with it.
The problem with Twitter is not, was not, and will never be a technical one. It's a simple site with a simple tech stack, using standard technology to scale.
The problem with Twitter, and what Musk doesn't seem to understand, is a sociological and political one. Social networks are the crack cocaine of tabloid media, left to the whims of bad actors they can destroy democracies, incite lynchings, distribute hate and misinformation on scales without historical precedent. "Free speech" just doesn't cut it, social networks are publications not mediums, they chose what people get to see and react to, and the fact that the choice is made by an algorithm does not absolve them of responsibility for the consequences, especially if the algorithm is tuned for revenue maximization and easily gamed by bad actors to spread their content.
By firing the watchers, Musk is setting Twitter up as an menace to stable democracies around the world.
At the scale twitter exists right now it is anything but simple. Had it been built from scratch it could have run fine with its current staff.
But the current staff needs to maintain code from a MUCH larger staff. That's hard. Especially with microservices where every team did "their own thing" and some teams just vanished completely. You have "dark areas" where no one knows how stuff works and what's going on.
Normally when you downsize at this scale you do this in an orderly way. Every person hands off their work and responsibility. Spends a couple of weeks writing docs and instructions and then leaves. This was done quickly and violently. I'm sure there's many repercussions we don't see simply because the systems are simply running. Once the team looks at some containers and decides to pull the plug to "see what happens" we'll find out...
Elon should get real experts like Infosys or Wipro in to rebuild it.
Sometimes it's really hard to tell if people are joking or serious in HN...
So you are essentially saying Twitter has an over-complicated architecture with regards to its real technical needs, so Musk was right to axe the microservice zealots. Good we can agree on that.
The next step is to acknowledge that code and data-centers continue to work long after their original designers have left the company, that's what computers are, tools for automation. Keeping the lights on and services in a roughly functional state is an activity that requires much less people of relatively lower qualification, even if they couldn't have engineered it themselves.
Yes, there is a long term risk of code rot and entropy if Musk does not plan for a gradual transition to a better engineered architecture with competent maintainers. But we are not there yet, far from it.
Meanwhile, schadenfreude people have rooted for a twittocaplipse from day one, nay, predicted it as inevitable. There is absolutely no sign it's going to happen, and Twitter turned out sufficiently simple after all on the technical side.
People choose to use social media, as they choose all media. People are individually responsible for the physical actions they make, even if a little bird told them what to do. It may be easier to control people by limiting what thoughts they're exposed to, but a people isn't free if that's done.
It's all fun and games until you are slain in the street because people chose to regard you as subhuman after a little bird told them so.
Disseminating politically extreme misinformation kills people - look no further than Russia, where a state run propaganda campaign has made people no more stupid or immoral than you or me support a vicious war of aggression against their neighbors.
No, the killer kills physically. Being told to is no excuse.
No.
Facebook had downtime on all services, globally... for like 7 hours 2021, facebook is how many orders of magnitude bigger than Twitter?
And a regional outage vs the internet claiming twitter would be offline completely?
Half an order of magnitude bigger, at most.
A regional outage of that size is embarrassing whatever way you slice it.
Leaving all that aside, he’s driving a massive subset of his users away at a time when he really needs all the users he can get.
You can spin this however you like, this is not a good situation for him. He’s said as much outright and implied it repeatedly.
Since this time last year he’s said that both Twitter and SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy, and Tesla has been flat out told FSD, the feature they’ve been selling all their cars based on (which he has said himself the company is worthless without), just isn’t happening.
This is dire for him.
As much as I hope Elon loses everthing. This isn't even related to downtime of Twitter. Volentarly shutting down twitter due to it being bankrupt is not the same as it falling over and having outages.
So I'm really not trying to spin anything. You're trying to take something unrelated and use it as justification as to why big bad billionaire do bad.
This is a fair comment, I'll clarify why I mentioned that.
Bringing up Tesla and SpaceX was only to point out that he doesn't really have any way to bail out bad Twitter decisions despite it being a (relatively) smaller company. There's nowhere to pull extra finances from to bail this out, and it's known he already went into debt to make the purchase.
I really don't want him to lose anything. I'd like him to go back in time to when he first installed Twitter on his phone and slap the thing out of his own hand and scream "NO! THAT'S A BAD ELON!"
Not to disagree with your general point, I just want to nitpick this:
Half an order of magnitude bigger, at most
I think you're overestimating Twitter and underestimating Facebook.
I don't know the best source for official stats, but a quick google suggests Twitter is ~300M users and Facebook is ~3B, so one order of magnitude.
And of course the new Twitter CEO used the interesting bargaining tactic of talking down his own purchase by implying many of those 300M users are bots... Joking aside, you could argue that very few of those 3B Facebook users are active, and you'd be right; but exactly the same can be said of Twitter and there's no good reason to think the ratio is any better or worse there.
At least in the case of SpaceX the US government will more likely than not step in and nationalize them out of national security requirements.
It always good to have fallback solution, isn't it?
That's nice for the US space industry, but won't help Elon in the slightest with his money problems.
Companies months from bankruptcy don’t get to take a higher valuation in a down market: https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2023/01/03/elon-musks-space...
SpaceX is a great company, worth investing into, because of their ISP + phone telco business (lot of people are ready to pay a high price for that) and a very difficult space technology to reproduce, nobody is going to compete soon. Twitter is different, it's more like MySpace.
Still, when the president of a company tells that to his employees, you can't completely ignore his words, even if it's Elon Musk.
And that outage was the first of its kind in a long time and made a lot of news. It's not like this is usual in any way.
Why do we care so much though? Given the outsized influence Twitter has over politics and society, is it so bad if it shuts down and we have a few years reprieve? Musk has just lost an ungodly sum of money and has loans to repay. He’s not going to be running things for the benefit for humanity.
Musk needs to care because if his little site is not online when people want to post, they won't use it. I applaud that he doesn't though, makes it so much funnier watching this unfold.
Do you remember July 08,2022 when Rogers Communications went down for about 19 hours and services like 911 and Interac a payment service almost all Canadians use was interrupted? I guess it can happen to even the most critical of services.
It’s running well because the old guard built it so well. Musk threw them all out, so it will slowly but surely degrade. There was a reason Twitter had such a large workforce.
Is this the same twitter who almost died trying to scale when they started? They have been in worse spots. They will be fine and much of the old guard still works there.
So under what conditions would you consider a company overstaffed?
I would say you are overstaffed if A) you can't afford them and / or B) you've grown so fast, you don't know how to make use of the staff you have. Perhaps there is a C) which is a variant of B) the business model you are running only requires so much staff and you hit a ceiling in growth.
I would not claim to have enough information about twitter being overstaffed? They might have a lot of technical debt, which can cause the need for more people to run it. But that is not "overstaffing".
The question is also how overstaffing is measured. If adding another person reduces the average productivity, you might define that as the cut-off due to the declining ROI for every other person added. But you probably also want some level of redundancy (aka reducing the bus factor) in order to account for the ongoing global health situation and general churn.
Of course repeated waves of mass layoffs, demanding a pledge of allegiance to the company and revocation of all employee privileges at the threat of being fired and publicly throwing your employees repeatedly under the bus are also ways to reduce churn, so the bar for "overstaffing" might have actually lowered.
The tragedy of Twitter is that:
- they were absolutely undoubtedly overstaffed
- Musk's approach was absolutely undoubtedly insane shenanigans of a stupid rich cry-baby
Both are true at the same time
Oh? What's your evidence here?
Look at FB's staff from back when they had comparable revenue and way more users.
I believe that 2013-14 FB was comparable in terms of revenue and users, and they had approximately half the staff.
So? WhatsApp had 35 developers and 350 million users. By that measure, every other company is grossly overstaffed.
Personally, I could argue that every social network is grossly understaffed by the measure of how lax they are about what they are supporting. E.g., in 2017, that company you say is more appropriately staffed contributed to a genocide that left tens of thousands dead: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Personal anecdotes from any big company :)
There's a second layer to the tragedy. Also applicable to any big company:
- many teams are overstaffed for what they do/produce
- many teams are understaffed for what they do/produce
And this is also true at the same time.
Yeah, this is closer to the mark for me. It's been some years since I worked at Twitter, but if I had been suddenly made CEO, I wouldn't have gone on a mass firing spree. I would have tried to figure out how to more effectively use the people that Twitter had. As with many big companies, I suspect the problem is much more bad management than bad workers.
This is roughly my feeling, but I'm a little less sure of the absolutely/undoubtedly part. Someone below is asking for evidence but I don't think any one of us could produce evidence for or against this. It all boils down to either "Twitter had ~7500 employees and..."
1. ... that feels like a huge amount for a company that has basically a single product
2. ... that feels entirely appropriate for a company operating at their scale
What we've observed is that they've kinda managed to keep going despite Elon axing an enormous number of employees, but they've also had a few high-profile outages like this one today, the 2FA issue and 16hr Aus outage. I don't know if these are enough for either side to declare that they're correct.
One thing I would like to say - even though I had a feeling Twitter was probably overstaffed, I was in no way celebrating the redundancies. Similarly even though I'm not a fan of Elon Musk, I'm not delighting in all these little goofs he's doing and how it's impacting him personally - every little embarrassment he suffers and every dip in Tesla stock makes it more likely he'll just call it quits or fuck up Twitter more. For all its faults, I quite like Twitter and I don't want it to just disappear.
Twitter is a shitshow technically. Sub-tweets don't nest right and change order in a arbitrary way.
The backend that handles the API has generally been relatively solid, but the official clients are a complete disaster.
This comment feels a bit out of place on a post about part of Twitter being down.
Currently it looks like 3rd party apps have been cut off, not the Twitter or the API being down. So I don't consider it out of place.
He haphazardly ordered turning off "bloated" microservices, including the one responsible for sending auth codes via SMS for 2FA... Learning through mistakes is a thing particularly for newbies, but a CEO should absolutely have a clue about not micromanaging, especially in areas he practically doesn't understand and after firing most people who do.
I'm unsure if it is running as good as before. I have noticed more issues over the past week than I ever have using Twit.
Particularly, a nasty bug that keeps the timeline refreshing while scrolling and is constantly moving content around on the screen.
Curious if anyone else has run into something similar.
I would from personal experience disagree on the "well" part.
I'm suddenly following accounts I recently unfollowed again. Previously blocked accounts show up. The search doesn't find stuff it used to find anymore - posts that are definitely not deleted because I can usually find them via other references.
I have noticed that the explore page, and my timeline are way staler than they used to be. Tweets I have seen or even interacted with keep popping to the top all day, and trends on the explore page can be there for days at a time. It can take hours for major world events don't show up on the explore page for me sometimes.
If you buy a house and move into it does it suddenly break apart? If not, does the new owner get credit for it not breaking apart?
It’s working _in spite of_ the new owner, not because of.
If you’re going to argue against what “people” say, you’re always going to look like you’re the smart one and the person you’re disagreeing with is the stupid one.
Really don't know why this is downvoted. We had relentless articles like this [0] expecting the complete and total shutdown of Twitter, globally. That never happened and everyone knows that it was pure hysteria.
So because [0] did not happen most of the critics are setting a new standard for Twitter uptime to be 1000% globally 24/7, absolutely zero outages of any kind and never down for one person. If one outage somewhere happens, it is immediately the end of the world.
It wasn't the end of the world when Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok had worldwide outages, but 1 regional outage on Twitter and it is somehow the end of times? Please.
The fact is, You are getting downvoted because Twitter is still up and running and many of the replies here cannot stand that predictions like this [0] did not come true and will point at any intermittent issue to show the 'Twitter is dying' narrative.
The death of Twitter has been greatly exaggerated. If you really wanted it to die, just ignore it. Simple.
[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...
His comments on Taiwan were prompted comments in request to a question buried in some interview. He didn't rant about it. He hasn't ever mentioned it on Twitter. And how he was quoted was very different from what he actually said.
I said his comments. Not his tweets. I’m fully aware of what he said. It was all over the news in Taiwan. He pissed off a lot of people here.
He showed everyone how in bed he is with the CCP.
I think he showed he doesn't really care about Taiwan that much. It was an off-hand remark, not a seriously stated position.
In addition to Tweetbot not working, it's been removed from my list of connected apps.
I can only see Twitter beginning to monetize third-party API access with some subscription plan whilst keeping the Twitter app free of charge (and protected with captchas, anti-botting tools, etc)
Either way, this demonstrates that it makes no sense to build an entire company soley on someone else's API.
Someone should have told Slide, "the creators of SuperPoke!" Besides that tagline about making a useless Facebook add-on feature that already existed, their recruiters never did explain what they did beyond like 3 Facebook API calls.
Glad I didn't depended on someone else's API, made 3 calls and got paid $182 mil in 2010 $$'s
I saw that too and I highly doubt Google bought the company for their SuperPoke routine but rather for their suite of products like the Pets and the data that comes along with it. Those 3 API calls may have put them on the map but that's probably not what made them valuable.
RIP. I’m hoping it’s temporary but not optimistic.
Could it be a coincidence that Twitter relaunched the algo timeline for everyone and within a day 3P clients that are linear-first stop working?
Although with the all the people laid off, who knows.
This might be the last straw. I flat out refuse to use their horrible app with its nonsense algorithmic timeline. Give it a few hours to see if it's permanent but if it is, I expect a huge wave of new mastodon users..
I use twitter.com in desktop browser, and chronological timeline is still there (accessible via "sparkle icon").
That’s chronological but still algorithmic.
Sure, technically, chronological ordering is an algorithm. I wonder what you would want.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Tweets flowing at 250kbps or more 24/7, of course…
Edit: the way “chronological” timeline works is, Twitter decides on your social graph and hide posts until it fits your serving. Shadowbans, Boosting and Deboosting are factored in as well. That is technically chronological, only technically.
Source? The thing is I compare chronological timeline with lists (of users I follow) all the time, and I didn't notice any missing tweets. "Shadowbanned" tweets always were visible in lists, I personally checked that.
Yeah, unless something has changed drastically in the couple of months since I stopped using Twitter, I believe the web-based chronological timeline is exactly as you say. As soon as you click on a tweet to see replies you're getting things ranked, of course. But one's home timeline should be fine.
In my experience it just shows me all the tweets from people I follow in chronological order.
I use the mobile web. It's better than the app, and switching to chronological is easy.
Agreed. I can't speak for iOS but the Android app is terrible. The font is too big and the scrolling is incredibly janky on high refresh rate displays. Mobile web is the only way to use Twitter on Android, and the PWA behaves mostly like a real app.
Elon said recently there are big changes coming to the timeline so it can be whatever you want
Elon says a lot of things.
Still waiting for that new Twitter CEO.
Heck, I'm still waiting for the robotaxis. "[2020] for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road,"
Still waiting for the Tesla Supercharger network allowing non Tesla vehicle use.
There were reports about timeline changes on iOS:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/10/23549368/twitter-for-you-...
I’m the same, I don’t really mind ads but I do not like the “algorithmic” timeline. Will find a way that doesn’t involve using their official iOS app, even if it means falling back to mobile web
Talon is the only reason I used Twitter for over a year, yeah. I can't stand the site.
(Talon is also not loading any tweets at the moment)
I moved to Tweetbot a few weeks ago when using internal keywords to hide "X person liked...", "X person follows..." tweets stopped working.
Now it seems im forced back. ~50% of my feed was from people i dont follow.
Does anyone know how to hide those tweets on the timeline?
Switch to the original timeline, not the algorithmic one.
The issue is not the ordering, it is that it contains tweets from people i am not following.
Before i could hide those by muting suggest_activity_tweet and suggest_recycled_tweet_inline
This does not seem to work anymore
Wait, what? Since when? I'm regulary reading using the chronogical timeline and I'm not seeing anything like you describe (I only see that using the "for you" algo timeline). Very concerning anyway. :(
Oh, it seems it was reset to use the algorithmic one. I for sure did not change that myself...
Thx for making me double check
Ah! Yes, since they rolled out the For You/Timeline things, the apps tend sometimes to revert to For you randomly for no reason...
One of my alts gets switched everytime, while my main account does not. All using them from the same iOS app.
It happens whenever the app reloads. If you swipe up (on iOS) to quit the app and then re-open it, you'll see it start off on For You.
I'd say just leave twitter, bookmark those people's direct twitter feeds or use something like fetchrss or feedcreator to integrate them to your favorite rss client.
For a few days now on the iOS app I have "For You" and "Following" on the top and I can swipe between them, left and right. It has a tendency to keep switching back to the "For You" that I don't like but at least it's quick to switch back to who I'm actually following. Am I being A/B tested?
Silly peasant, stop fighting the algorithm and embrace being fed filtered garbage instead of something atleast temporally coherent... /s
This is not new at all. I forgot when the "For You" tab got deployed, but for a while my iOS app kept switching to it-- hasn't happened in months now.
Elon is a fan of the chronological timeline, so I would take a pause there and consider. He even tweeted out instructions on how to switch to it and away from algorithmic.
I remember him saying that, but I'm pretty sure that was way back before he completed the purchase and the site was still perpetuating what he calls "the woke mind virus". Now that's he's fixed the algorithm so that it is instead pushing right-wing ideology he may have changed his mind.
Let's be real, if your "last straw" moment wasn't several weeks ago it's unlikely this is gonna be it.
But if it is, shame on you. All the silencing of journalists, banning accounts for saying "mastodon", or saying anything negative about Tesla, or criticizing Musk in any way, that didn't do it.
But now you have been mildly inconvenienced and it's the last straw. Really?
There's two reasons to leave a service, you can make a political statement - you leave because you disagree with their politics and you don't want to endorse them by associating with them. That's a legitimate reason to leave (although extremely often people declare they're doing this and then don't). But it's also perfectly legitimate to say "I'm leaving because the product got worse". It's sort of orthogonal to the political reason. Some people don't buy from Nestle because of Nestle's terrible track record, but I don't buy from Nestle because they're not selling anything I want. The second reason, generally is the thing that actually kills services. Digg didn't die because it conducted business unethically, it died because they fucked up the product, and that's what's happening here.
This is an excellent reply. Microblogging lends itself to absolutist statements. I guess sometimes people forget that the black and white thinking on twitter is a function of the medium and not a fact of reality.
Ha, fair response. But the truth is I haven't much cared, you're right. Twitter is a private company, they agreed to sell and Musk bought it, if he wants to screw up his asset and his reputation by doing ridiculous things, that's his prerogative. I don't really follow much of that drama, nor do I regard twitter as some kind of indispensable public utility.
But yes, now it is personally inconveniencing me, and so I'm looking at alternatives.
Eh, that seems a bit unnecessary to me.
I left Twitter nearly two months ago. Ultimately, I just couldn't stomach supporting Musk by continuing to view ads, contribute content, and give people positive feedback (via likes and retweets) that helped them stay: https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/1593662348568326151
But I don't think that people who stayed are necessarily morally defective. There have always been reasons to quit Twitter and reasons to stay. Most people stayed either because they decided Twitter was a net positive for them or because Twitter is a habit-forming drug, or a bit of both. It's not only unsurprising to me that some take longer to quit than others, that's part of what made me leave: to undermine, ever so slightly, the rewards for staying.
If this disruption to their usual method of consumption is what pushes them over the line, great. We live in an age where it's impossible to live an ethically pure life, so I'm happy to celebrate steps forward as people take them. Good job, Twitter quitters! Welcome to the club.
The thing about last straws is they're usually just a small bit of straw
And, different camels can carry different weights of straw.
God forbid someone stops using a product because it’s no longer nice to use. No no no, every commercial interaction must be driven by a deep political alignment strategy.
Not all of this is accurate. Sure, hating on Musk for banning linking to Mastadon is legit, but there isn't a ban on criticising Musk, there are countless accounts with tens of thousands of followers happily ranting about how evil Musk is. Similarly Tesla.
Also, if you're talking about the Thursday Massacre aren't they all reinstated?
How dare people care about the functionality of a service. Only moral judgements are allowed.
I mean, I think there are going to be a lot of people who _don't_ care about Saint Car's antics, but do care about Saint Car making the site unusable. And killing third party clients will make it unusable for many people.
Personally, my last straw was the journalists, but if I hadn't cared about that or other ridiculous Musk behaviours, _this_ would still drive me away; I haven't really used Twitter by any means besides Tweetbot in about a decade.
They're essentially different issues. The journalists, and the Fauci stuff, and the unbanning of various Nazis, are all, essentially, content/moderation issues, whereas this is a usability issue.
What happened to "it's a private company! Just build your own!"?
Yes, if this inconvenience is the case, this is definitely the last straw. Despite yours, and apparently the new owner's perspective, not everyone on twitter talks about or cares much for Tesla and metadrama, it's the people we follow, and how.
But half of my timeline, and most of my colleagues have left, the only thing that has kept me on so far is that the Tapbots Mastodon app https://tapbots.com/ivory/ isn't ready yet, because I like their UIs. Meanwhile I've collected lists and screenshots of where the people leaving said they were going. I've not had an actual reason to physically move over yet though; forced to use the site would be that.
I've been using third-party clients for over a decade, every time I've had to use the site directly it has been a nightmare. With a client app you never saw people you didn't follow anyway, and so as long as it's more effort to leave than stay... you don't have to think about it. Even if it is only specific third-party clients - then even the job of searching for and finding a different client is more effort than I want to put towards this site and its new ownership..
Silencing of journalists, banning accounts for saying mastodon, for saying anything negative about tesla or criticizing Musk in any way is a net positive to my twitter experience. I'm on twitter because some people that I follow and some friends are on twitter, and I want to see what they say. Meta commentary about the platform or the owner is noise to me. I do not feel any shame about it, just like I don't feel any shame because I don't contribute to most software that I use, or that I don't help every single person that is going through a hard time.
I've met a lot of wonderful people that do lots of things to help other people, and try generally to improve the world in their own way. They all objectively do more than me, and yet not a single one of them wasted time trying to shame me because I "didn't do enough". If I had to guess, that would be because it's not effective at all, maybe even detrimental to what you're fighting for. It's your ego being in the way, caring more about being right than doing good.
which other social app allows using chronological-mode?
Tumblr is still chronological i believe, with ads injected in to the timeline of course.
Other API apps like Movetodon and Tweetdelete still work, it looks like it's only third-party clients like Tweetbot and Twitterific that have stopped working.
They're also gone from my Connected Apps.
This makes it look deliberate.
I checked my Connected Apps list and can still see Tweetbot there, but it said I approved those permissions back in 2011, is ”Tweetbot for iOS” the same as the current Tweetbot available in the App Store?
No. The current subscription-based version required new auth when released (was a separate app).
Developers are saying their apps are showing as "SUSPENDED" due to rule violations in the Twitter developer console
https://mastodon.social/@mttvll/109680889237002903
https://mastodon.social/@bigzaphod/109682991853787913
Fenix also got removed from my connected apps and can no longer update its timeline. Feels like they're intentionally removing authorization for third party clients
The Fenix developer has said his app was suspended from Twitter for rule violations https://mastodon.social/@mttvll/109680889237002903
My API access is working fine
Don't worry, Clownlon will quickly rewrite the Twitter API service this weekend, make it as "beautiful as Niagra Falls", and hand it off to the Twitter engineers to maintain.
Pretty sure my Twitter bot is still happily tweeting via API (on a periodic cron job, doesn't seem to have missed it's post schedule). I'm not at my computer right now but I'll check my logs later and see if I got any errors.
Same. The API seems fine, just specific applications that have had their access revoked.
This. I immediately checked my IRC/IM bots and other tools that uses the API, they still work perfectly. So it looks like it's a sort of crackdown against third-party clients, and not API wind-down or technical issue (why would a technical issue only block some?).
I noticed an error on Twitter an hour ago. It looks like there are old school radio buttons peeking out from behind Twitter-style checkboxes that are (I think) supposed to cover them entirely: https://imgur.com/a/HCWmfgS
Would be interesting to inspect element and see if there are new radio options.
It would not surprise me if this is the end of third party clients and the new owner has removed access. Very disappointing if he has, particularly if he's done it with zero notice too.
He has been making significant noise of feature changes in the official client coming in the next couple of weeks. Removing the third party client access would align with that, along with removing the little "posted by ..." note on each tweet a couple of months ago.
I wander if the new policy is that you can't have an app that's main feature is replicating the existing functionality of twitters main app. That seems to be the rumour over there.
Publishing apps like Buffer and Typefully are still working.
Nah, most likely Elon pulled the plug on one of those servers that "nobody knew what it was used for" and brought the API down
(or maybe API prod was running in somebody's computer and their office got evicted - who knows)
It's clear that it's not a general API outage, specific "reader" apps have been removed/blocked, including from peoples "authorised apps" in their accounts.
This is not an "API Outage", I think we can be 99.9% sure it's a removal of specific apps.
Could it just be an anti-abuse system going wrong, and reader apps are targeted because they exceed some threshold?
Even with Musk's antics I don't see what would they gain by blocking API clients without announcing it - it would take Musk 30 seconds to tweet "oh btw third-party clients are done for" and would at least give everyone clarity.
Ok, so you may be right and my estimate of 99.9% is probably over zealous.
But to play devils advocate, say you are thinking of removing third party apps. You want to test the waters and see if users who use them continue to visit at the same rate when forced to use the official client. You schedule a quite "blocking" of the apps for the evening PT, your team can happily sleep through the noise generated and have the data in the morning from Asia/Europe of how people reacted.
In the morning you make the call as to whether to stick with the plan or say it was an errant moderation bot.
That may be to much 4d chess though...
Elon, the real life chaos monkey
yeah he probably grabbed an extension cord, unplugging the toaster that twitter is currently running on, to strangle a baby and take its candy
I bet there are people who make Twitter applications for a living. How is he damaging.
Oh sure, I feel incredibly sorry for small business and indi-developers who may loose their income from this. I hope they have contingency plans for this eventuality and have started to diversify.
There is also a whole ecosystem of "publisher" apps like Buffer and Typefully that haven't been blocked yet, if I was them I would be very worried right now.
Twitter should've announced this, giving developers time to switch.
You can't announce anything if you've fired the comms team.
Elon fired the Tesla PR team and yet announcements still are made, usually as Tweets from him. It sucks, but a comms team isn’t necessary assuming you are ok with substandard communication.
and yet announcements still are made
Elon's tweets aren't the same as announcements from Twitter. He tweets as an individual. Twitter, the company, is a blackhole as far as comms goes. There is no news in any official capacity from the company any more.
The @TwitterSupport account occasionally posts news announcements
I’m not saying it’s sane, but in his eyes, yes they are, just like his tweets about Tesla.
Sure, no news in any official capacity if you ignore
https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety
https://twitter.com/TwitterMktgJP
https://twitter.com/TwitterMktgUK
https://twitter.com/TwitterMktgKR
https://twitter.com/TwitterEng
https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport
https://twitter.com/TwitterBusiness
https://twitter.com/CommunityNotes
https://twitter.com/TwitterMktgDACH
https://twitter.com/Policy
https://twitter.com/twitter
I don't understand why you'd make up a claim like this that's easily disproven.
I paid for Tweetbot on iOS for a few years. Canceled that sub when I closed my Twitter account a month or two ago. Sorry Tweetbot devs.
Does anything stops devs from using the Web interface instead of the API? Sure it makes it a bit more challenging because parsing is involved but AFAIK it is completely legal to parse and display HTML output however you want. It's essentially like a browser add-on.
I wonder if Twitter can be killed by the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy?
So:
1. Make a client that combines Mastadon/Others and Twitter feeds, making it switching out of Twitter frictionless.
2. Provide extra functionality for non-Twitter posts, encouraging the use of the non-Twitter services.
3. Once have a good traction, penalize Twitter post to further push non-Twitter adoption. Eventually remove Twitter support completely.
4. Profit??
you get into an armsrace where twitter will obfuscate the markup to just wear out the scraper devs. which they can, because $$$
Then just OCR the rendered output. It's cheap and easy these days.
i heard it works best on iphones, best of luck
Apple’s vision framework is actually very good, so effective on-device extraction is really just a few lines of code on iPhone(all Apple device tbh).
Good luck OCR-ing images and videos, though. Twitter isn't just text.
Why do I need to OCR images and videos? Why not display those as-is?
Which one do you show for which tweet, if all you have is the OCR (that is, you can't read the markup)?
Apple's vision framework is not limited to text, can detect shapes and other things.
Twitter WebUI loads images and videos when you scroll. Which means you have a good signal what image and video is associated with what tweet.
Doing this requires a fair amount of development time, especially when you can break something else with this and you previously removed all the guardrails.
That didn't stop Facebook doing it (and breaking all kinds of stuff in the process).
Did Facebook lay off half of the company before they did it?
Facebook had far more engineers available to do this sort of work.
They don't do this when they can just disable the app without being logged in.
While it's quite possible to build an app that way, using scraping. The danger is that users of that app will get suspended from Twitter (users have explicitly agreed not to scrape), once thats happened to a couple of users, thats the end of your app.
Obviously you can try to obscure that you are scraping, but that is difficult to get right and there is no way back once you get it wrong.
On Apple devices that wouldn’t be an issue because you you can load the Twitter Web interface into a real Safari and get the markup from there for processing. Twitter can try things like CAPTCHA but this will degrade the experience for all Twitter users and you can simply delegate this CAPTCHA to your user to solve anyway.
While for reading that works, there is an easy why via posting to spot people use that app. They can change at any moment the input names so that when posting a tweet you are exposing that you are using the scrapping client.
Remember that you are loading full Twitter website in the background. You will use their original interface to post Tweets.
Yes, but the app is not a human and will likely interact with the website in a more predictable (and thus, detectable) way than the human itself would.
But you also have a human using the app, you can transfer the interactions with your app to the Twitter's Web UI.
Apple wouldn't permit such an app in the store so it's a moot point.
Why do you think that Apple wouldn't permit it on AppStore?
There are already apps like this on the app store
If something is built as a browser extension and the requests it sends look like the browser would normally then it must be hard to detect.
The requirement for the extension/plug-in has to be that: it looks like someone uses Twitter normally.
Where can I vote for this project?
You will have 2 problems with this:
1) the law, at least in the US. Laws such as copyright and maybe even the CFAA have been abused to outlaw adversarial interoperability. You'd need to either practice good opsec and operate anonymously or be based out of reach of US-allied law enforcement.
2) Apple (and maybe Google too?) - they will remove any client for a third-party service unless said client has explicit approval from the third-party, all the way up to ridiculous levels such as rejecting an app using the LAN API of smart home devices explicitly designed for this purpose: https://community.lifx.com/t/app-store-rejection-permission-...
Can you elaborate on the first point?
Apple might not be such a big issue because they allow reader apps. I guess they can ban you to improve their relationship with Twitter but you can also throw a subscription service as an IAP to improve your odds :)
Another point to show what Apple's true goal is: To kill general computing. If you buy an iPhone you should be able to run whatever app you want on it. But no, Apple knows best and will not permit you to do anything it doesn't approve of.
As for the APIs being copyrightable see Google vs Oracle.
I hear this sentiment quite often on HN. Maybe I’m missing something but was this tacked onto the end of those stone tablets that Moses brought down from the mountain?
If not, then it seems like people want this to be a statement of fact when the reality is much closer to:
Don't know about Moses, but here's what iJesus had to say:
https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-...
Yeah it's almost like he changed his mind? I don't know, I'm not too bright.
I'm also not in the habit of crying about what was said 15 years ago and what has clearly changed since then.
I never made a comment about your intelligence, but you may wish to re-evaluate your comprehension if a simple refutation strikes you as 'crying'.
Apple's goal was to kill malware, not general-purpose computing[0] as a whole. Unfortunately it turns out that killing general-purpose computing is an instrumental goal[1] to killing malware: if you want a phone that cannot get a virus then you need someone pre-approving every line of code that hits the processor.
Once you have any entity having control over your device, even if it is for your own benefit and you completely trust that entity, a whole bunch of other competing business considerations come into play. In the case of adversarial interoperability, that means business risks that Apple doesn't want to take on. Let's say that tomorrow Elon Musk goes absolutely insane[2] and decides that third-party Twitter clients are hacking as defined by the CFAA. If Apple knowingly distributes those clients, then they could be held criminally liable for signing and distributing the app.
Less dramatically, adversarial operability implies a lot of support headaches. Apple wants to sell working software, not stuff that needs updates every few hours to keep ahead of updates done on Twitter's side to kill it. Even if they wanted to fight for adversarial interop in court, the underlying constraint of "pre-approve software updates to keep malware away" makes updating the software in real time to work around Twitter's workaround to the software untenable.
For a non-Apple, pre-everything-being-locked-down example of how much of a pain adversarial interoperability is in practice, there's the time Microsoft tried to make MSN speak to AIM. They stopped once AOL started using buffer overflow exploits to validate that you were running AIM[3]. AOL did not need to actually sue Microsoft with a spurious application of the CFAA. They just needed to wrap their API and client in enough garbage to make interop monetarily painful to support.
[0] In the Cory Doctorow sense
[1] AI safety term for "thing you need to do to get to other things you want".
[2] More than he already has
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-7PjunSxLU
Pretty sure Section 230 of the CDA shields Apple from liability when it comes to what apps users create and share via Apple's App Store platform.
The truth is that the App Store lock-in is about securing Apple's moneyhose, and user "security" is an afterthought.
The time of CFAA being wielded to suppress interoperability is over. The Supreme Court's 2021 ruling of Van Buren vs United States put an end to it.
Malware/app security is always the excuse when it comes to app stores, though.
But there's no excuse that their OS can't sandbox apps as best it can to prevent issues like this. Sure there will still be scam apps, but it should be a lot easier to install apps from outside of an app store.
It's just a blatant money grab otherwise; Spotify for example is extremely trusted and unlikely to be malware - why can't they have an "install" button on their site to install their app? Because companies that run the app stores want a cut.
Why aren't mobile OS' more like desktop OS'? Everyone acts like it's about security but then we get things like Pegasus and Google's Project Zero which is constantly finding stuff anyway.
Even now the granularity on permissions and the main problem of user apathy towards this stuff are solvable. I'm on Android and I still don't understand why an app can only ask for gallery permission/access to all files and why I'm not able to only grant it read access to a particular folder in a streamlined way.
All of this stuff should be designed around a user's intentions.
You shouldn't even need to run an "app".
A phone is no different from a laptop, except that it is smaller and the mouse/keyboard are part of the screen. On my phone, I should be able to:
* Open an IDE and write some code.
* Compile my code (depending on the language).
* Run my code.
The whole concept of "app stores" is absurd. In 10 years, will we be denied sudo rights on our laptops? Will we need to pay a 30% cut to Apple for every program that we install, plus $99/yr if we want the privilege of building code for our own device?
More and more likely. In 10 years' time I'd love to be off the Intel/Apple Mx train and using devices that can run desktop Linux with with RISC-V and Raspberry PI-like SoCs.
Yes, you're 100% right, of course. This just goes to show how much we've lost.
This is exactly why I bought Librem 5 smartphone, which can do all these things and can even serve as a laptop, if you connect a keyboard and a screen.
If it could only also serve as a smartphone I'd have one already.
Using it as my daily driver. Depends on your use case though. Sent from my Librem 5.
Apple ships an app THEMSELVES that enables this (for iPad anyway) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/swift-playgrounds/id908519492 and there are third party apps for general programming as well. I have one for Python (Pythonista) and one for C# and F# (Continuous) on my iPhone right now. There is a HUGE selection of similar apps for general purpose computing on iOS.
These are unique platforms with unique properties in their design. You value them or you don't. Nobody's forcing you to use them for general purpose computing and there are thousands upon thousands of BRAND NEW general purpose computing products with zero restrictions produced every year. People in this thread are being drama queens.
In ten years everything will be the same because Andreas Wendker told us that Macs will stay Macs the way we know and love them. He’s neither in marketing nor in sales but an engineer so obviously what he says must be the truth, to put it sarcastically.
«Macs will stay Macs the way you know and love them. They will run the same powerful Pro apps. They will offer the same developer APIs Macs have today. They will let users create multiple volumes on disks with different operating system versions and they will let users boot from external drives. They will support drivers for peripherals and they will be amazing UNIX machines for developers and the scientific community that can run any software they like.»
Source: https://scriptingosx.com/2020/06/macos-11/
Regarding point 1, recent judicial decisions on scraping seemed to have entrenched it as legal.
On two, it seems like they are concerned with trademark to me. A workaround could be making a website that parses and displays Twitter content and call it something else. Then, in an app, make no mention of Twitter and only the website.
1) The Supreme Court's 2021 ruling of Van Buren vs United States CFAA ended the era of the CFAA being used as a legal tool to stop interoperability.
2) You can use another company's marks, names, etc. to indicate your product works with their product. You have to follow some guidelines.
I think you'll have the same problem as Twitter with #4!
Fair point. Maybe have a paid subscription with features that benefit social media professionals? There are some popular and profitable services economy built around social media.
I think the tools running on top of twitter are more profitable than twitter itself.
I’ve done this recently. Essentially created a browser extension that combines Mastodon and Twitter on twitter.com. It works surprisingly well, but I’m guessing catching up with Twitter.com changes is bound to be painful.
You can find it here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastodon-chirper/l...
Perhaps it should be handled in the same way the YouTubeDL (YT DLP) team handles changes in the html.
I'm not familiar with how they do that, can you expound on it?
Can't we have the EU force them to provide an API and thus interoperability with competitors?
Also, the whole silo thing reminds me of the old telephony days. We got over that, so what is the problem now?
I don't think they'll force a specific API, but the DMA forces messaging companies to interoperate and I wouldn't think Twitter would be exempted.
I wouldn't be surprised if the EU would force Twitter to interoperate with ActivityPub if they go so far as to disable API access. The EU already has their own Mastodon server so some people already have knowledge of the possibilities of decentralised social media and they also have a huge anti-big-tech stance.
Maybe, but it took them over 4 years to rule that Facebook was breaching the GDPR even though a just a casual reading of the legislation would've given you this answer.
Maybe they'll "force" them... in so long that Twitter may not even exist anymore.
Why are people jumping to a ridiculous conclusion about the API being removed, especially because it's literally in the middle of the night in California? Like why assume the much more reasonable opinion that it's simply an outage.
Because the API is still up for other apps.
API keys are showing up for developers as "suspended".
(Did you ever work in Houston, and does your first name start with M?)
That is why companies should always stay vigilant about platform risk. In general, own your platform, don't built your business on someone else's platform, it is too easy for them to deplatform you on their whim.
It's worked for them for the past 12 years
Sure. But remember when the API went from
"build something cool with our data!"
to
"build something cool with a limited set of data"
to
"pay us a ton of money for full data"
to
"pay us a ton of money for full data if you meet these internal requirements that assuredly mean we will monitor to make sure you don't compete with us"
to ... well, we'll have to see.
Yeah, just start your own Twitter if you want to build an app for it.
Or you could run your own website. This would also let your viewers browse your website freely without being hindered by a login wall.
No matter what most of us do, we’re at the mercy of a single search engine.
User-compiled list of banned apps: https://twitter.com/takke/status/1613796340869496832
Edit: Direct link to Google Sheets: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1O27Co27g2fWRon7gK79R...
Ironically I’m having trouble reading this because I’m on my phone and Twitter URLs go to Tweetbot. So I’m guessing that’s on the list.
Twitter allowing ban evasion and discussions about it had been a real clever move IMO. Users make a lot of noises and calls for exodus, none working, because it always happens inside the very platform.
Indeed, never discount network effects. The amount of people that moved to Mastodon (and crucially, have actually continued posting there and haven't moved back) is miniscule compared to Twitter's overall userbase.
It's not really "none working". It's different from community to community. Some of them did close to a mass migration. Enough that my plain Twitter timeline is extremely quiet now. Not everyone will see the same effects though.
It was real clever how they revoked the only means I was willing to access their service. Good for them, really sticking to their guns and committing to that “burn it all down and let God sort it out” approach.
By accessing an external client do you count as a monetizable user?
If Twitter tried, yes. I already paid for a client app, why wouldn’t I pay for the server access?
I pay for Twitter Blue even though I use Tweetbot; instead of shutting it down maybe require Blue if you want to use a third party app? I'm willing to pay for services that provide some utility.
He was presumably making the network more valuable by using it, though
Can we not call them "banned apps". The more likely thing that happened is one of the APIs isn't working (Twitter has 5 different APIs).
The apps disappeared from users’ authorized apps lists and are showing as suspended in developers’ accounts. That can’t plausibly be explained by API being down, although it could be by e.g. a trigger-happy banbot.
The developers are saying their apps have been suspended in the Twitter app center, due to rule violations. Other, non-client apps (like Movetodon) using the API work fine.
https://mastodon.social/@mttvll/109680889237002903
https://mastodon.social/@bigzaphod/109682991853787913
Hey man where'd you go.
Did someone play around with the servers again? :) Maybe he chewed on some server cables this time
it's working for my scripts
Ironically, we can know about this through posts to the FediVerse from the developer of Tweetbot, and ensuing discussion.
* https://tapbots.social/@paul/109679939029741163
There are additional reports in the #TwitterDown and #TweetBot hashtags on the FediVerse.
* https://tapbots.social/tags/twitterdown
* https://tapbots.social/tags/tweetbot
https://twitter.com/tweetbot/status/1613763746437947394?s=20...
Well, I hope they don’t mess with Tweetdeck.
Is this potentially retaliatory to negative responses to recent Twitter Blue changes?
I saw that Twitter started displaying Blue subscriber tweets in a rather obnoxious way, which resulted in non-subscribers removing and blocking subscribers. I’ve also seen that some users were subscribing Blue expecting their deboosting penalties to clear, only for it to be worsened.
That weakly suggests to me that Blue subscriber demographic is split between undesirable users, either undesirable to other users or to Twitter itself. If so, …
What way is that? Looks the same on my end.
Basically replies of subscribers get pushed to the top, so if you do a quick scroll you’ll see as if everyone is subscribed. If you expand, you’ll see everyone else.
Oh wow, never noticed this. Thanks!
I don't think that would have any impact on API downtime.
The issue with the new Twitter Blue users is one of adverse selection. Those that are 'verified' pre-takeover usually understand how Twitter works, in terms of how to drive engagement, likes etc.
Those that are new Twitter Blue-verified, are not as experienced, and it's pretty clear from the content of their tweets that they have recently purchased their status.
I wished everyone who Tweets would also post to the Fediverse. Because fediverse nodes like Mastodon support RSS out of the box.
Twitter is my only news source that I cannot consume via RSS. So if you publish something on Twitter, you miss most of my attention and only catch it if I log into Twitter that day.
Or post to your personal website and have it support RSS or Atom. It is super easy to implement. Or if you use a ready made cms like Wordpress, it usually supports it out of the box.
I do the reverse. My primary is now Mastodon, and I use a relay. I do have to pop into the birdsite to check replies, though. That's about all I do with it now.
just a tip, if you really need it for some interesting accounts, you can consume twitter feeds as RSS by using nitter, eg: https://nitter.net/dril/rss
Japanese Twitter app "feather" seems to have posted a screenshot of their Twitter API key being "suspended".
https://twitter.com/feather_ios/status/1613749938428727297
That's certainly worrying.
Fenix and Twitteriffic developer have also confirmed their apps have been suspended
Fenix, my favourite android twitter client is down too: https://twitter.com/mttvll/status/1613809046527541248
Seconding the appreciation of Fenix. Using the official app after being accustomed to Fenix is such a let down.
Actually Fenix being blocked would get me to use Twitter less. The official app is so annoying.
Same. I have reduced my usage since last month. If they block Fenix, that's it from me.
Surely someone at Twitter has to say something official about whats going on here. There’s no way they can continue radio silence.
What was it, “Twitter, which may no longer have a public relations department, did not reply to a request for comments”?
True but they still managed to communicate the new timeline changes somehow. One would hope that someone could at least acknowledge an issue seven hours or so after it’s happened.
Why would they acknowledge it? "We are killing our competitors" doesn't spin well, so might as well ignore it
If that is their intent, then yeah - bit ruthless and self-defeating but I sort of get it. But it is a possibility that there was a fuckup, some clients got deleted, and they’re either working on resolving it (and failing) or the only people left who can fix it are in a time zone where they’re still asleep. eh we will see I suppose
Why not?
Good lord people... Why is everyone jumping to "this is the end of the Twitter API" when in reality it's late at night in California and is much more likely a simple outage. Everyone needs to cool their jets. I don't understand the hyperbole. Every new thing that happens at Twitter is a new "this is the end of Twitter" even though it never is.
I have seen a handful of “this is it” comments out of ~180 in total and they were all downvoted to 0 or less. Most of the rest of the comments are people trying to figure out wtf works and doesn’t or people speculating if Twitter are moving to kill off 3rd Party apps (and whether they’d have to move to Twitter mobile web).
Almost every top post is a "this is it" post, along with many of the second level posts on the top posts that aren't.
The top few comments are…
Top: speculating about 3p clients “It would not surprise me if this is the end of third party clients …”
Second: about lack of comms, “Ironically, we can know about this through posts to the FediVerse from the developer of Tweetbot, and ensuing discussion.”
Third: list of banned clients
Fourth: link to API status visualisation
Fifth: your comment
Sixth: someone saying that they don’t want to use Twitters own app so they’ll just quit
are we looking at the same thing?
They've reshuffled a bit since I posted. The second was the top. The sixth was father down. My comment isn't in the top posts.
Top is fine, second is one of them, third is one of them (nothing's banned as far as we know), fourth has several top level posts saying it, seventh that you don't list is another "this is it".
They've shuffled now, but smcl's comment was only a few minutes after yours
I am not seeing these. In second place, you're referring to samwillis' post? They are speculating if it's the end of third party clients not Twitter the organization.
We all know Twitter will eventually go down.
It's just fun to speculate on how long it takes for a complex software system to collapse without maintenance.
Elon isnt going to buy you a horse for defending his virtue online.
Not with that attitude! Just need to believe harder!
You have to go much harder if you want a horse
It's funny how I hear this canned nonsense on any post regarding Elon.
You really think he will buy you a horse?
Well, yes, obviously. Why did you think he had all those weird defenders on Twitter? That's why they had to build those cars in a tent; factory was being used for horse payment logistics purposes.
Was this when Musk was sleeping on the production line? Horses... now that is "going hardcore" (and probably not legal in most states).
It's worth noting that we've been here before; back in 2012 Twitter attempted to curtail third party clients (albeit in a far more organised, less haphazard way): https://thenextweb.com/news/twitter-4
Eventually, they stepped back from the brink, presumably after realising that it was a phenomenally stupid idea (while the fraction of Twitter users using third party clients is likely small, anyone who's anyone uses a third party client; this will vastly disproportionately hit influential users). We'll see if new leadership learns the same lesson.
I was the creator of Twidroyd (First and biggest Android Twitter app w/ ~70% marketshare) and there was a larger story behind the first big anti-3rd party move. Basically we had some plans to bring users over to a new network after we got acquired by Idealab — and Twitter got wind of it. Think Mastodon 2010 style.
Uhh, need more details! What happened?
Twidroyd was one of my frequently used clients back when I had a Nexus phone, along with Seesmic client.
Nexus was already a Mercedes phone. We started when there wasn't even a physical device on the market.
Juicy story. I'm all ears.
This sounds fascinating, would love to hear more?
I wrote a paper on you and a couple of other third-party Twitter clients in undergrad on the importance of modern day brand preservation and protection for an integrated marketing class while this was playing out. In a roundabout way, you kind of helped me get an A in that class! :D
Lol, speaking of brand protection, there's even a reason why the app had to be renamed to ...droyd from ...droid.
The word “droid” is trademarked by Lucasfilm
That's not the "droid" you are looking for.
Naming your app as a portmanteau of two trademarked brand names is certainly brave!
E.g.: https://www.reuters.com/article/idIN341190544020111017 https://allthingsd.com/20111017/bill-gross-new-social-networ...
Has there been any interest in telling this story in any rich medium (podcast, long form article, 30 minute youtube video, documentary, netflix series). Not only does that sound super interesting, but now that most/all of Twitter Execs have moved on - I wonder if you'd be able to get Twitter's side of the story as well.
Twitter was a different shop back then — You could literally jump on a call with Ev et al (and even humans at Google when it came to Android) but while significant decisions were made at the time, it's nothing more than a melancholic blip in tech history. Strangely enough, I'm working on a new product in this space but it won't touch Twitter's API for sure :)
And Facebook 2007(?)-style: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interopera...
That's even what caused the creation of App.net (as a social network): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net
At the time I backed it at the developer tier as soon as the crowdfunding campaign was available and keep fond memories of it.
I really enjoyed using App.net for the brief time it flourished.
there have been a handful of App.nets created in the last couple of months (Post, Spoutible, Hive, T2, et cetera). they'll all probably suffer the same fate too.
This wikipedia list will be there for them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
The proper term is, of course, Apps.net.
Wow I remember that.
We'll see if new leadership is capable of learning any lesson at all
Narrator: They are not.
I wouldn't be surprised if Elon blocks access to apps like Tweetbot since they don't serve ads and therefore provide no revenue to Twitter (and users are unlikely to quit Twitter altogether because of it). An alternative route would be to allow third-party apps as one of the "features" of a paid Twitter account--that actually makes some sense. In fact, I'd be surprised if Musk didn't do something like this.
In 2012 Twitter did not have as established a user base as it does today esp among media, companies, politicians, influencers, celebrities, so there's less risk of dropping third-party clients than there was back then.
I don’t think this is true at all. If Tweetbot doesn’t come back I doubt I’ll ever use Twitter again; the website is unusable garbage by comparison. And I think a lot of the most influential power users who drive engagement feel the same way.
Are you an influential power user with tens/hundreds of thousands of followers? If not, then Twitter won't care whether you stay or go.
Here’s an example of those users:
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/01/13/end-nigh-for-th...
I already gave up after the jounopurge (well, I returned for one final poorly-received joke after mentioning prehistoric elephant-like things became thoughtcrime), but if I hadn’t left for ethical reasons, I’d be gone now; I’ve been using Tweetbot for about a decade and find the official web and mobile client borderline unusable.
Twitter's audience in 2012 was significantly smaller. A far higher percentage of users are using the official apps now.
Maybe within the tech space, but again, Twitter's userbase has expanded outside of tech.
Whew I hope this isn’t permanent. I was just starting really like using Echofon to digest my twitter feed. Somehow I have a much more positive experience when I’m not being constantly suggested inflammatory tweets by people I don’t follow and third party apps allowed me what felt like more control there.
I've been active on Twitter for the past 15 years, thanks to its API and nice clients such as Echofon and TweetBot.
I never understood anything to their website nor app, and will certainly not use Twitter any more if that becomes the only way to use it. What made Twitter great is its API and ecosystem around it.
In case anyone is interested I made a browser extension which helps you transition to Mastodon. What it does is it injects Mastodon posts into your Twitter.com timeline so you can slowly but surely get exposure to more and more of the Fediverse while keeping the familiar Twitter UI.
It’s available here https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastodon-chirper/l...
My site makes heavy use of the emoji font made by Twitter. They used to provide a CDN for it “https://twemoji.maxcdn.com/2/twemoji.min.js?12.0.0”.
It seems to be down as well. I knew it would happen with the whole Elon Musk stuff but that still makes me very unhappy.
That's unrelated from this, MaxCDN is shutdown to my knowledge.
On their Github repo check the CDN section: https://github.com/twitter/twemoji
MaxCDN is down.
Most public nitter instances have had issues in recent weeks also. Its not 100% down, but sometimes you need 3-5 refresh to get a tweet.
Unsurprisingly, the outage hasn't affected twitters own client.
Roll on May 2023. Unless twitter want to block the EU, they will have to provide the same level of access to 3rd party clients as they do their own. If the API is down for 3rd parties, but not for twitters own client, that will be considered a breach.
Is Twitter actually considered a gatekeeper by the DMA?
Not automatically, as they dont meet the turnover/market cap requirement - but the EC can still label them as one following market investigation.
A breach of what?
The EU's Digital Markets Act.
Does it even apply to something like Twitter? If it applies to Twitter then surely that means it also applies to Youtube? Does that mean youtube-dl must be officially supported? I thought it only applied to digital markets (stuff like amazon, google's advertising platform, etc)
Actually, no, it doesnt apply to twitter right now (turnover and market cap is too low). But EC can assign status anyway following market investigation.
It absolutely does apply to Youtube (finally some way to challenge youtube!), but im not sure how that affects the use of youtube-dl.
The DMA covers ten core platform services:
How do you know that, by the way? I've been trying to find this kind of info about Twitter, but I haven't really found anything.
The word 'market' here is being used in the same sense it's used in 'common market' or 'free market', not as in literally a place that directly sells things to consumers.
Speaking of which, I wonder if the DMA would finally let us get decent RSS bridges for Instagram and Facebook. At least we already have that for Twitter.
Sadly, I suspect (while not having read the DMA myself) that what it would require is some kind of published format for interoperability...meaning that Facebook would publish the FacebookStream API and Instagram would publish the InstaStream API, neither of which would actually look like any existing formats (or each other).
Would this work to get the EU to say they've fulfilled the DMA's terms? No idea. But Facebook has yachtloads of cash to throw at legal battles, especially where it sees a potential existential threat.
That's fine, a third party will ingest both and publish normalized feeds.
The question is: is blocking the EU a flex that Twitter could successfully achieve? Would there be sufficient backlash against regulators to grant an exemption?
More like 2027. Keep in mind the GDPR became effective in 2018 and it took just now for Facebook's blatant breach of it to finally be ruled in breach despite this being obvious with just a casual reading of the regulation.
Did you look at the Digital Market's Act? It's not at all going to be allowing 3rd party clients for services lol.
This is more than a stretch of interpretation, it's wishful thinking.
Allowing 3rd parties to interoperate with the gatekeepers own services is one of the core obligations...
Maybe you are thinking of something other than the DMA?
The "API" isn't "down", these specific apps have been suspended in the developer center, citing a violation of the Twitter rules. Other, non-client apps still work fine.
https://mastodon.social/@mttvll/109680889237002903
I sure hope this is an accidental outage. Third party clients are low key what keeps me coming back to Twitter.
Sigh. How do I even use the official client in a reasonable way? I want to start over where I left off, with unread tweets left chronologically to scroll.
The official client all seem to show the most recent tweets so I have to scroll down backwards in time?
The official client is not designed to make Twitter reasonable to use, it is designed to show you ads.
Yeah. I could stand an ad or two maybe, but I really really don't want any recommended tweets or anything non-chronological. Any ideas?
No, sorry, I closed my account a month or two ago. Prior to that I used Tweetbot on iOS, which it sounds like they have also nuked. I've since moved to Cohost and Discord, and I continue to post on the Something Awful forums. None of those are Twitter replacements, but I don't miss Twitter at all.
Check out this replacement I made: https://vent.fly.dev
I use Tweetbot for timeline sync and mainly browse my curated lists
Twitter would be unusable for me without this feature
No problems for me with a homegrown app that uses some parts of twitter API.
I only ever use Twitter via Tweetbot, which has never tried to show me something other than a chronological feed of posts from people I follow.
I have absolutely no interest in a curated timeline, so I guess I'm done with Twitter if the API doesn't start working again.
The Twitter app just got an update that makes it easier to switch to the chronological timeline, and it appears to actually stick now. (At least it has so far).
Doesn't avoid the ads though, which are still ubiquitous.
What they can fix in an update, they can take away in another update.
The only safe solution is competition between multiple service providers. If third-party clients are dead... looks like even more of a reason to switch to alternatives like Mastodon?
Twitter wasn't valuable enough to me BEFORE Elon bought it for me to put up with ads. It definitely isn't now.
Yeah, same here. I actually only follow a handful of active feeds, so it won’t be the end of the world either way.
But one thing I’ll miss are the HN feeds, since I otherwise stay off HN. I may have to find an alternative for that, at least, since I don’t want to get (back) in the habit of visiting the HN homepage.
Anyone seen a poll from Musk on this matter?
It's been 16 hours and there's been no communication from Twitter on this. Do they not know what's going on? Not care? Have no respect for their third party partners?
Elon paid $44B for Twitter! He's going to squeeze every short-term dollar out of the platform and count on users sitting back and taking it.
Nitter[0][1] (which does not use the official API) still works.
[0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
[1] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances
how exactly does it get around not using the official API? it scrapes?