Discontinuation of Twitter Integration
If that title sounds vague to you, you'd be correct. The changes that Twitter's New Management have made so far have been pretty superficially annoying at worst and haven't really significantly affected anything, apart from dropkicking third party applications, but that didn't affect me personally. Well, earlier today the TwitterDev account dropped this gem (archived) announcing the discontinuation of free API usage and that's where we are now. In this post, I'll go over what I know and tell you where to find the RSS feeds.
Flashii uses the Twitter API to announce news posts and to retrieve metadata about Tweets to embed details about it in chat. Both of these are conveniences at best and I cannot be bothered to pay to keep these features alive, even if it was for the most reasonable price in the world. Any service worth its salt would have a document of some sort ready outlining the details for existing users, but all Twitter gives us is three sentences worth of "screw you" and a pile of nothing. If there's any form of grandfathering that allows you to continue using existing free applications, then those features will continue to work and nothing is likely to change for the time being. If there's no grandfathering, you'll eventually see various strikethroughs appear in this news post and the "Possible" part of the title will despawn.
If this post comes off as annoyed, you'd once again be correct. A few months ago I rewrote the Twitter integration code and that's pretty much for nothing if this ends up going through. It wasn't all for nothing though, as it gave me some experience with implementing OAuth2, which has come in handy for the in development Flashii ID system. As for the metadata service, Twitter lookups can probably be switched over to read from a Nitter instance or made to use the same methods as Nitter does internally.
Anyway, this post is primarily intended for those that depend on the @flashiinet Twitter account to keep them informed of news posts. Apart from manually checking the front page of the website, you can subscribe to the RSS or Atom feeds from the news page. You'll find the links on the right-hand side, or at the bottom of the page if your screen/window is too narrow - they're big buttons so you can't miss them.
Personally, I recommend Reeder if you want to subscribe on an iOS device. I have no experience of using it on a Mac, but I'm sure it's pretty good on there too. It does cost $5, but Twitter was pretty much the replacement for RSS in a lot of ways, whether that was a good thing or not you can decide for yourself, so a lot of other sites will probably follow suit and recommend you follow their feeds instead of anything else, so I would call it a worthwhile "investment". Unfortunately I don't have any recommendations for other platforms, the user experience of every feed reader I've tried to use on Windows has been pretty poor but hopefully The Current Events will bring about positive changes in that regard. Drop your own recommendations for others in the comments or elsewhere on the site!
Even if Twitter decides to backtrack on this announcement, this news post will still continue to serve as a reminder that RSS feeds exist, not to mention the precedent that's been set ever since Twitter's New Management has gotten comfortable. If this kind of communication continues and on such short notice, I don't think I want to continue adding value to this platform.
And before it is suggested, I have no interest in setting up an announcement system on the "fediverse".
