Twitter used to have a Firehose API, too. Over time they closed it, and made it only available to large users like Google Search with real-time indexing needs.
Twitter had a really outstanding search and streaming API, but after Musk bought it they put it behind a $60k/year paywall. You can see a corresponding and abrupt falloff in academic network research papers, with newer ones that revolve around Twitter largely limited to cannibalizing old datasets.
With luck bsky keeps growing and researchers invest effort in studying a more open-by-design platform.
