Now that Twitter has become what it is, I'm somewhat offended that my local government makes announcements on it. Hopefully this will be an impetus for them to stop... although many agencies use Facebook too, and FB and IG have been this way for years.

I've worked in local level government communication. Most of the time your just trying to hit as many places as possible in a hopeless effort to keep an interested public informed. The price is usually low, the audience is there, and information can be duplicated to other platforms easily, so it generally makes sense to use social media.

That said, low engagement on a platform would be a great reason to consider cutting it out. A citizen with feedback is enough to spark the flame too.

As much as I hate the idea of Yet Another Social Media App, I kind of wish there was some sort of official government-specific platform that was only available to state/local/federal government(s) or organizations for making important announcements. No memberships required (other than posters or commenters), no likes, upvotes, or retweeting or whatever, just postings of information that people can get to from anywhere. Something completely untied from any corporate entities.

This should be the kick in the butt that public entities need to stop using twitter, since their announcements should be made available to everyone, not just those who have twitter accounts.

Some EU agencies are already on top of this. They host a Mastodon instance under the actual EU top-level domain name to make it actually verifiably official. https://social.network.europa.eu/@EU_Commission

Our taxes should not go to padding twitter’s wallets

Or just nationalize Twitter, make it a public utility like water, parks, roads, etc. Then it's not subject to the whims of some clownshow billionaire dictator. It could be the people's podium, not some damp troll cave.

Don't forget Elon unironically said he wanted Twitter to be a global town square. Dudes playing 1d chess by reducing his advertisers reach even further...

Same thing happened to Insta back when I used to lurk on it. They start requiring a login to view any content, so I just noped out. I don't care enough to make an account on every social media site.

Are all the news articles with embedded tweet widgets busted now?

Anything worthwhile from Twitter gets screenshot or there's an article posted anyways.

twitter is the perfect place to have a screenshot of something you said in 2010 be put on blast so a bunch of college kids can scream about it and demand your corporation fires you

The only reason I use it is that not enough prominent people are on Mastodon and for me it's only good for being a quick way of seeing what's going on in media and politics.

Walled gardens are not a plus, no matter how much you might want to watch something wilt and die, restricting access to information doesn't help you nor I.

This is a blessing. That stuff will no longer get upvotes in video subreddits and communities.

I never understood the appeal. I have friends that send me random twitter links and I'm like I don't understand wtf I'm looking at, it's difficult to tell who is talking to whom, and whatever it was isn't funny or interesting to begin with. I don't care what chucklefart69 has to say about a famous person. If I want to read the news, I'll read the news. I'm ok with not knowing about a major event breaking within the first 5 minutes of it happening.

It basically is, free API was culled destroying many apps and sites that scraped data from Twitter. So many glitches and bugs mean it's easy to get banned.

You get temporarily blocked if you follow more than a couple accounts in a short time and basically anything. So much anti-vax rubbish and crazy people forced onto my feed. Blocking too many of those gets you temp locked out.

Now this login screen and I'm struggling to see how anyone can find it useful. My work still insists though.

the only way mastodon will ever get a chance, and even then, it's gonna be an uphill battle. even with zero competition, mastodon will struggle. Because its name fucking sucks. Dear gods. Who in their right fucking mind names a social media service after an ungainly lumbering beast that is world renowned for being EXTINCT.

Maybe if they renamed the whole thing to something like "trunky", a bright and bouncy name like that might actually stick. Meanwhile, an elephant never forgets, etc. The unfortunate connection to the american conservative faction's mascot might still be a stumbling block, but it's not nearly as big a problem as it being currently called "mastodon".

Corporate greed and commercialisation of everything. Welcome to the dystopian hellhole we live in

Many of the services are ran by huge companies that are simply running out of ways to grow. This makes them try to gain more out of existing user base often through questionable ways.

Same thing has been happening for the game industry as well with premium games now having season passes, battle passes, gambling, micro transactions and online only requirements.

[edit] corrected duplicate mention of season passes, intention was to mention battle pass instead.

It's not a suggestion. It's what they're doing right now.

That's what I'm experiencing. Every tweet and even going to the main url results in a redirect to a log in splash page.

Yep. I wonder what this is going to do to their traffic. I know I’m not signing up.

I bet Reddit will follow suit.

Is there a way to control the image size?

I think we're reaching that point in the technology cycle where the money people have finally realized that running a social media platform is essentially unprofitable. People absolutely loathe ads and go to extremes to block them, and legislative and regulatory controls are starting to squeeze the manipulative aspects of social media such that what few ads the platforms can serve aren't as relevant anymore, and the data they collect from their users is protected in more and more jurisdictions.

So they're bailing on the open platform idea. They're slapping paywalls up, putting things behind required-accounts, and trying to build a walled garden they can control.

I wish them the best. I remember what happened to Prodigy, CompuServer, and AOL.

Always have been

beeing monolithic is not bad, its just an issue when its not FOSS.

Wow, that's kind of sad to see since it's the only interaction I've had with twitter for years has been through nitter.

I had one w/o telephone number, it got locked right the day I decided to delete it...

Can't believe I wasted 40 minutes on this, I shouldn't write this, but using Tor on Brave I was able to open an account without a phone number. Now I'll have to delete it...

I've avoided that awful site since it's creation and now that it's getting significantly worse, there's even less of a reason to make an account.

Yep, I've tried to make at least 5-6 and all have been suspended without warning.

Just another reason why that site is going to shit.

We're now in the era of Enshittification:

1. Initial Stage: When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. It provides services that are beneficial to the users, attracting them to the platform.

2. Second Stage: Once the platform has a substantial user base, it starts to abuse its users to make things better for its business customers. It starts prioritizing its business needs over the needs of the users.

   1. Final Stage: Finally, the platform starts to abuse its business customers to claw back all the value for itself. It starts taking a larger share of the value that passes between the users and the business customers.

The article: https://www.wired.com/...

Maybe I’m being optimistic, but it seems like the internet is slowly returning to its open ways. Lemmy and Mastodon have taken off over the last few weeks, and while that’s no guarantee that they’ll continue to get more popular, they do seem to function as decent alternatives.

Previously you could view linked tweets. It would be very annoying if you're not logged in. It would try to obstruct your view with a giant popup telling you to log in, but until today, twitter was readable without an account.

Lol, same

My Nitter is asking for username. It was been working normally before today.

Does it? It will only help to kill it off faster.

Idk, it's given me a good reason to not load it

My theory is that they are being sneaky and this is a trial to see how it will affect Twitter if they only made it to registered users. That is why they are calling it a "tech" issue. What a bunch of bollocks. This way they can backdown if they see a negative impact by claiming that they "fixed" the issue.

My theory is that they are being sneaky and this is a trial to see how it will affect Twitter if they only made it to registered users. That is why they are calling it a "tech" issue. What a bunch of bollocks. This way they can backdown if they see a negative impact by claiming that they "fixed" the issue.

It does if you run nightly and set up a custom extension profile. I currently have all my desktop extensions on mobile.

Nitter's not working for me, either. Just returns no results when I run a search.

It's pretty wild. Users are inherently lazy. Give a decent product where you can have a positive ROI on user engagement and sit back to rake it in.

But actively be hostile to users and they are fickle as can be.

I was on Reddit for 16 years with over 100k karma.

And I've deleted the app I was using for it which they broke and switched app and habits over to Lemmy in less than 24 hours.

Nothing like hubris with a dash of greed to ensure success for one's competition.