all this does is make me completely uninterested in twitter. at least with nitter i would make an effort to use it to look at the few accounts that stayed in twitter that i liked
Realistically, the thing was always living on borrowed time.
I could have believed that Twitter and Reddit might have been okay with alternate third-party platform-native clients, but not third-party Web frontends.
Well, in theory, it actually wasn’t. Nitter doesn’t use the official Twitter API, which you can easily block access to, but rather uses the webpage API. Blocking access to the webpage API requires blocking access to the whole webpage without user login, which no one expected would ever happen for a service which’s main use is to publicly announce things.
Well, and then came the great scraping to feed the LLMs + the questionable sanity of Musk, which meant Twitter did actually block public access to the webpage.
It isn’t so much a front end as a privacy-enhancing proxy service. You can’t participate, you can only consume. If our governments are going to conduct their interactions with us on fucking Twitter, we need services like this. Or we need our states to stop neglecting our need for online infrastructure and punting to capital interests.
Twitter dies as Musk wins war against own service
It amazes me how much effort people will go to in order to experience the shitshow that TwitXter is.
Just avoid entirely.
The sooner it dies the better society will be
it is not as easy as it sounds because public services and figures send their news/notifications through X
Weird, I’ve survived without it for 8 years.
Recently our county sheriff put out an Amber Alert (a forced alert on all mobile devices) but the obfuscated link resolved to Twitter.
I wonder what portion of the public saw the Twitter login page and just closed the tab, never to see the details of the child abduction.
Ours does the exact same. Sometimes they even put an obfuscated link to a tweet that was very quickly deleted, so you just get an error and there’s no info unless you both log in and go searching their twitter for whatever tweet they may actually still have that has info. It’s pretty ridiculous.
Sounds like a misuse of the amber alert system
All they achieved was make me not ever engage with their website in any capacity. I’m not making an account, I’m not logging in. If I can’t see the content without logging in, or with a proxy, I’ll just never see it. It’s no sweat off my back if I can’t see some random porn someone linked in a group chat.
Hopefully, this ends up being good for the fediverse - if you have to log in to view posts, you’re probably much less likely to create an account, and maybe just a little bit likely to at least just creep on mastodon posts…
Of course Elon is free to close twitter like this, as sad as it is. It’s his company (which already halved in value since he bought it…)
BUT, governments and officials really must stop using twitter for official communication at this point. It’s not OK to require people to make an account just to view their communication.
Our Dutch government actually set up their own Mastodon instance, but many politicians still continue to use twitter.
That’s a shame, but fortunately I see fewer and fewer twitter links being posted these days anyway
