Overnight, Twitter users started talking about how the older, much better version of TweetDeck and the free API access that let third-party Twitter apps work have come back. Last week, Twitter suddenly put up a rate-limiting paywall and killed the older APIs that let the old version of TweetDeck work. In January, Twitter stopped letting third-party apps work.
In an update this morning, Harpy developer Roberto Doering said they switched to the “old v1 API” to get it working again, but they also said “this doesn’t mean that harpy will be maintained again, since Twitter will probably shut down access to their legacy api (again) soon and third-party apps are still against their TOS.”
A look at Twitter’s official accounts, as well as those of Elon Musk and new CEO Linda Yaccarino, didn’t show anyone talking about the old TweetDeck coming back. In fact, the last tweet from the Twitter Support account was a few days ago, when it announced the launch of the new TweetDeck.
After that, Twitter made everyone use its “new, improved” TweetDeck, which had been in preview for more than two years. It said on the Twitter support account that the feature would only be available to Twitter Blue users and people the company thinks deserve a free blue check.
Twitter said that its decision to limit the number of tweets its users could see in a day was limited and necessary because companies were scraping its site to feed artificial intelligence models.
The company is also facing its most dangerous copycat with the launch of Instagram’s Threads app. Meta rushed the app out early this week to take advantage of Twitter when it was at its weakest, and over 70 million accounts were made in less than two days.
But Threads might not copy TweetDeck, because Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri told Alex Heath, “Politics and hard news are going to show up on Threads, just like they do on Instagram, but we’re not going to do anything to encourage those verticals.”
