Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Twitter used to provide an RSS feed, that's gone too.

If you google "twitter rss" you will discover four sites that will do that for you as a free service and a node program that will do the conversion for you as well... on the first page of results, anyway.

I switched from Reader to TT-RSS. Now there's no fear that anyone will start analyzing my subscription list, send me personalized ads or suddenly stop serving me.

I think there is a qualitative difference between a company officially supporting an open standard, vs the availability of third party tools that translate from whatever the company chooses to produce to the open standard.

I would go one step further and say that, especially for twitter, I prefer the 3rd party methods. If you depend on twitter to provide the RSS feed then when they withdraw it you're screwed. But if you're already using a non-TOS-compliant workaround, twitter has to go out of their way to break it and when they do people who care enough will find another way to get the content they want. Information wants to be free.

Would it be better if Twitter produced RSS feeds? Yes.

In the meantime, don't let the best be the enemy of the good.

The best is also the enemy of the worst. I basically have no use for twitter minus an RSS feed. Why would I bother trying a 3rd part application when twitter pulled the rug out from under me?

Twitter could shut down those four sites at any time. I also switched to TinyTinyRSS and also self-host a simple Twitter to RSS parser. Anyone savvy enough to set up TT-RSS can manage getting a Twitter API key and configuring this.

https://github.com/jdelamater99/Twitter-RSS-Parser

I tried that recently and discovered that Twitter now require a mobile number to obtain API access even for read-only, which was an immediate hard-stop.

>suddenly stop serving me. Those four sites are explicitly breaking Twitter API TOS, so I think you should have at least a little fear that they will suddenly disappear :)

Except syndication is explicitly forbidden by Twitter developer agreement and they can get shut down at any time.

I have no idea why you're being downvoted but what you say is true. And having to find workarounds to get twitter pushed to me at my laptop is very annoying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com