Twitter's API is down?
Getting an error loop on Tweetbot on all accounts:
Re-authorization Failed Failed to request token from Twitter.com:: service unavailable
Re-authorization Failed Failed to request token from Twitter.com:: service unavailable
He has been making significant noise of feature changes in the official client coming in the next couple of weeks. Removing the third party client access would align with that, along with removing the little "posted by ..." note on each tweet a couple of months ago.
I wander if the new policy is that you can't have an app that's main feature is replicating the existing functionality of twitters main app. That seems to be the rumour over there.
Publishing apps like Buffer and Typefully are still working.
(or maybe API prod was running in somebody's computer and their office got evicted - who knows)
This is not an "API Outage", I think we can be 99.9% sure it's a removal of specific apps.
Even with Musk's antics I don't see what would they gain by blocking API clients without announcing it - it would take Musk 30 seconds to tweet "oh btw third-party clients are done for" and would at least give everyone clarity.
But to play devils advocate, say you are thinking of removing third party apps. You want to test the waters and see if users who use them continue to visit at the same rate when forced to use the official client. You schedule a quite "blocking" of the apps for the evening PT, your team can happily sleep through the noise generated and have the data in the morning from Asia/Europe of how people reacted.
In the morning you make the call as to whether to stick with the plan or say it was an errant moderation bot.
That may be to much 4d chess though...
There is also a whole ecosystem of "publisher" apps like Buffer and Typefully that haven't been blocked yet, if I was them I would be very worried right now.
Elon fired the Tesla PR team and yet announcements still are made, usually as Tweets from him. It sucks, but a comms team isn’t necessary assuming you are ok with substandard communication.
Elon's tweets aren't the same as announcements from Twitter. He tweets as an individual. Twitter, the company, is a blackhole as far as comms goes. There is no news in any official capacity from the company any more.
I’m not saying it’s sane, but in his eyes, yes they are, just like his tweets about Tesla.
https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety
https://twitter.com/TwitterMktgJP
https://twitter.com/TwitterMktgUK
https://twitter.com/TwitterMktgKR
https://twitter.com/TwitterEng
https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport
https://twitter.com/TwitterBusiness
https://twitter.com/CommunityNotes
https://twitter.com/TwitterMktgDACH
I don't understand why you'd make up a claim like this that's easily disproven.
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, making it switching out of Twitter frictionless.
2. Provide extra functionality for non-Twitter posts, encouraging the use of the non-Twitter services.
3. Once have a good traction, penalize Twitter post to further push non-Twitter adoption. Eventually remove Twitter support completely.
4. Profit??
Twitter WebUI loads images and videos when you scroll. Which means you have a good signal what image and video is associated with what tweet.
Obviously you can try to obscure that you are scraping, but that is difficult to get right and there is no way back once you get it wrong.
The requirement for the extension/plug-in has to be that: it looks like someone uses Twitter normally.
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 approval from the third-party, all the way up to ridiculous levels such as rejecting an app using the LAN API of smart home devices explicitly designed for this purpose: https://community.lifx.com/t/app-store-rejection-permission-...
Apple might not be such a big issue because they allow reader apps. I guess they can ban you to improve their relationship with Twitter but you can also throw a subscription service as an IAP to improve your odds :)
As for the APIs being copyrightable see Google vs Oracle.
I hear this sentiment quite often on HN. Maybe I’m missing something but was this tacked onto the end of those stone tablets that Moses brought down from the mountain?
If not, then it seems like people want this to be a statement of fact when the reality is much closer to:
> If I buy an iPhone I wish I could run whatever app I want on it.
> The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today..
https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-...
I'm also not in the habit of crying about what was said 15 years ago and what has clearly changed since then.
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
The truth is that the App Store lock-in is about securing Apple's moneyhose, and user "security" is an afterthought.
But there's no excuse that their OS can't sandbox apps as best it can to prevent issues like this. Sure there will still be scam apps, but it should be a lot easier to install apps from outside of an app store.
It's just a blatant money grab otherwise; Spotify for example is extremely trusted and unlikely to be malware - why can't they have an "install" button on their site to install their app? Because companies that run the app stores want a cut.
Why aren't mobile OS' more like desktop OS'? Everyone acts like it's about security but then we get things like Pegasus and Google's Project Zero which is constantly finding stuff anyway.
Even now the granularity on permissions and the main problem of user apathy towards this stuff are solvable. I'm on Android and I still don't understand why an app can only ask for gallery permission/access to all files and why I'm not able to only grant it read access to a particular folder in a streamlined way.
All of this stuff should be designed around a user's intentions.
A phone is no different from a laptop, except that it is smaller and the mouse/keyboard are part of the screen. On my phone, I should be able to:
* Open an IDE and write some code.
* Compile my code (depending on the language).
* Run my code.
The whole concept of "app stores" is absurd. In 10 years, will we be denied sudo rights on our laptops? Will we need to pay a 30% cut to Apple for every program that we install, plus $99/yr if we want the privilege of building code for our own device?
More and more likely. In 10 years' time I'd love to be off the Intel/Apple Mx train and using devices that can run desktop Linux with with RISC-V and Raspberry PI-like SoCs.
If it could only also serve as a smartphone I'd have one already.
These are unique platforms with unique properties in their design. You value them or you don't. Nobody's forcing you to use them for general purpose computing and there are thousands upon thousands of BRAND NEW general purpose computing products with zero restrictions produced every year. People in this thread are being drama queens.
«Macs will stay Macs the way you know and love them. They will run the same powerful Pro apps. They will offer the same developer APIs Macs have today. They will let users create multiple volumes on disks with different operating system versions and they will let users boot from external drives. They will support drivers for peripherals and they will be amazing UNIX machines for developers and the scientific community that can run any software they like.»
On two, it seems like they are concerned with trademark to me. A workaround could be making a website that parses and displays Twitter content and call it something else. Then, in an app, make no mention of Twitter and only the website.
2) You can use another company's marks, names, etc. to indicate your product works with their product. You have to follow some guidelines.
You can find it here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastodon-chirper/l...
Perhaps it should be handled in the same way the YouTubeDL (YT DLP) team handles changes in the html.
Also, the whole silo thing reminds me of the old telephony days. We got over that, so what is the problem now?
I wouldn't be surprised if the EU would force Twitter to interoperate with ActivityPub if they go so far as to disable API access. The EU already has their own Mastodon server so some people already have knowledge of the possibilities of decentralised social media and they also have a huge anti-big-tech stance.
Maybe, but it took them over 4 years to rule that Facebook was breaching the GDPR even though a just a casual reading of the legislation would've given you this answer.
Maybe they'll "force" them... in so long that Twitter may not even exist anymore.
"build something cool with our data!"
to
"build something cool with a limited set of data"
to
"pay us a ton of money for full data"
to
"pay us a ton of money for full data if you meet these internal requirements that assuredly mean we will monitor to make sure you don't compete with us"
to ... well, we'll have to see.
Eventually, they stepped back from the brink, presumably after realising that it was a phenomenally stupid idea (while the fraction of Twitter users using third party clients is likely small, anyone who's anyone uses a third party client; this will vastly disproportionately hit influential users). We'll see if new leadership learns the same lesson.
At the time I backed it at the developer tier as soon as the crowdfunding campaign was available and keep fond memories of it.
This wikipedia list will be there for them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
We'll see if new leadership is capable of learning any lesson at all
In 2012 Twitter did not have as established a user base as it does today esp among media, companies, politicians, influencers, celebrities, so there's less risk of dropping third-party clients than there was back then.
I don’t think this is true at all. If Tweetbot doesn’t come back I doubt I’ll ever use Twitter again; the website is unusable garbage by comparison. And I think a lot of the most influential power users who drive engagement feel the same way.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/01/13/end-nigh-for-th...
> this will vastly disproportionately hit influential users)
Maybe within the tech space, but again, Twitter's userbase has expanded outside of tech.
* https://tapbots.social/@paul/109679939029741163
There are additional reports in the #TwitterDown and #TweetBot hashtags on the FediVerse.
Edit: Direct link to Google Sheets: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1O27Co27g2fWRon7gK79R...
I have absolutely no interest in a curated timeline, so I guess I'm done with Twitter if the API doesn't start working again.
Doesn't avoid the ads though, which are still ubiquitous.
The only safe solution is competition between multiple service providers. If third-party clients are dead... looks like even more of a reason to switch to alternatives like Mastodon?
But one thing I’ll miss are the HN feeds, since I otherwise stay off HN. I may have to find an alternative for that, at least, since I don’t want to get (back) in the habit of visiting the HN homepage.
I’d wager a backend issue over a policy change as a 403/401 isn’t returned.
The system is running as good as before. The only thing I've noticed is theres more ad's than usual.
----
Edit: Currently there isn't any outage of Twitter as far as anyone knows. It looks like 3rd party apps have been kicked to the curb.
A ~16hr regional outage in AU/NZ is not indicitive of anything. In 2021 Facebook had a global ~7hr outage.
Since Musk took over we haven't had all the downtime and disruption everyone kept claiming we would have. Big companies haven outages too, but so far the death of Twitter isn't in sight.
Also: I hate Musk since his comments on Ukraine and Taiwan. So don't take my comments as trying to stick up with Musk. I'm not, I hope he loses all his money and becomes broke.
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/14/twitter-e...
The problem arises at the point when there are bugs or other incidents and there is nobody who can fix them.
Was there someone to fix it eventually? Sure. Is 16h of downtime acceptable for a $44b business? I'm going with no.
No, Twitter isn't gonna "blow up" overnight. That's nonsense.
It's also not something any of the parent comments claimed.
Single digit number of hours happen from time to time, but double digits are not really a thing anymore. Maybe in early days of social media, not in the past decade.
I did the same and found a Guardian article that claims no Twitter outage lasted even an hour since 2016, but I thought it was irrelevant because articles about outages aren't exactly top-notch in quality.
Did you find anything better? If so, do share! I'd be happy to be proven wrong!
Actual Guardian article from 2016 discussing twitter outage lasting more than one hour:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/19/twitter-d...
Amusing comments over there from readers.
You are right and I am wrong. And I'm sorry. RIP Twitter.
Is let's say five hours and sixteen hours within the same ballpark? I'm not interested in a couple of hours, my claim is not one lasted 10 or more in the past decade. If such a thing actually happened, I'm sure someone would've posted it by now.
After a 70% reduction in headcount, is a 16 hour downtime acceptable in a 5% market? I'm going with yes, executives from all major corporations are itching to press that button if only they could get away with it.
The problem with Twitter is not, was not, and will never be a technical one. It's a simple site with a simple tech stack, using standard technology to scale.
The problem with Twitter, and what Musk doesn't seem to understand, is a sociological and political one. Social networks are the crack cocaine of tabloid media, left to the whims of bad actors they can destroy democracies, incite lynchings, distribute hate and misinformation on scales without historical precedent. "Free speech" just doesn't cut it, social networks are publications not mediums, they chose what people get to see and react to, and the fact that the choice is made by an algorithm does not absolve them of responsibility for the consequences, especially if the algorithm is tuned for revenue maximization and easily gamed by bad actors to spread their content.
By firing the watchers, Musk is setting Twitter up as an menace to stable democracies around the world.
But the current staff needs to maintain code from a MUCH larger staff. That's hard. Especially with microservices where every team did "their own thing" and some teams just vanished completely. You have "dark areas" where no one knows how stuff works and what's going on.
Normally when you downsize at this scale you do this in an orderly way. Every person hands off their work and responsibility. Spends a couple of weeks writing docs and instructions and then leaves. This was done quickly and violently. I'm sure there's many repercussions we don't see simply because the systems are simply running. Once the team looks at some containers and decides to pull the plug to "see what happens" we'll find out...
Elon should get real experts like Infosys or Wipro in to rebuild it.
So you are essentially saying Twitter has an over-complicated architecture with regards to its real technical needs, so Musk was right to axe the microservice zealots. Good we can agree on that.
The next step is to acknowledge that code and data-centers continue to work long after their original designers have left the company, that's what computers are, tools for automation. Keeping the lights on and services in a roughly functional state is an activity that requires much less people of relatively lower qualification, even if they couldn't have engineered it themselves.
Yes, there is a long term risk of code rot and entropy if Musk does not plan for a gradual transition to a better engineered architecture with competent maintainers. But we are not there yet, far from it.
Meanwhile, schadenfreude people have rooted for a twittocaplipse from day one, nay, predicted it as inevitable. There is absolutely no sign it's going to happen, and Twitter turned out sufficiently simple after all on the technical side.
Disseminating politically extreme misinformation kills people - look no further than Russia, where a state run propaganda campaign has made people no more stupid or immoral than you or me support a vicious war of aggression against their neighbors.
And a regional outage vs the internet claiming twitter would be offline completely?
A regional outage of that size is embarrassing whatever way you slice it.
Leaving all that aside, he’s driving a massive subset of his users away at a time when he really needs all the users he can get.
You can spin this however you like, this is not a good situation for him. He’s said as much outright and implied it repeatedly.
Since this time last year he’s said that both Twitter and SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy, and Tesla has been flat out told FSD, the feature they’ve been selling all their cars based on (which he has said himself the company is worthless without), just isn’t happening.
This is dire for him.
As much as I hope Elon loses everthing. This isn't even related to downtime of Twitter. Volentarly shutting down twitter due to it being bankrupt is not the same as it falling over and having outages.
So I'm really not trying to spin anything. You're trying to take something unrelated and use it as justification as to why big bad billionaire do bad.
Bringing up Tesla and SpaceX was only to point out that he doesn't really have any way to bail out bad Twitter decisions despite it being a (relatively) smaller company. There's nowhere to pull extra finances from to bail this out, and it's known he already went into debt to make the purchase.
I really don't want him to lose anything. I'd like him to go back in time to when he first installed Twitter on his phone and slap the thing out of his own hand and scream "NO! THAT'S A BAD ELON!"
I can assume one of the primary reasons for cutting staff and offices is to reduce costs and hopefully get cash flow positive asap even if it’s $1 positive. That puts him in a better position to stop incurring debt.
Half an order of magnitude bigger, at most
I think you're overestimating Twitter and underestimating Facebook.
I don't know the best source for official stats, but a quick google suggests Twitter is ~300M users and Facebook is ~3B, so one order of magnitude.
And of course the new Twitter CEO used the interesting bargaining tactic of talking down his own purchase by implying many of those 300M users are bots... Joking aside, you could argue that very few of those 3B Facebook users are active, and you'd be right; but exactly the same can be said of Twitter and there's no good reason to think the ratio is any better or worse there.
At least in the case of SpaceX the US government will more likely than not step in and nationalize them out of national security requirements.
Companies months from bankruptcy don’t get to take a higher valuation in a down market: https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2023/01/03/elon-musks-space...
That means that it should be judged like a startup. Did it demonstrate a market? If so, it's valuable, if not, it's not. Current cash flow isn't very relevant.
Of course repeated waves of mass layoffs, demanding a pledge of allegiance to the company and revocation of all employee privileges at the threat of being fired and publicly throwing your employees repeatedly under the bus are also ways to reduce churn, so the bar for "overstaffing" might have actually lowered.
- they were absolutely undoubtedly overstaffed
- Musk's approach was absolutely undoubtedly insane shenanigans of a stupid rich cry-baby
Both are true at the same time
Oh? What's your evidence here?
I believe that 2013-14 FB was comparable in terms of revenue and users, and they had approximately half the staff.
Personally, I could argue that every social network is grossly understaffed by the measure of how lax they are about what they are supporting. E.g., in 2017, that company you say is more appropriately staffed contributed to a genocide that left tens of thousands dead: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
So we might not, in fact, be able to meaningfully compare Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc by headcount alone?
Recent layoffs across a big chunk of the tech industry suggest this argument may have at least some truth in it.
> that company you say is more appropriately staffed contributed to a genocide that left tens of thousands dead
Contributing to a genocide has nothing to do with staffing levels and all to do with unhealthy incentives - the company makes its money on "engagement", and it turns out polarizing/divisive/violent/outrageous content generates a lot more of it than friends/family/cat pictures, so effectively moderating toxic content is actually against their bottom line and is only needed in extreme cases where the toxic content's negative PR impact outweighs what it will bring in "engagement".
> Contributing to a genocide has nothing to do with staffing levels
Unless we just want to outlaw online forums, any provider is going to need to track and moderate harmful content. Note that even something as small as HN has a full-time moderator. That's just part of the business model these days.
You're correct that moderation can run counter to short-term revenue gains. But it's much less clear that's true in the long term; as Facebook's reputation has worsened, its growth has slowed and its revenue has declined. Or on the other end of the scale, look at how the less restricted sites are doing. E.g., the 'chans are never going to move beyond a very small niche, and despite Twitter's troubles, nobody's expecting Gab to take the lead.
There's a second layer to the tragedy. Also applicable to any big company:
- many teams are overstaffed for what they do/produce
- many teams are understaffed for what they do/produce
And this is also true at the same time.
1. ... that feels like a huge amount for a company that has basically a single product
2. ... that feels entirely appropriate for a company operating at their scale
What we've observed is that they've kinda managed to keep going despite Elon axing an enormous number of employees, but they've also had a few high-profile outages like this one today, the 2FA issue and 16hr Aus outage. I don't know if these are enough for either side to declare that they're correct.
One thing I would like to say - even though I had a feeling Twitter was probably overstaffed, I was in no way celebrating the redundancies. Similarly even though I'm not a fan of Elon Musk, I'm not delighting in all these little goofs he's doing and how it's impacting him personally - every little embarrassment he suffers and every dip in Tesla stock makes it more likely he'll just call it quits or fuck up Twitter more. For all its faults, I quite like Twitter and I don't want it to just disappear.
Twitter is a shitshow technically. Sub-tweets don't nest right and change order in a arbitrary way.
Particularly, a nasty bug that keeps the timeline refreshing while scrolling and is constantly moving content around on the screen.
Curious if anyone else has run into something similar.
I would from personal experience disagree on the "well" part.
I'm suddenly following accounts I recently unfollowed again. Previously blocked accounts show up. The search doesn't find stuff it used to find anymore - posts that are definitely not deleted because I can usually find them via other references.
It’s working _in spite of_ the new owner, not because of.
> Since Musk took over we haven't had all the downtime and disruption everyone kept claiming we would have. Big companies haven outages too, but so far the death of Twitter isn't in sight.
So because [0] did not happen most of the critics are setting a new standard for Twitter uptime to be 1000% globally 24/7, absolutely zero outages of any kind and never down for one person. If one outage somewhere happens, it is immediately the end of the world.
It wasn't the end of the world when Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok had worldwide outages, but 1 regional outage on Twitter and it is somehow the end of times? Please.
The fact is, You are getting downvoted because Twitter is still up and running and many of the replies here cannot stand that predictions like this [0] did not come true and will point at any intermittent issue to show the 'Twitter is dying' narrative.
The death of Twitter has been greatly exaggerated. If you really wanted it to die, just ignore it. Simple.
[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...
He showed everyone how in bed he is with the CCP.
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.
A breach of what?
It absolutely does apply to Youtube (finally some way to challenge youtube!), but im not sure how that affects the use of youtube-dl.
The DMA covers ten core platform services:
- online intermediation services;
- online search engines;
- online social networking services;
- video-sharing platform services;
- number-independent interpersonal communication services;
- operating systems;
- cloud computing services;
- advertising services;
- web browsers;
- virtual assistants.How do you know that, by the way? I've been trying to find this kind of info about Twitter, but I haven't really found anything.
Would this work to get the EU to say they've fulfilled the DMA's terms? No idea. But Facebook has yachtloads of cash to throw at legal battles, especially where it sees a potential existential threat.
More like 2027. Keep in mind the GDPR became effective in 2018 and it took just now for Facebook's blatant breach of it to finally be ruled in breach despite this being obvious with just a casual reading of the regulation.
This is more than a stretch of interpretation, it's wishful thinking.
> Gatekeepers should ensure interoperability for third-party providers of number-independent interpersonal communications services that offer or intend to offer their number-independent interpersonal communications services to end users and business users in the Union. To facilitate the practical implementation of such interoperability, the gatekeeper concerned should be required to publish a reference offer laying down the technical details and general terms and conditions of interoperability with its number-independent interpersonal communications services.
> ‘interoperability’ means the ability to exchange information and mutually use the information which has been exchanged through interfaces or other solutions, so that all elements of hardware or software work with other hardware and software and with users in all the ways in which they are intended to function;
Maybe you are thinking of something other than the DMA?
They're also gone from my Connected Apps.
This makes it look deliberate.
I never understood anything to their website nor app, and will certainly not use Twitter any more if that becomes the only way to use it. What made Twitter great is its API and ecosystem around it.
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 demographic is split between undesirable users, either undesirable to other users or to Twitter itself. If so, …
What way is that? Looks the same on my end.
The issue with the new Twitter Blue users is one of adverse selection. Those that are 'verified' pre-takeover usually understand how Twitter works, in terms of how to drive engagement, likes etc.
Those that are new Twitter Blue-verified, are not as experienced, and it's pretty clear from the content of their tweets that they have recently purchased their status.
If it’s not an outage, I guess I expected more ceremony around this.
(Although tbh it is only William Gibson, David Frum, and Grady Booch that keep me reading Twitter.)
I too thought the 'garch might have abruptly pulled the plug on the API. But then, I installed the Twitter iOS app and tried that, and it emitted a cascade of error screens, too.
So if I had to bet a dollar, I'd bet on "shit malfunctioning".
(BTW indie dev world, I've paid money for years for Twitterrific and would definitely pay money for a client that did a reasonable job of showing me people I follow on various social brainfart networks, all in one place).
Tweetbot for Mastodon.
“You’re either with us or against us”.
My agua fresca would like a word with whoever came up with this.
And events like this shows they shouldn't put all their eggs in one basket.
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/29/tapbots-ivory-mastodon-...
For instance Trump owed much of his popularity to his Twitter account and the way it allowed him to communicate much more effectively in a completely unfiltered way with both his existing supporters and undecided potentials. The same pattern has repeated with right wing politicians in other countries.
Those who were banned or otherwise de-amplified tended to be very fringe or extreme, and were never a significant chunk of the right wing. That's one reason why the alternatives never took off, as the kinds of people they attracted were those that few people really wanted to deal with or associate with.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: the way “chronological” timeline works is, Twitter decides on your social graph and hide posts until it fits your serving. Shadowbans, Boosting and Deboosting are factored in as well. That is technically chronological, only technically.
Source? The thing is I compare chronological timeline with lists (of users I follow) all the time, and I didn't notice any missing tweets. "Shadowbanned" tweets always were visible in lists, I personally checked that.
>In a change rolling out to iOS users first, the company has taken away the star button at the top right that let you switch between two feeds. In its place are two tabs — one labeled “For You” and the other “Following” — and when you open the app, you’ll see the For You tab first.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/10/23549368/twitter-for-you-...
(Talon is also not loading any tweets at the moment)
Now it seems im forced back. ~50% of my feed was from people i dont follow.
Does anyone know how to hide those tweets on the timeline?
Before i could hide those by muting suggest_activity_tweet and suggest_recycled_tweet_inline
This does not seem to work anymore
Thx for making me double check
One of my alts gets switched everytime, while my main account does not. All using them from the same iOS app.
Also- this random behavior is totally different on my couple of alts on the same iOS app.
When I quit and reopen the app, or choose one of my custom lists and then tap home, it switches to For You.
Not surprised than Elon's Twitter's isn't better. In one hand I welcome their revert to tabs for "For you / Timeline", at least, it's easy to know you aren't reading the correct timeline…
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?
But yes, now it is personally inconveniencing me, and so I'm looking at alternatives.
I left Twitter nearly two months ago. Ultimately, I just couldn't stomach supporting Musk by continuing to view ads, contribute content, and give people positive feedback (via likes and retweets) that helped them stay: https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/1593662348568326151
But I don't think that people who stayed are necessarily morally defective. There have always been reasons to quit Twitter and reasons to stay. Most people stayed either because they decided Twitter was a net positive for them or because Twitter is a habit-forming drug, or a bit of both. It's not only unsurprising to me that some take longer to quit than others, that's part of what made me leave: to undermine, ever so slightly, the rewards for staying.
If this disruption to their usual method of consumption is what pushes them over the line, great. We live in an age where it's impossible to live an ethically pure life, so I'm happy to celebrate steps forward as people take them. Good job, Twitter quitters! Welcome to the club.
Not all of this is accurate. Sure, hating on Musk for banning linking to Mastadon is legit, but there isn't a ban on criticising Musk, there are countless accounts with tens of thousands of followers happily ranting about how evil Musk is. Similarly Tesla.
Also, if you're talking about the Thursday Massacre aren't they all reinstated?
Personally, my last straw was the journalists, but if I hadn't cared about that or other ridiculous Musk behaviours, _this_ would still drive me away; I haven't really used Twitter by any means besides Tweetbot in about a decade.
They're essentially different issues. The journalists, and the Fauci stuff, and the unbanning of various Nazis, are all, essentially, content/moderation issues, whereas this is a usability issue.
But half of my timeline, and most of my colleagues have left, the only thing that has kept me on so far is that the Tapbots Mastodon app https://tapbots.com/ivory/ isn't ready yet, because I like their UIs. Meanwhile I've collected lists and screenshots of where the people leaving said they were going. I've not had an actual reason to physically move over yet though; forced to use the site would be that.
I've been using third-party clients for over a decade, every time I've had to use the site directly it has been a nightmare. With a client app you never saw people you didn't follow anyway, and so as long as it's more effort to leave than stay... you don't have to think about it. Even if it is only specific third-party clients - then even the job of searching for and finding a different client is more effort than I want to put towards this site and its new ownership..
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.
Twitter would be unusable for me without this feature
https://twitter.com/feather_ios/status/1613749938428727297
That's certainly worrying.
Why not?
It’s available here https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastodon-chirper/l...
Could it be a coincidence that Twitter relaunched the algo timeline for everyone and within a day 3P clients that are linear-first stop working?
Although with the all the people laid off, who knows.
Either way, this demonstrates that it makes no sense to build an entire company soley on someone else's API.
Glad I didn't depended on someone else's API, made 3 calls and got paid $182 mil in 2010 $$'s
It seems to be down as well. I knew it would happen with the whole Elon Musk stuff but that still makes me very unhappy.
MaxCDN is down.
The official client all seem to show the most recent tweets so I have to scroll down backwards in time?
Twitter is my only news source that I cannot consume via RSS. So if you publish something on Twitter, you miss most of my attention and only catch it if I log into Twitter that day.
Or post to your personal website and have it support RSS or Atom. It is super easy to implement. Or if you use a ready made cms like Wordpress, it usually supports it out of the box.
From the source: https://twitter.com/Twitterrific/status/1613755585727447040
Something Bad Has Happened At Twitter
Twitterrific users are currently unable to access the service via the iOS app. As of this writing we have heard nothing officially from Twitter and are trying to learn more. This may just be a temporary bug; it may be more a more serious issue.
As soon as we know more we'll update this message. We thank you as always for your support and patience as we work through this problem.
- The Iconfactory Team
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 use Twitters own app so they’ll just quit
are we looking at the same thing?
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".
It's just fun to speculate on how long it takes for a complex software system to collapse without maintenance.
You really think he will buy you a horse?