https://sixcolors.com/link/2023/01/the-end-of-the-twitter-client-era/ [sixcolors com]

I remember using 3rd party clients to access #Twitter. There was the commandline #TTYtter, the #Flock browser's built-in social client, and many others.

As Twitter added ads andspewed tons of #JavaScript, leading to a "jumping and twitching" interface that would move underneath your mouse pointer and cause mis-clicks, and as it took 5-10 minutes after logging in for the page to fully load, it was clients that made the site tolerable.

There was the "OAuth-pocalypse", when they required all clients to use OAuth (v2?) and it intermittently failed for a few weeks.

Then came the day when clients and other API uses "that substantially reproduce" the Twitter UI were notified that their days were numbered. I remember @evan telling them that Identica and other StatusNet instances had a similar API ... but few, if any, clients came over. Most just shut down.

Hilariously, there was a trivially reproducible social ranking thing that was cited as an example of the kind of API uses Twitter considered interesting and allowable.

There were other, lesser bumps in the road, but as Twitter had already strangled most of its client ecosystem, I did not pay attention.