Curated twitter

We’ve ‘enjoyed’ curated content on twitter (by an algorithm) for years now. We are finally able to only see relevant content. Everything else is filtered out ‘automagically’! So they would have you think. In reality your timeline is a mix between being chronological and being ‘just whatever Twitter thinks will interests you. Hell, we are even able to see favorites from people we don’t follow! Isn’t that great? The reality is that it is usually something you don’t really care about.

I decide what people to follow because I want to read their tweets. I don’t care about anything else. If I did I would follow those people too.

I always loved twitter because it was (and still is for now, at least for me and everyone else that uses a 3rd party twitter client) a place where I chose who to follow and what to follow. A place where no one would inject my timeline with their posts or ads, a place that you could shape to your own desire as if it was an RSS feed for short messages or as a group messaging app. Everything was possible. Twitter is is migrating far away from that concept.

I’m not saying it was heaven, but it was a nice place to stay. Not anymore. And the worst thing is that with app.net dead we don’t have a real alternative, not that people would embrace it looking at what happened with it. Every year there are a few apps that try to be the next twitter (see peach, mastodon, vivo), but they just don’t gather enough users to tip the scales.

Difficult times ahead folks.

PS. I still have hopes that none of those changes are going to be rolled out to 3rd parties. We’re not the company focus and we haven’t been for the past 5+ years. They are always trying to limit third party tools as much as they can by first imposing arbitrary token limits to cut on their revenue and later forcing them away from the streaming api reducing the number of features they could offer to users. Fortunately despite the repeated blows third party apps still survive. Only time will tell. The only thing that’s certain is that embarking on the journey to develop a client for a third party api (Twitter API in this case) that you don’t have full control over is a dangerous endeavor. One day they could decide to shut you out from it or enforce their arbitrary policies and you will have no say in it.