Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elon isnt going to buy you a horse for defending his virtue online.
Not with that attitude! Just need to believe harder!
You have to go much harder if you want a horse
Twitter's API is down?
281–290 of 431 posts
Re: Twitter's API is down?
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
You will have 2 problems with this: 1) the law, at least in the US. Laws such as copyright and maybe even the CFAA have been abused to outlaw adversarial interoperability. You'd need to either practice good opsec and operate anonymously or be based out of reach of US-allied law enforcement. 2) Apple (and maybe Google too?) - they will remove any client for a third-party service unless said client has explicit approva…
Another point to show what Apple's true goal is: To kill general computing. If you buy an iPhone you should be able to run whatever app you want on it. But no, Apple knows best and will not permit you to do anything it doesn't approve of. As for the APIs being copyrightable see Google vs Oracle.
Apple's goal was to kill malware, not general-purpose computing[0] as a whole. Unfortunately it turns out that killing general-purpose computing is an instrumental goal[1] to killing malware: if you want a phone that cannot get a virus then you need someone pre-approving every line of code that hits the processor.
Once you have any entity having control over your device, even if it is for your own benefit and you completely trust that entity, a whole bunch of other competing business considerations come into play. In the case of adversarial interoperability, that means business risks that Apple doesn't want to take on. Let's say that tomorrow Elon Musk goes absolutely insane[2] and decides that third-party Twitter clients are hacking as defined by the CFAA. If Apple knowingly distributes those clients, then they could be held criminally liable for signing and distributing the app.
Less dramatically, adversarial operability implies a lot of support headaches. Apple wants to sell working software, not stuff that needs updates every few hours to keep ahead of updates done on Twitter's side to kill it. Even if they wanted to fight for adversarial interop in court, the underlying constraint of "pre-approve software updates to keep malware away" makes updating the software in real time to work around Twitter's workaround to the software untenable.
For a non-Apple, pre-everything-being-locked-down example of how much of a pain adversarial interoperability is in practice, there's the time Microsoft tried to make MSN speak to AIM. They stopped once AOL started using buffer overflow exploits to validate that you were running AIM[3]. AOL did not need to actually sue Microsoft with a spurious application of the CFAA. They just needed to wrap their API and client in enough garbage to make interop monetarily painful to support.
[0] In the Cory Doctorow sense
[1] AI safety term for "thing you need to do to get to other things you want".
[2] More than he already has
Re: Twitter's API is down?
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does anything stops devs from using the Web interface instead of the API? Sure it makes it a bit more challenging because parsing is involved but AFAIK it is completely legal to parse and display HTML output however you want. It's essentially like a browser add-on. I wonder if Twitter can be killed by the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy? So: 1. Make a client that combines Mastadon/Others and Twitter feeds, mak…
I’ve done this recently. Essentially created a browser extension that combines Mastodon and Twitter on twitter.com. It works surprisingly well, but I’m guessing catching up with Twitter.com changes is bound to be painful. You can find it here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastodon-chirper/l...
> catching up with Twitter.com changes is bound to be painful.
Perhaps it should be handled in the same way the YouTubeDL (YT DLP) team handles changes in the html.
Re: Twitter's API is down?
#284This might be the last straw. I flat out refuse to use their horrible app with its nonsense algorithmic timeline. Give it a few hours to see if it's permanent but if it is, I expect a huge wave of new mastodon users..
Let's be real, if your "last straw" moment wasn't several weeks ago it's unlikely this is gonna be it. But if it is, shame on you. All the silencing of journalists, banning accounts for saying "mastodon", or saying anything negative about Tesla, or criticizing Musk in any way, that didn't do it. But now you have been mildly inconvenienced and it's the last straw. Really?
[deleted]
Re: Twitter's API is down?
#285Most public nitter instances have had issues in recent weeks also. Its not 100% down, but sometimes you need 3-5 refresh to get a tweet.
Re: Twitter's API is down?
#286Is this potentially retaliatory to negative responses to recent Twitter Blue changes? I saw that Twitter started displaying Blue subscriber tweets in a rather obnoxious way, which resulted in non-subscribers removing and blocking subscribers. I’ve also seen that some users were subscribing Blue expecting their deboosting penalties to clear, only for it to be worsened. That weakly suggests to me that Blue subscriber d…
> I saw that Twitter started displaying Blue subscriber tweets in a rather obnoxious way
What way is that? Looks the same on my end.
Re: Twitter's API is down?
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
The top few comments are… Top: speculating about 3p clients “It would not surprise me if this is the end of third party clients …” Second: about lack of comms, “Ironically, we can know about this through posts to the FediVerse from the developer of Tweetbot, and ensuing discussion.” Third: list of banned clients Fourth: link to API status visualisation Fifth: your comment Sixth: someone saying that they don’t want to…
They've reshuffled a bit since I posted. The second was the top. The sixth was father down. My comment isn't in the top posts. Top is fine, second is one of them, third is one of them (nothing's banned as far as we know), fourth has several top level posts saying it, seventh that you don't list is another "this is it".
They've shuffled now, but smcl's comment was only a few minutes after yours
Re: Twitter's API is down?
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
The top few comments are… Top: speculating about 3p clients “It would not surprise me if this is the end of third party clients …” Second: about lack of comms, “Ironically, we can know about this through posts to the FediVerse from the developer of Tweetbot, and ensuing discussion.” Third: list of banned clients Fourth: link to API status visualisation Fifth: your comment Sixth: someone saying that they don’t want to…
They've reshuffled a bit since I posted. The second was the top. The sixth was father down. My comment isn't in the top posts. Top is fine, second is one of them, third is one of them (nothing's banned as far as we know), fourth has several top level posts saying it, seventh that you don't list is another "this is it".
I am not seeing these. In second place, you're referring to samwillis' post? They are speculating if it's the end of third party clients not Twitter the organization.
Re: Twitter's API is down?
#289This might be the last straw. I flat out refuse to use their horrible app with its nonsense algorithmic timeline. Give it a few hours to see if it's permanent but if it is, I expect a huge wave of new mastodon users..
Let's be real, if your "last straw" moment wasn't several weeks ago it's unlikely this is gonna be it. But if it is, shame on you. All the silencing of journalists, banning accounts for saying "mastodon", or saying anything negative about Tesla, or criticizing Musk in any way, that didn't do it. But now you have been mildly inconvenienced and it's the last straw. Really?
Silencing of journalists, banning accounts for saying mastodon, for saying anything negative about tesla or criticizing Musk in any way is a net positive to my twitter experience. I'm on twitter because some people that I follow and some friends are on twitter, and I want to see what they say. Meta commentary about the platform or the owner is noise to me. I do not feel any shame about it, just like I don't feel any shame because I don't contribute to most software that I use, or that I don't help every single person that is going through a hard time.
I've met a lot of wonderful people that do lots of things to help other people, and try generally to improve the world in their own way. They all objectively do more than me, and yet not a single one of them wasted time trying to shame me because I "didn't do enough". If I had to guess, that would be because it's not effective at all, maybe even detrimental to what you're fighting for. It's your ego being in the way, caring more about being right than doing good.
Re: Twitter's API is down?
#290Unsurprisingly, the outage hasn't affected twitters own client.
Roll on May 2023. Unless twitter want to block the EU, they will have to provide the same level of access to 3rd party clients as they do their own. If the API is down for 3rd parties, but not for twitters own client, that will be considered a breach.