Elon’s New API Pricing Plan Seems Perfectly Designed… To Help Send More Users And Developers To Mastodon

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the thanks-Elon dept

Huh. It had actually felt like quite some time since Elon Musk had last done something so stupid as to send a new bunch of users to Mastodon. But, apparently he can’t go that long without helping to do so. Last night, I had actually started working on a story about how developers were increasingly moving from Twitter to Mastodon, following the ridiculously, poorly communicated decision to shutdown API access for companies building Twitter clients (from which many original Twitter innovations arose).

However, the API was still working for tons of other projects that relied on it, including various useful bots and services that rely on Twitter for sign-on. But, late last night, Elon’s Twitter announced that was all over, and there would no longer be any free use of the Twitter API:

This sudden announcement, with one week’s notice (which, I guess, beats the no notice at all given to client developers) has thrown a ton of projects into pure chaos. There are tons of useful tools that rely on the API. For a long time I used Tweetshelf to follow news links on Twitter. I’m wondering if they’ll be able to survive. BlockParty, which is one of the most useful tools on Twitter to enable users to avoid harassment and abuse, makes extensive use of the API, and I’m curious how they’re going to be able to handle this. There were all sorts of other useful bots, things for reporting earthquakes, for example, that aren’t likely willing to pay. Other tools, like various thread reader apps will also likely be impacted.

Twitter has had an enterprise paid version of its API already, but way more projects relied on and used the free API, and helped make Twitter way, way more useful. And most of those seem likely to shut down.

This may also include tools that use Twitter for sign-on. GovTrack, for example, is already warning users to change their login if they were using Twitter’s login on that site:

But, perhaps an even bigger impact may be on a vast array of academic and journalistic research that relied heavily on the access to the API. Just a few weeks ago, we had reported on a really useful study, done using the Twitter API, that found that Russian trolls on the site hadn’t really done much to impact the 2016 election.

One of the authors of that study had pointed out that this change by Elon is going to create pretty massive “collateral damage” for important research.

Of course, there’s a question as to how much of this is really “collateral damage” and about Elon’s crazed desperation for any new revenue stream he can find behind the couch cushions, and how much of this is actually about closing up the windows, and continuing to make Twitter less and less transparent… all while pretending he’s doing the opposite of that.

In the meantime, this should drive a lot of those developers, who were previously making Twitter more useful for free to move elsewhere. I’ve already seen multiple bot developers (the useful kinds, not the spammy kinds) say that they’re now in the process of moving those over to Mastodon.

And, already, many other developers had started to make the move. The decision to cut of third party clients had already done a lot to create this incentive.

Now, the developers of some Twitter clients are turning their attention to another upstart platform: Mastodon. This week, Tapbots, the studio behind Tweebot, released Ivory, a Mastodon client based on its longtime Twitter app. Matteo Villa, the developer behind Twitter app Fenix, is testing a Mastodon client of his own called Wooly. Junyu Kuang, the indie developer behind Twitter client Spring is working on a Mastodon app called Mona. Shihab Mehboob, developer of Twitter app Aviary, is close to launching a Mastodon client called Mammoth.

And it’s not just the tech press that’s noticing. The Houston Chronicle recently had a similar article about developers ditching Twitter for Mastodon.

Both of those articles were focused on client development, which has really exploded in the last month or so. But there has also been tremendous new development elsewhere that is making Mastodon increasingly useful (and user friendly). There are some great tools for algorithmic recommendations for posts, there are better and better tools for finding new users to follow. There have also been some cool new web clients that have shown up recently, including Elk and Mastodeck. There has also been tremendous new development on Mastodon-compatible alternatives, with just yesterday the latest version of Calckey being released (Calckey is a Mastodon-compatible alternative that has a really clean UI). And I know that others are working on more development in that area as well.

And all of that has really shown up in the last few weeks and months… while many other developers had stuck around on Twitter. But with Elon now closing down free access to the API, it makes you wonder why those developers would want to keep helping Elon when they can move over to Mastodon and continue to make it way more useful. Already, since Twitter announced these changes last night, there has been yet another influx of Twitter users to Mastodon, which seems to happen whenever Elon does something to drive people away.

Once again, this really does go completely against what Elon promised. He insisted he was going to “open source” things, but this is actually closing up shop. Jack Dorsey had directly told Elon that the best thing Twitter could do was to be more open to third party developers, as they’re the ones who help make Twitter better. Instead, Elon is driving them away. You could argue that he also promised to get rid of bots… and this seems likely to do that, but it’s quite a statement that he doesn’t realize just how many fun and useful bots there were on Twitter. His loss and Mastodon’s gain.

Filed Under: api, developers, mastodon, pricing, third party developers
Companies: twitter