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?
I could imagine something that caches the exact response for anything doing a onebox and saves it for any future connection error. But I don’t know if such a thing has ever been built or is easy to build.
Or a rebake that just has a failsafe when a onebox can’t be regenerated. Again has it been built already or is it easy to do?
(If either of those is simple, and someone wants to tackle it quickly, I can chip in some funding. But I’m not making money on this forum and my budget wouldn’t cover full dev costs.)
API access to cost money starting February 9th, 2023. Full details not yet available for a change happening in seven days.
Twitter has not yet shared how much its new “paid basic tier” will cost, and the company has only vaguely promised “more details on what you can expect next week.”
This will probably break “login with Twitter”, too.
This was what I was wondering about and what would happen to those who created their accounts that way? Would they still be able to access the forum with a password reset or something?
Something tells me that Elon made a bad investment and now is really looking for money. Charging for API of all things is a really bad idea, really in this area. Every single site that you dont want to pay upwards of $100 for will instantly break for users who linked their accounts on it with Twitter, including a lot of sites I personally use, with only a weeks notice?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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”.
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 ↩︎
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.
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.
He didn’t invest but do a lot of money controlling the masses. He’s the owner of OpenAPI and used Twitter to destroy genuine crypto data on internet (because Bitcoin guys used Twitter for that).
Not so much, I think. I’ve followed Musk since his Paypal days, and I even own a small amount of Tesla stock.
I once worked for someone who reminds me a bit of Musk. He was conceptually brilliant, but was often a bull in a china shop with regards to breaking stuff with his new ideas. What made him successful was he surrounded himself with what he called ‘a lot of people with brooms to follow behind him and sweep up the broken pieces’. I was one of them.
Where Tesla and Space-X have been successful is where Musk’s impact on Twitter has often failed, he got rid of too many of those people with brooms.
