And Tweetbot, and Twitterific, and every other 3rd party app for using Twitter.

Which is ironic since some of those predate the official Twitter app

Ex post facto, as usual.

What are the odds that this whole imbroglio happened because their third-party APIs broke and they can't figure out how to fix them?

The funny part is that there are fairly stable internal (as in, 1p client but open to the internet) Twitter APIs that don't require authentication.

I think that this has a way higher chance of being true than people have been assuming.

The slack convo leak would have been the same either way.

It really has a strong smell of protect-my-ego.

> Goodbye, nitter(?)

That would be devastating for me. Not only it's the only way of looking at anything on Twitter (I invite you to open a thread on mobile. I get 3 modals covering 95% of a screen) but it's also how I follow some accounts via RSS.

Leaving aside why someone is still using RSS in 2023, this is a pretty good user signup strategy. Reddit does it, Instagram does it, probably plenty others. If you block people from viewing stuff without an account... they're gonna make an account.

> Leaving aside why someone is still using RSS in 2023

Because it's superior technology for following posting/news to opening app and praying that algorithm will show me what I wanted? My feeds flow to me at 6:00, via rss2email, and get filtered into a IMAP folder and I can read them at my leisure. Online or offline, with whatever client I have handy.

> this is a pretty good user signup strategy

Nagging only works if I really, really want to see what you hide behind a login screen. For most of the posts on Twitter it won't be worth it.

> Leaving aside why someone is still using RSS in 2023

What do you propose instead?

> Reddit does it, Instagram does it

One website known for its hilariously broken performance and a Facebook subsidiary. Nothing anyone should look up to.

> why someone is still using RSS in 2023

Better question is: why not?

> Leaving aside why someone is still using RSS in 2023

Gen Z? Or just not familiar with the technology? Protocols don't die just because the newer generation doesn't understand them.

Sadly the Gen-Z ers are not used to the term RSS, download and offline. Specially for podcasts.

- Reddit sucks except for old.reddit.com or libre 3rd party sw

- IG it's crapware and unusable with tons of propietary JS.

> If you block people from viewing stuff without an account... they're gonna make an account.

At least for me - I leave. Or in the case of reddit, occasionally use old.reddit.com, which does not block without an account.

> Leaving aside why someone is still using RSS in 2023

I got this article via my RSS client; it's the best way to consolidate everything I follow from YouTube videos to things that hit the front page on HN, all in one place.

Then I can browse through doing my morning coffee.

If you block people they will not know what the content is and move on.

.. or stop viewing. Just like Instagram and Pinterest.

I doubt that Twitter is interesting enough for people who just want to view

If you think RSS is old, wait until you hear about HTML and Javascript!

It's gonna blow their minds when they realize how old Linux is

> I invite you to open a thread on mobile. I get 3 modals covering 95% of a screen

i see no modal on the twitter app :)

Did they change that thing where they want you to log in in order to be able to see Twitter? That was the reason I used Nitter, but I haven't been getting that login popup lately.

At some point I did see or hear Elon say that he also found it annoying, and they were working on disabling it.

Goodbye Nitter indeed. Also, goodbye Twitterific. Goodbye Tweetbot.

Goodbye all methods of accessing Twitter outside of their apps. They took down their API and bypassing this move via internal API's or scraping output via a headless client (thinking of ways forward for Nitter) will surely be seen as intentional to violate this. So, I guess this is the end then.

https://twitterrific.com/beyond

https://twitter.com/tapbots/status/1614041474567372804

Rather than goodbye, won't they move onto using twitter the same way invidious and newpipe use youtube with no "API"?

If the developer even cares what twitter says. Piped exists even though YouTube has the same clause.

The whole point of Nitter is to not give a shit about what Twitter thinks. It's built by screen-scraping the frontend (and using its internal API endpoints) for this reason so it is immune to changes to the official API.

Nitter will be fine and will gain more relevance as a result of this.