Belated Farewell to the Twitter/X API

This isn't much of a "real" post, and admittedly I needed a filler for this week, but it's been on my list to write about here for a while: Last summer I shut down my three Twitter bots when the Twitter API moved to a ridiculous new access rate structure.

It Was Coming For Some Time

Honestly, I'm surprised it took as long as it did for the API to fully stop working (if you weren't paying the ridiculous $100+/month access fee). I was just hoping that the MMS Retweet Bot would make it through MMS MOA 2023 (early May), and not only did that happen...it wasn't until the middle of June when things just quietly stopped working.

The change to access is super frustrating. I understand charging for access, and had even considered it (before seeing the monthly price). I mean, for a few bucks a month I'd keep bots running. Not for $100. That's just … dumb.

The Bots' Future

I had written and run three various novelty bots:

• Holiday Progress Bot (my first) to play with the Twitter API (and Google Calendar API) in a one-way format (post-only)
• Dad Joke Bot to play with two-way communication in the Twitter API (and a fun way to use the Dad Joke API)
• MMS Retweet Bot (by far the most popular) to curate and retweet content related to MMS MOA by searching Tweets

After things stopped working, I culled them from my host (where the back-end stuff was running), made a few notes, and then changed their respective GitHub repos to "Public Archive" state. Their respective sites and accounts will remain indefinitely.

I have ported the Holiday Progress Bot to Bluesky (in July 2023) as an exercise in working with ATProto and the bits for Bluesky. I may try to do something similar with the Dad Joke Bot at a point in the future, but I have no plan at this point. As to the MMS Retweet Bot, any decision is on hold indefinitely until a common platform is identified (or bubbles up) as the place for all of that chatter.

Code and Site References

The Account, Code, and GitHub site for each:

• Holiday Progress Bot Account | Source | holidayprogressbot.mzonline.com
• Dad Joke Bot | Account | Source | dadjokebot.mzonline.com
• MMS Retweet Bot | Account | Source | mmsbot.mzonline.com

They were fun to have around, fun to make, and sad to remove from service. But that's how it works sometimes...

Headline image via Reddit thread