![]() Let's see what happens.Purpose: This study explores the influence of the noise-canceling technology in commercial earphones on sound pressure levels and preferred listening levels in terms of hearing protection. Mastodon will never become a Twitter replacement, but it might work for my followers. Perhaps the gamedev and IF crowd will migrate to Mastodon. I have a Mastodon account: (on the ace server). IF services that I help run, like IFComp and IFTFoundation, are of the same order of magnitude. On the other hand, I don't have a Twitter-sized mass audience. I mean, there will be no service that is "like Twitter, with a Twitter-sized mass audience, but run with respect for users." You can't get that many users with an open service, because big services are expensive to run, and the only way to make money is to grind up your users for advertising paste. (I can use fussy, degraded interfaces for a long time.) If they go away entirely? I guess I lose Twitter. I'll keep using third-party clients even if they become degraded. Twitter isn't saying, because every year they're a little farther away from caring. Third-party clients will still work, but maybe they won't refresh as smoothly. Last week's announcement, and partial retraction, is just another step in that dance. One day they're going to just shove us off the boat. Even if I'm right, the early cohort is a shrinking piece of Twitter's selling proposition. The problem with this, of course, is that every year there are more newcomers, and they follow more people who aren't me. (I don't care about those features - I just want my old-fashioned behavior - but newcomers will want them.) (So old people could keep using their clients, but it's hard for those clients to acquire new users.) Over the past few years, Twitter has added new features which are not available to third-party clients. In 2012, they limited how popular third-party clients could get. This explains Twitter's weird, half-assed client support over the years. That's their only hope of getting and staying profitable. Twitter wants newcomers to use the web site, which they have total control over. They want to keep us early-cohorters around, because their selling proposition for newcomers is "Twitter is full of interesting people." But they don't want newcomers to use Twitter the way we do, because we're free-thinking radicals. So for years (my theory says), Twitter has had a problem. (Ad-free, for a start.) We are cranky and unwilling to change our habits. We started with Twitter early, and we like how early Twitter behaved. We are, I am sure, the biggest users of third-party clients. I am a very small-time influencer, but there are a fair number of such people. (In one circle or another.) "Influencers," if you will. Not me, I mean, but people like me: early adopters with a lot of followers, who are seen as important or interesting people to follow. I believe Twitter sees me as a selling point for their service. I am a freeloader! Why does Twitter put up with me? Remember I just said that the official Twitter experience is full of ads? The clients I use don't show ads. The question is why they've kept supporting them for so long. The question isn't why Twitter would drop support for third-party clients. You might imagine, given my Slack post, that I will now write an open letter to Twitter telling them to continue supporting third-party clients. Echofon hasn't posted or tweeted anything about the issue, which is worrisome in a different direction.) I use Echofon on iOS and Tweetbot on Mac. ( Apps of a Feather is hosted by Twitterific, Tweetbot, Talon, and Tweetings. It's noisy, it's out of order, and it's full of ads. ![]() I just find the official Twitter experience to be abysmal. I'm not saying that out of principle or anything. If third-party clients vanish - and I see that day coming, soon or late - I will not be switching to the official Twitter client or web site. Twitter has responded by "delaying the scheduled June 19th deprecation date" ( Apr 6) but it's unclear if their new Account Activity API will be sufficient for third-party apps to keep working. That's from a web page, Apps of a Feather, which was just launched as a joint announcement from the developers of four popular Twitter clients. ![]()
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