Basically, I don't want to bother if it's lurker-hostile. Twixxer joins Facebook in the "closed silos" category.
I only ~followed two people's content:
* Dan Luu, available on https://mastodon.social/@danluu
* Paul Graham, available on https://mas.to/@paulg but he doesn't post anymore. I'll live without this.
This is like saying you wanna use windows without a user account.
You want to use twitter no account in the age of AI. It don’t work like that anymore
It's like saying I want to use Windows without a Microsoft account, which I do.
I understand this is easy, and others won't mind doing this. That's fine.
I object to the idea of needing an account solely to read heavily linked, otherwise free, content.
Besides, my browser doesn't store logins/cookies, so it'd be another login I have to do on each session.
> You want to use twitter no account in the age of AI. It don’t work like that anymore
So be it, I guess? The content isn't that valuable to me anyway.
To be fair, that's a burden you imposed on yourself.
But I agree that requiring an account just to browse and read content, is BS.
It's true that wiping cookies was the most effective to prevent building up this trail of cookies from every visited site adhered to those ad companies.
But this seems to me like a solved issue since Mozilla deployed their Total Cookie Protection [1] with Firefox i.e. each domain has its own isolated set of cookies.
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-rolls-out-total-...
how does having an account to view twitter meaningfully change anything during this mystick time of AI?
If it's to prevent AIs from reading twitter threads, well, good luck.
>It don’t work like that anymore
well if a company doesn't follow customer demand they fail; I don't intend to continue using a service that requires me to have an account to lurk -- i'm not the only one. The rules for customer service don't somehow just get cast away because of magic software.
> If it's to prevent AIs from reading twitter threads, well, good luck.
If you require an account, it’s harder to scrape you and train an AI for free using platform you've build with your own investment and effort. Until court rule in favor of copyright holders, welcome to the future where nothing is shared in the open anymore.
By the way, you know for legal purposes those creators (copyright holders) also include guys like Disney, Warner Bros, Penguin et al. right?
If only I was able to do what you describe, I would use Windows. But sadly, Microsoft wants to invade users' lives like a malignant cancer, so Linux it is.
MS took these pages down, but there were two posts that I think gave users the most in depth look at at the kinds of data they've been collecting:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170722175209/https://docs.micr...
https://web.archive.org/web/20170407072948/https://technet.m...
This only gives examples of some of the types of things they collect though. For example, it says that the Photo App (default image viewer) will tell MS if the file was on your hard drive or a network share or a cloud server or an SD card, and it will send them the metadata (resolution, file size, encoding, etc) and tell them if you looked at the photo or video in fullscreen mode, as well as how long you spent looking at each file, but you shouldn't assume that's all the information they take. That's why the start of each section has the words "such as"
Now that they're fully committed to using their OS as an ad delivery platform they likely collect everything that they think will help them target those ads to you better.
It still works. There are several alternative workarounds as well. I have a laptop that normally runs Debian that I can dual-boot to Windows for BIOS updates or to use Acer’s app to limit battery charge to 80%. I use a local Windows account without a password, as I don’t keep any data on the Windows partition.
If this is Twitter in the age of AI, Twitter isn't worth the effort to me in the age of AI.
Especially since I can use Mastodon, and that is actually very nice. I get that not all interests are as well represented, but I like it.
That's probably going to leave people with the impression that JS is required. Sure, there are desktop clients (all third party) and I could probably try those, but generally the kinds of people who'd run random code on their systems and give it network access will probably just have JS enabled by default in the first place. At least some are open source I guess.
Looking at some of the the open source projects I was amused to find a client for MS-DOS (https://github.com/SuperIlu/DOStodon) and then amused again to see all the .js files it needs to work. It looks like it might take a little work to find a desktop client that doesn't just run a bunch of javascript anyway
So, parity to unauthenticated Twitter browsing.
Due to the federated nature of Mastodon every other instance is ostensibly an archive as there is currently no way to guarantee that a tweet/comment/account is removed from remote instances when you delete it from your local instance.
You can add /embed on the end to see the singular post without replies, but it's not really a good substitute.
GH issues:
I don't know why it sometimes does and sometimes doesn't.