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This blog post discusses the decline of open APIs on social media platforms, citing the legal pressure placed on tools like Nitter. The author advocates for a shift toward decentralized protocols like atproto to preserve an open web.
Why it matters
It highlights the ongoing tension between corporate 'walled garden' business models and the movement for a decentralized, interoperable internet.
11 4 In 2007, Tim Berners Lee write the essay The Giant Global Graph . Quote:
It seems appropriate as X is sending cease-and-desist letters to Nitter to remember TBL's essay. Nitter is - was - a simple frontend to X which allows users to view tweets without logging in. Even that small use of proxying to the pages is enough to receive threats of legal action.
Twitter's API in 2007 was famously open, which meant thousands of developers building clients, tools, and analytics for free. So, what happened? Why was it pulled? Simple: the network won. The developers stopped being an asset, and the API progressively closed. Rate limits, pricing tiers, login requirements, then technical blocks on the workarounds, and now letters from lawyers. Meta ran the same playbook a decade ago and it's now hard to remember there was ever a Facebook or Instagram API worth building on.
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