I haven’t seen this topic elsewhere, but maybe I missed it. My site has a lot posts with tweets oneboxed that people include to discuss events (typically politics) but some that are there for sharing images poster to Twitter. I’m curious what happens to them if Twitter ceases to function. My guess: the post looks the same, but links in the onebox are dead. My fear: the oneboxes all show errors. My additional concern is that posts which continue to show things will turn into errors if rebaked. Is there anything I can do to keep content in oneboxes as an archive of what was there?

[image] Jason: Would they still be able to access the forum with a password reset or something? Yes. They would need to click the “I forgot my password” link on the Discourse login form to get a password reset email sent to the email address they use on Twitter. After doing that they would be able to log into their account with a password. It would be a bad move on Twitter’s part to start charging for their authentication API - logging in via Twitter requires you to be logged into Twitter. They should see the benefit of that. If they start charging for adding a login via Twitter button on external sites, I’m sure someone here can provide instructions about how to customize a site’s login form to help users with the change. Edit: when Twitter banned links to other social media platforms and then walked back on doing that, I abandoned my plan to build a Discourse site that used tweets as the starting point for Discourse topics, so I totally get the concern about this.

[image] Jason: what would happen to those who created their accounts that way? Users can use any login method that uses the same email address as their Twitter account. Given that they have access to the email address that is connected to their account, it doesn’t matter if Twitter goes away.

[image] Pyx : Something tells me that Elon made a bad investment and now is really looking for money. It will take quite a lot of paying API users to earn back 44 billion. I don’t think this is the reason. I think it’s political. Cutting off API access will stop people saying that Twitter encourages the use of bots.

[image] Richard - Communiteq: I think it’s political That can be very true, if Musk is a political person in that way. But I’m not totally sure if he can see the difference between billion and thousand any more.

[image] Richard - Communiteq: It will take quite a lot of paying API users to earn back 44 billion. My point was more Twitter is on a fast track to bankruptcy as of right now and he really needs the company to earn money to save it, but this really isn’t the way to do it. Maybe phone or ID verification at the most, not these outrageous prices for basic API

[image] Pyx : outrageous prices AFAIK no price has been communicated yet? Musk is not trying to save Twitter by earning money by selling API subscriptions. He is trying to shake off the “Twitter is being overwhelmed with bots” image and he is trying to prevent freeloaders from selling data.

[image] Richard - Communiteq: and he is trying to prevent freeloaders from selling data. Which is a great thing, however charging to people to run bots while users enjoy and destroying them, along with oAuth services aren’t the way to go about it imo. These devs don’t make much and have to pay for hosting anyways, asking to pay up more for API access is just making it worse.

[image] Pyx : Something tells me that Elon made a bad investment and now is really looking for money. Unlikely. [image] Elon Musk @elonmusk @waitbutwhy Not surprising, as I just learned that OpenAI had access to Twitter database for training. I put that on pause for now. Need to understand more about governance structure & revenue plans going forward. OpenAI was started as open-source & non-profit. Neither are still true. 6:34 AM - 4 Dec 2022 20K 2K It could be that he learned about some other significant company using twitter data for free, but you can’t just say “oh, hello, I want you to pay for API that others get for free” or even more likely it’s something along the lines “we don’t know how many more potential cash cows we have, so let’s force everyone to paid plan, learn specifics of their use cases, and then come up with a tiered pricing structure”. [image] Pyx : Charging for API of all things is a really bad idea, really in this area I’m not so sure. If I produce content for a platform[1], it doesn’t mean I’m ok with some other third party using that content via API for free. Not that my opinion matters, but I’d prefer that other folk at least pay for it. There should be a now absent distinction between the kinds of access you need: data access, login access, rich embeds[2]. I say we’ll see it down the line. I’m not calling it my data cause I know it’s not really mine ↩︎ i wouldn’t be surprised if Elon doesn’t even realize that APIs are used for this ↩︎

Musk seems to have a history of making changes, finding out what problems they cause, then trying to undo the worst of those problems, often with at best modest success.

What will happen to existing post content if Twitter implodes?

Product Support

elijah (Eli the Bearded) April 15, 2023, 3:21am 16

Well, my api key for Discourse embeds got shut down today. Seems like a lot of other people got termination notices, too. Hopefully I never need to retake. Haha.

Topic		Replies	Views
Bye bye embedded tweet previews General embedding	21	4639	May 20, 2023
Configuring X login and rich embeds for Discourse Integrations sso , how-to , social-auth	142	231069	January 20, 2026
Twitter oneboxes now require Twitter credentials Announcements	2	1547	December 11, 2023
Twitter oneboxes and links broken now that login is required Bug	14	3445	October 30, 2025
Twitter embeds have broken Product Support	27	4265	July 8, 2020

What will happen to existing post content if Twitter implodes?

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