In ridicu­lous Twit­ter news, the ser­vice has decid­ed to close off its free API access. For the less tech­ni­cal read­ers, this will effec­tive­ly end cross-posting and bot accounts. While Twit­ter bots have a bad rep they can be use­ful tools and pow­er all sorts of neat accounts. One of them is the Quak­erQuak­er Twit­ter account, which was set up to send out tweets when­ev­er a Quak­erQuak­er mem­ber wrote a new blog post or start­ed a new con­ver­sa­tion on Quak​erQuak​er​.org. It was use­ful enough that it had 3,317 fol­low­ers, but it will now be going dark. For those want­i­ng to keep post­ed on new con­ver­sa­tions, I rec­om­mend the Quak­erQuak­er Mastodon account.

Also going is the abil­i­ty to post notices of new Quak­er­ran­ter blog posts on Twit­ter and to cross post from my per­son­al Mastodon account to my Twit­ter account. I’m not clos­ing the lat­ter but my use on it (already down quite a bit from six months ago) will become very infrequent.

None of this reflects my opin­ions for the new Twit­ter own­er’s pol­i­tics. Cut­ting off free APIs is an incred­i­bly dumb move for Twit­ter HQ, a reflec­tion that they fun­da­men­tal­ly don’t under­stand why so many of us stuck with the ser­vice for years despite its flaws. For those want­i­ng more, Buz­zFeed News’s arti­cle is called “RIP To The Best Bots On Twit­ter.”