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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

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the hell are government agencies using Twitter/Facebook for official communication in the first place? At the very least if these sites are being used for official communication that might be critical to peoples safety some sort of privileged status or ToS should be negotiated. Can you imagine Musk banning some random non-USA government agency because he had a fit while high at 3 am? Also: https://xkcd.com/743/

> 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?

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#202
post #85

Ugh, what an eventful time of social media this has been. First Twitter API, then Reddit API, so today Apollo and many more Reddit clients shut down, and now Nitter. :-( I'm happy Lemmy is kind of taking off. I think it's helped more than Mastodon because it's less realtime/feed focused and slower paced. It also doesn't require you to form a friend circle to benefit. Instead, the community is waiting for you already.…

I really like lemmy too. I think the biggest issue is that people think of Lemmy itself as the replacement of reddit.com. But what makes more sense to me is thinking about Lemmy as a tool to build separate websites that are each a replacement for reddit.com and that these can interoperate with each other to grow based on the local users interests. I think the biggest hurdle is figuring out where to create your first account... it's just not intuitive and of course the more established sites shut down signups during mass waves as an anti-September protective measure.

I ended up starting at programming.dev because someone on HN mentioned it and it at least seemed to have a focus and also wasn't a ghost town. And that was pretty good but I've also joined beehaw (takes some time) because I like its size and decorum and generically would choose to get on their side of a defederation. And after I'm starting to understand how this whole activity pub and defederation and federation works, I really am optimistic about it.

I think somebody needs to build something that's a crossover between GitHub pages and activitypub that sort of behaves like discus and integrates with Lemmy/kbin/mastodon. So that blog writers can have comments at their own sites again and they can integrate together to grow organically. I haven't quite pieced it all together, but I sort of see that could grow as a replacement for what we lost with Google Reader and the loss of blog commenting communities.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#203
post #110

This killed nitter. Fuck. I guess I'm done with Twitter. Reddit is in Eternal September. Twitter is login-walled. If HN is next, I'll probably be mostly done with the Internet. This version of the Internet is starting to suck. :(

This internet started to suck a long time ago, but today was a red letter day. Reddit's been circling the drain for years, but today is the day it truly crossed a line for millions of people at once (They killed Apollo and RIF). Twitter's been getting rapidly worse since Musk bought it, but this is another red line. We're not even allowed to talk about the influence of bots and astroturfers here. A popular post today…

You can talk about the influence of bots and astroturfers...so long as you agree it's all one big conspiracy theory, like all the comments did on my post from yesterday [1], "The Gentleperson's Guide to Forum Spies". [2]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36526827

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221215015113/https://pastebin....

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#204

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!)

I tried it but I just can't get into the flow of things, it doesn't feel like a lot happens during the day, but maybe i'm on the wrong server? I just want to expel my bowels and doom scroll bad funny memes

Maybe if nothing is happening then nothing is happening and you should do something else ;)

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#205

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.

If anything, nature is healing. I’ve noticed at least 1 community return to forums due to all of this ( https://mholdschool.com/ ), and while unfortunately AFAIK there isn’t any good FLOSS software for it, it’s certainly a start.

There's Discourse[0]

[0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#206
post #110

This killed nitter. Fuck. I guess I'm done with Twitter. Reddit is in Eternal September. Twitter is login-walled. If HN is next, I'll probably be mostly done with the Internet. This version of the Internet is starting to suck. :(

> This version of the Internet is starting to suck. :( Totally! The internet was better before pay walls / auth walls. I get why we're here today, and I get that the last phase was just about acquiring an audience, and getting people hooked, and now this part of getting everyone to pay was always the plan, but this part really does suck. Just feels like all the services lined up to start shitting on users at the same…

I remember seeing a documentary way back in 2000 about the internet that said something like "the internet is freely accessible now, but some people believe eventually pay walls will begin to block access to more and more portions of the internet." And I thought how ridiculous, that will never happen, information wants to be free!

Well, looks like I was only partially right. Most access is still "free", but at the cost of enshittification.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#207

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!)

I tried it but I just can't get into the flow of things, it doesn't feel like a lot happens during the day, but maybe i'm on the wrong server? I just want to expel my bowels and doom scroll bad funny memes

Maybe try bluesky

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#208

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!"

I wonder what percentage of legitimate traffic is blocked by this. I would imagine that the majority of users don't have an account, by a large margin, correct?

I would not assume that, no. Following accounts is fundamental to using Twitter; I absolutely think the majority of people using Twitter are logged-in.

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#209
post #110

This killed nitter. Fuck. I guess I'm done with Twitter. Reddit is in Eternal September. Twitter is login-walled. If HN is next, I'll probably be mostly done with the Internet. This version of the Internet is starting to suck. :(

At this point even "Truth Social" is looking less bad

Re: Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

#210
post #76

Paul Graham famously started to use Mastodon (but has not written anything there since last year). But the HN Status emergency “is HN down” channel is still only on Twitter. It used to be publicly readable at https://twitter.com/HNStatus >. But now, if HN was to go down, only logged-in Twitter users would be able to see why.

>if HN was to go down, only logged-in Twitter users would be able to see why That's probably close to 99% of HN users

doubtful
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