Removing Twitter support from Scheduled Player

As many of you might be aware of: Twitter has been purchased last year. Since then, they have proven to be completely unpredictable in how their product is being moved forward. From the absolute circus that was the botched rework of Twitter Blue to now the latest act: It seems their third party API required to reliably retrieve tweets will soon switch to a paid plan. From announcement to implementation they give developers 7 days and don’t even provide a pricing preview.

Charging for an API might be fine, if it included some guarantees one might rely on going forward. Given the absolute shit show Twitter has been this past months, there is unfortunately no trust left. This is no basis for any kind of business relationship and from them 9th February onwards, the Twitter feature in the Scheduled Player will no longer show any tweets and the feature will be fully removed soon after.

If you’ve been using the Twitter addon in the past, now might be a good idea to check out alternatives. Especially if it’s for smaller events or similar installations. The increasing toxicity of Twitter, thanks to them greatly reducing content moderation, has resulted in many advertisers leaving Twitter and it would eventually also creep into what your displays might have shown.

Now is a great time to abandon Twitter and use alternatives like Mastodon. There is already a 3rd party Mastodon Timeline addon available and it will soon be integrated into the Scheduled Player. Similarly info-beamer’s twitter account has been dormant for a while as well and will soon also finally move away from Twitter.