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Twitter's API keeps breaking, even for developers paying $42,000
Browsing the Mastodon profile of someone from my city, I found this post, a couple months old now, about the ways in which Twitter keeps breaking. As the article's subtitle says, "everything worked fine until Elon Musk took over"; it details the ways in which Musk's chaotic reign has supremely fucked the site and alienated not just its users, but also the developers in the Twitter ecosystem, the people who make all kinds of software that hooks into Twitter's API.
Unfollow bots, literary bots, where's-Musk's-plane? bots (the latter of which was naturally the first to be banned) - these all generally rely on API access to get information, send tweets, send DMs. Now, there has always been a precarity in making one's living in the public APIs of major sites: you're relying on not just stability, but goodwill, and it's very easy for both to vanish. In Twitter's case, both did. The stability was remarkably okay until early July, when (it was supposed) some unpaid bills (or at least fuck-you-I'm-not-paying-these-bills) lead to rate limits and yet another bluebird exodus. But if the stability was mostly okay, the goodwill obviously wasn't.
Twitter's new API plan costs up to $2.5 million per year
Musk famously paid (tens of) billions for Twitter, and needed a way to make a quick and heavy profit. There's a bunch of ways to do that, but advertisers didn't seem to be lining up to buy multiples of their current spends, and if anything, Twitter's peak as a cultural force was in the past, somewhere in the 2010s, around the time Trump rose to power and his tacky fascists marched on Charlottesville in their polo shirts and tiki torches.
So what else can you do? Shed costs, aka people. He famously did this, too, the Twitter workforce now a hollow shell. The problem with axing everyone at once (well, over a few months, but you know) is that institutional knowledge takes a nosedive. There's always someone who knows about the weird race conditions, the correct-and-undocument order that servers are supposed to come on in the event of a catastrophic failure. And while these particular cases haven't manifested yet, the few developers left seem to be caught in a mad scramble to implement the ketamine king's edicts. Twitter, of course, is now "X". But I'm not going to refer to it as that here, because fuck him; and X isn't even a good name, it's the sort of shit you do when you're thirteen, like giving your tortured ranger in your buddy's D&D campaign the name "Darkpath", because it sounds cool, and years later you grow out of it and laugh about it. And this is obviously not a hypothetical example (oof), but at least I haven't named everything Darkpath since 1996. Musk, however; well; he keeps naming all his shit X. SpaceX, Tesla Model X, X.com, to say nothing of his own damn son. It's to the point where people are clueing in and we're all side-eyeing him and wondering what the fucking deal is with this guy, anyway.
In amongst the hemhorrage of developers, Twitter has been tinkering with the public API. Removing actions and not documenting it. Changing signatures. And thereby breaking all kinds of software in the Twitter ecosystem, as mentioned above. Not the end of the world for Twitter-the-company, at least not immediately, but a lot of users rely on API stability, whether they realize it or not. If they see all their favourite bots being shuttered because Musk is trying to shakedown nobodies for $100/mo, if they see the bigger tools they use stop working because he wants many times more, well, it doesn't exactly provide a sense of stability. APIs, famously, need to be stable. If not stable, then versioned, so that there is a sense of continuity, an understanding about the expected life, the sunset date, and other such details that developers, even if they don't love them, can use them to plan out roadmaps and coming-years.
But this hasn't been the case and the portcullis around the API has been (in my estimation, anyway) another way in which Twitter has doused its reputation with gasoline and gone looking for matches.
I'll be honest: I'm pretty boring. I tend to use the official sites/tools/apps/whatever. When it comes to Mastodon, I've played around a bit with other clients, and this actually represents growth for me. I had a lot more energy for this sort of thing when I was younger. Different Linux distros, IRC clients, emulators, I'd try two of anything. But since the internet got boring, I played around with things less. I never used any of the reddit tools that got similarly nuked by API-minded decisions, either. But in terms of Mastodon, and my Android phone, I've settled on Moshidon; it seems nice. And the Fediverse is open about its APIs. That's the sort of thing you expect from a bunch of open-source/free software advocates, but it's also increasingly clear to me that it's the sort of thing that any social media site needs going forward.
Because if a site is going to be long-lived, it needs a way of surviving bad actors, whether that's trolls or incels or in a particular case that companies will use as a case study for decades going forward, the site's own owner. Any site that doesn't provide such guarantees isn't serious about the future. And any site that isn't serious about the future isn't something I'm willing to invest in seriously. Because the last 15+ years have been characterized by single points of control, and lack of ownership over one's own data. And going forward, I'm not particularly interested in either. I want to know that what I'm using will be around in 20 years, whether that's the internet (all but certain), the web (pretty likely, but who knows), or a particular edgelord social media site (almost certainly not). And I want to have full control over my data. Not just in terms of not sharing it with the shittiest people I've ever met, but also being able to, well, get it.
I'm less conscientious about this than I should be, but I periodically SFTP my data from RTC and commit it to a private git repo. It's text and it's greppable. More importantly, it's a story, not just about what's going on at this exact moment in time, but about who I was during such. What I was thinking, what I was calling myself - because I'm winter here and nowhere else, and [redacted] elsewhere but definitely not here.
It all feels hypothetical, but it's not: download your data. Keep it safe. Because as things crumble and burn, sites and apps may go black, but you'll always have what you said, and when.