Goodbye Twitter. It Was Fun While It Lasted
I joined Twitter in October 2008 (after noticing everyone else was using it during a Networking Field Day event), and eventually figured out how to automate posting the links to my blog posts in case someone uses Twitter as their primary source of news – an IFTTT applet that read my RSS feed and posted links to new entries to Twitter.
This week, I got a nice email from IFTTT telling me they had to disable the post-to-Twitter applet. Twitter started charging for the API, and I was using their free service – obviously the math didn’t work out.
That left me with three options:
- Pay for the post-to-Twitter service (IFTTT Pro). It’s peanuts, but using a gazillion $1.99/month services eventually adds up.
- Post the links manually. That’s a hassle, and as I’m getting older I’m trying to save my mental energy for stuff that matters.
- Stop cross-posting to Twitter.
Next step: check whether I’m getting any significant traffic from Twitter. The results are dismal – Twitter referrals are not even 0.1% of the traffic, and I’m getting approximately as many referrals from Wikipedia (for unknown reasons; I never posted anything there).
The final decision was easy: stop cross-posting to Twitter. The bird button at the end of each blog post will remain there, and you can use it to post stuff to Twitter if you wish. I will keep posting to LinkedIn (so you can follow me there), or you could decide to try out the ancient technology called RSS.
Last but definitely not least: it would be a fun summer project to write a script that would email you the short summaries of last week’s posts each Saturday, but I have no idea whether anyone would be interested in that. Please write a comment (or send me an email) and let me know whether that’s something you’d be interested in.
Happy RSS/Atom feed consumer here. I prefer open technology whenever possible, both in my job and for private use.
No Mastodon? ;)
+1
I'm getting too old to get used to yet-another platform. I have a mastodon account somewhere, but never did more than created it 🤷♂️
Same here - happy user of the modern RSS feed after NNTP fell out of fashion. The Birdsite just does not make sense any more. Mastodon would be an idea to post to in case someone doesn’t like RSS.
RSS FTW!
RSS works great. Twitter was just duplicating that. Maybe highlight that?
Thank you, added.
I'm visiting jaluri.com, there are a lot of RSS feeds aggregated. Not all I wanted, but the others (Russ White) post to LinkedIn, so thats fine for me.
And yes, a weekly (or maybe every two weeks) newsletter with the summaries would be nice. I don't always have the time during the day and, more often then I like to admit, don't want to read the technical details of whatever in my spare time. With a newsletter like that, I could scan through the articels of the last, or maybe last two weeks and click on the interesting ones.
Been using the "ancient technology" (LOL) RSS for decades, it serves me just great. Opened a "bird" account back then and never used it (neither I will). I do pay for some services monthly (Readwise) which allows me to aggregate feeds and filter these and tag these for later note taking, and daily review and summarization and export my highlights into Obsidian as notes, it may not be for everyone but it works for me just great, and I get my ipspace feeds this way (possibly one of the best feeds I receive as everything else is mostly junk). Before I was using free Innoreader with IPSpace RSS ;TLDR I'm just good with the RSS, works great
I've had you in my RSS feed for quite a while. Having you on twitter or Mastodon would simply be a duplicate entry. It would be nice to see you an Russ on Mastodon, only to get a view into your other interests.
Another content (pun intended) RSS/Atom user here. RSS feeds are how I get a significant percentage of IT-related news daily. I rarely ever used my Twitter account and recently dumped it.
Ivan, I would be interested in emails with summaries.