Favstar will shut down as a result of Twitter’s API changes for data streams

They killed off the Windows Twitter app a few weeks ago too, replaced it with an iFrame to www.twitter.com

I really don't understand why a social media site so large and influential is spending so little on their own product. Twitter won't let anyone develop any clients, but Twitter itself won't develop any clients either. Twitter acts like they wished no one would log in at all, they act like they're just waiting to be acquired and shut down.

There was a point in time, around 5 years ago more or less, when third party twitter clients were driving a fair amount of innovation in desktop UI, particularly on OSX. As a mentor I'd even ask if my mentee would want to learn to code by pulling some stuff out of Twitter and putting it in their own design on their own webpage. There was a lot of hope and promise back then, and Twitter was giving a voice to people in harsh regimes as their other modes of contact were being shut down (like with Arab Spring). They looked like they were on the up and up.

I don't think moves like this solve Twitter's existential abuse problem, which I believe has far more to do with their 140 characters and unsolicited heckling than it does anything else. It turns your whole reality into gossip and this gossip overpowers any semblance of rational or reasoned discourse. It's intensely toxic and shutting off an API and some client apps changes nothing about that.

Your comment makes me wonder, did I just enter a time warp back to 2012-2013? (https://readwrite.com/2012/08/16/developers-are-pissed-frust... , https://readwrite.com/2013/03/03/twitter-kills-off-tweetdeck...) I'm frankly surprised at anyone counting on Twitter sharecropping since then.

A follow on from this question is why you’d ever build a company based entirely on analyzing data from another company. Best and worst case scenarios:

* you do something amazing, and start making money. So your source company turns off your access to the data and makes there own version * you never make enough money for them to care/notice you. They remove the source of data for non-competition related reasons/accidentally break the api and don’t care enough to fix it (if you’re not really making money presumably they’re not making money off you)

Shrug - maybe it’s simply a relatively easy way to get to the point where you can say enough buzzwords convincgly to get VC money?

You're absolutely correct re: the history. Twitterrific not only came up with the word "tweet," they were the first one with a blue bird logo!

Twitter basically encouraged a third-party ecosystem to blossom, then decided that rather than finding ways to monetize that ecosystem, they should start slowly strangling it to death. I can't imagine that this is happening because investors are insisting on it; yes, they want a positive return on their investment, but who's really saying, "If only you guys knife Tweetbot, the stock price will double!"? There's a very small minority of users who use third-party clients, but those users are disproportionately the highly engaged "super tweeters," if you will. Is supporting them -- ideally better than they do now -- really so expensive that it's easier to just kill them? And if the answer is yes, is it really better to keep pretending that you're not doing that, and instead just make the experience of third-party developers and dedicated Twitter users steadily worse over time?

> I just find it strange how developer-hostile twitter is, considering the community it once fostered.

Think about the money and it's not so strange. Everyone has a price.

I'm not saying it's right, but it's not a mystery. The got big off the backs of others and they've been screwing them over ever since. People building stuff on top of Twitter are crazy. They've been developer hostile for years and years now.

I’ve been meaning to start my own Pleroma instance due do the excessive hardware requirements of the Mastodon client. How would you compare the two projects since you’ve used both?

I was curious about Mastodon's scale so I grabbed some basic stats last week: https://davepeck.org/2018/05/03/mastodon-stats/

I mean, if they had a decent app I wouldn’t worry, but why they offer can’t be compared to Tweetbot and others.

So tweetbot is dead then?

Why can't twitter make a decent app on it's own? This shouldn't be complicated...

Tweetdeck.

Instead of following people, add them to a list. You get a sequential feed of tweets from everybody in the list, and no ads. Works across all official Twitter clients, no need to worry about API restrictions or token limits.

Not associated with Favstar. But, if you want to call names for someone who wants to make a living on the product they built, then you have a wrong understanding of software.