Replied to Apps of a Feather (Apps of a Feather)
Third-party Twitter apps are going to break on August 16th, 2018.
If Twitter doesn’t love you, the IndieWeb would. I wish Twitter clients like @tweetings @twitterrific @tweetbot @TalonAndroid would support Micropub for publishing and Microsub for reading/following. Spend a few days to convert your apps and support the independent web. #BreakingMyTwitter
 
Imagine if we could use these clients not only to interact with Twitter, but almost any website on the planet? How cool would it be if I could use Twitterific to post to my WordPress website and Dries could use Tweetbot to post to post to his Drupal site? Maybe I could dump Feedly and Inoreader and dovetail Aperture to work with Tweetings or Talon to read all the content I’m interested in?
 
Manton Reece’s Micro.blog platform is an interesting multi-use case/example that has quickly usurped lots of social functionality using IndieWeb building blocks and has a handful of posting clients while it serves as a reader as well. (And of course it still allows cross-posting to Twitter as well.)
 
Since these W3C specs are full recommendations and work on the open web with dozens of implementations, it could allow social media apps/clients like those mentioned to not only gain new audience, but give them tremendously more autonomy as businesses and prevent any future social networks from pulling the rug out from underneath them the way Twitter has done in the past. The open web can bring back true competition to the space and collectively allow the community to keep innovating and creating while they’re interacting.
 

👓 Apps of a Feather

Read Apps of a Feather …Stick Together (Apps of a Feather)
Third-party Twitter apps are going to break on June 19th, 2018.

After June 19th, 2018, “streaming services” at Twitter will be removed. This means two things for third-party apps:
  1. Push notifications will no longer arrive
  2. Timelines won’t refresh automatically
If you use an app like TalonTweetbotTweetings, or Twitterrific, there is no way for its developer to fix these issues.

We are incredibly eager to update our apps. However, despite many requests for clarification and guidance, Twitter has not provided a way for us to recreate the lost functionality. We've been waiting for more than a year.
Twitter seems to finally be closing off the remainder of their open API that allowed full-fledged Twitter clients to still exist. This certainly creates a chilling effect in the future on developers spending any time or resources on projects like it that aren’t completely open. This also makes it much harder to build competing services to Twitter which have a similar financial model. I remember the heady days when there were dozens of awesome Twitter clients to chose from and interesting new things were happening in the social space.

If I was sitting on a huge pile of Twitter related code with a full set of Twitter related reading/posting functionality, I think I’d head toward some of the new open protocols coming out of the IndieWeb to build a new user base. By supporting feeds like RSS, ATOM, JSON feed, and even h-feed (possibly via Microsub) for the feed reader portion and building in the open Micropub spec, one could rejuvenate old Twitter apps to work with a myriad of microblog-like (and even traditional blog) functionality on platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Craft, WithKnown, Jekyll, Kirby, Hugo, micro.blog, and a myriad of others in the future. Suddenly all those old Twitter apps could rise from the ashes and invigorate a new, more open community. Given the open “architecture” of the community, it would give developers much more direct control of both their software and futures than Twitter has ever given them as well as a deeper sense of impact while simultaneously eating a nice portion of Twitter’s lunch. With less than a week’s worth of work, I suspect that many of these old apps could have new and more fruitful lives than the scraps they were getting before.

If the bird site doesn’t heed their cries, I hope they’ll all re-purpose their code and support the open web so that their hard work and efforts aren’t completely lost.