this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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Technology
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Realistically, the thing was always living on borrowed time.
I could have believed that Twitter and Reddit might have been okay with alternate third-party platform-native clients, but not third-party Web frontends.
Well, in theory, it actually wasn't. Nitter doesn't use the official Twitter API, which you can easily block access to, but rather uses the webpage API. Blocking access to the webpage API requires blocking access to the whole webpage without user login, which no one expected would ever happen for a service which's main use is to publicly announce things.
Well, and then came the great scraping to feed the LLMs + the questionable sanity of Musk, which meant Twitter did actually block public access to the webpage.
It isn't so much a front end as a privacy-enhancing proxy service. You can't participate, you can only consume. If our governments are going to conduct their interactions with us on fucking Twitter, we need services like this. Or we need our states to stop neglecting our need for online infrastructure and punting to capital interests.