Reevaluating the Twitter / X API: manton.org

@manton Good decision. The vast majority of people are still on X. Hardly any know Bluesky (which has become a den of pedophiles sadly) and even fewer have heard of Mastodon.

For real reach you have to build up a following on X.

@manton I understand the desire to make Micro.blog as accessible as possible, and I get that many people are still on X-Twitter. But Elon Musk’s leadership and the general culture on X-Twitter make it a platform I don’t feel good supporting financially or technically. I believe in free speech under the Constitution, but I also believe private services, and individual users, have a responsibility to “vote with their dollars” and attention. Recommitting resources to X-Twitter, even indirectly, doesn’t align with my values, and I’m not convinced there are that many people who’ll only try Micro.blog if they can keep cross-posting to X-Twitter. For me, this decision just leaves a bad taste.

@DanielG @manton it's laughably delusional to describe Bluesky as "a den of pedophiles" when comparing it to X

@manton Ditto what @megabyteGhost said. Not loving this choice and the idea of a single cent of my money going to Musk/X.

@laze Thanks for the feedback. As I said in the closing paragraph, I don’t love it either. But to be clear on the money part, if you keep X disabled, no money is used for it. It’s isolated only to accounts who enable it.

@manton I’m not sure I really buy the “micro.blog just wants to enable people to publish wherever they choose” argument. Are you planning to enable posting to Truth Social as well?

There’s a spectrum here. Reasonable people can differ on how far along the spectrum you should move. X is far enough along to start to make me uncomfortable. Even if my money isn’t going directly there, it helps in some small measure to enable the coding that sends other money there.

@manton But I know it’s eternally hard to try to be a neutral publisher and free-speech advocate. Overall I’m still quite happy with your vision & leadership.

@manton I’ve clearly got a dog in this fight (work for Bluesky) but I’m genuinely curious: what’s the value of posting links to a site that explicitly devalues/buries posts with links?

@manton Thank you for the clarification on that.

@ffmike Thank you. Good point about Truth Social: definitely not. I should’ve also said that I will reevaluate this again and see how it feels in a few months.

@jimray.net Hmm. I hadn’t considered that part of it. I guess that’s up to users to weigh the value of. We’ve done way more with Bluesky, of course, and the integration goes much deeper because it’s open.

@manton

“erratic and divisive” rather downplays the white nationalist who owns that platform.

@manton I’m fine with your cross-posting to X, even though I personally don’t see myself taking advantage of it.

I’m up to my neck in Facebook. I’d love if my connections there would move to more open platforms. I don’t see that happening. But I’m loath to get myself enmeshed in yet another silo, which is what X is.

For the same reason, I don’t cross-post from Micro.blog to Threads, even though I enjoy reading Threads and occasionally reply to a post there. I don’t want to get sucked into a place where it’s hard to get out of.

Like @ffmike said: I think you do a great job as a steward of Micro.blog.

@MitchWagner Thanks for the support. Yeah, ironically I’m not going to use the cross-posting to X either! I’m personally done with X for posting.

@manton My ideological and professional disdain aside, the idea that Twitter would ask you to develop a feature that devalues your writers’ posts — and then charge you to use it! — is rather outlandish.

And if I can help with anything atproto just let me know (@jimray.bsky.team is my work handle)

@manton Very happy to read this will be an option for us, thank you Manton.

@manton Ya know, also… if you don’t love it, you don’t need to do it. (And despite my money not going directly there, I still wish you would reconsider.)

@manton I don’t care how big X is. It’s trash and most people know it. Elon ruined what Twitter was for his vanity and pulpit. The day Elon turned off the switch for 3rd party Twitter clients was the day I left and don’t miss it one bit.

I will gladly remain Mastodon only where most decent human beings are and you can have actual meaningful discourse and learn things from other people.

@manton I don’t care how big X is. It’s trash and most people know it. Elon ruined what Twitter was for his vanity and pulpit. The day Elon turned off the switch for 3rd party Twitter clients was the day I left and don’t miss it one bit.

I will gladly remain Mastodon only where most decent human beings are and you can have actual meaningful discourse and learn things from other people.

they’re also increasing the prices of tweets that include links, when posting via the API → techcrunch.com/2026/04/22/x…

@j4ck.xyz Charging extra for links is so ridiculous. Sigh.

@manton

> “Micro.blog doesn’t “support” Elon Musk any more than we support Mark Zuckerberg. We support users who want to blog and reach an audience on other platforms.”

This is so good, man. I mentioned in my feedback that I think some academics use Twitter/X because that’s just were the discourse is. I closed my Github Pages academic profile for Carrd this year, but if I ever build it up again, Micro at the premium tier makes perfect sense.

@lukemperez Thank you. It is a little surprising to me how many communities are almost exclusively on X, but that’s the way it currently is.

@manton it really is… says it all that they explicitly charge less for linking in a reply….

@manton Please don’t do this. I admit that I am basically ignoring what must be a fight to maintain “relevance” for lack of a better term but I can only say that the loss of goodwill is more significant than you seem to be estimating. I have had a paid subscription for micro blog since the beginning. I realize that I basically don’t use micro blog because I also have a self hosted masto instance but I have not cancelled because I have wanted to support the platform at least in this way. Restoring cross posting to X is literally the first thing to make me reconsider that. Maybe there have been other decisions that I missed but I doubt it. My upset isn’t even about “impact”. It’s about principles and the idea that Elon Musk should genuinely be treated as a contaminant. He is a white nationalist who has literally and completely explicitly worked to subvert the US political system and, through DOGE, has killed an untold number. This is t speculation. Any amount of support for his holdings is suspect at best.

There is no neutral path in this. His actions, even his purchase of X, has been obviously political. Reenabling support for X lends some amount of support to his efforts.

Please, do not do this.

@manton World Cup has been instructive on this point. Much our collective discourse about Elon/X is myopically really a debate about US politics. But the rest of the world doesn’t care or doesn’t see it.

I’m constantly reminded that in the period before and after Elon purchased Twitter, the data suggested that less than 1 percent of the voting public was on Twitter but it was overwhelming those who identified as “extreme left” and “extreme right”.

@manton It seems that I completely missed Vincent Ritter related discussion. Yeah… especially with that in the past… please don’t do this. Again, there is no neutral way through this. I understand trying to be nuanced for whatever reasons but this simply isn’t a worthwhile place to exercise that kind of nuance. It is support for X no matter how gated behind whether a user enables it.

@griotspeak Thanks. I really appreciate all the folks who have kept a subscription even though they don’t use Micro.blog much. But what about Mark Zuckerberg? He isn’t outwardly political, but Meta has arguably done much more direct damage, from Instagram’s impact on teens to genocide in Myanmar. It feels right to let users decide rather than us disable Threads posting.

@manton I won’t argue that Zuckerberg is any better or that Meta hasn’t done terrible things. If I had my way, I would simply pay a bit more and you would, in fact, disable Threads posting.

That said, the issue is “trending toward supporting these platforms and their harm as opposed to away”. Restoring support for X makes it plain that you aren’t really moving away from supporting these platforms and their harms. It is imperfect, but it is–at least in some way–consistent to aim for attrition if nothing else.

@griotspeak I tried to articulate in my post that it’s not about moving to these platforms but making blogs stronger. By the way, please don’t believe people lying about me or the people I work with. Adam has a long-standing gripe with me, mostly a misunderstanding, and I can’t engage with him anymore.

@DanielG @manton > which has become a den of pedophiles sadly

What

@manton I understand the framing but I guess I just disagree with the idea that you are only strengthening blogs. There is something that you give in exchange for that strength–credibility and relevance at the very least. It seems clear to me that there are more concerns here for you than I am admitting in to my reasoning but that’s a response to how obvious certain problems have become.

@bradleyandroos Thanks! Yeah, I knew I was inviting some criticism, but I feel it’s best to be transparent about how I’m thinking about this.

@manton Twitter is a huge social network and a lot of consequential people use it. To say “still” use it is ridiculous. It has the network effect, you stay there because the people you want to interact with are there.

Manton isn’t a political leader, I know his politics because from time to time very infrequently, he shares them, but micro.blog is not a service that’s exclusive to any political view. I think the only criteria he should use is this – do my customers want it?

Personally I had stopped using Twitter but kept my account, but lately I’m promoting a new way to do social networks, and Twitter is very useful for talking to smart people who like Twitter. :-)

If Manton offered the service, I would use it.

@manton I think you are free to make any choices on this. I won’t turn this option on and I continue to hate the fact that to view stuff on X now you need the app and a number of things I follow are pretty much only posted on X so I have to repeatedly install and delete the app. I hate it

@adamprocter Thanks. I won’t use it either. The “you have to use the app” is a disappointing trend that Reddit seems to be moving toward too.

@griotspeak I think that the last bits I’ll add are these since I understand that you can’t spend all day going back and forth

1. Currently, no microblog user is crossposting to X from the app. If they post to X, they have chosen to go against the friction of that fact. Adding this feature removes that friction. That helps X, even if it also strengthens ‘blogs’ somehow.

2. Of the people voicing support for this decision, how many are marginalized? People of color, queer, etc. Many people quietly leave the room in response to these kinds of decisions so it’s easy to miss the fact that it’s happening or has happened.

@manton my gut feel is I don’t like it. I left twitter the day musk took over. Anything that aids them keeps the hate alive and is a real threat to my very existence. If someone wants to crosspost, URL copy&paste works. And let’s keep building the micro.blog brand as a destination in itself!

@newdawn Thanks for the feedback and support. I’m going to reset again and give this another week before any decision.

@griotspeak Yeah, for the friction it’s hard to know the impact. You could say that it helps X if someone who is already blogging enables cross-posting. But there are also people who are posting to X more than their own blog, and in that case removing the friction will mean they blog more than before! That’s what we want to enable.

@manton I would like to get back to cross-posting to X, though from my personal account (this is my company) account.

I am there to fundraise and to watch disinfo influencers. One day I can quit, Academics gone. Not today

Cross-post all the places. Protocols with less politics.

@mackuba @manton Yes. Apparently Bluesky has an unusually high number of accounts which describe the themselves as “minor attracted” which is a soft term for pedophile.

The guy in the attached screenshot simply made a post saying he disagrees with paedophilia and Bluesky slapped him with an “intolerant” label.

Wtf?!!