As a paid user, I’d personally be willing to pay for a higher tier for this feature alone–super helpful feature for me. Just my 2c.
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Feedbin and Innoreader have both had their API access rejected recently because their apps “violated Twitter Rules and policies”. The egomaniac that now owns Twitter don’t want you accessing Twitter any way besides the official site and app.
Seems like an utter waste of Samuel’s time & effort to even try to support Twitter at this point.
Move on and let Twitter die.
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Would also pay for continued Twitter access.
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That may not be a great option for some people, but I do agree that I don’t think that @samuelclay should be responsible for playing Eternal Whackamole against Elon’s whims. There’s no payment tier that would make that worth it, imo.
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…which is exactly the reason I was using Newsblur for in the first place, to see the few sources that only post to Twitter without actually using Twitter, which I already hated long before “the purchase”.
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Unless Twitter gets enough blowback to build additional tiers between hobbyist and enterprise, I think samuel’s right the dream is over. A number of us would pay multiples of our NewsBlur subscription to keep this one feature, but even that wouldn’t cover samuel’s new API costs, unless I’m missing something. HUGE shame - folders + aggressive filtering in Intelligence Trainer made reading Twitter so much more useable.
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One of the attractions of Newsblur has been Twitter integration. I have discovered it only in the last 2-3 years, but many of my feeds are Twitter feeds and the percentage is increasing. That and substack.
Newsblur is a beautiful piece of software, and I’ve been a very satisfied paid user for many years, but I can totally see how this could decrease its attraction for some.
I hope that @samuelclay will find a way to fix the connection again, once Elon figures out he needs to drop the prices. I too would happily pay for it.
Btw, this is what Samuel is dealing with:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/30/23662832/twitter-api-tiers-free-bot-novelty-accounts-basic-enterprice-monthly-price
The company says older tiers will be deprecated “over the next 30 days.” Here’s a short summary of the three replacements (which can also be found on Twitter’s website):
- Free — Write-only access with the ability to post 1,500 tweets per month at no cost.
- Basic — A $100 per month subscription for hobbyists with the option of posting 3,000 tweets per month at the user level, or 50,000 tweets per month at the app level. The read limit is 10,000 tweets.
- Enterprise — Promises to offer “commercial-level access that meets your and your customer’s specific needs” as well as “managed services [from] a dedicated account team.” No specific price was listed, but Platformer previously reported that a “low-cost enterprise plan” could cost as much as $42,000 a month.
Later edit: Problem relatively fixed with changing the RSS feeds to nitter.net/[twitterusername]/rss. The only issue is that nitter only returns the latest 10 posts.
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I’m sure I’m in the minority, but I need Twitter for work (I know) so I’d be willing to pay over $100/month for this feature alone. The Newsblur Twitter experience is just that much better than vanilla, and that was true before the acquisition as well.
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Nitter looks extremely useful, but most likely will get shot down sooner or later too. But thanks, will use it while it lasts.
If you really want to make it work, you could use the NewsBlur repo and run it yourself, using your own hobbyist twitter api credentials, which costs $100/month. it should be trivial to do, you would just need to register your own twitter app and drop in the API credentials. Running NewsBlur from source is a single command (make) and works quietly in the background, provided you install Docker.
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FYI for the past few days I’ve been trialling OpenRSS.org as a twitter-to-RSS bridge. Seems to work well. I would happily donate to this free service but they make it hard to even find how to donate, so I guess they must be doing fine.
https://openrss.org/
Seems it’s able to convert a lot of other sites to RSS also.
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awesome project! openrss.org seems to be from
https://github.com/markcellus
he may not have capacity to tie in with newblur, but it’s worth asking, @samuelclay
https://openrss.org/contact
Yes it works well. However, it’s not the fastest twitter-to-RSS bridge.
I’ve more recently switched to using nitter, via the main public instance at nitter.net and it’s faster (the “Story” and “Original” views to work as intended, and are way snappier than loading those views direct from twitter). So, in total, using nitter as the twitter-to-RSS bridge is a solution that is actually superior to the now-broken twitter-to-RSS bridge that was built-in to NewsBlur.
So @samuelclay , what would be superb is if there was a facility to bulk-change the URL’s of feeds matching a certain Regex. That would make switching between nitter instances a breeze. In addition to newsblur automatically transforming newly added twitter feeds to a corresponding nitter URL, that is.
Two questions: is there a bulk way to export who I follow on Twitter to set up nitter feeds?
Or, on a different thought, could we all individually get hobbyist API keys for Twitter and configure them in NewBlur. (Obviously, some development would be required there.)
is there a bulk way to export who I follow on Twitter to set up nitter feeds?
Not presently. @samuelclay (or anyone with the programming chops) could modify newsblur to provide a facility for bulk-transforming the “Site Settings” for each twitter feed in a user’s account over to nitter URL’s.
In the meantime, to use nitter as your twitter-to-RSS bridge in newsblur, you can manually go into the “Site Settings” for each twitter feed you have already configured in Newsblur (which won’t be currently working) and change it yourself.
The process is straightforward. You change your existing “Site Settings” for each twitter feed as per the following example pattern:
RSS/XML URL: Change https://twitter.com/AlessioUrban to https://nitter.net/AlessioUrban/rss
Website URL: Change https://nitter.net/AlessioUrban to https://nitter.net/AlessioUrban
Done!
could we all individually get hobbyist API keys for Twitter and configure them in NewBlur. (Obviously, some development would be required there.)
I’d rather protest the change by twitter by circumventing it.
That said, I just tried switching a few more twitter feeds I follow in Newsblur over to using nitter.net RSS feeds, and Newblur is choking with the error “There was a problem trying to add this site. Please try a different URL.”
…However, the URL is definitely correct (checked the URL via my browser and it returned the RSS feed)
@samuelclay any idea what the dealio might be?
Update: As timing would have, Newsblur went down just before I tried to switch a few more twitter follows over to nitter. So that is probably why the latest batch failed to convert
FWIW, I downloaded an OPML file for my Newsblur account (contains all of the feed URLs), used a text editor to search and replace the twitter URLs, trimmed the OPML file to contain only the changed feeds, then imported the file back into Newsblur. That took much less time than manually changing even a handful of feeds via newsblur’s interface.
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