In an experiment on Sunday evening, M. Haddad switched out the Twitter API key used by TweetBot, which had already been disabled since Friday 2023-01-13, for an older one that it still possessed that had posting limits. People rushed to confirm that TweetBot was back, only to discover that they could only log in and read, not post. It was approximately 3 hours from then until that API key completely stopped working too, along with all of the other API keys that Tapbots had.
The Twitter API itself is still present, but specific API keys used in several 3rd party apps have ceased functioning.
No developer has received any word from Twitter at all about what is going on.
However, unconfirmed rumour, reported on some WWW sites, had had it that internal communications within Twitter revealed that the disabling of the API keys for specific 3rd-party Twitter apps was intentional, and that Twitter staff had yet to work out how to announce this publicly. M. Haddad took the disabling of the other API keys once they were put into use as confirmation that this rumour was indeed accurate, that this was not an accident or just some bug that would be fixed, but a deliberately targetted move.
This combines with other developments. 3rd party apps could show chronological Twitter timelines, and skip advertisements. The chronological timeline has this same weekend been removed from the Twitter WWW interface and 1st-party app, and the Wall Street Journal reported that the same day that the 3rd party apps stopped working Twitter offered advertisers halved advertising rates if they paid for a blitz of up to $250,000 worth of advertising to Twitter users that must run before 2023-02-28.
* https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-offers-free-ads-b...
Effectively, Twitter is now marketing itself as distinct from the FediVerse, with no 3rd party apps (the FediVerse having several each for iOS and Android, including one in development by Tapbots), an advertising blitz with user attention being sold to advertisers and those who pay Twitter as the funding model (with many FediVerse instances opting for a user-funded or coöperatively-funded model, with organizations that wish an "official" presence funding their own instances for hosting official staff accounts, as Tapbots itself does, and advertisements being banned), and only algorithmic timelines (chronological timelines being the only option in most FediVerse WWW interfaces and apps).
Several users who have disabled their accounts in response to the loss of TweetBot, deleting and archiving all posts, marking the accounts private, and unfollowing everyone, have also reported (in various FediVerse posts) upon checking back that their accounts have had followers re-added to them by Twitter itself.
* https://mastodon.scot/@bodhipaksa/109694529674624449
Unfollowing everyone ensures both that the accounts do not accumulate notifications and concomitant junk e-mail, and that follower counts accurately reflect the real reduced Twitter effectiveness to those others that remain using it. Many (not just Charles Stross) have also stressed the importance of not deleting accounts, and occasional dummy keep-alive posts, in order to prevent impersonation of long-standing public identities. Anecdotal reports over the weekend have already stated much reduced views of Tweets made by those without paid-for accounts, because of the switch to non-chronological viewability only, favouring advertisers and the posts of those who have paid Twitter for accounts. Not paying Twitter is, by those reports, to be no longer read, as much if even at all.