Comment by kylec
9 years ago
This is an unfortunate, but not unexpected, end of an era. App.net was created at a time when discontent was high with how Twitter was treating its users and 3rd party app developers. Even though App.net wasn't hugely successful, its existence provided a needed check against Twitter exercising user-hostile control over their platform.
However, it has not been a viable platform (one that people actually used) for many years, so while I am saddened that it is finally being shut down, I'm not surprised. Many thanks to Dalton and everyone who built it and kept it going these many years!
Did Twitter actually do anything in response to App.net?
App.net came out in 2012, and while I can't really remember the specific areas of discontent that I experienced with Twitter back then, here's an article I found:
http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2013/01/14/twitter-in-2012/
I think what everyone was worried about back then was that Twitter was changing the nature of what Twitter was. Twitter started placing limits on API tokens, introduced new UI in the form of cards, which could also be used for ads, etc. There was a sense that the freedom and openness of the Twitter platform was quickly diminishing.
Twitter's response was basically no response, but in a good way. They slowed down making those sorts of radical changes, and to this day you can still browse Twitter with a 3rd-party app like TweetBot and never see cards or ads.
> They slowed down making those sorts of radical changes, and to this day you can still browse Twitter with a 3rd-party app like TweetBot and never see cards or ads.
TweetBot is older than the API cap, so did they roll that back? It was 100,000 users (or 2x current users if that was >100,000 which TweetBot probably was). So if they didn't roll it back I guess TweetBot would have stopped adding clients.
This is my first time hearing of App.net.
(This is something that happens for me regularly -- I "discover" something only by its shutdown notice making the HN front page...).
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It didn't need to. App.net was a "success" at first because the bigshots from the tech twitter-sphere all jumped over.
Problem was none of them actually stopped posting on Twitter, at best they just set app.net to mirror their Twitter never really engaging with the network because none of them were willing to give up their high follower counts they had from being early adopters of Twitter.
Too much ego to put up with the BS from twitter, yet also too much ego to give up their high follower counts.
No.
It provided a check? How?
If people were dissatisfied with Twitter, they could leave and join App.net. If enough people did this and App.net reached critical mass, it could have become the default service of its kind.
Since the primary motivation for people switching to App.net was them getting upset at Twitter, they slowed down the frequency and breadth of the changes they were making to their service so as to upset fewer people and less frequently. In the end, this was a positive outcome for users that liked Twitter exactly the way it used to be and didn't want it to change.
Of course, Twitter's changes may not have been motivated by App.net at all, but even if not there was still an escape hatch for users if things got too bad.
> they could leave and join App.net
Except they couldn't. They had to be invited or pay for it. In those days circa 2012, it was a hype train among a niche crowd.