Good question!

The motivation behind it is to get our feet wet with people building on top of our API. It was already possible if you knew how¹ but not many people used it because it was too annoying (as one @anon kept pointing out) or not obvious that it was possible (?).

Now with this official API key support, more people might be interested in building bots like @hn or @nitter but we don't want to drown in support requests or deal with API abuse (too many expensive requests etc).

This formal API key request is intended to act as a rate limiter: With it, we know who wants to do what and can be more prepared for what's to come. It also limits the access to people who can come up with ideas that make sense from our perspective. So less "opportunistic abusers".

Also keep in mind that there are no guarantees that the API is stable. That's also a reason to limit it since else people might see this as a lot more stable than it really is, build on it without our knowledge and then get disappointed if their code breaks because we changed something on our side.

With this request, we can also establish a direct communication channel for such things or feedback and support.

If you use ~meta to request API access, others can also chime in on the ideas. But you don't have to use ~meta, you can also reach out to us privately via email, Telegram or SimpleX as mentioned in the info message: