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from incredibly uncomfortable Department
When Elon Musk was first considering buying Twitter, he spoke with Jack Dorsey, who said in a text message released as part of Musk’s lawsuit over the acquisition that Twitter ” Musk told Musk that the original sin was founding Twitter as a privately held company, rather than an open source protocol. This was no surprise. Dorsey has more or less said something similar publicly. Musk responded to these texts by calling them “very interesting ideas” and “wanting to help out if I can.”
Elsewhere, Jack says the decision to discontinue the API ten years ago was also one of the biggest mistakes the company made. I and many others agree (and agreed at the time that it was a mistake). The reasoning behind it made some sense — some investors basically bought a third-party Twitter app, effectively wiping Twitter (and Twitter monetization) from under the company. We were trying to, but in the long run, it greatly impeded Twitter’s ability to evolve (initially driven by many third-party developers).
Since the acquisition, Jack has praised Elon, suggesting that Elon will eventually reach the same place in favor of making Twitter a more open, protocol-style social media.
But Elon seems to have other plans.
On Friday we wrote about the Twitter API going down and several very popular third party Twitter apps going down. We pointed out rumors and concerns that Musk intentionally shut down these third-party apps, but refused to go further without further evidence. But now, not only is Mr. Musk repeating his decade-old mistake of his Twitter shutting out third-party developers, but (in Mr. Musk’s own special way) in a stupid and obnoxious way. Evidence seems to indicate that it does.
First, last weekend, the informant reported seeing an internal message confirming that the block was intentional.Various developers all claim to have received zero Information about this (at least compared to 10 years ago when companies explained to developers what they were doing).
When one of our favorite apps, Tweetbot, made a brief comeback, over the weekend there was a glimmer of hope that it might have been an accident. However, this was quickly disproved in a way that effectively showed that it was all intentional. The company switched to a different API key (with much lower limits) to see if it worked again, but it worked temporarily until someone at Twitter unplugged it again. subject to blocking.
The details were explained (on Mastodon, on natch) by Paul Haddad, creator of Tweetbot.
In other words, rather than following in Dorsey’s footsteps by making the platform more open to third-party developers and outside innovation, Musk sees Dorsey as his biggest mistake. It looks like you’re repeating yourself. And trying to bring it all home. This is Musk’s version of “Only I can fix it”.
That was his choice, and it’s not as disappointing today as it was Twitter’s choice a decade ago.Sure, it makes it more Because we already know why it’s a bad idea, and Dorsey explained directly to Musk why it’s a bad idea.
Chris Hockenberry, creator of one of the closed apps, Twitterific, wrote a very worthwhile post about all this. Hockenberry has been in service (and building for it) since his early days. The post is touching, personal and sad.
What bothered me about the final day of Twitterrific was the lack of dignity. No prior notice to the creators, customers just got a weird error and no one explained what was going on. was. Instead, it’s just another scene in an ongoing shit show.
But I think that’s what you should expect from a crappy person.
personally, i’m doneAnd vengeful.
Like Haddad, he now seems to be more focused on exploring what can be done with ActivityPub, the underlying protocol for Mastodon and a range of other services. Expect to see a lot more new development in Mastodon as Musk pushes not only users but also developers to migrate to his Mastodon (every week new new developments making the service better and better) service). It’s a bit of an odd choice for Musk to tell those who make his service useful to help someone else, but Musk doesn’t seem to think much of his decisions carefully.
But at this point, I’m almost astonished Any Developers will create tools for Twitter. Owners don’t have to rely on sites to do this.
Filed Under: Third Party Developers, APIs, Elon Musk
Companies: iconfactory, tapbots, twitter
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