Dear Elon Musk manton.org
@manton I post twitter web - hear hear! - I think about all of those excellent twitter threads - I read - that should have been blog posts.
@manton "The common digital “square” should be the entire web, with a diverse set of platforms. There should be common APIs but many communities with their own rules, goals, and business models." Agreed.
@manton thanks for this articulation. the savior-complex ego behind the 'i'll save the world by owning and controlling the free part of it' idea is so 🤢🤮
@manton Agree. Good to hear a successful decentralization voice continue amid these few oversized platforms.
@manton Love it. But will fall on deaf ears. The hubris of combining "future of civilization" and buying Twitter is astounding.
@manton - you could take the approach that twitter is part of the web and find ways to peer with it.
@dave I wish there were more opportunities for that — less restrictive Twitter API rules, and bringing back RSS feeds. Also wondering what will happen to the Bluesky project.
@manton I like your view that we need more platforms, and more freedom to move between them – still owning our own content. I’ll stay on micro.blog, even if I’m not leaving Twitter (a lot of Swedish people there). Micro.blog is great! Friendly and fun. And as an answer to your earlier post: I think you should make a noise and try to attract as many Twitter users as possible after the Elon Musk deal. More people here, more fun here. The risk this would turn into something unfriendly must be low.
@manton -- their API is good, i've done a lot of work with it. no restrictions in my way, i don't want to create a twitter client. also i have RSS feeds for twitter, and since writing the app have figured out a way to make ti work with an unlimited number of accounts efficiently. i think with musk coming on board it's kind of like 1997 when jobs came back to apple, and a few months later blew up the entired internet development community. but the developers came back, right. no corporate platform is going to be as good as an open one, but -- wishing twitter would go away is not imho a rational approach. not very likely.
@Manton here are the docs for tweetfeed, the app I wrote that adds feeds to twitter. Supports markdown. Tweets can have titles. It folds threads. docs.tweetfeed.org
@ndreas -- why would you leave twitter? it's like living in NY and not taking the subway. sure it's dirty and smells bad, but it's how you get places in NY.
@dave but tweetfeed requires the person with the Twitter account to create the RSS feed for their tweets, right?
@pratik @dave NetNewsWire can follow individual Twitter accounts or lists as if they were feeds. I wasn’t finding any of the phone Twitter apps satisfactory so I made a short list of people whose tweets I'm likely to want to read on my phone and I follow that in NNW. I still read my full Twitter timeline in a web browser on the Mac.
@artkavanagh Reeder can do it too. That’s how I read Twitter now.But still built-in RSS for all public Twitter accounts would help @dave
@pratik Sure, Twitter ought to provide their own RSS feeds and I was very annoyed when they stopped doing so. But that was years ago and they’re not showing any sign of changing their mind so we have to make do with what’s available.
@pratik -- my server creates and manages the feed for you, for $0 -- because I want to get something going. Paying for it out of my own pocket.
@dave Yup! Love to create a feed for my Twitter account but if I want a feed for say, Beyonce's Twitter account, she has to create the feed, right?
@pratik @dave Nitter, an alternative front-end for Twitter, features RSS feeds. For example, Beyoncé's feed is available at https://nitter.net/beyonce/rss.
i looked at the feed. i see a problem right off the bat -- they synthesize titles for each of the tweets. but -- tweets don't have titles. feeder.scripting.com/returnjso...