Abandoning egg-mode

[QuietMisdreavus]

egg-mode started as my "learn Rust" project, and grew into a love letter to API design as well as the website i spent a lot of my time on. I'm still proud of the work i put into this crate, years after my big initial push into its implementation. Every time i hear people speak positively of it, or say that it powers some project or another, it warms my heart.

However, a few things have happened in the last few years (and the last few months) that have made me stop wanting to contribute to egg-mode:

• I have stopped writing Rust in my spare time; this is mainly a product of the project i work on in my dayjob using a different language and me not wanting to invest as much energy in writing code outside of work as i did before.
• Twitter's ever-tightening clamp over the years on API access for uses that would "replicate the core site/app experience" (read: alternate clients) meant that the primary reason i wanted to write egg-mode in the first place was quickly becoming moot.
  • Sidebar: When Twitter revamped their developer account system in 2020, i went through their application process to make sure i could still work on egg-mode (this was prior to starting my current job). My application was returned because they thought that i would violate their "automation rules". I only got invited to the v2 API in May 2022.
• I've been using Mastodon more and more; in the last month and a half i've been using it exclusively and stopped checking Twitter at all.
• On a personal note: Twitter's newest executive has expressed some casual transphobia (just a quickly-sourced example) both before and during his tenure as owner, and in doing so has riled up a contingent of people who tend to swamp people who disagree with them. As a publicly trans person on the internet, i don't want to be a part of that atmosphere, much less enable the continued enrichment of it.
• At time of writing, Twitter has announced that they will no longer be allowing free access to the Twitter API, both v1.1 and v2.

With all of these factors, i cannot in good conscience consider myself to be a good steward of egg-mode any more. I cannot speak for @adwhit, but as the master branch has not seen a commit since 2021 but the issue tracker sees new comments every month or two, i feel safe in calling egg-mode abandonware.

If you would like to step up and bring egg-mode into the future of Twitter, let me know and i can give you commit and publish access. Otherwise, i think i should let this egg hatch. ❤️

[maxdeviant]

I just wanted to say thank you for creating egg-mode.

I started using it a few months back to back up my tweets and it made it incredibly easy to do ❤️

[adwhit]

I can only echo @QuietMisdreavus comments. I stopped using Twitter a while and haven't much interest in maintaining this crate, especially now that the API is no longer free. I do hope something 'like Twitter, but better' comes along eventually.

[lmammino]

Also here to say thank you for having created and maintained egg-mode so far. I can't disagree with all your reasons and I can only support them. Still I have been using egg-mode for some personal twitter integration lambdas and it has been a pure joy to use, so thanks once more for that!

[wiseman]

Thank you for creating this! You made a good, useful thing :)

[klausi]

A big thank you from me as well, I used egg-mode heavily for https://github.com/klausi/mastodon-twitter-sync which just stopped working for me a couple of days ago as my Twitter App was suspended for terms of service violations. Quickly trying to revive it with another app did not work, I'm not able to authenticate against Twitter anymore.

Synchronizing my tweets the last couple of years would have been much harder without your work.

As I'm using Twitter less and less this is a bit of bitter sweet goodbye, but probably ok. I had a good time while it lasted and playing around with egg-mode gave me that little extra joy.

I hope to see/hear/read you on other platforms and wish you all the best!