Third party Twitter clients are down. Does anyone care?

Where is the setting to access it? I can’t see a relevant option in the settings.

Twitter—long before Musk—was working to phase out third-party clients. It started with Tweetdeck, it moved to the delays that were imposed in tweet updates for the third party clients, and now they are finally banned. I loved Tweetbot but abandoned it after the time delay was imposed because I saw the handwriting on the wall

I do not like in the least how Twitter handled this shutdown. It was so seemingly hostile to the developers and users alike. That is a shame.

Mine may be a very unpopular opinion, but not only do I not find Twitter to be a cesspool since the Musk takeover, Twitter seems much better and I am seeing less hateful material. I know I’m not a big research institution doing studies, but my own feed has been much better since Musk.

I think a lot of people have jumped on the Twitter-under-Musk-is-bad bandwagon without objectively analyzing whether that is true or not. I find the debate much more robust and like @mark2741 and @SeanCowdrey mentioned, I appreciate seeing more varied viewpoints—even those with which I might disagree. Without Musk the #twitterfiles would have never been and, at a minimum, they were, as @tgara characterized it, eye opening. I share his recommendation. That level of transparency has given me hope for the platform going forward.

Like some others here have mentioned, I left all social media except for Twitter several years ago. Pre-Musk and post-Musk, I’ve found more real debate on Twitter than anywhere else.

I also find it interesting that Twitter has such an outsized impact despite the smaller user based. I have a number of theories as to why that is, but it’s a testament to how the platform works, the voices it has attracted, and the depth of subjects that are covered. I’m surprised how much meat can be mined on a platform that only lets users type 280 characters… and I’ve been on since it was all done over SMS with half the characters. The early days of Twitter were a lot of fun and the future, I think, will be too. Certainly, it is not as dark as some have proclaimed.

Going back to the client itself, I vastly preferred Tweetbot back in the day, but I don’t mind using the native app. It’s gotten better over the years. I especially found it more usable when it added the ability to pin lists.

Went onto Tweetbot to get news on the mass shooting late last night in So Cal and got the message the appp wouldn’t work anymore. Was bummed for maybe 3 seconds then deleted the app and went to the Twitter app. That is literally my only use case for Twitter - to get news of something that just happened.

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Twitter app still has a chron feed. It’s changed recently. On the app it’s now the “following” tab. All the tweeps you follow are collected there in traditional reverse chronological order. Before that recent update, you had a choice of either chron or curated.

I’m not sure about the issue regarding threading, but I haven’t observed this issue with Tweets in a thread being missing. You can also request an unroll from @threadreaderapp. That service is great if you are unfamiliar with it.

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Twitter owns Tweetdeck

I am aware. I use it. But Tweetdek was independent and was very different before Twitter took it over. Particularly, it had a wonderful app that I loved using. I don’t enjoy the web interface nearly as much.

I’d like to disagree with this. There are people monitoring this, and the increase hate speech, hostility, harassassent etc. has been empirically observed (as much as these things can be) e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-hate-speech.html.

Various sectors also monitor these things as they relate to their own fields, so e.g. in my field (Earth science) I know that climate scientists have seen a rapid increase in harassment, because that’s what many are reporting and you can objectively compare how much trolling a tweet got a year ago versus what it’s now receiving. (And unfortunately, many will stick it out because they feel they have a moral obligation to keep reporting their research.)

I’m going to stop commenting on this thread now but it’s very tiresome to see white men in this forum dismissing the harassment of other user groups as “all viewpoints should be allowed”. There’s quite a field between “we should be freely able to discuss things” and “we should be allowed to use racial slurs and threaten violence against anyone we don’t like”, which is what Twitter is now offering up for many.

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not true if marco arment is there…

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Yeah, it is the manipulation one is being subjected to, to put your point another way. Even techie folk don’t seem to be aware of it. Some of it not even understood by the people who implement it. I read Jarod Lanier’s writing on the topic and found it changed my approach and understanding totally. Nothing personal one might say! :cowboy_hat_face:
I would say Mastadon is left biased: Good and it is interesting to ponder why that should be? The point is though that the bias is ‘up front’ and transparent as it were?
I am of the view, and look forward to empirical data, one reason I am on Mastadon, is that the ‘right’ will not predominate and will, as you say, gravitate towards their own, marginal, servers.
My own experience is that when they are not ‘fed’ and amplified their presence is way way smaller than one thinks.
I will declare ny own bias: I don’t think really the far right, not true conservatives, have anything much to say of interest or depth and I think that will play out. I think it was on Twitter at one time in fact before the algorithms really got going.

My concern with Mastadon is that it will simply amplify tribal echo chambers and limit discourse between the right and the left.

I believe one of the best uses of the internet is to be able to read views opposing mine as well as those supporting mine.

It seems to me that Mastadon is likely to further separate Red from Blue, Rich from Poor, White from Black, and every other type of demographic one can imagine. It defeats the whole point of public discourse.

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It probably will. Everything from Twitter to the national news media does. That’s just the world we live in today. But I remember a time when both the right and the left were closer to the middle.

Without expressing support for either side, it’s worth noting that Trump got 46.9% of the vote in the 2020 election. If polarizing definitions are true (which is what the two sides seem to believe), that means that “the left” has a thin majority over “the right” - something like 3%.

If Mastodon is the future, “the left” is likely to predominate, and “the right” is going to be marginalized, that’s a pretty solid 40% of a fairly large country that we’re talking about effectively not having a voice on the platform. And the reverse would also be true.

My experience is that if “public discourse” doesn’t functionally include a group that size, it’s not really “public discourse”.

…and this is what happens when public discourse starts breaks down - the two sides get further and further apart.

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It’s under ‘Advanced Settings’ > ‘Setup Custom Tweet Source’
I’m failing at the callback url point - I can call out and authorise but something is amiss on the way back.

Half the vote in one country [edit and then only one third of eligible voters, one third of whom didn’t vote], a small minority globally though it would be hard on that scale to break opinion into ‘left or right’ I would agree.
As for what the ‘two sides’ believe, I don’t know. I know what I believe. I find the false equivalence rather thin frankly on this point. The two cohorts don’t resemble each other in all kinds of ways in my view. Whatever.
Anyway I believe that 100% of the vote nearly was won in America by the right, albeit one party now AWOL and the other with some policies that might have helped a lot of Americans due mostly to pubic pressure not program or donor wishes.

It is, I agree, hard to avoid equivocation with those terms. I also avoid the cult of the ‘middle’ or independent or so called ‘moderate’ on similar grounds. The middle of what? Moderate in regard to what two poles? In regard to truth and lies?

Regarding Mastodon though. Public discourse doesn’t include the right to manipulate and distort in the pursuit of ‘clicks’ and profit, though probably doesn’t specifically exclude the practices either, there is no formal rule I know of that will help. The practice is generally to be avoided though, or even legislated against.
It does include the essential right to create private discussion and space for that. Free from prior constraint and retaliation, not necessarily working against the public interest either.
Like email, the postal service and many institutions of Civil Society. It is not necessarily a source of division, though it can be especially if dedicated, like The Klan, to that end. It is stil protected speech though.
That is my last word though, since at some point, unless we are careful @ismh will have to moderate. So I don’t get the last word.

In more important news, I’ve got Spring working again :slight_smile:

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Wondering how long the developer will be willing to maintain Spring. I.e.

  1. This feels like an awfully big hoop to get many users to jump through.

  2. Can Twitter detect the use of API credentials through a third party app and then terminate API access for the account? (I appreciate “could they” and “would they” are two different questions here)

I suspect the number of users that are willing to jump through the hoops required will be quite small, as you say and as such they probably won’t notice the small amount of new dev accounts.

I guess the optimistic case here (for Spring) is that although the % of third party users willing to jump through this hoop will be small (or tiny), it could be worthwhile for the Spring developer if Spring is the only game in town

I.e. all the ex Tweetbot/Twitterific/Fenix users now only have one option if they want to use a third party client.

I’m pretty sure I read a post on Mastodon yesterday of someone who filled in his Twitter API credentials in Spring and saw them revoked a couple of hours later.

Unfortunately Mastodon does not offer free text search, so I’m likely never going to find it back.

(It was a reply to a post from Paul Haddad, developer of Twitter; not from someone I follow)

If all users indeed have to enter the same URL (with “spring” as one of the components) on Twitter’s developer portal, it’s going to be rather easy to block everyone…