[grishka]

It's really funny how Twitter manages to somehow do both these things at the same time:

1. Promise everyone to decentralize itself, aka the "bluesky" project. Except it's been a thing for ~2 years and exactly zero meaningful progress has been made. Related: didn't Jack say they wanted to open up the API again?

2. Become ever more manipulative and get in my way more and more with its engagement growth bullshit.

[pcmoney]

The did open up the API again, or rather are in the process of doing so. Look at the new essential access tier and v2 endpoints. Its early but they are launching more and more.

[grishka]

Okay so there still are nonsensical per-app limits, and they still act as if building a third-party client is not a use case that exists. Yeah, right, because of course people primarily use APIs of social media services for research and business.

How hard would it be to simply comment out all the checks in the code to give everyone the same access official apps have? Why is it taking them months? It's as if they don't actually want to open up their API.

[pcmoney]

I think there is a balance here. Open the API and make shareholders happy. If they cannibalize their own traffic they violate fiduciary duty and get sued into the ground. Otherwise they inject ads into the API endpoints themselves and make it part of TOS to not strip them out. You can pay for higher and higher access levels but they would never offer “all of Twitter data running on our servers and pipelines for free”. They have spent and spend millions and millions building that physical infrastructure.

[grishka]

> fiduciary duty

Ah yes, the one reason why everything eventually turns to shit unless it's a nonprofit.

> but they would never offer “all of Twitter data running on our servers and pipelines for free”.

But they are contemplating doing exactly that with the Bluesky project. Not just that, but federation, as in, you'd be able to interact with tweets without a Twitter account, but from an account you host on your own infrastructure.

This is why I'm asking the question in my original comment. These two efforts feel so misaligned to me. If you're going to federate, you could as well provide completely unauthenticated API to access public content — you'll have to anyway.

[pcmoney]

Non-profits are typically just a mechanism for turning wealth into status. Mostly useless for all other concerns.

You would need to self host on Bluesky. Also it is just an open social standard that Twitter would be part of it. It would not be Twitter giving up control of Twitter data. They would never provide "completely unauthenticated API to access public content". The abuse vectors alone would destroy the network.