
Favstar will shut down as a result of Twitter’s API changes for data streams - QueensGambit
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/14/favstar-twitter/
======
gkoberger
I have no clue why you'd build an app on Twitter's API anymore. I get it from
their perspective (they want to control the ecosystem completely), however
they've made it clear they don't care about anyone developing on them. Which
is sad, since they only exist thanks to their early community of developers.

I can't believe they killed off their MacOS Twitter app, told people to use
third-party apps, and now are effectively killing them off too.

(All this being said... Twitter is ripe for abuse, and locking down their API
is probably one of the best ways to fix this)

~~~
maxsilver
They killed off the Windows Twitter app a few weeks ago too, replaced it with
an iFrame to www.twitter.com

I really don't understand why a social media site so large and influential is
spending so little on their own product. Twitter won't let anyone develop any
clients, but Twitter itself won't develop any clients either. Twitter acts
like they wished no one would log in at all, they act like they're just
waiting to be acquired and shut down.

~~~
jjeaff
And they have over 3000 employees. It's quite a mystery to me what all those
people could possibly be doing.

~~~
Fukkaudeku
Making more buttons into the retweet button.

------
zaksoup
I deleted my twitter account a while ago but this is a new level of forgetting
history. If I remember correctly Twitterrific/Iconfactory were the first folks
to actually use the verb 'tweet', and absolutely provided the first iteration
of the interface to twitter that we all expect today. It took acquiring
Tweetie, which literally invented 'pull to refresh', before they had their own
native app 3 years after Twitterrific had been released.

Twitter's success is directly attributable to a fantastic native app ecosystem
on mobile platforms. If there's a lesson to be learned here, I guess it's
"don't make apps for platforms you don't control because they'll drop you like
it's hot the moment investors want an exit"...

As an aside, Tweetie/Twitter for iPad's column based interface was one of the
absolute best interfaces I'd ever seen and used on a tablet, and one I have
yet to see reimplemented in a use-friendly way to this day.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
You're absolutely correct re: the history. Twitterrific not only came up with
the word "tweet," they were the first one with a blue bird logo!

Twitter basically encouraged a third-party ecosystem to blossom, then decided
that rather than finding ways to monetize that ecosystem, they should start
slowly strangling it to death. I can't imagine that this is happening because
investors are insisting on it; yes, they want a positive return on their
investment, but who's really saying, "If only you guys knife Tweetbot, the
stock price will double!"? There's a very small minority of users who use
third-party clients, but those users are disproportionately the highly engaged
"super tweeters," if you will. Is supporting them -- ideally better than they
do now -- really so expensive that it's easier to just kill them? And if the
answer is yes, is it really better to keep pretending that you're _not_ doing
that, and instead just make the experience of third-party developers _and
dedicated Twitter users_ steadily worse over time?

~~~
sgt101
They faced the prospect of aggregation of the clients via takeovers, this
would have allowed the owner of the majority of the clients to change out the
platform. I had a conversation with a private equity guy in 2009 who wanted to
do this, what stopped them was the idea that twitter would ratelimit and
control the interface. So there was a pretty rational fear driving Twitter to
do this.

------
CrystalLangUser
I just find it strange how developer-hostile twitter is, considering the
community it once fostered.

If you want to move with your feet, Mastodon [1] is rapidly growing in
popularity, and it's completely open source [2].

Disclaimer: I used to run a mastodon instance, now I run a pleroma [3]
instance to save on memory/cpu usage. Feel free to ask me any questions.

[1]: [https://joinmastodon.org/](https://joinmastodon.org/)

[2]:
[https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon)

[3]:
[https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma](https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma)

~~~
sondr3
I’ve been meaning to start my own Pleroma instance due do the excessive
hardware requirements of the Mastodon client. How would you compare the two
projects since you’ve used both?

~~~
CrystalLangUser
So currently, choosing Mastodon vs Pleroma boils down to what you care more
about: performance/less complexity, or more features/maturity.

Mastodon is really nice, but it's fairly intensive. Precompiling the
rails/webpack assets in particular made my tiny VPS choke, even with 4GB of
memory I believe. It also requires Sidekiq and other services [1].

Pleroma is newer and written in Elixir/Phoenix purely as an API. It only has
itself as a dependency, and it's lean enough to run on a Raspberry Pi. It
offers two frontends, pleroma-fe and mastofe, the latter is a port of
Mastodon's UX.

\---

Features wise, Pleroma doesn't really have a lot beyond the basic
functionality of subscribing to people, posting, etc. There aren't real
moderation tools (yet), since it's mostly a weekend project for the core devs.
Blocking instances requires an IP block still, I think.

Mastodon wins features-wise, hands down. But some things aren't really easy to
reconfigure- since the frontend is baked in, changing things like the post
character limit (500 chars) is tedious. In pleroma it's a simple config file
change.

\---

I like Pleroma personally but it's not for everyone (yet). I plan on
contributing more soon to help change that.

I also was only running single user instances so I can't really discuss
scaling. @technowix@niu.moe [2] would be better to ask about that, considering
their instance has ~3k users [3].

[1]:
[https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Runni...](https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Running-
Mastodon/Production-guide.md)

[2]: [https://niu.moe/@Technowix](https://niu.moe/@Technowix)

[3]: [https://niu.moe/about/more](https://niu.moe/about/more)

~~~
s73v3r_
I've only heard of Mastodon. Is Pleroma a Mastodon server, or its own thing?
(Searching for Pleroma does nothing but result in Greek Mythology hits).

~~~
CrystalLangUser
You can see it on their gitlab instance. [1]

Mastodon and Pleroma are both part of the Fediverse [2]. They work with any
software that works with OStatus and the newer ActivityPub. This includes
things like GNUSocial, etc.

Mastodon doesn't explain any of this well, or at all, to my dismay. (As far as
I'm aware, on the joinmastodon page).

[1]:
[https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma](https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse)

------
QueensGambit
More from Apps of a Feather:

1) Push notifications will no longer arrive

2) Timelines won’t refresh automatically

If you use an app like Talon, Tweetbot, Tweetings, or Twitterrific, there is
no way for its developer to fix these issues.

[http://apps-of-a-feather.com/](http://apps-of-a-feather.com/)

~~~
joelrunyon
So tweetbot is dead then?

Why can't twitter make a decent app on it's own? This shouldn't be
complicated...

~~~
wmeredith
*its

They don't want to make a decent app. They've bought great apps and shuttered
them. They want you to use the web client.

~~~
jwilliams
> They want you to use the web client.

I use the web app version exclusively -- based on that I don't agree.

Both the Twitter and Facebook Android/iOS web applications constantly push you
to download the native client. They even get demanding sometimes. They want to
be able to send you push notifications.

------
egfx
Bye Favstar. I followed you for years. They shut down my
[https://2fb.me](https://2fb.me) app so many times, I no longer keep track of
how bad they f'd it up. The latest blow was to my @shareU account. Yes, about
3 months ago I owned twitter.com/shareu and it was alive and sharing people's
tweets to Facebook. Many people loved it, and it was a great promotional tool.
All it's following was 100% organic, and it followed no other users. 17% of
it's followers were from verified accounts, yet it was shut down for doing
what it was set out to do, share tweets to Facebook.

but the original “like” on Twitter is back, [http://2fb.me](http://2fb.me) for
the time being, let's see how it goes.

------
partiallypro
I don't understand what Twitter is doing, I think they arguably have one of
the most valuable social tools on the planet in terms of real time information
and news, more than Facebook, more than Google...but they don't seem to
understand what they have, how useful it can be in rich API forms, etc. It's
baffling. They are hostile to their developers and to their userbase all in
some weird chase to be Facebook. The one and only good move Twitter has made
recently is teaming up with Bloomberg...but even that has been a botched a
bit.

IMO Jack has to go, he seems to understand Square, but he seems very very out
of touch with Twitter.

------
Pmop
I started to use third-party twitter clients exclusively because of the
annoying timeline manipulation. Now this. Is there any other way around other
than quitting twitter ?

~~~
eigen-vector
Tweetdeck.

~~~
oliyoung
Tweetdeck isn't third party

~~~
gmemstr
It does however avoid screwing with the timeline order, and I find the column
layout very convenient in most cases.

------
hivacruz
They should have waited a little more before shutting down on June 19th.
Twitter announced they will postpone the death of real time streams after
Tweetbot and some other apps complained about it weeks ago. It was told on the
Twitter API account.

------
wink
All these years and I haven't grasped what favstar is for. The article also
really doesn't clear it up. I only see it congratulating people on milestones
of 500/1000/etc. Favs.

------
pm24601
Once again, proving that building a business dependent on other business is a
bad long-term idea. I say long-term because Favstar had a good run.

But every app company loses out.

------
ahbs66
Favstar was useful back in the day when you didn't get notifications about
favs, etc. Not so much anymore. I also used it to read the most liked tweets
of certain users, but these greedy fucks want you to pay to read the top one
(which you can bypass with Inspect Element) and to read more than the top 10
or so. So, good riddance.

~~~
QueensGambit
Not associated with Favstar. But, if you want to call names for someone who
wants to make a living on the product they built, then you have a wrong
understanding of software.

