Loyalty systems, moderation, safety, giveaways, and in-stream games. These are just a few genres of third-party applications that creators have adopted to make their community special. All these applications have one common aspect that makes their success a lot easier to achieve; they all need to know who’s in Twitch Chat. To further drive the innovation of these use cases, we are launching an official Twitch API endpoint to obtain the list of chatters for a given Twitch broadcaster.
What’s new?
Get Chat Chatters — Gets the list of users that are connected to the specified broadcaster’s chat session.
moderator:read:chatters
– A new authentication scope to obtain the list of users connected to a chat session.
What else should I know?
To request a chatters list, the authenticated token must belong to the broadcaster themselves or any of their moderators, and include the moderator:read:chatters
scope.
If the authentication token is used on behalf of a broadcaster, then you would set both the broadcaster_id and the moderation_id to the same value. In any case, the moderator_id must match the user_id associated with the authentication token.
Regarding pagination, the number of objects returned per page by default is 100 and the maximum you can request per page is 1000. Providing these higher paging numbers will help creators and their developers use this information when a broadcast has a large audience.
What about…you know…that other endpoint?
It is no secret that third-party developers have been aware of an unsupported and undocumented endpoint to retrieve a list of users in chat. In full transparency, we do intend to withdraw the “TMI chatters” endpoint in the future. However, we are not setting a decommission date until we have received feedback during this open beta period, made any necessary changes based on that feedback, and are ready to make an announcement for general availability. The open beta timeframe will depend on the amount of feedback and the actions or updates necessary. We will make sure to have a discussion publicly about a shutdown timeline for TMI chatters and provide ample time to migrate applications at that time.
Thank you
We are also excited to finally mark one of the most requested third-party developer features as completed (or at least partially released as we consider adding user_ids to the response during the beta period). Thanks to @TheElm for being the first reporter and all 200+ developers who have voted for this feature since.
We also want to thank the 72 developers who provided feedback for this endpoint in our last quarterly survey. Your answers help guide our product decisions and you might have already seen this coming because of the question! I may be biased, but I’d say getting hints (aka twitchdevLeeks) about product direction is a good reason to check out these surveys when you have the time.
UPDATE (2022-11-17): user_id
and user_name
have been added to the return payload for each user in the list.