Twitter Turns Off Access for Third Party Applications to Twitter Since January 12, 2023 — Musk Take Over Causing Problems

Tweetbot Service Disruption

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter on October 27, 2022, it is really a struggle to remain a customer of Twitter. From allowing blocked accounts back on the service to the most recent issue of blocking third party apps from accessing the service. The whole take over by Musk has been a joke from the beginning with the tweet “Entering Twitter HQ - let that sink in!” At some point, it is hard not to think that he is trying to get rid of loyal Twitter customers. I have a few friends that once Musk took over Twitter, they left the service deleting their account completely. 

The most recent change on January 12, 2023 at 7:30 pm blocking third party applications might be the last straw for me. As of this update, it has been three days since third party Twitter applications stopped working with no information from Twitter on the matter. I have been a Twitter member since April 2009 with 656 people I am following and 661 followers. Not great numbers, but I have been very active at certain times of the year and I especially found it useful for sporting events.

I have used Tweetbot for a number of years and I like the app more than the Twitter app. The main point I like is that I can set my own feed and not have to do what Twitter wants with popular tweets at the top of my timeline. With Tweetbot, I see the actual flow of tweets from those that I follow. The past few years, Tweetbot had a subscription model for a small fee to receive updates which I had been doing. 

What a surprise on January 13 when I started up Tweetbot to find that it was not working. Then searching Twitter to find that it was a change Twitter had made affecting all third party applications using application programming interface (API) where all apps broke. With no news from Twitter, it has people wondering if this is another change by Elon Musk to force everyone to the Twitter application or site. Basically, the change being to not allow any third party applications to access Twitter. Bad idea! If there is not correction to this issue, I will leave and I think more people will leave Twitter Than we have already seen since the take over in October 2022.

Sad day to break such a wonderful social media application. Easy to share information, easy to follow, and fun to interact with others. No wonder people are leaving. I am interested what Elon Musk will do next to break the service or force people from the social media platform.

For me, I have started to use Reddit a lot more. I still enjoy the ease to post and interact with Twitter, but Reddit has a sub for almost everything and finding that it is fun to interact there with others on sporting events. So, I have not decided yet to delete my account, but I am certainly approaching this as my next action on the Twitter site going down the tubes.

What are you using for your social media platform? Do you still use Twitter? If not, why did you decide to move away from Twitter?