☠️ WordPress to Twitter

I’ve long used automation to auto-publish from my WordPress sites to Twitter. I used to work with Automattic as a sponsor for ages, and I’d talk up Jetpack, a WordPress plugin, that handled this social media automation nicely.

The Jetpack Blog, 10 days ago: The End of Twitter Auto-Sharing

We have attempted to work with Twitter in good faith to negotiate new terms, but we have not been able to reach an agreement. As a result, the Twitter connection on Jetpack Social will cease to work, and your blog posts will no longer be auto-shared to Twitter.

It’s the same story everywhere. Feedbin, another product I adore, was smacked. Bots have been largely banned, including super important ones that deliver health and safety alerts.

And all this put onto the absolutely heaping pile of reasons to be disappointed in Twitter. With the jab at WordPress, I was surprised to see Matt defending it. I actually agree with many of the things he said, but he didn’t mention anything about my biggest reason: Elon Musk treats human beings very poorly both personally and through policy decisions. I can’t look past that.

I still pop in there once in a while as… well, I guess I miss it. It’s the best of the social media apps, functionally. I still have friends there. DMs still have some value. But I increasingly feel bad about it because I don’t want to be a part of any ongoing success. I guess I do want Twitter to fail. I want to see a company that has decided to remove protections for their fellow human beings and constantly punch down in that same icky way that Trump does suffer the consequences.

I’m assuming this post will actually auto-post to Twitter. I haven’t touched my Jetpack settings, have posted since this announcement, and it’s still worked. Throw another tire on the fire. Saying one thing and doing another is embarrassing and seeds all the more mistrust.

Since “moving” to Mastodon, I’m getting almost as much value out of that. It’s healthier, anyway. I’ve gotten onto Bluesky as well, but it feels smaller and weirder so far. I followed all the same people as I follow everywhere else, and the general tech conversation doesn’t seem as good there yet. Anecdotally, it feels like people are a bit more excited about AT than about ActivityPub for some reason, yet I expect the tech crowd to be a bit more ActivityPub-heavy in the short-term future.