Twitter app source code for free#
The AGPL license mandates that software developed for free - like Mastodon - remain publicly available after its been modified. “Compliance with our AGPLv3 license is very important to me as that is the sole basis upon which I and other developers are willing to give away years of work for free,” Rochko added. Then came the new Twitter replies, and suddenly hundreds of people were joining Mastodon every hour.“ I do intend to seek legal counsel on the situation though,” Rochko told TPM, while declining to discuss any specific legal action he may be contemplating. Mastodon acquired around 24,000 users in its first six months. (So far, there are at least three for Android, and three for iOS.) And there would be no advertising. There would be an open API allowing any developer to build a Mastodon app to their liking. In October, he announced the service with a post on Hacker News. A designer friend created its logo, a cuddly mastodon. Rochko named the service after a popular metal band that he enjoys. Anyone can create a server and host their own instance of Mastodon, and Mastodon works in the background to connect them. Instead of building a unified service, Rochko envisioned something more like email, or RSS: a distributed system that lets you send public messages to anyone who follows you on the service. Last year, after Twitter began moving away from a purely chronological feed, Rochko began building the back end for what would become Mastodon. (Its flagship app was also never very good, Rochko says.) He says he has tried to learn from some of App.net’s mistakes, including a focus on becoming “a realtime cloud API company” and not a more straightforward microblogging service. One of App.net’s users had been Rochko, who was drawn to it for the same reasons that would eventually lead him to build Mastodon. “Maybe Twitter itself is not the way to go forward.” Despite raising $500,000 from Twitter refugees, the app failed to grow, and it entered “maintenance mode” in 2014 before finally shutting down in January. In July 2012, a developer named Dalton Caldwell announced App.net, a crowdfunded Twitter clone that promised to be mostly free but charged users for certain features. Rochko is not the first person to attempt building a better version of Twitter.
So in the end I decided that maybe Twitter itself is not the way to go forward.”
But it continuously made decisions that I didn’t like. “I kept promoting it to everybody I knew. “I brought all my friends to Twitter back in the day,” says Rochko, 24. On Tuesday, Rochko shut down new sign-ups “until quality of service can be assured for existing users.” User interest is largely rooted in Mastodon’s alternative view of its service: one designed not first and foremost as a business, but as a public trust. Those users have collectively authored nearly 1 million posts despite heavy server loads that have made basic functions unavailable for hours at a time. Just in the past 48 hours, the network has grown by 73 percent, to 41,703 users, according to the public counter on Mastodon’s about page.
Twitter app source code update#
Then last week, Twitter rolled out an update that changed the way it displays replies many longtime users complained that the redesign is confusing - in a piece on Motherboard, Sarah Jeong asked, “Why does Twitter hate itself so much?” Overnight, Mastodon added users by the thousands. Rochko launched Mastadon with little fanfare six months ago. Mastodon, a distributed, open-source version of Twitter, is almost identical to the platform it’s based on, but with key differences: posts can run 500 characters rather than 140, and users can make individual posts private. Rochko set about rebuilding Twitter from scratch. Most people in Rochko’s situation fired off an angry tweet or two and moved on.
Twitter app source code series#
The company had made a series of changes that he thought eroded the value of the service: limiting how big third-party applications could grow, for example, and implementing an algorithm-driven timeline that made Twitter feel uncomfortably similar to Facebook.