Slack is retiring its status account on X
theverge.com
theverge.com
> 24 years ago
I believe the SMTP RFC says 1986 or something
If a service can't keep its own status page up (Twitter's has been an SSL cert error for months), you should perhaps consider not using it for yours.
This one? https://api.twitterstat.us/
Seems fine now.
Looks like Twitter have just quietly deprecated this page, given that it's powered by a completely different service.
Is there anyone left working there at all, or is it just Elon roaming the empty corridors as Jason Calacanis follows him telling him how marvellous he is?
The company renowned for their CEO using a pocket knife to unplug servers straight from the server room is not expected to do stellar work managing certificates.
I saw the common name on the cert and the redirect and was like, oh ok so they wanna move away from this domain then, makes sense.
It didn't cross my mind that what they were redirecting to could have an invalid cert as well...
Enter through an alternative front-end (https://nitter.com/SlackStatus) and you should see more status from this year.
Would be nice if they were adding a Mastodon account, but I can't blame any company that chooses to retire Twitter presence at this point.
The algorithmic stuff was only ever for users' feeds, not Twitter profiles.
It's made the whole business of status updates completely unusable. If I want to find out why the fire helicopters are out, I can no longer see that on the fire department's Twitter page (even though they do post it!). If I want to find out if my local lake is closed due to algae, I can no longer see it on the park's page (even though they do post it!).
Pretty soon all these organizations are going to realize that their pages are worthless and leave Twitter.
a) Favouring blue-tick comments and post over those with higher engagement.
b) Paying people to comment which has meant more click-bait, hate etc. content.
I don't think this is a very fair and honest take on the toilet flush spiral where Elon Musk placed Twitter. Screwing up the timeline made available to non-registered users is a recent development, and one that lands squarely on Elon Musk's rule over Twitter. So does the shitshow that was the verified badge policy changes and opening the floodgates to racist and anti-semitic content.
In fact, I dare say that there was not a single change to Twitter that spawned from Elon Musk's takeover that had any positive or neutral impact on the company in general and service in particular.
Providing a status monitor/canary page does not force anyone to register an account or subscribe to a service. They can provide all sorts of push/pull notification options they can conceive. Once Elon Musk's Twitter restricted access to their API I'm afraid Twitter lost any relevance for this type of use case.
When I go to most Twitter pages, now, I see completely random posts from years ago at the top.
Slack users should be using https://status.slack.com/ in any event.
The real problem with walled gardens is that people actively avoid going outside the wall. Who is actually not going to Slack's own status page when slack is down? People who would rather be wrong than inconvenienced.
There are many bad things about how Musk is running Twitter, but the UX for people not logged in is pretty low on the list.
If I'm a random person who just heard that Joe Biden tweeted something, I can't see that tweet by going to his Twitter page. That's a pretty goddamned terrible experience right there.
It's also not clear that I'm just seeing the most popular tweets — no other social network has that experience for logged-out users.
I agree wholeheartedly that Twitter shouldn't be the primary vehicle for official communication from just about anything (except maybe Twitter itself).
This can be anything from websites announcing maintenance to a public safety announcement. For example, the district I live has a disaster announcement account on Twitter.
At least for people here, using Twitter only for status updates while not logged in is a very common thing.
Not just in Japan.
But the practice, much like the one of using Facebook or other such service exclusively, has always been a Very Bad Idea. Perhaps such entities will finally abandon it entirely.
Very assuring to know Elon jeopardized the reliability of the service for cost savings
Although I do enjoy the sublime wonder of how between Twitter and the Twitter clones everyone in this space has concluded that to display a 280 character text message they require somewhere between a full Javascript web app or that and an account. It is a pity that HTML is not up to the challenge of these hard times.
This is blatantly false. In the past, Twitter links, both to tweets and to user timelines, were widely shared through third-party services, including major news outlets.
I don't want to use a third-party client to access a fucking website for it function logically.
I want X to always show me the most current post someone has made. I'll decide to scroll down on my own if I want.
This is also why I don't use it much. To be fair, Twitter had this same problem - at least so far as I can remember, it did. I didn't see much value in Twitter and I don't see much value in X, at least not in it's current state.
Maybe that'll change.
The issues you mentioned were not engineering problems. They are all Product Manager diktats. Screwing over the timeline of non-authenticated users is a business requirement, and one which Elon Musk's Twitter decided to change recently.
They started doing this a few months ago. It means if you want to see a persons latest tweets, you have to login/create an account. It's infuriating. A stupid growth tactic. My workaround for now is using Nitter. I can see how businesses linking to their Twitter (e.g. as a source for 'updates' on anything) would have issues with this.
It's a dark pattern, and one which only the most desperate services implement as their last desperate attempt to force users to register and login at the expense of eliminating any value the platform has to them.
9/10 times TLS cert errors are bad cacheing, clashing between browser cipher suites, bad intermediates/roots being on devices etc. Especially on mobile, more especially on android.
But, I also can't find this status page you mentioned. So maybe I'm missing it and twitter actually is incompetent?
Joking aside, I'm a bit shocked that X is being used for Twitter, and we just have to go along with this. I can't understand how a letter is allowed to be a trademark. It feels wrong like allowing a company to call themselves The University or The Army.
Strangely, I'm not sure why Sting's old band doesn't iritate me with it name.
It's intentional that trademark registration is reasonably easy, but enforcement is more thorough. When (say) 99% of trademarks are not contested, this saves the government agencies substantial resources.
Think of it like a software optimisation where edge servers cache files when they are requested for the first time, but not proactively when 99% of files are not requested.
Nothing of value was lost; the existing value will be absorbed by other tech companies.
Twitter killed their free API and apparently their replacement doesn't work properly[0]. Probably not worth trying to work around it for Slack any more.
[0] https://mashable.com/article/twitter-api-elon-musk-developer...
We don't, really. I'll keep calling it Twitter.
I wanted to do the same last year, but interestingly nobody of my audience went off from X to mastodon, so I still have to post my film industry updates to X.
Similarily when WhatsApp changed its Terms of Use to be incompatible with german privacy laws (using whatsapp content for facebook profiling), I had to give up whatsapp as primary communication medium in the local club I'm leading. But nobody else went to Signal, so now we are back again with whatsapp. Nobody cares
That’s a mental shortcut. Social circle you decided to be in doesn’t care.
On the other hand I did research on WhatsApp vs. alternatives and decided to promote Telegram. Sure, it’s not that/very secure, but UX is on completely different level than Signal. It was much easier to transition people on aesthetics alone in comparison to Signal which has its own “quirks” (making sense from security standpoint but perceived as anti-features for casual user e.g. history transfer).
I didn't choose the family I was born into, lol
Also matrix spaces is more elegant than telegram folders.
Who has the keys? What exactly is encrypted? 1-2-1 chats? Group chats? Attachments? Are metadata handed over? Dear Autumn12 don't just read the marketing material.
In a real example: Apple's Cloud has a copy of most users' data as (by f...g default) when you activate an iphone it enables them all. I remember the case with that terrorist (was it the Boston Marathon guy?) that Apple wouldn't hack the device but they handed everything they had on their cloud to FBI.
I don't know what you want to say with your example, but there are dozens of examples where telegram did not give out data even thought they likely should have. It's definitely a more private choice to apple or meta
Yes, but not by default, and it’s weird/custom and not properly peer-reviewed.
> somewhat better than meta AND the whole US government having access to my data
How do you know that that is the case for WhatsApp?
Its not like its a significant difference honestly. I know people beat the E2EE drum and they definitely should: but that only makes sense if the clients are disconnected from the transport. IE: ensuring that collusion between them is less possible.
Though storing things on the server is something telegram then has to secure on your behalf, it does provide a tangible UX improvement.
Telegram supports open source and third party clients, so if you wanted the benefits of E2EE with a popular chat network then that's a better way to go. Custom clients on the telegram network.
It is best is to use something like Element/Matrix though, for sure. But if you're trading UX for convenience then materially the difference really is a lot smaller than you imply.
By switching their optional E2E encryption from their weird proprietary thing to the Signal protocol, Telegram could at least display some goodwill – but only making that the default would show that they actually care about their users privacy.
I'd be happy if it was available on desktop clients as well :D
The desktop client requiring me to constantly have the mobile with me defeats the purpose.
Still... It's an excellent product. Default e2ee, notifications on partner key changes. The main thing I'd like from it would be an option to block me from sending messages until I reauthenticate the partner, or a colour coded system like threema that serves as a reminder that without authc you really don't know who you're chatting with.
We already had that with OTP over ICQ/MSN/AIM etc. in the early 2000s. I could use it with about all of 3 other people.
And why stop there? You can always message base64-encoded PGP messages back and forth. Problem solved!
Except that defaults matter.
Also, both iMessage and WhatsApp support encrypted cloud backups.
On Telegram, I can be in rando messaging groups of people and have a username rather than a hard-to-change, legacy voice traffic routing number that's widely used for tracking.
The only improvement is if they could get rid of the requirement that you use a phone number to sign up for these services, which is a regression from AIM, MSN, ICQ, IRC and Jabber/XMPP.
That would only lead to one thing: absurd amounts of spam.
And as far as I know, Telegram still requires a phone number (or some crypto nonsense) as a primary identifier and for signups. They just allow you to hide that from your contacts.
A bunch of people I know who play video games are on Telegram. I'm pointing out that I can talk to them without sharing my phone number which I can't do on WhatsApp/Signal.
Not being stalked by weirdos is a higher priority for a lot of people than anything involving spooky Edward Snowden stuff involving the NSA, FSB, GCHQ, Mossad and Five Eyes etc.
Depends on the threat model. If you're being in opposition to Western governments, you can be relatively sure that Telegram will stick the finger to them and not cooperate beyond occasionally shutting down public channels that promote violent terrorism and thus garner media attention.
you don't care (enough).
Of course I'm sure this depends on each accounts circumstances.
With this said, it sounds like NPR had no idea why they used Twitter. My best news source is a paid service that summarizes every article in the headline. It gives them both money and tremendous power to set the narrative but few clicks. NPR instead measured their success in CTR which seems like a strange measurement for the genre, especially when you don't get your main funding from ads.
But that's kinda what I was targeting. I have friends that make a living by successfully funnelling their Twitter followers to Substack. What is a product sale for NPR? For some reason, NPR's KPI is measured by CTR for tweets like this:
"Disney's animated hit movie Moana is getting a live-action remake, the company announced Monday. The new version of the 2016 movie is under development, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who played the character Maui, said in a video."
Why would anyone click on that? It doesn't make much sense to me.
Just out of interest, what is that?
Did you really expect otherwise? A niche platform only cared for by a niche of a niche of a community?
When X has 500million users and Mastodon 10million. 400m monthly daily users verses 100,000. Tens of millions of app downloads vs not even 250k total...
I just don't see it. Even just raw numbers and probabilities it would be unlikely
This should change with DMA.
I just removed WhatsApp long ago and honestly it's very rare that I meet anyone who doesn't have signal or telegram as alternative
Including Slack. Who are moving off X. In most cases, another protocol—be it a status page or even an email—may be better.
Did they do that in Germany? The ToS didn't change in France precisely because it was incompatible with GDPR and previous EU rulings[1], and I thought their new ToS didn't apply to the EU at all.
1 - such as https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/pl/IP_17_...
There's lots of products which allow you to post to both at the same time. Unless you're posting to alternative networks, the next person will run into the exact same issue, and the one after that, and...
There is a non-zero chance that something bad could happen with the domain, or something else that would prevent people from visiting the status page.
Using an independent 3rd party provider for such communication is, in my opinion prudent.
I believe that there are a few companies who run services for it.
Personally, I do not want the hassle of having to set up, and maintain a list of various RSS, ActivityPub, pubsub, whatever else for every tech vendor I am in contact with.
It is a good use case for Twitter. (even though they suck)
If something happens with the domain that prevents you from accessing the service, the page works as intended by being down. I mean, what do you think users will say when they go to the domain and their browser shows an error?
- Is my internet down? Can I access any page?
- Is that a region accessibility issue for my location?
- So they killed the status service and I won't know when the main service is back.
The outage scope and estimated time to be back online may not matter much if you just want to check the latest memes. But if you're coordinating some product launch / promotion, this may be very important info. Even more so if that idea of "everything app" ever materialises and the question becomes "so when can I make that payment".
...and in a few seconds the same user opens google.com. What then?
> - Is that a region accessibility issue for my location?
Why does a user care? A user only cares if they can access the page from where they are at that moment.
> - So they killed the status service and I won't know when the main service is back.
Users check if the main service is back by hitting F5 to try to access the main service. Either it's up or down. If they can't access the service, it makes no difference if they can access the status page or not, because they already have their answer.
I think you're trying very hard to overthink and overcomplicate something that's quite simple and straight-forward. All a canary does is check if the service is up, and possibly track uptime as well.
This is just categorically false. The difference between "something went wrong", "we're looking into it", "we've found the problem and are working on a fix", and "we have a fix and are deploying it region-by-region" is huge. If an upstream dependency of mine is having issues, I need to communicate it to my clients/users as well, and they also want to know this stuff. E.g. a lot of people use Slack with external users for support and collaboration. The scope of the outage will determine if I should try to onboard them to a new system as quick as possible or wait it out.
But this isn't just about Slack. It could be any service operating at any scale, with varying levels of support. Employees might be asleep, it might be that just my subdomain/project is having issues, it could be planned maintenance, maybe an issue with the hosting provider. As a customer I want to know all of that, and as a business I feel obliged to provide it.
It's also a figment of your imagination.
No service provider provides those fine-granular updates. Even AWS shows their services as up when they are clearly major outages going.
The only reliable services tracking outages are third-party canary services that rely on crowdsourced reports, and obviously those don't come even close to providing any insight onto progress.
I think you're confusing your own wishful thinking with real-world implementations of status reporting services.
I wrote some of those, so... yes they do. You just didn't get to experience them.
- If they know about it
- If they have a fix ETA
- Any other problems related to their service which I haven't noticed
And many more things, which actually need a status page not an "error"
What exactly leads you to believe that each and every employee of Slack would fail to notice that each and every single service accessed through the domain slack.com was down?
> - If they have a fix ETA
I never saw a single status page that provided that. At all. In fact, the most reliable status monitoring services tend to be crowdsourced third-party services, which obviously do not track ETAs for fixes.
> Any other problems related to their service which I haven't noticed
I see no reason why that could not be provided through the company's domain.
Your hypothetical scenario either involves a regional deployment being down, which I would be very surprise if any non-amateur setup didn't tracked with canaries, or if there's a problem with how the internet is being routed, which is something that's beyond the control of any team but canaries would also flag.
To recap: it's better to have separate domain for status reports.
It's true that your overall chance of failure is now higher, what you really don't want is for both to be down at the same time.
> or a good enough idea to be worth the possible confusion this might cause to consumers who find it valuable to receive status updates via that medium.
I assume they're trying to _avoid_ confusion. If you go to their status twitter right now, unless you're logged in, it shows you an incident from 2022.
The death of Twitter seems quite questionable and mostly political.
https://svenskarnaochinternet.se/rapporter/svenskarna-och-in...
And it is noted elsewhere that the survey was taken before the rebrand in June. So I don't think this _actually_ tells you as much about Twitter in 2023 as the title implies. What this really says is that more people claimed to have used Twitter in 2022 than in 2021, maybe with some overlap into 2023 at the edges. Of course, it also says nothing about the nature of that use.
Anyway, that's irrelevant, as I didn't say Twitter is dying, I said:
> the death of Twitter as a semi-reliable place to put status updates
I absolutely stand by that; again, it is showing random incidents from the last four years in random order on their status twitter unless you're logged in. That makes it clearly unusable for status updates.
I would not, by the way, that even if it meant what you thought it meant, it would not be _great_ evidence against the death of Twitter, in that it's scoped to a single country. On that basis, you could claim that Orkut, or Bebo (depending on country chosen) was the dominant social network of the late noughties.
Like, seriously, what on earth are you talking about?
And the small pieces of signal related to that are of interest, because while incomplete and noisy, they are the best indication we have of what's next.
Edit you work for Discord my friend surely you can see that something is happening here?
Much of the utility of Twitter was that it provided a record of all sorts of public communications, from automated updates about a museum being closed, to weird jokes that went viral across different social networks, to a rambling thread about a sex worker's trip to Miami that was made into a movie, to updates from people who were near the epicentre of earthquakes, to resignation statements from prominent politicians.
People like Musk who spend all day on Twitter might plausibly pay for it. But part of the reason for that is because everyone not on Twitter could see that important things happened there, and everyone who was on it got to feel like they got to be part of the first draft of history.
If you try and research internet drama (including internet drama of wider import) from a few years ago, you simply run into the impossibility of seeing embedded tweets w/ replies or accessing whole threads.
I am surprised how this was not what they went with originally — a dedicated, google-indexed status page that they have full control over, and an RSS feed for those who really want to be notified. It just is so more mature and self-reliant than posting service updates to a social network...
Better to have updages on twitter / x imo.
This is a pretty sad news. For a while you could publicly shame a company and exert some pressure to get things moving a little. We're back to ticketing systems only, and I don't think it's a good news
I wish someone with deep pockets went after Musk for changing the name of Twitter to X for a Computer App.
If that isn't a trademark issue nothing is. But when you are that rich I guess you get to infringe on anything you want.
note: I've just read similar comments, with an actual explanation of what happened.
/feed https://status.slack.com/feed/rss