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The Shit Show

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Re: The Shit Show

#331

Post by foogazi »

riffic wrote: post #193
pbronez wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm counting from Identi.ca? Fair enough. What’s the term you prefer for this stage of its growth then? The jump to 7 figures of MAU in the wake of Twitter’s collapse seems like an important change to me. The idea might be 15 years old, but the dominant implementation (Mastodon) started ~2016, the modern protocol (ActivityPub) arrived in 2018, and the last four years seem to have been mostly a small community working…

I suppose my larger point is we're not in any particular hurry to grow: it'll get there when it gets there.

Who is we ?

Re: The Shit Show

#332

Post by rsynnott »

x86x87 wrote: post #184
sysadm1n wrote: post #10

I never relied on Twitter's API, since building stuff with it is akin to building your castle on other people's land. You're always going to be a tenant, and the API gatekeepers play landlord and can rugpull you without notice. But I'm looking into Nostr[0] as an alternative, aswell as ActivityPub which seems to be working well these days. Dorsey's Bluesky Social[1] looks promising too, but it's a very late move sinc…

This is not the first time twittet screwed developers. If you're olf enough to remember they did this shit in their early day when they had the real possibility of being social media's message bus. Corporate greed took over and capitalism won / they pulled the plug on developer apis. Up until that point they flourished. Now with new wind in their sails generated by 45 and more recently by the technoking they have for…

> they have forgot the lesson

They haven't _forgotten_ it, Saint Car is _ignoring_ it. People in Twitter would absolutely be aware that the last attempt (which for all its problems was still infinitely more ordered and less user-hostile than this one, of course), didn't go so well.

Re: The Shit Show

#333

Post by rsynnott »

ryanSrich wrote: post #280
geerlingguy wrote: post #28

I'm still waiting to hear any kind of official word, but it looks pretty bleak. Without Tweetbot, Twitter is almost impossible to use. Checking in on https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ , the alternate UI, it's almost usable, but still missing like 8 of the most important features that made Twitter useful to me. I have been posting sometimes on Mastodon but still primarily on Twitter, waiting to see how things turned out.…

I’m reluctant to use Mastodon because I don’t see it gaining much traction outside of tech. It’s incredibly annoying to use, and the entire concept of how different servers work is far too complicated for any non-tech user. It really needs a frontend to take off that regular people can join without having to worry about getting anything setup.

This is a really common attitude _on Hackernews_, but, well, on Mastodon, non-tech people seem to be using it happily enough (in particular it is full of journalists, for obvious reasons).

I don't think this should be that surprising, because people already use _email_.

Re: The Shit Show

#334

Post by rsynnott »

raydev wrote: post #208
ArmandGrillet wrote: post #71

Well-written and touching post. To switch off this API used by so many long-time users on the same day "For You" appears as the default option on Twitter triggers me. The "For You" timeline is only for Elon: it will drive engagement, extremism, and all the things social networks have been accused of driving for years now in order to make more $. Some folks here have been comparing the crypto/Web3 and ActivityPub craz…

> The "For You" timeline is only for Elon The "For You" timeline is a new name for the "Home" timeline that's been around forever. And now it's easier to get to the chronological feed ("Following"), the first actual UX improvement to the site since the acquisition.

It does seem to have gotten substantially _worse_, though. In 15 years of using Twitter, up to late last year, I had blocked maybe three 'real' users (that is actual established accounts with followers, not FirstNameBunchOfNumbers). I mostly used it via Tweetbot, but if I went to the website, the algorithmic timeline was... not that useful, but basically inoffensive.

Then between the takeover and giving up entirely at the end of November, I was hitting block every time I looked at the website. For instance, I'd never had to trouble to block Elon Musk before, but he was suddenly constantly popping up.

I'm pretty sure that some settings got fairly dramatically tweaked.

Re: The Shit Show

#335

Post by rsynnott »

mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #46

If federation was a worthwhile goal (in one's mind) after "the bozo took over Twitter" then it is quite obvious nothing fundamentally has changed such that federation would have been a noble goal as a foil to previous Twitter management. Seriously - if more personal sovereignty is the goal then complaining about Twitter only after new management is admitting that the primary quality you don't like is the new manageme…

> complaining about Twitter only after new management is admitting that the primary quality you don't like is the new management.

So the thing about Twitter (and actually I think this is something Musk badly misunderstood) is that Twitter users, particularly long-time Twitter users, have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. It's always been a bit of a broken unpleasant mess; there's a reason that Twitter users affectionately call it the hellsite.

Previously, federated services were a nice idea, but there was never really the push needed; significant numbers of people weren't sufficiently annoyed with Twitter to leave. Now, well.

(I pretty much expected this to happen once Saint Car bowed to the will of the Delaware Chancery Court, but I've got to admit I thought it would take a lot longer, via a thousand cuts. This API thing feels like such an unforced error.)

Also, this has served as a timely reminder that, even if the private service you like (or love-hate) is fine now, it could at any moment be taken over and ruined by a weird idiot. Even if your interests align with the platform's interests, you can no longer assume the platform will act in its best interests.

Re: The Shit Show

#336

Post by Espressosaurus »

laborcontract wrote: post #304
Espressosaurus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what happens when you rely on a service you have no control over. It'll happen now, it'll happen later, but at some point, somebody is going to decide they make more money turning the thing you rely on off.

Oh boy what do we tell everyone using AWS?

The risk is always that they decide the service you're relying on is too niche/is being replaced by something else and you need to adapt.

Which is a thing that happens.

The big stuff like EC2 isn't likely to go away before Amazon itself goes away, but there are piles of other smaller services that may or may not. It's not Google in terms of getting rid of capabilities, but they sunset APIs and capabilities all the time. For good reason! It's probably not a good idea to be running Python 2.7 today, and there's no reason why they should want to support it.

So you're being snide but yes, this is a concern, and the deprecation schedule is solely under Amazon's control.

If at some point the cloud goes bust because on-prem is the new hotness (what's old is new again) in 10 or 20 years, you bet your damn bippy AWS will pull the plug when it makes sense for Amazon to do so.

And that's a product you pay for. If you're not paying for the product (I don't know if Twitter was offering free access to its APIs) then you're relying on the good will and support of the person/company providing the product/API and at any moment they can change their mind. As we've seen here.

If you rely on someone else's platform, you are at their mercy. If you don't believe me, wait another few days for yet another app developer to complain about getting locked out of an app store, or some payments platform locking them out of their account to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Re: The Shit Show

#338

Post by x86x87 »

rsynnott wrote: post #332
x86x87 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the first time twittet screwed developers. If you're olf enough to remember they did this shit in their early day when they had the real possibility of being social media's message bus. Corporate greed took over and capitalism won / they pulled the plug on developer apis. Up until that point they flourished. Now with new wind in their sails generated by 45 and more recently by the technoking they have for…

> they have forgot the lesson They haven't _forgotten_ it, Saint Car is _ignoring_ it. People in Twitter would absolutely be aware that the last attempt (which for all its problems was still infinitely more ordered and less user-hostile than this one, of course), didn't go so well.

Saint Car? That induced a permanent chuckle.

Re: The Shit Show

#339

Post by [deleted] »

sincarne wrote: post #295
paulcole wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm only in my early 30's, but… [as time has gone on ]… something I've noticed is that as everyone has come online, I have made fewer friends Welcome to your 30s. You will make fewer friends than you did in your 20s.

Until you have a kid in school, and then it’ll pick up again.

[deleted]
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