But the point remains - don't be fooled into thinking that the grass is always greener. Unless it really is.

"Hey, see the stupid thing that happened to Eli Lilly? You know how you can actually just have your own email instead of gmail in your company if you pay for it? Also your own website? This is that, for what Twitter does."

Seems positively stupid for companies to NOT go in this direction.

Letting third parties do the hard work of experimenting with user acquisition and engagement, then buying up the best and turning their backs on the rest was a masterful move.

We need an open alternative to Twitter, but as a publicly-traded for-profit organization, Twitter, Inc. will never deliver that.

For clarity, I see Twitter as having this amazing potential as a message bus for both people, apps, and services. And I feel that potential has been squandered.

I'm unsure if this particular idea is going to pay off. But the general notion of an ecosystem of services hanging off of Twitter seems like the right one to me.

(This is usually where someone says app.net, and I say 'critical mass'.)

Twitter, the giant that's integrated into pretty much everywhere, is still fighting for engagement and new signups. So for a company to come and challenge them with such a vague value proposition is plain bad.

Worse, there isn't even an attempt to provide or support an open protocol/open endpoint as a way to entice developers.

Don't get me wrong, I'm under no illusion that had this open endpoint been provided, that it wouldn't be shut-down in a couple years once this "Post" service gains market share .. but still, this performative action would have been welcome.

I think a company like Twitter could have had a real competitive advantage if they were to have repackaged its core experience as a "bring your own domain name" hosted implementation of ActivityPub in the likes of G Suite or M365. I thought for a minute that's what Bluesky was, but I am losing all hopes they'll have sense to do that.

However, 3rd party clients were the route into Twitter for a huge amount of early adopters (and even later adopters). Most Twitter "features" (including the retweet concept, hashtags an even the word "tweet") were from the open community they started with. Moreover, their own clients are falling behind even simple 3rd party experiences. Twitter for Mac has, essentially, been abandoned. How many users will swallow an inferior experience, just for the privilege of getting adverts thrust in?

For my 2p, I certainly won't - to me, the value of Twitter has been decreasing over time, not increasing. As it moves towards "mass market", it seems to be seeking a broadcast model, where billions of users subscribe to feeds of a few celebrities. It's becoming a "send only" service - the total amount of micro-conversions I've had in the last year is much lower than even 2 years ago.

Perhaps this will work out for them as a company - a real time newswire for companies and celebs to send 140 character press releases, interspersed with adverts. Or maybe I'm wrong, and mass adoption of their web and iffy mobile/desktop clients is coming. I just can't see it, yet.

> Can someone name me an instance where a site as popular as Twitter eventually flopped because it didn't play nicely with third-party developers?

The internet is still very new, the internet in its current form is even newer. Facebook is ~8 years old, Twitter is ~6 years old, it's probably not even worth considering previous examples of social sites and developers because even Twitter in 2010 and Twitter now is significantly different (as a company, product and community).

The value of Twitter has nothing to do with the product, and everything to do with the name and market share. For that reason, it's been almost impossible for any other alternative to call itself a real Twitter competitor.