Latest Followers - Auth Change and OWN3D Partnership
Why the sudden change?
At the start of this month Twitch made a change to how followers are made available to third-party developers: instead of being fully public to anyone making a third-party app, follower information would now effectively become "private", and the only way to get this information was to get express permission from the Twitch user to read their followers or following lists.
This change is absolute, there is no way around it. Every third-party Twitch app, extension, plugin, streaming bot, tool, etc, now must get this permission from the Twitch user to read follows/followers. This is typically done via an "Authorize" step - that little window you see where it shows you logged in with your Twitch account and says something like "Do you want to allow [APP NAME HERE] to read your Twitch information?"
Most streaming apps and tools that provide useful functionality to you probably asked you for such permissions the first ever used it, and typically that's the only time you'd ever know about it. This is a little different for Latest Followers because we simply never needed that permission before - follow information was fully public to developers so we could get your entire follower history without you needing to do anything. And as you already know, this has now changed.
Why are OWN3D involved?
Latest Followers is a very high traffic extension; by some measures it's typically around the #2 most active extension on the entire site. Before this recent Twitch change, every time the extension checked for new followers, that check was made directly on Twitch's servers. However, this change requiring authorization meant that all of these checks had to go through "my" server first. In princple this isn't a big deal, and in fact "my" server already takes care of all the Bits features in all Casperr extensions, but due to Latest Follower's popularity, this meant the amount of traffic "my" server would now have to handle would go up by several thousand orders of magntiude - we're talking from 1 or 2 processes every minute up to 100,000s.
By some wonderful coincidence, OWN3D and I had started speaking just a few weeks ago about potentially bringing some extra features to Latest Followers for OWN3D's existing users, but then this change to followers on Twitch's side went live and our focus quickly pivoted. Being the powerhouse of streamer tools that they are, OWN3D had their own pre-existing followers feed that Latest Followers could utilise and their servers were already handling 100,000s of requests more than my lil' ol' one ever would, so adding Latest Followers' traffic in would be super easy, barely an inconvenience.
In order for OWN3D's followers feed to be able to read your followers you need to give OWN3D permission to do so - this is the new auothrize step on Latest Followers config page. And to clarify this step would still look almost exactly the same if we did this on "my" server instead, the only difference is that OWN3D ask for a few more permissions beyond just reading your followers. This is to enable the myriad of other amazing features that they offer and that you can completely ignore if you're not interested.
What's next?
For the time being, that's all there is to it! Looking forward, OWN3D and I will be working closely together in the near future to bring new features to Latest Followers. Where possible, the default behaviour will stay exactly as it is - if you don't want or care about any other features you can safely ignore them and absolutely nothing will ever be forced on you. This latest change was 100% necessary - with or without OWN3D - otherwise we wouldn't be able to read your followers list and, well, that's basically the only thing the extension does, so we kinda need that.
Keep an eye on the extension config page and OWN3D's socials, because that's where any new features will be announced! And again, if you simply don't care then feel free to do neither of those things and everything will carry on as normal until the heatdeath of the universe (or Twitch, whichever comes first).
I also want to give a huge shoutout to the dev team at Twitch themselves, whom I contacted at the EXTREME last minute, but were very accomodating to help this change get through without any more disruption to Latest Followers than was absolutely necessary.