Not going to lie, Twitter killing off free API access hits me in the feels. I remember with great affection the flood of creativity that happened after we opened up the API, and it's heartbreaking to see that unceremoniously strangled.
I'm relieved that we've got better alternatives, though. While this is perhaps the final straw for many bots on Twitter, it's been a long time coming and the API has long been hobbled compared to the early days. Open protocols or bust. β
@blaine I made this for my (post-only) bots, but it seems like it's soon to become obsolete for me:
@russss it should be trivial to just create a twitter-api-compat to mastodon api proxy, right? (I'm roughly 100% certain in this, but haven't looked in detail so I *could* be missing something subtle?).
I'd build it myself but I won't be at a computer for more than a few minutes until Tuesday and I reckon people could be using such a thing before Twitter gates their access.
Damn, sad I'm just now seeing this, would have been useful. Might still be I guess. Any sense how hard it is to store the state data in something like s3 instead of locally?
I guess I'd also have to figure out how to keep the RSS feed my bots are also creating if I didn't want to just switch everyone to the Mastodon provided one.
@bmann I assume they're not going to be charging for *logins*. That'd be really dumb and I would laugh at their incompetence. π Restricting access to eg the post API (or even any API access, eg for reader apps) makes marginally more sense.
My thought here is more: switch the "twitter.com" const to "birdbrainsformastodons.com" and all the old bots (and maybe even client apps) just work again?
@blaine re: logins, since it requires an βappβ to be created and API credentials, at this pointβ¦ π€·ββοΈ
And yes, totally get your point. With @moaparty we donβt really have a bunch of other people running instances so I would expect the same from this.
An initial API shim instance gets collectively managed. Work to have people host some of their own.
I often find myself wanting to use a metaphor based on the 1997 John Woo film Face/Off to explain my worries about decisions made inside organizations If you haven't seen it this likely won't make much sense to you, but my mental model of a "Face/Off situation" is when the last person inside an organization who understands the rationale for a particular decision has left, leaving a gap in institutional knowledge that results in terrible decisions being made (Yes this is about the bird site)
@lucid00 @jonoabroad @blaine @bmann I see Passkeys as mainly being about the fact that passwords are just a TERRIBLE form of authentication for the vast majority of people
They either forget them or they use the same password for every account. Password managers are a useful solution for a tiny fraction of the overall user-base
@simon @lucid00 @jonoabroad @blaine let me rephrase before Blaine twitches more: password managers are a necessary blight for super users.
Passkeys as a mass market passwordless solution that increases security by default is what weβre betting on at @fission
@jonoabroad @simon @lucid00 @blaine @fission a mass market friendly brand for WebAuthN that uses βsoftware keysβ rather than like Yubikeys, supported by Apple / Amazon / Google / Microsoft etc
Hereβs Apple https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213305
@bmann @jonoabroad @simon @lucid00 @blaine @fission I did some reading about passkeys, but couldn't find any information about handling certain real-world problem scenarios. Namely:
"Someone just stole my phone!"
Okay, are there solutions offering support for:
1) Having backup passkeys on secondary devices?
2) Remote invalidation of the lost phone's passkey?
How do passkeys support redundancy and key management? I couldn't find information on that.
@todd_smith @jonoabroad @simon @lucid00 @blaine @fission the major platforms are backing up / syncing passkeys across devices and in their respective cloud storage.
There is a growing directory of sites where you can try it https://passkeys.directory
And the WebAuthN demo site is likely the most obvious https://webauthn.io
Attached image is the success message after register / authenticate
#passkeys really are just getting started, so I put together a page on @fissionβs public wiki with links to some resources https://talk.fission.codes/t/passkeys/4086 Weβre working on adding passkey support to our #UCAN and #WebnativeSDK libraries which currently use the browser WebCryptoAPI for passwordless logins https://webnative.dev
A demonstration of using Apache Camel with Quarkus for Cloud-Native Integration Patterns - supersonic-subatomic-integration/mastodon-stream.yaml at main Β· redhat-appdev-practice/supersonic-subatomi...
@blaine In March 2009 I started a Twitter/SMS-based literary review that uses the API to propagate/archive posts and author bios to our site. We've already needed to discuss whether to continue, but this will force the issue.
It also helped me return to programming as a powerful creative tool (after intro to compsci had snuffed out my interest ~5 years before), which ultimately changed the trajectory of my life.
@blaine
Do people think stopping API access stops bots? It won't.
Also bots are only part of the problem. Troll farms are the main problem. I get the feeling people are in denial of that as it's rarely mentioned. Always about "bots".
@blaine Said it before, but I'll say it again: #ProtocolsNotApps. If we're to exchange information, let's agree on protocols to do it, not specific implementations.
(And for this argument, we can consider Twitter's API a cloud-hosted "implementation" that non-Twitter people cannot download and run on their own infrastructure.)
@blaine I have a Twitter bot. I've heard nothing from Twitter about free access ending.
You'd have thought, wouldn't you?, that if free access was going to end I'd have received an email inviting me to pay, and telling me how to pay?
Am I right in saying that many features, that are now core features of Twitter, wouldn't have been implemented if it wasn't for the API allowing 3rd parties to add features to Twitter themselves (inspiring Twitter to make them core features)?
Twitpic is one obvious example I can think of. Hashtags and at-mentions also come to mind but I don't know if those features were dependent on the API.
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