Twitter appears to have stopped third party Twitter apps from accessing their network, without any warning or explanation. The reason Twitter can do this is because they control twitter.com and there are no other servers to choose from.
This kind of instant shutdown cannot happen on Mastodon or the Fediverse, because there are thousands of independent servers running on free open software standards.
This is why third party apps are so much more widely used on Mastodon and the Fediverse.
p.s. These posts from third party Twitter app developer @paul are interesting:
https://tapbots.social/@paul/109684886363418765
https://tapbots.social/@paul/109685010188695190
The "Ivory" they're referring to is an upcoming third party Mastodon app they're also developing. you can follow it at @ivory to keep up with news about it.
Almost 24 hours later and still no official/unofficial info from inside Twitter. I'm going to continue as if this was all done on purpose. What now? Ivory goes into hyper mode with just the absolute minimum 3-4 things that have to be done finished up and then off to Apple. Probably going to be a bunch of things I'm not super happy with but I guess we'll fix it in post. Hopefully everyone knows what we're capable of and can live with some, hopefully not long lived, rough edges/missing features.
p.p.s. For a quick overview, there's an article about this issue on the Verge at https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/13/23553161/third-party-twitter-clients-apps-outage-twitterific-tweetbot
(Well done to the Verge for embedding a toot by the way!)
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Nate