Twitter’s API, the data interface that allows third-party apps and websites to fetch tweets and post new ones, died mysteriously right before I went to bed last night. I refuse to use the actual Twitter app on my phone. Twitter’s official client is hot garbage and it isn’t worth downloading. It is unusable.

This is the quickest way for me to simply not use Twitter.

Last month, I stopped posting to Twitter. My life did not change drastically. I still read my curated list of people I follow, but my proactive use of Twitter basically stopped.

I’ll be honest since Twitter broke third-party apps, I might be done with Twitter for real. TweetDeck still works, so I’m not completely off the platform just yet. However, if I can’t use Tweetbot on my phone, I simply will not be checking Twitter on my phone. End of the story.

As of this writing, all the popular third-party clients like Tweetbot and Twitteriffic are still down. Of course, Twitter hasn’t said anything about this situation. The affected developers of those clients have heard nothing. Is it an unintended outage? Who knows? Twitter barely has any staff. If this were a strategic decision, I’d figure Musk would be telling everybody about it and pushing the actual Twitter app. None of that is happening.

If this is intentional and third-party apps are not coming back, my use of Twitter will plummet. Seriously, Tweetbot not working has been way, way more effective at keeping me focused on what needs to get done than any Screen Time or Self Control apps that I’ve ever used.

Ultimately, that’s probably a good thing.