Musk Appears To Have Deliberately Cut Off Popular 3rd Party Apps, And Still Hasn’t Officially Said Anything
Back when Elon Musk was first exploring taking over Twitter, he spoke with Jack Dorsey who (as text messages released as part of Musk's lawsuit over the purchase revealed) told Musk that the original sin" of Twitter was setting it up as a private company, rather than being an open source protocol. This wasn't a surprise. Dorsey had more or less said similar things publicly. Musk responded to those texts by saying super interesting idea" and then that I'd like to help if I am able to."
Elsewhere, Jack has said that the decision to cut off the API a decade ago was also one of the biggest mistakes the company made. I, and many others, agree (and agreed that it was a mistake at the time). There was some sense to the reasoning behind it - some investors were basically buying up 3rd party Twitter apps and trying to effectively swipe Twitter (and Twitter monetization) out from under the company, but in the long run it massively stunted Twitter's ability to evolve (something that had initially been driven by many of those 3rd party developers).
Since the takeover, Jack has praised Elon, and has suggested that Elon will eventually get to the same place he's at in his support for making Twitter a more open protocol-style social media.
Elon, however, seems to have other plans.
On Friday, we wrote about the Twitter API being down, taking a number of super popular third party Twitter apps with it. We noted the rumors and concerns that Musk might have killed off those 3rd party apps on purpose, but refused to go that far without more evidence. But now it appears the evidence shows that Musk isn't just repeating the mistake that Twitter made a decade ago in cutting off third party developers, but (in Musk's own special way) doing it in a dumber, more obnoxious way.
First, over the weekend, the Information reported that it had seen internal messages confirming that the block was intentional. Various developers all claim they've received zero information about this (as compared to the time a decade ago when at least the company explained what it was doing to developers).
There was a brief bit of hope over the weekend that maybe it had been an accident, when one of the popular apps, Tweetbot, briefly roared back to life. But that was quickly disproved in a way that effectively showed this was all deliberate. The company had switched to a different API key (with a much lower limit) to see if they could get it working again, and it worked briefly, until someone at Twitter pulled the plug again, more or less confirming that these popular 3rd party apps are being targeted for blocking.
The details were explained (on Mastodon, natch) by Paul Haddad, the creator of Tweetbot, who said that he had found some old unused API keys" but that Twitter had then killed those as well.
In other words, Musk, rather than following in the footsteps of what Dorsey suggested by making the platform more open to third party developers and outside innovation, appears to be repeating what Dorsey considered his biggest mistake: shutting off the platform from that type of innovation and trying to bring it all in house. It's Musk's version of only I can fix it."
And while that's his choice, as it was Twitter's choice a decade ago, it doesn't make it any less disappointing today. Indeed, it makes it more disappointing, since we've already seen why it's a bad idea, and Dorsey has directly explained to Musk why it's a bad idea.
Chris Hockenberry, who created Twitterific, one of the apps that has been shut down, wrote a really worthwhile post about all this, which he called The Shit Show. Hockenberry had been on the service (and building for it) from the earliest days, and with this he's moving on. The post is touching and personal and sad.
What bothers me about Twitterrific's final day is that it was not dignified. There was no advance notice for its creators, customers just got a weird error, and no one is explaining what's going on. We had no chance to thank customers who have been with us for over a decade. Instead, it's just another scene in their ongoing shit show.
But I guess that's what you should expect from a shitty person.
Personally, I'm done. And with a vengeance.
It seems he, like Haddad, is now much more focused on exploring what can be done with ActivityPub (the protocol underlying Mastodon and a series of other services). With Musk pushing not just users but now developers over to Mastodon, I'm hopeful that we're going to see even more new development happening there (every week I'm seeing new services that are making the service better and better). It's kind of an odd choice for Musk to tell those making his own service useful to go help someone else, but Musk doesn't seem like one to think through many of his decisions carefully.
Though, at this point, I'm almost surprised that any developers are left building tools for Twitter. Why rely on a site where the owner would do this?
Update: About half an hour after this post went up, Twitter posted this generic, meaningless bullshit message about the API, pretending that this was all just about enforcing existing rules.
No explanation is given for what rules were violated. The devs of these apps still say they've received no clear indication about anything, and to post this four days after killing those apps seems just extra obnoxious.