Twitter shutting down free access to their API on February 9

UPDATE: Read my Twitter bot retrospective
UPDATE 2: Now he’s backtracking. Don’t fall for it!
UPDATE 3: Never mind, not ready yet!

Two days ago I posted a poll asking folks how they went or are planning to go about their Twitter bots.

And this morning I woke up to news that settles it for everyone.

Twitter was immediately flooded by messages from creative botmakers about being forced to shut down their bots. It was particularly heartbreaking to see comments from followers of the image alt text-generating bot @AltTextUtil.

I am genuinely speechless. I did expect that now that Elon Musk runs the show, he’d severely restrict free access to Twitter’s API, sure. But I will admit I did not see this coming.

I started working on Botwiki at the end of 2015, that was right before Slack announced their API, and a few months before Mastodon was created. So it makes sense that the original Botwiki was built around Twitter bots, and today they still make up more than 90% of the bots on this site.

This is truly an end of an era, and Botwiki is fulfilling one of its stated goals that I did not expect to see for a long, long time.

I’ve personally moved on from Twitter a few weeks ago, posting exclusively at mastodon.social/@botwiki and on my own personal instance stefanbohacek.online/@stefan.

I do understand that folks have spent years creating and curating their network over on Twitter, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that the platform has no future ahead of itself, and its new owner is fully set on running it into the ground.

I know Mastodon and the wider fediverse have their challenges and there’s quite a bit of work left to do to make it truly for everyone, so I won’t spend time here convincing you to leave behind all your friends and acquaintances that you made on Twitter.

But I do hope that in time we’ll be all ready to make the switch and never again let a rich guy have this much control over our shared culture and friendships.