People use microblogs (e.g., Twitter, Mastodon) for different reasons. I have mostly used such tools for discovery. I get the feeling many have moved from RSS readers to microblogs to keep up with innovations.
I am also on the other side of this trend. When I examine the data on how individuals come to my blogs, I see an obvious trend away from RSS to search and microblog recommendations. I mostly blog using WordPress which offers extensions that will automatically send tweets and toots when a new post is published. This is very handy and eliminates to the need to connect to the microblogs and generate a post.
Twitter has obviously undergone changes in the last year or so with the new ownership and agenda. I understand that some of these changes concern political issues, but some involve how to generate revenue. Evidently, some of the new revenue plans involve charging heavy users. I have bumped up against this change, not because I am a heavy user by any means, but because it appears Twitter is changing its API to differentiate those who post automatically into different tiers.
Anyway, this means that the WordPress extension I have used for years suddenly stopped working requiring some adjustment on my part. My familiar WordPress extension refused to allow me to post and provided the following alert.
I began searching for an updated extension and was dismayed to find that the process had become far more complicated. There is still a free tier for those of us making occasional use, but application process seems quite complicated.
I did start the application process, but I quickly became annoyed over what used to be such as simple thing. For the immediate future, I have decided to just manually post to Twitter and wait to see what happens. How many casual bloggers are going to make this effort?
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