In an unforeseen turn of events, Twitter has decided to test user patience by cloistering tweets behind a sign-in wall
Twitter was one of the few socials where government agencies could publish to the masses. Everyday Twitter erodes its worth for short-term wealth.
In hindsight, it seems absurd that we collectively trust a for-profit company to disseminate official information. Governments should probably take this opportunity to spin up their own Mastodon instances and migrate away from Twitter.
Germany of all countries has dippped into it: https://social.bund.de/
Not quite sure how this works without fax machines, but it does.
Judging by the number of German posts I see on here as well, it seems Germany is very receptive to the idea of the fediverse.
When we think back on how the Google Street View coverage looks in the EU when the majority of Germans objected to getting their houses filmed, there just might be a certain attitude against big tech companies.
Well, Germany is officially a Federal Republic, it does make some sense they would join a federated universe :)
I’ve noticed a lot of German language fediverse content too. Does anyone know why German speakers are so keen on the fediverse?
German speaking Swiss here. Absolutely no idea.
According to Kbin’s Privacy Policy page many of the servers are in Germany.
I actually like the way it’s written, “the Germany”, and hope it doesn’t get changed. :)
I guess it’s because we don’t like US platforms.
We don’t like, that they have a monopoly on these platforms, we don’t like the idea of influencers, we don’t like cult of personality, we don’t like to loose control over our data, we don’t like English speakers as a whole, we don’t like US politics, we don’t like radical politics (even though I am a radical right, I hate everyone else who is radical right and more so the left. Actually I hate every political position), we also hate to loose our productivity for screentime and the list could go on.
We Germans are control freaks. We have always been. In the past we tried to enforce it with weapons. Now we are desperately trying to enforce our values with generosity. Running around the world and throwing money around.
We are longing for absolute control, centralised in Germany and not in some foreign third world country without healthcare (USA).
American here, fuck you
Ah yes. The American greeting.
Fuck you too.
It’s HRE all over again
yay deutschland
The European Commission is on Mastodon and are seeing how it goes there. They post fairly routinely.
I also liked seeing Thierry Breton there but it seems he’s not active anymore :/
Yeah, I’m with you 100%. The same thing could be said about reputable news organizations. And really, there’s no better “verification” than people and agencies having their accounts on servers tied to domains that they own.
Some of us never did trust them to, but politicians went there anyway.
Everyday Twitter erodes its worth for short-term wealth.
This is, and will always be, the main push of capitalism. This isn’t some cute new term like “enshittification” or something, this is just good ol fashion rent seeking and it’s capitalism working as intended.
“Oh no, I can’t read anything on Twitter!”
-No one with good mental health.
In areas experiencing ongoing conflict where maintream media is either muzzled/ unable to keep up, twitter is used by people & journalists to provide updates. In countries with dictatorial governments where the mainstream media cannot be trusted , twitter (&other SM) are used to organize protests and discussions.
In countries with dictatorial governments where the mainstream media cannot be trusted , twitter (&other SM) are used to organize protests and discussions.
It was good for this, but it is not anymore
It still is. Let me explain, in India MSM cannot be trusted (they are called godi media aka modi’s lapdog media) . Even though SM also routinely blocks & throttles opposition and jounalists to favour the majoritarian Hindutva (aka violent Hindu supremacists). they cannot block/ throttle everyone and information could still get out and reach people. Those who who didn’t wish to be tracked could access this info without having to log in to twitter and risk their identity being exposed to the govt. Now that access to info is blocked.
TW: violence, SA
rn, one of our North-Eastern states Manipur, is experiencing large-scale & intense govt. backed communal & sectarian violence ( a govt. backed ethnic cleansing) The situation is ghastly.
100s have been killed, 4000+ weapons have been stolen from the army, girls & women have been gang-raped. the mob burned alive an injured 7 year old ichild, his mother and his aunt inside an ambulance. Since the violenece is govt. backed, neither the central govt nor the sstate govt is interested in quelling it and their pet godi media has either blanked it or is spouting the state govt.'s lies. The only way, the rest of India is able to know details (to organize civil society protests) is through SM.
Hey, there is some good art on Twitter. It’s not all politics and Wendy
There are plenty of people on twitter to follow that are are good influence and creators of quality content, or just nice to keep track of what they’re up to. No other platform unfortunately gives us the same amount of (casual) information about stuff like that. I hate what twitter’s become just like the next person but there’s just simply no alternative for casual user that provides the same experience.
Musk claimed that it’s temporary. Either way this is an absolute disaster. This must be costing them insane amounts of money.
“we were getting data pillaged” … LOL I wonder what on earth that means in his feeble mind.
Just some deranged rich snob who thinks UGC is … his? Kinda sad if you think about it. People posted on Twitter with the expectation of it being public, not some man’s sandbox.
That whole tweet reads like a screenwriter shit it out to fill some tech mumbojumbo plot point for a police procedural.
He only cares because it’s not him that’s doing the pillaging.
“Temporary” in corpo-speak means permanent if it generates profit and there-were-some-technical-issues if it doesn’t, so this is just Felon Muskrat testing the waters.
Right, they will do a cost/benefit analysis to see if the amount of traffic and engagement that they lost cost more or less than what they made or saved by forcing log in.
Because that works so well for Pinterest right? I mean, we all have Pinterest accounts so we can access all that content on Pinterest don’t we?
Oh… we don’t? People add -site:pinterest.com to their google searches to avoid the site entirely? Well then… dang.
Personally, I don’t get many search results from Pinterest
Or not anymore, anyway. Google’s algorithm seems to have come to the conclusion that pinterest isn’t worth linking as much anymore.
Twitter is going even harder than Pinterest. They’re not even showing a preview of the content, they’re just immediately redirecting users to a login page before seeing anything at all.
LinusTechTips just had an issue with this on WAN show tonight where Luke was trying to show a video on Twitter but he wasn’t signed in on his stream laptop and Linus was remote so he couldn’t share his screen.
Luckily the creator of the video they wanted to show had also posted it to YouTube so they were able to show it anyway, but it still disrupted the flow of the show and led them to not be able to use the platform as a news source.
This is a much more extreme version of the same reason I never used Quora. I’d be allowed on one page, but after that, clicking on any internal link in the site would push a “create an account” dialogue and wouldn’t let me click off to see the content. The way around that was just reloading the page, but the irritation and tiny extra step was enough to stop me from browsing that site. Just checked right now and Quora doesn’t do this on PC, but it does on my phone.
Now Twitter won’t let you on the site at all without logging in.
Also… Quora just seems fucking wild
Have to remember to change the results from “related” to “answers” to make sure you aren’t seeing completely unrelated comments.
So… Less ad exposure?
But higher conversion, I bet.
saw this too! looks like it broke a ton of tweet embeds too… Muskrat says its to mitigate scrapers but–this feels heavy handed
What damage do web scrapers actually cause Twitter? I don’t understand Elon’s logic in this move.
Extra traffic that their infrastructure can’t handle since he fired all the people that knew how.
Like reddit, he also probably sees it as losing millions of dollars for data he wants to be paid for.
So losing money from degraded services and losing potential money from data being taken.
What’s worth more - the loss of ad revenue from walled login, or the loss of potential revenue selling the data
Your first mistake is assuming that Elon Musk uses any kind of logic.
There’s no way they cause more damage than what they have done now. The vast majority of users (and eyes on ads, etc) are not going to have accounts. The majority of accounts that might pay money only do so because lots of people (who may not be logged in) see them.
You have to assume flawed logic if you want to understand him.
Elon doesn’t understand how to use robots.txt.
To be fair, many bots don’t know how to use it either.
there is no Elon logic other than having an ego larger than this planet
I mean they have to protect all that content that they’ve been given for free, right?
- spez probably
Guess I’m not going to Twitter anymore
Same I rarely went there to check specific people’s posts. I have not made a twitter yet and certainly not going to make one now.
Good! This is a true death knell.
Good. Finally that one friend of mine will stop posting Twitter links and I can blacklist it again.
Good, faster Twitter dies, the better.
Holy shit, I thought it was just a bug on my end. Sometimes I wonder: what has ELON been smoking?
“ketamine” says wsj
You don’t smoke ketamine. And it definitely would not be responsible for the type of behavior he exhibits.
That’s just called “extreme avarice,” and “sociopathy.”
Well, I guess we know he’s been doing some weed already. ;)
It’s starting to feel like LinkedIn. Can’t view a page without the person getting notified you looked.
