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Twitter's API is down?

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191–200 of 431 posts

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hard part for Twitter is figuring out who's left that can fix it.

I disagree, the day he took over twitter people were saying "it wont be up this weekend" "it will be down in a week" "it will be offline in 2 weeks"... yet the reality is, its up and running well. The system is running as good as before. The only thing I've noticed is theres more ad's than usual. ---- Edit: Currently there isn't any outage of Twitter as far as anyone knows. It looks like 3rd party apps have been kick…

His comments on Taiwan were prompted comments in request to a question buried in some interview. He didn't rant about it. He hasn't ever mentioned it on Twitter. And how he was quoted was very different from what he actually said.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#193
Good lord people... Why is everyone jumping to "this is the end of the Twitter API" when in reality it's late at night in California and is much more likely a simple outage. Everyone needs to cool their jets. I don't understand the hyperbole. Every new thing that happens at Twitter is a new "this is the end of Twitter" even though it never is.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#194
post #191

Surely someone at Twitter has to say something official about whats going on here. There’s no way they can continue radio silence.

What was it, “Twitter, which may no longer have a public relations department, did not reply to a request for comments”?

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#195

Good lord people... Why is everyone jumping to "this is the end of the Twitter API" when in reality it's late at night in California and is much more likely a simple outage. Everyone needs to cool their jets. I don't understand the hyperbole. Every new thing that happens at Twitter is a new "this is the end of Twitter" even though it never is.

I have seen a handful of “this is it” comments out of ~180 in total and they were all downvoted to 0 or less. Most of the rest of the comments are people trying to figure out wtf works and doesn’t or people speculating if Twitter are moving to kill off 3rd Party apps (and whether they’d have to move to Twitter mobile web).

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#196
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's quite possible to build an app that way, using scraping. The danger is that users of that app will get suspended from Twitter (users have explicitly agreed not to scrape), once thats happened to a couple of users, thats the end of your app. Obviously you can try to obscure that you are scraping, but that is difficult to get right and there is no way back once you get it wrong.

On Apple devices that wouldn’t be an issue because you you can load the Twitter Web interface into a real Safari and get the markup from there for processing. Twitter can try things like CAPTCHA but this will degrade the experience for all Twitter users and you can simply delegate this CAPTCHA to your user to solve anyway.

While for reading that works, there is an easy why via posting to spot people use that app. They can change at any moment the input names so that when posting a tweet you are exposing that you are using the scrapping client.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#197
post #155

It would not surprise me if this is the end of third party clients and the new owner has removed access. Very disappointing if he has, particularly if he's done it with zero notice too. He has been making significant noise of feature changes in the official client coming in the next couple of weeks. Removing the third party client access would align with that, along with removing the little "posted by ..." note on ea…

Does anything stops devs from using the Web interface instead of the API? Sure it makes it a bit more challenging because parsing is involved but AFAIK it is completely legal to parse and display HTML output however you want. It's essentially like a browser add-on. I wonder if Twitter can be killed by the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy? So: 1. Make a client that combines Mastadon/Others and Twitter feeds, mak…

You will have 2 problems with this:

1) the law, at least in the US. Laws such as copyright and maybe even the CFAA have been abused to outlaw adversarial interoperability. You'd need to either practice good opsec and operate anonymously or be based out of reach of US-allied law enforcement.

2) Apple (and maybe Google too?) - they will remove any client for a third-party service unless said client has explicit approval from the third-party, all the way up to ridiculous levels such as rejecting an app using the LAN API of smart home devices explicitly designed for this purpose: https://community.lifx.com/t/app-store-rejection-permission-...

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#198
post #195

Good lord people... Why is everyone jumping to "this is the end of the Twitter API" when in reality it's late at night in California and is much more likely a simple outage. Everyone needs to cool their jets. I don't understand the hyperbole. Every new thing that happens at Twitter is a new "this is the end of Twitter" even though it never is.

I have seen a handful of “this is it” comments out of ~180 in total and they were all downvoted to 0 or less. Most of the rest of the comments are people trying to figure out wtf works and doesn’t or people speculating if Twitter are moving to kill off 3rd Party apps (and whether they’d have to move to Twitter mobile web).

Almost every top post is a "this is it" post, along with many of the second level posts on the top posts that aren't.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, most likely Elon pulled the plug on one of those servers that "nobody knew what it was used for" and brought the API down (or maybe API prod was running in somebody's computer and their office got evicted - who knows)

It's clear that it's not a general API outage, specific "reader" apps have been removed/blocked, including from peoples "authorised apps" in their accounts. This is not an "API Outage", I think we can be 99.9% sure it's a removal of specific apps.

Could it just be an anti-abuse system going wrong, and reader apps are targeted because they exceed some threshold?

Even with Musk's antics I don't see what would they gain by blocking API clients without announcing it - it would take Musk 30 seconds to tweet "oh btw third-party clients are done for" and would at least give everyone clarity.

Re: Twitter's API is down?

#200
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Apple devices that wouldn’t be an issue because you you can load the Twitter Web interface into a real Safari and get the markup from there for processing. Twitter can try things like CAPTCHA but this will degrade the experience for all Twitter users and you can simply delegate this CAPTCHA to your user to solve anyway.

While for reading that works, there is an easy why via posting to spot people use that app. They can change at any moment the input names so that when posting a tweet you are exposing that you are using the scrapping client.

Remember that you are loading full Twitter website in the background. You will use their original interface to post Tweets.
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