Twitter devs, what's your plan?

[scripting]

Do you have an app that runs on the twitter api? What is your plan for next week?

I'm starting a thread here on the Scripting repo to gather comments.

Let's not use Twitter for this one. 😀

[preslavrachev]

No idea as of yet. We'll most likely go with any price tag, because our products and customers depend on the API access. However, as of this moment, I am still unable to uncover more details about the pricing, or whether it will require regenerating key (and respectively, our customers' tokens), etc.

[scripting]

@preslavrachev -- can you say what your product does, pointer?

I'm glad to hear another perspective, in the echo chamber everyone is angry and won't pay, etc.

For me, I see it as a chance to transition my products in a direction that they were going in anyway, and this way the users don't mind some downtime, because now is when the change has to happen and it's sudden and they'll understand.

It's also an opportunity to get more attention for products that were lost in the crowd on the twitter platform but might get a fresh look in Mastodon-land. ;-)

[scripting]

One thing I wonder, will tweet embeds be included in the new for-pay Twitter API?

If so, imagine all those broken iframes out there on the web!

[scripting]

Starting to do small things for the create corner-turn away from Twitter. We no longer have RT icons on items on the Scripting News website. And there no longer is a button in the upper left corner that lets you log on and off of Twitter. Watch this space for more updates.

[jonsagara]

I had been building app that would (eventually) search the Twitter API for mentions, but I put it on hold when Whatshisface took over.

I think my time is better spent investigating how to do the same with Mastodon. I very highly doubt I will develop against Twitter's API.

[OleEichhorn]

Watching all this with great interest. Implementing a Mastodon API on the theory that whatever wins in microblogging will have one that’s similar.

[scripting]

@OleEichhorn -- are you implementing client support for mastodon api? if so what platform?

[OleEichhorn]

Remember when eBay was free? Then they started charging, everyone said it would die, it did not. Network effect too strong.

Same with PayPal. Started out free (better than free they paid you to sign up) then they started charging, everyone said it would die, it did not.

Agree it’s a big mistake for Twitter to charge for non-commercial use of their API. Could understand wanting to charge Tweetdeck etc but not all the one-offs like me. But will it kill Twitter? Time will tell…

[gruber]

I wrote my own bot for posting links to new DF articles to the @daringfireball Twitter account back in 2010. I can’t see paying $100/month to keep it going, and the price might be higher than that. So I guess I’m just pulling the plug on that account, or else I’ll switch to some other service that uses their own API key.

Feels like Twitter is dying, at least for my audience, so I can’t say I’m all that upset about it. It just seems so fucking stupid on Musk’s part though. Thousands of DF readers enjoy getting those tweets.

[dw808303]

Remember when eBay was free? Then they started charging, everyone said it would die, it did not. Network effect too strong.

Same with PayPal. Started out free (better than free they paid you to sign up) then they started charging, everyone said it would die, it did not.

To my mind, the big difference between those platforms and Twitter is that they started charging while they were still growing. Twitter is actually shrinking, at least among the sort of technical folks that care about APIs.

[scripting]

@dw808303 -- when you say "twitter is actually shrinking" is that based on data or intuition?

@gruber -- i have similar issues. but i have so many connection points with twitter in my codebase, it's basically triage here, what do i care about and how much work is it to convert.

@OleEichhorn -- we'll have to reserve judgement until we hear what the deal is.

in the meantime how ridiculous is it that they give us 7 days notice with no info on what the actual deal is.

that's some seriously bozo platform management imho.

[dw808303]

@dw808303 -- when you say "twitter is actually shrinking" is that based on data or intuition?

I have no access to data (I suspect the true numbers are zealously guarded, especially now), just going by my own experience on the platform (the number of people who have completely stopped engaging with the platform or who have deleted their accounts entirely).

[scripting]

@dw808303 -- this is like the blind men and the elephant, i never trust that kind of impression. when people guess about what i'm doing they always get it wrong. always.

[gruber]

@scripting It’s the bozo-est of bozo platform management I have ever seen.

[scripting]

@gruber — maxed ou the bozo-osity factor. The bozo bit was high. The bozo of all bozos. 🤡

[billstclair]

As far as I know, FeedLand uses Twitter only as an OAuth server. Every Mastodon server is an OAuth server. You probably won't want to let the user select ANY Mastodon server, but you could have a list of known-reasonably-secure servers, and ask the user to pick one. Getting an account on one of them shouldn't be hard.

[scripting]

@billstclair — we’re not going that route.

http://roadmap.feedland.org

@dw808303 — see what I mean? 😀

[billstclair]

Thanks. That works, and matches many sites nowadays.

[easp]

Twitter survived the reign of the Fail Whale due to network effects. For the same reason it may well survive as Elon The Pale flails around.

I think people are wise to be plotting their exit, though, but there is nothing wrong with sticking around to extract as much of the value you built there as possible - use Twitter to launch the post-Twitter future.

Dave has used the analogy of the coral reef to describe platforms and standards. In this case I'd use the example of the carcass of a fallen redwood, or perhaps a dead whale, nourishing new life.

[scripting]

@easp -- coral reefs are formed by sunken ships.

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/artificial-reef.html#:~:text=In%20June%202002%2C%20the%20retired,of%20creating%20an%20artificial%20reef.

[jeffehobbs]

For what my bots do, it's really minimal usage of the API with no interactivity: It's basically posting a bit of text, and often a picture or video to a tweet, and hitting "send tweet" at a specific time.

I plan to see if there's a puppeteer script I can hack together which would essentially automate this (log in to twitter with bot account, post tweet, hit send) so I can keep the bots going. That way I could basically run the whole shebang on a RPi 4/8GB on the cheap.

[jpbutler]

I'll know more when they actually release the pricing. It's a troubling limbo right now.

If it's a monthly developer license ($99/mo), then I can make that happen.

If it's a fee per token, then that's untenable.

Then, there's login...

Right now, Login with Twitter is the one and only one way to log in. This was great at minimizing spam, but I can no longer trust it. I have to implement the "send a magic link to my email" method.

Unfortunately, "one and only one" way to authenticate is pretty low-level in the system. Moving that to "many" ways to authenticate is a big lift.

[scripting]

@jpbutler -- re the magic link to email -- i did that too, started working on it in october and went through extensive testing. that's the problem with stuff like this, shoehorning it in under a big app that's already been through a ship cycle and has actual users is a lot of thankless boring work, with absolutely no upside. I like working on features and fixing bugs in my code, not replace Twitter's or Apple's or whoever decides they hate me this year.

I'm trying to persuade a big tech mogul to sponsor an open source system the users pay for, for storage and identity. I'm going to show him this thread.

[jpbutler]

@scripting

an open source system the users pay for, for storage and identity

I will stay tuned for this.

Life is better as a developer if identity is "containerized" (in the shipping container sense) and better for billions of humans if they can actually control access to their container.

[scripting]

@jpbutler

absolutely agree. that's all twitter was doing for me. if they had any patience or an idea of how this shit works, they were sitting on an AWS size opportunity. i tried to clue jack into this, but he was always dreaming of really cool shit, and all we want is a simple package of services that work and have no patience for science experiments. we'll do the creative stuff, storage and identity has to be boring and reliable, and not subject to having the rug pulled out from us.

[scripting]

I was getting "invalid token" errors from http://radio3.io, from Twitter. I tried logging off and logging back on and am not being allowed to. I see in the log that other users are getting that error as well. It could be their system has failed, or they turned us off.

[OleEichhorn]

Twitter haven't announced pricing yet, have they? They've definitely talked about it internally, must be watching the chatter to help them decide.

I wonder if they'll leave the API free for some use cases? Low volume non-commercial users? Surely they recognize that many (many!) are creating content which they can then monetize, they're not stupid. There is friction in charging anything, even the lowest possible amount, on both sides.

[scripting]

@OleEichhorn -- i wouldn't expect anything thought-out at all, given the way they've handled it so far.

[scripting]

I deleted a spam message here from @timothyjchambers who's been following me around asking me to post his spam and I guess he wanted you all to work for him too. I blocked him on Twitter and here on GitHub. Some of you may have gotten notification via email. Please ignore it.

[gruber]

Musk alluded to proving starting at $100/month, supposedly for just 500 API calls. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1621259936524300289

[preslavrachev]

@preslavrachev -- can you say what your product does, pointer?

@scripting When we developed Murmel, we knew from the start that we'd have to be clever with our API usage, so we can make the best out of the available basic tier limits. This has served us and our customer base well for close to two years, and I am crossing my fingers that it remains this way.

as @jpbutler says, if it's a sort of reasonable flat fee per month, we'd be OK to go with it.

Otherwise, we might have to rethink the business model - e.g. pivot to Mastodon (but who is willing to pay for something like that there), or switch to a B2B model - billing business customers on consumption as well.

As said, crossing my fingers that none of this has to happen overnight 🤞

P.S. On the topic of Mastodon, what do you guys think - how likely are people to pay for SaaS built on top of the Mastodon API?

[OleEichhorn]

probably you-all saw this … so there will be a free tier for low levels of posting … 1,500 Tweets/m is 50/d, seems like that will cover a lot of use cases including Tweets which are links to blog posts

[OleEichhorn]

This seems likely to me: https://indieweb.social/@brentsimmons/109876944430881678

[preslavrachev]

Any updates on the topic? I haven't been able to catch up lately.

[OleEichhorn]

https://www.engadget.com/twitter-announces-new-api-pricing-including-a-limited-free-tier-for-bots-005251253.html

Free tier will be 1,500 tweets/month. That’s enough for many purposes. Including linking to a blog’s posts …

[preslavrachev]

Do I understand correctly that fetching a user's own timeline won't be counted against the 10K tweets cap per month (for the Basic Twitter API tier)? This is a vague glimmer of hope that we might be able to keep our apps running with the Basic Tier.

That is, if we manage to update our apps to use v2 on time.

[scripting]

@preslavrachev -- thanks -- i didn't know 2.0 was a requirement.

[jpbutler]

Yes, 2.0 is a requirement.

I'm having more trouble with the pricing (as a one-man band). If I understand it correctly:

Now: $0, working within Twitter's rules.

Future: $100/mo | $1,200/yr for crippled version of a subset of the current API.

--- or ---

$42,000/mo | $504,000/yr for lowest tier of "enterprise"

My wife reminded me that we don't have an extra half a million dollars right now.

I hope I'm misinterpreting things, because it would be insane if there's no options between $100 and $42,000.

[scripting]

@jpbutler -- what's your product(s)?

[jpbutler]

It is a newsfeed engine for the open web. (One of the curses of being a web 1.0 guy is that I still try to live that way...)

https://serendeputy.com/

How it works: https://serendeputy.com/about/how-serendeputy-works

I wrote an early version of this in 2008, and wrote this version in 2017.

My Twitter integration is currently broken (my app somehow got suspended yesterday morning despite running continuously for five years. I filled out the "what happened?" form, but given how Twitter has been gutted, I don't expect a response any time soon.) Because of that, registration and sign in are currently offline.

I'm trying to figure out what to do next (beyond doing a simple email login). I can excise all the Twitter pieces and still have a useful tool, but it will be less useful. And, that's sad.

[preslavrachev]

Looks like they killed our last glimmer of hope. We were getting ready to go with the Basic tier 😣

Does any of you guys have the Basic tier already? Is it really the case that the reverse chronological timeline call now counts against the 10K cap too?

[scripting]

Most of my apps have now been cut off from the Twitter API. Some comments here on my blog.

http://scripting.com/2023/04/15.html

Dave

[preslavrachev]

We are also giving up (and not giving up at the same time). We've decided to pivot Murmel to the Fediverse. Even opened up a signup list for people willing to enroll in the beta: https://tally.so/r/mOaqGA

[preslavrachev]

I am happy to announce that our plan to move away from Twitter is going according to plan. We have successfully soft-launched Murmel's Mastodon version today! It should offer everything that our existing customers know and love from the Twitter version, but is running entirely on the Fediverse (Murmel and friends). We are hoping that people love it so much that it becomes our one and only instance as soon as this month (well, Twitter won't give us many options anyway).