So long, Twitter API, and thanks for all the fish

Well, it’s come to this. Twitter is burning, a billionaire owes money, an API will soon get lobotomized, so Bridgy‘s Twitter support will die within the month is dead. Granary‘s and twitter-atom too. The Twitter API may now be effectively unmaintained, but they still managed to find an engineer somewhere to change a few numbers in the billing code and update some text on a web page.

What a waste. Plenty of ink has been spilled on all this already, I won’t belabor the point, but what an utter waste.

Right now, Bridgy uses a free tier of Twitter’s API, equivalent to what many other major social networks offer. By April 29th, this free tier will disappear. My options will be a $100/mo plan with a quota of 10k tweets/mo, roughly .1% of what Bridgy currently uses, or an enterprise plan with unknown quota that reportedly starts at $42k/mo.

Neither of these options is feasible. Bridgy can’t function with .1% of its current usage, and I won’t pay Twitter $500k/yr for a little side project.

The silver lining is, after all the chaos and destruction and flight to the fediverse, Twitter doesn’t feel nearly as important now as it did half a year ago. It’s always been Bridgy’s biggest user base, it had a great 11-year run, I never quite expected it to end like this, but here we are.

To everyone who used it, thank you for your interest and support over the years! It’s been a great ride. And who knows, Elon’s Twitter 2.0 is awful at comms and changes its plans all the time, so there’s a chance they’ll take this all back tomorrow. But assuming it sticks, Bridgy Twitter will stop working on April 29, if not before. I plan to leave it up and running until then. got unceremoniously suspended on April 4th. So much for the month’s notice.

A billionaire owes money, Twitter is burning, and the future is the IndieWeb and the fediverse. Try out Mastodon with Bridgy, classic or Fed, and join us there!