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Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

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Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#351
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely rough around the edges but getting into fediverse content (mastodon, kbin, lemmy, etc) has been extremely rewarding to me. It's like twitter and reddit but 15 years ago (and by that I mostly mean it's janky and full of bugs. Just like the web was 15 years ago!)

For me the main barrier is that I want to have portable/roaming control over my IDENTITY , even if the content hosting is (for now) entirely through a system administered by someone else. If I control the identity, I can at least keep local copies and rehost/repost content later. Instead, it feels like the current Fediverse demands that I make a blind choice to entrust not merely a copy of my content but also my whol…

There are people who want to add distributed identity to ActivityPub. It was left out of the spec but there were things left in to make it possible to add later. That's my understanding from a distance, anyway.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#352
post #151

Uggh. I only use twitter to follow critical (life-and-death) emergency broadcasts from our local fire department. Is there a viable alternative for them to use now that twitter is going to block most of our county’s residents?

RSS. It’s quite good for an application like this where the publisher has the resources to operate a website, and it allows multiple different consumer applications to all view the published text.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#353
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This version of the Internet is starting to suck. :( The internet is fine. The highly centralized businesses that built themselves on the technology are meeting their inevitable end.

Why are centralized businesses doomed to fail? It’s been the primary organizational mode for the last 10,000 years.

Genuinely curious: which centralized businesses existed in 8000 BCE?

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#354
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This version of the Internet is starting to suck. :( The internet is fine. The highly centralized businesses that built themselves on the technology are meeting their inevitable end.

> This killed nitter. I suspect that was the intent.

Nah, how many people are using Twitter without being logged in compared to how many people legitimately change every link they receive to Nitter?

I used the 'redirect to nitter' Firefox extension and Android app but it got quite unreliable and nobody else that I know uses nitter at all. I think Nitter users would be a tiny, perhaps even immeasurable minority compared to casual readers that now are incentivized to either log in or fuck off (but... FOMO).

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#355
Unpopular take: large platforms can do anything, any kind of evil moves towards their users and still mostly get away with it. We can see that it generally works with Twitter, Reddit, YouTube and lots of others.

I don't know for sure if it is possible to fight it. Centralized platforms will always win because they are very convenient and UX is very smooth while user plays ball by platform's rules. Migrating to decentralized is mostly for geeks.

I am geek myself, but I still can't find energy to migrate at leas email to my own domain. Instead I keep using GMail, despite all the risks (I am citizen of Russia, so in my case risk of deplatforming from Google is even higher).

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#356

Musk commented on this: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674865731136020505 "Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!"

So much for those here & elsewhere who believed Musk’s lies about “radical free speech”. The last few months showed he’ll silence people whenever he wants (his right— it’s his platform— but clearly he lied) And now you can’t even consume that limited speech on Twitter without letting Twitter track every single thing you read and link you click on.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#357
post #337

It always irked me that public institutions embraced Twitter as a primary means of communication in many cases. It never seemed right that a private company was being put in between public functions and the the public which depends on them. Not to mention, since I live outside the US, a private company in another country. I even wrote complaints to one local public body to ask them to set up a communication channel t…

On the other hand, public institutions have long been criticized for not communicating where the people are. Notices posted on their own website are unlikely to read by anywhere as broad an audience. Plenty uses newspapers, but even my grandparents get stuff from Twitter before the paper now, if just from younger people sharing it with them. I agree Twitter shouldn't be the only channel, but it is where the people are, or at least were.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why the hell are government agencies using Twitter/Facebook for official communication in the first place? Reach. IDK if anyone is using it as the sole method of communication. But Twitter in practice has a much higher reach than every other method.

Why can't someone build a twitter just for such purposes?

Because people won't use it.

REACH

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#359

Musk commented on this: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674865731136020505 "Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!"

"Data pillaging", WTF does that mean? Remember when Twitter used to give archives of tweets to the Library of Congress? And had a firehose for folks to consume as many tweets as they could?

I love how the town square model gets completely thrown out whenever it's inconvenient.
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