On 7 February 2010 at 19:51 SAST, I wrote the following on my Facebook profile: "Playing around with the Twitter API. Testing to see if I can update my Twitter status programmatically from my C# application."
Those were the days. When Twitter's API was free and open and anyone could use it without restrictions or applying for permission or anything. And there were a plethora of Twitter clients for all sorts of platforms, as well as little apps to do specific things.
And then Elon Musk happened... Well, to be fair, they started locking it down long before Elon Musk. But Elon Musk hammered the final nail.
But a free, open, unrestricted API, along with the GARGANTUAN number of clients out there, is one of the things that drew me to Mastodon. And I've written a few Mastodon bots myself. It's the good old days. :-)