Pay for Twitter? No thanks!

I was alerted by an API failure that Twitter (X) recently removed their free tier for bot interaction. These bots have been running for a long time now, sharing random nonsense like what movies we’ve been watching, what retro video game achievements I score on the pooper, and if there are any interesting news stories worth a conversation.

Not only did they remove the free tier, but they charge a pretty hefty amount for posts. For example, tweeting 41 times with a URL attached cost me over $7.50 - hardly worthwhile for silly little updates. So, like every other situation where I don’t agree with the new terms & conditions, I built my own!

The question was “how?” Bluesky 🤮 has an API, as does Mastodon. I really don’t want to get anywhere near Bluesky, and Mastodon sounds like a massive hassle with a very limited audience, so I just built the feed into my own site (here). If all goes well, you’ll notice an entirely new section called “Stream”, along with the three most recent entries below the links in the sidebar.

More features will get added over time like its own independent XML feed, image support, prettier styling, more bots, etc. For now the framework is there, the process is in place, and it looks good enough.

I solved the problem and it looks good. I’m not paying for the Twitter API, and this puts me back in control of my own data - despite the audience being considerably smaller than their 560M active users.