in tuft we trust

one of the things stated in it is that twitter doesn't have separate environments for testing things

rumor? truth? let's ask one of the official twitter testing accounts (because it responds to comments for some reason lol)

it's not definitive proof but...... i think it might actually be true tbh

1. elon saw someone posting about how all of the bots he hates steal API keys from official clients anyway;
2. he understands just enough about computers to know that the secrets on twitter's official apps should be rotated, so he stormed into the moderation office to order that;
3. this failed to get communicated to the product teams and it went through without their approval, under the idea that either the official apps don't use the API for anything loadbearing or that rotating the secrets should be an unnoticeably quick process;
4. that idea is very very false;
5. we're watching them learn this

Here's the error message I got when trying to DM.

The Twitter developer page says this about that error message (as error code 37 is something else, apparently):

Code 220
Your credentials do not allow access to this resource.
Corresponds with HTTP 403. The authentication token in use is restricted and cannot access the requested resource.

So yes, API keys were indeed restricted lmao

(Error code 37 seems to mean "Not authorized to use this endpoint" according to the Twitter Community forums, which is an inaccessible webpage which is conveniently cached in google search results though. More confirmation that it's API issues though!)

So there's a lot of people wanting to grab what they can before our beloved birdsite goes tits up. There's a few tools out there that can help you do that!

One thing to know is that tools that use the official twitter API (aka the tools that talk to twitter nicely for the non-programmer folks) can only retrieve up to 3200 tweets, and are bound by request limits within certain time intervals.

There are also tools that don't use the API and are more like scrapers; aka they just go over the posts one by one, save them, move on to the next, and so on. If you've got a big account with >3200 tweets, you probably want to use a scraper tool

I'm writing this lil guide just to make it easier for folks to grab what they want and run; it's not always simple, especially for the non-techy folks!

Click "read more" for the guide!