We here at Freezenet have decided to formally end the automated sharing of news links on Twitter. This relates to JetPack.
For years now, we here at Freezenet have been taking every single opportunity to try and expand our audience and reach new people. It’s an obvious strategy that any website would take if the aim is to further grow.
One of the platforms that we have expanded to is Twitter. For years, this has nicely worked out. Twitter allowed the use of its API to permit the existence of tools that would allow us to automatically share links onto Twitter. In our case, we used Dlvr.it for the longest time, but when they announced that they would be charging money for this free service, we were forced to move to an alternative for the simple reason that this website is struggling to break even with server costs alone – a problem that has only been compounded by dropping digital ad revenue despite nearly doubling our audience in the last year or so.
With that, we switched to JetPack and the automated sharing was able to continue. Unfortunately, Elon Musk bought Twitter and it has been pure carnage and chaos on the platform ever since. JetPack had also announced that they would be limiting the number of shares to a certain amount unless we paid money as well, but with the chaos going on at Twitter, it has led us to wonder if we should be contributing to Musk’s effort to turn Twitter into the dumpster fire it is today. Because of that alone, we decided to not bother attempting to find other solutions to continue the automated sharing of news links. If a few links get missed, we simply shrug and say, “oh well.”
Of course, Musk is incredibly talented of making situations increasingly worse. A while back, he announced that he was going to charge developers to access its API. This affected JetPack. Earlier, JetPack announced that a solution to resolve their issues with Twitter have been unsuccessful. In response, they were going to shut down the automated sharing of posts to Twitter. How long the sharing continued, no one really knew. Earlier today, however, we got notice that our Twitter accounts were disconnected, signalling that this is actually the end of the functionality of this feature.
Now, we do have two options:
- Find a new plugin to resume this feature
- Drop automated news sharing in response
With respect to the first option, we end up going back to asking whether or not we want to continue to supporting an egotistical thin-skinned idiot as he continues burning Twitter to the ground. Honestly, that option just doesn’t strike us as all that attractive. So, that leaves the latter choice which is to just drop news links sharing altogether. While this could mean jeopardizing the 5 clicks per month that we get out of Twitter, it’s not as though we will lose sleep over that option. Twitter never really provided a whole lot of traffic to our website to begin with.
So, we went into our settings and just disconnected Twitter from my personal account and the Freezenet account. We might still visit and communicate with the few holdouts left on the platform, but our presence will be more limited as a result of this decision.
Obviously, our Mastodon account will continue to be the most reliable source of getting links to our site. That is handled separately from the Jetpack plugin and doesn’t appear to have any real limitations involved. We’ve been getting far more interactions and follows on that platform to begin with, so we’ll be happy to continue to foster that as well. Tumblr and Facebook will still be fed via the Jetpack plugin. We suspect that, next month, there’ll be more posts being shared in those places, but the plugin was always pretty glitchy with how many shares we get per month to begin with. So, we’ll see how disconnecting Twitter affects those platforms.
For those who follow us exclusively on Twitter, sorry, but the circumstances forced us to this conclusion. We thank you for following us all this time and we may still pop in from time to time, but Mastodon is probably the better way to follow us at this point.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
