I cannot believe that there are companies and non-wingnuts who are still actively using that site at this point. Like maybe at the start it was ha-ha funny watching him flail about with code printouts and unplugging random microservices leading to outages, but I feel like the moment he started actively funneling money to alt-right knuckleheads and human traffickers should have been enough of a kick in the pants for even folks heavily reliant on the platform to make their exit.
Thats the worst part about the real world, nobody gives a shit whose at their table as long as they get to eat.
Yep. It’s easy to complain or change your profile picture or share a link but if putting your money where your mouth is results in even the slightest discomfort or change to your comfort zone, that’s usually where people stop having a problem with the latest offense.
As long as our lives keep moving unaffected we’ll abide anything 😞
The problem is that there isn’t a great replacement for it now. The same with reddit. I’m on here and I’m on Bluesky. The main uses I have for both Reddit and Twitter/X is sports news and discourse. Reddit for the discourse and Twitter for the news. There aren’t the communities here to have that. I want to talk Orioles baseball but the Orioles community here literally has zero comments other than bot comments updating scoring updates/pitching changes during the game threads. I’m trying to do my part and comment/post stuff to them but without any actual responses or conversation it feels like yelling into the wind.
Yea a lot of the niche communities haven’t and probably won’t migrate to these smaller sites like Lemmy and Mastodon. Don’t know how to solve the issue either.
In this case, the Orioles would have to announce they have an official mastodon to get most fans to move to it.
Personally I’ve just stopped using the internet for checking on my niche hobbies. A good number of Reddit clones have been trying to populate communities with bots to just post links but without any discourse, it’s the same effect as just googling “topic” and filtering for links from this week. I’m sure it will get better with time. Maybe
My utility company uses Twitter, and keeps it updated with better information than they do via text message alerts. I wish they would get a mastodon account. During tornado season or ice storms, it’s nice to know if power will be back on in an hour or in three days. And once the boil water notice appeared on Twitter a couple of hours before being sent out by text.
When the internet is full of seemingly valid and populated alternatives, I’ll just assume them all to be bots.
Yep. There are only so many people willing to take the leap for ideological reasons. I bailed from Twitter the day Apartheid Boy reinstated Donald Trump (but laughed when Donald decided to start his own dollar-store Twitter instead). Most people aren’t willing to go that far.
I’m tired of being manipulated & jerked around by shitfucks like Apartheid Boy, so I came here for ideological reasons, specifically, because I think it’s time to bring democracy to social media, and the distributed Fediverse model is the way to do that. Those playing ball with the Zucks and Musks and Spezs, should know they’re playing footsie with wannabe dictators, so don’t be surprised when they get shit dictated at them.
Porn is the only reason to use it now
That’s the power of critical mass. Person 1 won’t leave because they have too many followers and follows Persons 2, 3 and 4, who also have too many followers and only follow person 5 and 6 there, who…
The decline is gradual, but will hardly be complete. Facebook isn’t as used as some years ago, but it’s still absurdly big. Xitter is likely to lose some relevancy, but there’s not much that can be done to truly “kill” it. One way to speed that up is if space karen x decides to block all porn.
Must be heaven for real hackers, bet everything is deteriorating at the speed of time …
Isn’t… isn’t everything happening at the speed of time?
Eh, it’s relative.
Usually the speed of time is one second per second in any reference frame.
I’m really shocked that anyone would be surprised.
So many people that used to be really amazing creators ended up down the Twitter rabbit hole. At first their content suffered, and then dried up completely. And now all you ever hear from them is about whatever Twitter tells them to hate this week.
Hating Twitter is just the latest thing to hate on Twitter. And all these people are going to keep on going to get their hit during the 2 minutes of hate, and then a bunch of them will run off and write articles about how much they hate Twitter based on all the stuff that they read on Twitter.
Say the line Bart!
Free speech absolutist
Stop enabling his childish tactics by continuing to treat his platform as some kind of essential tool for communication. It simply isn’t.
It was - and it’s not that the need has gone away or been fulfilled elsewhere, it’s just that it’s no longer viable.
I think paying close attention to this is important though. It’s a case study that just keeps giving - every couple weeks we get an important reminder that billionaires and billion dollar companies aren’t a good thing - their interests are not aligned with ours
I have never used Twitter or X even once in my life. It’s definitely not essential. I really don’t understand how people have convinced themselves that short format screamposting into the void is somehow the peak of communication. Just quit and let your followers know why.
If people actually cared about what you had to say, they’d go wherever you go to hear you say it. If not, were they really all that interested in the first place? or was it just convenient because they were already on Twitter and so were you?
Like it or not, Twitter is the only place where you can talk to a random developer at a huge company and get immediate confirmation that there is indeed a bug in their latest release and have a bunch of people crowdsource work arounds. There really is no alternative for professionals and experts to discuss the particulars of their fields and it really sucks that Musk is destroying that.
Yes, I get that, and it does suck. I blame that particular situation on brands/companies abandoning their own websites and canning their web developers in favor of hiring social media reps to keep a presence on Facebook/Twitter/etc instead of maintaining their own space.
I understand why they did it. It’s far cheaper and you end up reaching a larger audience, but I’ve always personally been a fan of just going to the website and looking at information there.
Oh, me neither. I hate the format, I used it long enough to reserve my name, then never logged in again
But it’s a centralized town square. How much news came out of there? And I mean actual news, not tabloid crap. It’s where science discoveries came out first, where earthquake responses organized, where Arab spring came together
This is the correct and only take. Stop using these shit services.
at this point, with twitter being inaccessible to non logged in user, the ‘public square’ thing is totally done,. Get off twitter now. There are alternatives.
The way I use Twitter, I follow ~40 specific people. Half of them created accounts other places when Elon first started fucking around but they don’t use any of them so if I want to keep following these people I’m stuck (and I do).
true. I know a lot of people are in similar situations, that’s what kept me on facebook for years. I’ll just say at this point, twitter could just die any day now, starting DMing people if you haven’t already and find another way to say in touch.
People demanding others to leave Twitter often seem to forget that not everyone has the same experience on that platform. If one wants to argue that I should leave to make some sort of a statement then fair enough, but to claim I should leave because it has now become something it wasn’t before doesn’t at all resonate with my personal experience. Besides the obvious UI changes I haven’t noticed anything else to be different. No one is forcing right wing/conspiracy propaganda down my throat there. My highly curated feed has the same content it always has and when I see something I’m not interested about I block it and it’s gone. Lemmy is way better alternative for Reddit than Mastodon is for Twitter.
Do what you want but just be sure to know shit is going down hill. It’s not effecting you now but doesn’t hurt to start looking for an alternative for when these wide sweeping changes do start effecting you.
They’re going to have a hard time throttling the Fediverse.
Why? Because there are 100 or so moderately active instances with their own url? Or will you expect people who link to the fediverse to use new or obscure instances to indirectly link to things?
Yeah they’re not going to have a hard time at all haha
Export a list of largest instances and put them in the firewall QOS, 5 minute job max
deleted by creator
Soooooo, none? (Is that the joke?)
A bit of both, actually. With such a diverse amount of instances, covering every possible type of social network, the best they’re ever going to throttle the flagships. xD
Yeah, except they federate. They keep lists about who they federate, defederate, and know of in machine readable format
Actually they could do the same thing to any Fediverse link as they are with these news sites’ links. They added a 5-second delay from when a twitter user clicks the external link from a twitter post, which is garbage overall, but not “throttling” websites. Yes I skimmed the article.
The headline seems to imply that Twitter controls the internet traffic to non-Twitter sites, which is misleading. Twitter is simply degrading the experience of their own site’s userbase, and nobody else. The rest of us can still visit the news sites that Leon Skum hates without Twitter.
Enshittyfication without earning more money? Interesting concept.
Let’s call it shittyfication.
True
Why? It’s easy to get a list of federated servers, in JSON no less. In an afternoon I could build a tool to block them as they come, testing included
You’re still playing whack-a-mole.
Is it really whack a mole if within minutes of federating, a simple automated tool could add them to the list with no human involvement?
I wouldn’t say so, at that point it’s a trivial technical challenge
This should surprise no one at this point.
I don’t give a xit about Xitter.
Wait, I was told net neutrality wasn’t needed.
This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Either you didn’t read the article, you didn’t understand what you read, or you don’t understand what net neutrality means.
To your credit, the use of “throttles” in the headline is (likely intentionally) deceptive. It’s the wrong term entirely. What Xitter did was make their own servers wait ~5 seconds before serving an http redirect.
Net Neutrality.
The principle that internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of source and without favoring, blocking, or throttling particular products or websites.
Sounds exactly like he is disregarding net neutrality to me.
Edit: To be clear, proponents of net neutrality believe that all corporations, not just ISPs should follow net neutrality. It’s because of this exact situation that people want shit like this put into law.
internet service providers
This is the key here, though. Twitter isn’t an ISP, they’re just making it more annoying when navigating from their site to elsewhere.
Which is hilarious. This will only hurt them.
People will just think Twitter is slow. Obviously Threads or NY Times will work normally when people are on those sites.
Net neutrality is the concept of an open, equal internet for everyone, regardless of device, application or platform used and content consumed. You can argue semantics all day but twitter slowing traffic or redirects to certain other websites is a violation of net neutrality. If not the letter of the definition then for sure the spirit of it.
They’re violating the spirit of net neutrality, but not the law. Since they aren’t an ISP, they can’t actually slow down or block you from accessing certain websites. The most they can do is slow down (or block) their own URL redirection service when its used to access to those domains. That’s within their right of free speech, even if it’s really fucking petty.
Just concede and learn from your mistake, because you’re missing the point. Cloudflare throttles connections to sites as part of their DDoS protection, but that isn’t even remotely related to net neutrality. On your site, you can do whatever you want, but ISPs preventing customers from accessing certain sites (or accessing them as they would “normal” sites) is what net neutrality is concerned with.
That’s because you don’t know what an “internet service provider” is. Twitter is not one.
I know what ISP means. Read my edit.
Twitter isn’t, and shouldn’t be under any obligation to respond to you proxying your requests through their url tracker with any service level.
Is it unethical? Yeah. Does it violate the letter of proposed NN laws? No. Does it violate the spirit of proposed NN laws? Also no. Those laws don’t cover what happens while a request is inside a parties network, only the traffic that travels in and out of it, of which Twitter was manipulating neither.
Well, I suppose they could deliver a few packets with a couple microseconds of latency when they delivered the HTTP response payload but they would have to literally modify their OS’s TCP stack to do so and the entirety of that actual throttling would be literally milliseconds of difference.
He’s like the asshole bakers who won’t make the cake for the gay wedding. Or he’ll do it eventually but whine about it the entire time and it’ll arrive late and burnt.
I’ve got no problem baking anyone a cake, but you’re right it’ll be late and burnt. I can’t bake for shit.
But your assumption that I wouldn’t force anyone to bake that cake, you’re absolutely right.
I was talking about Elon, but I’m sorry about your lack of baking skills in case you wanted to be good at it or something.
While still expecting to get paid.
It definitely draws direct parallels to net neutrality. It also shows the consolidation of web services into the hands of a few large corporations and the impact it has on the internet.
Im sure Twitter would argue that it’s not throttling, they don’t limit the speed in any way. But it does make it appear to end users as if the web site is loading slower.
It would be interesting if these sites could see a noticeable drop in traffic during the period Twitter was imposing delays on the redirect. If so, thats potential lost revenue and a basis for a lawsuit.
What is Twitter?
A Mastodon alternative apparently. Seems they haven’t implemented ActivityPub yet? I’ll stay away.
It’s an older platform that no longer exists. You’re thinking of X. Which is newer than Mastodon but still hasn’t implemented activitypub.
This is the most perfect response.
Birdy don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more
These companies either need to rip the bandaid off and leave Twitter or, at least, start establishing themselves elsewhere and encourage their users to find the content wherever that place is.
This is definitely already happening. It’ll be slow, but both my wife and are work adjacent to marketing for larger companies and “well twitter is a shitshow, what else can we use” is such a constant refrain it’s basically canon now.
Interesting insight. Glad to know it’s happening.
On Tuesday afternoon, hours after this story was first published, X began reversing the throttling on some of the sites, dropping the delay times back to zero. It was unknown if all the throttled websites had normal service restored.
Who there didn’t see that coming? They thought nobody was gonna notice 5s delays on NYT links?
That new CEO must be locked in a cage somewhere at this point because she is definitely not calling the shots on this, or “X”, or any of the other nonsense that’s still been occurring because only one billionaire egomaniac is capable of this absolute fucking trainwreck.
People eat Elon Musk’s garbage PR like it’s dinner.
Every damn day they post about some inane shit just so Elon can stay in the 24 hour news cycle.
I am not sure being a petty anti-competitive cunt here is inane exactly,if anything it highlights the issues with rich cunts owning access control.
The most immature billionaire. Scary.
Doesn’t that go against net neutrality?
Is Twitter an ISP?
Yes.
Twitter is website that contains “links to” the other 5 websites. Those “links to other sites” are really links to Twitter scripts that do database queries before finally linking to the other sites for real. It is easy for elmo to insert delays in the process.
It provides a service on the internet.
That’s not what ‘ISP’ means.
I know.
I still think it’s unethical.
Net neutrality is about Internet itself. Twitter/X is a service build on top of the Internet, so no.
It is for example when your Internet provider Gomes you 100Mb/s, but only when accessing these particular sites, otherwise it’s 1Mb/s. It has nothing to do with data caps or overall speed limit, as some suggest, or with speed on the other end.
They repealed that anyways.
Not in Canada.
Did we ever have it in the first place? :>
Yes, actually. In Québec, Videotron offered a mobile data plan that included unlimited data exclusively for the Google Music service. The CRTC told them that this was illegal and it broke net neutrality laws.
I think I recall reading now that they had implemented it here. The whole “what happens there, happens here” dynamic made me cancel it out when they cancelled it down there I guess.
It’s Elon Musk. So it’s not surprising.
