The Bird Site Massacre

Victims of the Bird Site Massacre

So, as I feared, the worst was confirmed; Twitter deliberately killed off the third party clients without notice, despite their helping drive the service's development and often being used by the more active users. Twitterrific and Tweetbot and more gone without warning to company or users. Twitter's developer terms and conditions retroactively changed to make such services unacceptable. 

Confirmation of Ollie's demise

This made the decision to leave the bird site quite easy for me; I exported archives of my data (which come as a funky HTML set up so you can explore them and closed down both my accounts. They'll auto delete in less than a month. The BITS Traveller account is still there but we're discussing what to do with that (and, to be honest, it's mostly been dormant since the pandemic hit). So if you want to find me on social media, you can hook up with me on Mastodon, where I'm on the Dice Camp server using my usual Cybergoths tag (something from university, don't ask!).

It was a strange feeling killing the accounts. I opened the private one on Friday 3 April 2009 at 7:24 in the morning and closed it at 21:40 on 22 January 2023. The public account was started later - Sunday 5 June 2011 at 10:14 - and closed last at 12:19 on 26 Jan 2023. They've been there a while, but increasingly had less value and engagement as the algorithms that drive toward contention made Tweeting more and more like shouting into the void. Twitterrific combated that, but the reduced API access that the application got over time didn't help the bird site be more approachable. Functionally, Twitter has been dying for me for quite some time, so I guess I should thank Space Karen for pushing me over the line to decide to leave. To be honest, using the official Twitter app and website made it clear it wasn't for me anymore.

Failing Twitter Engagement

The failure of Twitter on engagement was shown by a Mastodon toot by Ged Maheux, one of the Iconfactory team. They've 16.1k followers on Twitter and 4.1k on Mastodon. They tweeted the same material on both sites and got 9 likes and 3 retweets on Twitter and 287 favourites and 163 boots on Mastodon. Others are reporting the same.

I like what I see on Mastodon, especially now Tapbots have released Ivory, a Mastodon app for iOS which uses their experience on Tweetbot to create an excellent application which is actively being developed. The basic Mastodon app was fine, but Ivory jumps it to another level. Mastodon reminds me of early Twitter crossed with Google+, which is a good thing. I do get a bit annoyed with some of the others who have fled from Twitter or are hedging their bets on both sites who keep on using Twitter conventions and posting Tweets. I don't want Mastodon to just be another Twitter, I want it to be it's own thing.

Project Phoenix About dialog box.

I do hope that The Iconfactory re-enter the space using their experience from Twitterrific but Tapbots are also doing a great job and winning me over. I had a connection to Twitterrific because it was how I discovered Twitter, and I'd also backed the Kickstarter to update the macOS version of the app to match the iOS one.

Thank you to The Iconfactory for 14 years of excellence, and thank you to Tapbots for making the jump to Mastodon and bringing a great experience.

Let's see where the herd takes us. 

29 January 2023