Remove Twitter Extension

[stuartbreckenridge]

@TwitterDev:

https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1621026986784337922?s=20&t=PH8grgFcRU8-zD1LRernug

The API will be restricted from 9th Febrthe 9th February.

• Do we do anything destructive with the Twitter feeds a user has subscribed to or just leave them as is?
• Do we any any sort of alert in the app to update users (only displayed if they have Twitter feeds)?

[michaeljtsai]

Do we actually know that NNW would have to pay to access the API? Maybe access would be tied to the user’s account so that users who choose to pay would be able to use the API from any client. In that case, the extension should not be removed.

[stuartbreckenridge]

If that happens to be the case, you're still asking NetNewsWire developers to pay for Twitter API access so that we can ensure NetNewsWire continues to work with the API.

(In any scenario, if there's no free tier, we can only continue to support the Twitter extension if we pay for API access.)

[michaeljtsai]

I’m just saying we don’t know how this is going to work yet. If the API restriction is actually about bots, as claimed, maybe read-only access will remain free. If there’s no free tier, maybe interested users and developers would help test or chip in. How does testing work for BazQux, which is not free?

[stuartbreckenridge]

Correct, we don't know how it's going to work yet.

However, we can only react to what we've been told: no free API tier and no app should create a substitute or similar service to the Twitter apps.

[vincode-io]

@michaeljtsai BazQux was super cool and gave me a free account to test with. I usually just keep creating and deleting accounts to use the free trial for other services like Feedbin.

We have to take the Twitter Dev account at their word and do the best we can with it. Just having our Twitter support stop working or throwing errors would be a bad user experience. I don’t see that we have any choice but to take this path.

One thing you could do is not upgrade until after the deadline has passed. If the bots get shutdown and NNW keeps working, you could just not upgrade. If it keeps working, that doesn’t change anything for us. We’re tired of Twitter’s BS. But, if you wanted future enhancements and Twitter support, you could do your own fork and pull in upstream changes for personal use. I’d be happy to walk you through how to get the API keys from Twitter and integrate them securely into you NNW fork.

[michaeljtsai]

@vincode-io Thanks. What happens to iCloud data with a fork? Presumably, it would not have access to the same CloudKit database. If I use my current SQLite database, will it get confused because the existing cloud record IDs are not valid in the new container? Or just re-upload everything as new?

[vincode-io]

@michaeljtsa Unfortunately there isn't a way to migrate to a new CloudKit container. You would have to start all over by importing you OPML file.

[andyzickler]

@michaeljtsai It is not a perfect solution, but https://github.com/zedeus/nitter scrapes twitter and provides rss feeds of accounts. For example you can subscribe to https://nitter.nl/NetNewsWire/rss You can also run your own instance if desired.

[michaeljtsai]

@andyzickler Thanks. I’ve actually been using that for the last few days, and it seems to work well. The downsides are that it doesn’t show replies or private accounts.

[brentsimmons]

Closing this because I think it’s been done. :)