Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries
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At the time, twitter allowed you to receive SMS notifications of tweets posted to a followed account. I created a private account and used twitter's API to post tweets to with the notification content I wanted to send. I then had "dummy" accounts follow the "notification" account. These dummy accounts had recipient phone numbers with SMS notifications turned on.
The flow was: Web App -> Twitter API -> Tweet from "notification" account -> followers received SMS notifications. Free SMS delivery!
It was clunky and SMS notifications looked like they came from twitter (they did) but it solved my use case perfectly.
The problem was that sometimes Twitter's messages were delayed by hours...
https://techcrunch.com/2008/04/23/amateur-hour-over-at-twitt...
I started using Twitter via SMS and before the age of modern smart phones (I was on my Palm Treo. The girl in the cube behind me just got an EDGE eyePhone) and for all my university friends, we used it as a big SMS-based group chat room. It was kinda fun, the total opposite of what Twitter is today.
If you want to hack on platforms and build tooling around them, I suggest people look at ActivityPub implementations: Pleroma, Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed and others. ActiviyPub is really where a lot of the neat federated social networking stuff is happening, and having more devs hacking on it and making more implementations can help keep it diverse and falling into the state where modern E-mail is.
Or maybe I'm just reflecting on a younger period with nostalgia and have lost touch. Maybe those Instagram stickers and TikToks are equally as hackworthy as the things we spun up in the ol' days.
All but the worst of the worst providers have an API of some sort and if you're savvy enough to set up BIND, you can handle writing a curl command to post your IP to the API and sticking it into cron.
Works in the free tier as set and forget. As long as you keep updating it (with whatever API), it works. Filling out a form manually makes NoIP sound like a horrible service.
A friend of mine convinced me to get us a Fortinet appliance at home - it’s good, I can’t deny - but integration with th rest of our Ubiquiti kit would be nice.
https://github.com/troglobit/inadyn
A lot of domain registrars offer dynamic DNS for free using the original protocol or variants supported by inadyn. I’ve been using domains.google for the past 5 years and been pretty happy with it.
A filter in GMail labeled some important incoming mails based on my criteria. My Google App Script checked for this lable every 4 hours, & if found, extracts some info, & post it as a tweet to a private account. The followed account gets a SMS notification
I used to SMS friends from my email client and later my iPod touch using email.
sigh
> Run for your lives!!!!!
> That's not really relevant to the technical discussion at hand though.
Now you have an algorithm of forced political tweets.
I think currently your only hope is to use the "latest tweets" timeline, complete with periodically resetting your preference when Twitter decides to change it for you, which is abusive behavior on their part.
I prefer the chrono timeline and no "likes are stochastic retweets" nonsense, so that's a happy convergence for me. Who knows how long it'll last; Twitter seems to despise their users and I'm quite convinced no one in power at the company actually uses the platform.
Take that out and you'd be left with essentially a feed of cute animals and still get fights between people arguing if dogs or cats are cuter.
That's true, but even more so than your list suggests. It's not just socio-cultural controversies that are political, but even basic elements of the economic status quo. Why do I have health insurance but not my Uber driver? Is my labor worth more than his? Is it OK that Pat Bowlen owns the Denver Broncos, or should the city of Denver own it instead (a la the Green Bay Packers)?
On the other hand, I know a few of the old-timers at reddit still use old.reddit, so that might help keep it alive.
In theory reddit can rebuild as an alternate front end, or someone else could do it. A good chuck of it is open source. You'd have to do a lot of work integrating the new APIs though.
It's a shame that the most important chunk of Reddit isn't open source any more. I recently found bugs in both the old API (introduced in 2011, detailed at [1]) and in PRAW regarding bulk flair updates. Since PRAW is open source, I submitted a pull request [1], and their bug was promptly fixed. On the other hand, Reddit is no longer open source, so instead of submitting a pull request like in the old days, I'll have to make a submission to /r/bugs or message the current admins and pray that an engineer sees.
You’ll have to do at least two things -
1. Train the algorithm to drop politics from your feed by actively liking content on other topics.
2. Use Lists to curate timelines on a particular topic.
After this learn to use search and mute filters well. There’s a lot to gain from twitter if you follow and interact with the right people.
During registration I was given a choice between providing an email address or a phone number. I provided an email address, only to immediately have my account locked until I provided a phone number. Well, I wouldn't have given my email address if I knew a phone number was required anyway! It wouldn't even let me visit my account settings to delete my account, and I never got a reply when I emailed Twitter support.
But this is not necessarily true, as spoofing a source phone number of an SMS is a lot easier than receiving an SMS that was sent to another number.
(Still) works against Amazon btw: https://medium.com/@espringe/amazon-s-customer-service-backd...
I'd say 2FA is often worse than 1FA because customer support systems are rarely prepared to say "sorry, can't give you access to your account :/". Because 99.9% of the time, it really is a user accidentally locked out of their account.
Many Telegram accounts were compromised in Iran a while ago because of this. https://www.wired.com/2016/08/hack-brief-hackers-breach-ultr... Similarly I know for a fact that in many countries your GSM provider stores your texts so you can view/reply them from their web portal. (As you can imagine despite an attacker might not have your SIM card, they might find your user/pass to log in your GSM provider's portal.)
Also state-sponsored actors do tap into GSM operators since SMS is not end-to-end encrypted. Add this to the previous attack vector and you'll see that wiretapping inbound SMS is surprisingly not that hard.
I'd have to second this guess. SMS is much more expensive than push notifications.
My standard practice on mobile now is, no joke, take the URL of the tweet page I'd like to read and paste it into a new FB post because it's faster and more reliable to get FB to fetch preview the content than it is to load it with my own browser. (edit: and note this is while using FB in my mobile browser. Think about how much more complicated a FB page should be than a single tweet, and it's still 100x faster to load.)
I've come to the conclusion that this is very intentional because they'd really like me to install the app and therefore have no incentive to improve the mobile experience, but I absolutely will not install an app for content that could very easily be delivered as a simple web page. I hope the trend of companies pushing their apps hard eventually reverses.
Not my knowledge.
SMS prices in Europe varies from country to country, but I would say that they are, on average, around 3-4 cents. You have cheap countries like Portugal (1-2 cent), intermediate countries like Spain (2-3 cents) and France (3 cents) and expensive countries like Germany (6 cents) or Belgium (6 cents).
From the top of me head, Azerbaijan is the most expensive country in the world, at 10 cents per SMS.
Source: Running a SMS hub in Europe for the last 15 years.
This is an extremely aggressive claim that I doubt holds up.
I would absolutely agree with "In _many_ such cases", or "In _most_ such cases", but it's almost certainly false to claim "In _all_ such cases".
Not only that, but also their community building and tending is abysmal too, so your app will end up used mostly by the kind of user that brings infinitesimal value with them.
Twitter isn't worth it.
edit: removed a comment on about 2-FA as it takes away from the intended point.
It frustrates me that often folks who express support for HK independence so fiercely can't even tell me who Modi is.
Best wishes friend.
>The protests began in December when the government passed a law that uses religion as a criterion for determining whether illegal migrants in India can be fast-tracked for citizenship. The measure favors members of all South Asia’s major religions except Islam, India’s second largest faith. Muslims worry that the law will be coupled with a citizenship test and used to strip them of their Indian nationality.
They're very different situations, but the common thread is people feeling their rights are not being respected, and protesting that.
It's pretty well discussed among those who actually care about free expression and/or censorship circumvention.
What else to do but use Twitter through SMS? It was surprisingly still very good--could follow the news at very low bandwidth.
But honestly the time has long since passed where it still makes sense to support. Smartphone notifications with the app are far superior in every way. (And if you don't want to install the app? I mean, just don't use Twitter then.)
And the only people who don't have smartphones these days are the kind of people who have made an intentional choice to reduce their always-on digital connection. They are the very least likely people to use Twitter anyways.
It's a good thing when a company is able to simplify its software architecture to remove code that's expensive to maintain and keep protected from security vulnerabilities.
This needs to be qualified: with respect to Twitter's target audience.
It's empirically not true that smartphone penetration is universal. Only ~350 million smartphones exist in India for 1 billion people, for example (source: McKinsey Global Institute's "Digital India" report publication from April 2019).
It's a fair statement to say that the majority of prospective and current Twitter users have smartphones, which justifies this decision.
Bizarrely, the relevant link in their help center is broken:
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/supported-mobile-c...
It used to work:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200420041309/https://help.twit...
People used to think we— @Twitter_Tips —worked for Twitter. When Twitter forced us to change our username to @TweetSmarter, @Twitter_Tips became a "new" account (that no one could use) that started with zero followers. In a few weeks it racked up over 250,000 followers—that were "ours"—because of all the press, blogs, lists, good will, etc we had on that account.
We supported the great software ecosystem that grew up around Twitter, and watched closely as Twitter killed it all off.
So Dan was a freeloader, instead of HIM paying the cost to notify HIS subscribers (aka TWITTER followers), he externalised/rolled off the cost to Twitter. Now that Twitter wants to do some cost-cutting and Dan has to pay HIS own "phone bill" for HIS customers, Dan is calling out on Twitter? Suck it up bro.
When I hear people complaining that "in our office they changed the coffee to a shittier one", I know what this is a prelude for avalanche of cost cutting measures. SMS in Twitter are being switched off? Blame the folks that created their business on someone else's £€¥$ and the Twitter shareholders came calling for more profit.
I wonder what are the savings that Twitter is making by flipping that switch off...
Mobile twitter works fine with 2G connections and the right settings.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3668372/how-was-twitter-...
LONG LIVE TXT2MOB!