If they really care about free speech and citizen journalism, they totally should have working onion service.

Of course they don’t care, not only because Musk is full of shit, but also because of billions from Saudis.

Serving a valid tls cert takes virtually no effort. It's far more likely that Musk's downsizing killed off infra that was doing this job correctly and inexpensively for many years.

If Musk actually cared about free speech like he says he does, onion services would be a priority. But obviously that's just hot air. You can't have it both ways.

Did they properly remove it or does no one there even know it was/is happening. They didn’t shut it down, the seem to have left the lights on with nobody home.

Bigger picture - given the role news making and sharing in real time has always played in Twitter, it seems logical that services which may not provide obvious returns but which build a platform that journalists find useful would help do that.

Why not? For an international communication service with a "historical" significance on freedom of speech, is this not a natural extension of the platform? Something like this does not cost very much money to operate. "distraction" implies that it does not align with the rest of the company's objectives, and that it costs an inordinate amount of time or resources. A service like this can be administered by a single person as a tertiary function of their role, is it really any significance to their bottom line?

Maybe, but then, why the onion service is still up?

This feels more like uncontrolled infrastructure rot/lack of maintenance rather than a conscious decision to cut unnecessary parts of it.

If you think running an onion service is distracting, wait until you see how distracting trying to become an "everything" app is.

It's so funny to me seeing variations of this post in response to anything related to what could be seen as a weakness to the actions taken after acquisition, while also seeing this in posts promoting twitters relative stability. It's just so transparent to what your motivation is and laughably pathetic how you feel the need to reaffirm and defend your stance on musk (lowercase) at any opportunity that projects any positivity on his decision making.

Oh, right, the topic that neither of us were actually taking about. Yep, I don't think anyone reasonably minded would be using a twitter tor exit node with twitters current reputation. Probably best to remove a service that no one would ever trust you enough to use.

It broke because there's no one left at the company who knows how to keep it online.