19 ms·

Twitter has banned Mastodon links in name and bio for being “malware”

637 points by luu 4y ago

jimbob45 4y ago
- themitigating 4y ago
  Let's set aside the reason he banned the links, there's no need to debate that. Elon Musk bought twitter because of his concerns about freedom of speech/censorship right? This is a Tweet from him regarding freedom of speech in April of this year "By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect..." Each incident in which he bans an account or censors links, like this, is evidence that his concerns about freedom of speech might be disingenuous.
  - GaylordTuring 4y ago
    But you don’t know what happened in this instance. Wait for a while to see if the van stands and/or Twitter makes a statement regarding this. As of now, it just seems that everybody on HN are taking part in a collective confirmation bias session.
ddmma 4y ago
Please include TikTok as well
- midoridensha 4y ago
  And Facebook too. And Discord.
  - ddmma 4y ago
    Yahoo messenger
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      I don't think anyone uses that any more. My point is that links to communications services that people use a lot should be blocked on Twitter, and result in account suspensions, and users should only be allowed to share info on the Twitter platform itself, and any straying from this should result in severe repercussions, just like showing any other data Elon doesn't like, such as the ElonJet account, and now Mastodon links. Ideally, this will cause nearly everyone to flee Twitter altogether.
- qualudeheart 4y ago
  Trump should’ve forced that sale to $MSFT.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  He can’t because he’s in bed with the CCP.
  - ddmma 4y ago
    Jesus had similar fate
- ddmma 4y ago
  Here is reference to the idiocracy app https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiktok-pushes-potentially-harmful-content-to-users-as-often-as-every-39-seconds-study/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiktok-pushes-potentially-harmf...
greyface- 4y ago
Reminiscent of the Freenode downfall
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- anakaine 4y ago
  Whats the story with Freenode in a nutshell?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jcranmer 4y ago
    Someone "bought" Freenode, kicked out the existing staff, who formed Libera chat as a result. The new owner of Freenode then speedran self-destruction of the site, first banning every channel that mentioned libera in its topic, and then wiping all of chanserv and nickserv and starting from scratch. This is very reminiscent of the "ban everyone who mentioned libera in its topic" phase of the self-immolation, which prompted a lot of people who had previously been hesitant or only considering whether to move to libera basically having the choice made for them.
    - defrost 4y ago
      Damn - glad I missed all that. I was part time staff + channel admin on various language channels ( #C etc.) until 7+ years back and avoided drama politics as much as possible. Seems like a shame and a reason to drop into Libre.
    - jjulius 4y ago
      >... and then wiping all of chanserv and nickserv and starting from scratch. I'd followed the saga in realtime up until just before this point. I had no idea that homeboy went scorched earth. Jfc lol.
    - simonw 4y ago
throwawaysleep 4y ago
The "free speech" man is on a suspending rampage.
typeofhuman 4y ago
Time to move to https://www.SpaceHey.com https://www.SpaceHey.com
bakoo 4y ago
This is the time to leave. I feel sorry for everyone who built a community or business around Twitter.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  Had a whole one planned out and prototyped for using the renewed twitter api as the in-app community so that I could avoid the insurmountable challenge of moderating UGC as a small business ʕ⁎̯͡⁎ʔ I’m moving to a decentralized and self-published model for community UGC but discovery suffers dramatically
- for_i_in_range 4y ago
  96% of Twitter users haven't heard of Mastodon.
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    And the bans are obviously designed to make sure it stays that way.
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    You’ve surveyed them personally, have you?
- friendlypeg 4y ago
  I want to quit but there's nothing that truly replace it. I might try Mastaodon but in the meantime, I will do my job by blocking every ads I see on the app.
  - timmytokyo 4y ago
    I was a huge Mastodon skeptic, but I made the switch a few weeks ago and it's been pretty nice, honestly. The community feels so much less toxic, and it's growing. I only hope with growth it doesn't start to replicate the rotten aspects of Twitter.
Mistletoe 4y ago
This reminds me when I started some internet companies in the early days of the internet and the newspaper refused to run ads in their classifieds for internet companies, since they said they were a competitor. :)
zagrebian 4y ago
Well, I’m glad that I added it to my bio when it was still possible. I hope it doesn’t get removed.
CloudRecondite 4y ago
Very sad to see what’s happened to Twitter in such a short time
- standardUser 4y ago
  When a major player falls it creates an opportunity for new ideas to fill the vacuum.
raydiatian 4y ago
Elon has lost all of the respect I built up following his activity from 2008-2018. What a doofus.
- zouhair 4y ago
  He is mostly a con man who was found out.
  - ajross 4y ago
    Makes a pretty damn good car for a con man, though. This kind of argument seems silly to me. The world is complicated. He can be both a fantastic manager able to push out successful products in markets that don't even exist and a narcissistic thin-skinned asshole. We can celebrate SpaceX and Tesla while we condemn his censorship on Twitter.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      > Makes a pretty damn good car for a con man, though. In 2018, yes. By today's standards, almost everything his car does, the competition does better.
    - thrillgore 4y ago
      The build quality on Teslas have declined significantly. He can't even build a good car anymore. [1]: https://insideevs.com/news/595828/tesla-model-y-build-quality/ https://insideevs.com/news/595828/tesla-model-y-build-qualit...
      - culi 4y ago
        2013: least eco-friendly EV – Climate Central 2018: feds ask Tesla to stop misleading the public about safety ratings – NHTSA 2020: Tesla ranks lowest on Initial Quality – JD Power 2021: Tesla ranked 27th of 28th in reliability ranking – Consumer Reports 2022: Tesla least reliable of EVs[0] [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-least-reliable-ev-brand-uk-survey-2022-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-least-reliable-ev-bran...
mindslight 4y ago
Clicking through to Mastodon links is a breath of fresh air. Posters can actually write a few substantive sentences straightforwardly, rather than having to break their thoughts up into sentence fragments punctuated by nn/?? and unnecessary username repetitions and reply frames. Also the fact that it just loads quickly. There's some delay and it's not as quick as plain web pages could be, but it's lightning fast compared to Twitter.com with its "infinite scrolling" (aka never finished loading).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tstrimple 4y ago
  I found value in the limited characters. I did not thread post, but I did learn to make my points more concise. I think that is worthwhile.
  - kibwen 4y ago
    Encouraging extreme conciseness is often valuable. Enforcing extreme conciseness is terrible. Not all worthwhile thoughts are compressible.
  - prawn 4y ago
    I also enjoyed it and the challenge it provided, writing and rewriting to distil a message. I actually miss that.
    - macintux 4y ago
      Constraints are great for creativity.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    I would agree. If at same time threading was made impossible.
  - lokedhs 4y ago
    Different instances have different limits. If you want even more constraint you can use oulipo.social where you're not allowed to use the letter e. Or you can go to dolphin.town where you're only allowed to use the letter e.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
egberts1 4y ago
- klardotsh 4y ago
  The logical conclusion of this argument is to disable all links on Twitter, as any domain that resolves to a server running an HTTP server could serve up malware, and that is not the world we want to go to (I say even having left Twitter long before the Elon buyout)
  - rafael09ed 4y ago
    What does HTTP vs HTTPS have to do with malware?
    - wwalexander 4y ago
      I don’t believe the parent made a distinction between the two. Presumably they used “HTTP” to include both bare HTTP and HTTP-over-TLS?
woodruffw 4y ago
What's particularly strange is they seem (from the thread) to only be banning "mastodon.social" links, which are by far the least likely to be suspicious. Not that I believe the excuse anyways; it's just remarkably flabby.
- tedunangst 4y ago
  No, it's every masto instance (that I've been able to check).
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    I just tried with infosec.exchange (which is a pretty large instance), and my profile edit went through. I also tried with my personal domain (which isn't hosting Mastodon, but has a WebFinger alias for a Mastodon instance), and it also worked.
    - tedunangst 4y ago
      Ah, I guess it will let you change it, but anyone clicking the link is warned it's unsafe. See links in https://mobile.twitter.com/JordanOnRecord/status/1603555252866801664 https://mobile.twitter.com/JordanOnRecord/status/16035552528... Or https://mobile.twitter.com/hacks4pancakes/status/1603501886275047424 https://mobile.twitter.com/hacks4pancakes/status/16035018862...
      - woodruffw 4y ago
        Interesting! Yeah, I get a warning click-through with those as well.
- mgerdts 4y ago
  Also hachyderm, which as of the last count I saw had over 30k users. https://hachyderm.io/@steveyackey/109521492988061127 https://hachyderm.io/@steveyackey/109521492988061127
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
meta2023 4y ago
Best part is every action he takes with Twitter further tanks Tesla's market cap as everyone realizes he's an unhinged pathetic ignorant fuck.
- GolfPopper 4y ago
  He's also tanking Twitter's value. The people he's booting bring people to Twitter.
- Laaas 4y ago
  "unhinged pathetic ignorant fuck" doesn't seem accurate, nor fit for a comment on HN, no matter how much you may dislike him or think his actions are deplorable.
  - amrocha 4y ago
    Seems 100% accurate and fit for the situation to me. You don't tank a company and your reputation like this if you're not unhinged. You don't ban people linking to a competitor if you're not pathetic. You don't fire the entire engineering team only to roll out a half baked checkmark, only to have to remove it a couple weeks later if you're not ignorant. Anyone that treats other people, and especially their own coworkers, with as much contempt and cruelty as Elon has is absolutely a fuck. Unhinged pathetic ignorant fuck it is.
    - dang 4y ago
      No one is saying that you guys owe $BillionaireCeo better, but you (all of you) owe this community better if you're participating in it. Please read the rules and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. They've been largely the same for many years.
  - meta2023 4y ago
    > nor fit for a comment on HN You're right, we should all emulate PG and just assume Musk is right instead of having the intestinal fortitude to call out grifters and stop encouraging idolatry of these pieces of shit. [1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1603555493238435840 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1603555493238435840
areoform 4y ago
One of the saddest parts of this affair is that he has kicked a hornet's nest. Twitter is one of the homes of the OSINT movement and these moves, including the lawsuit against Sweeney, have pissed off enough people in the OSINT movement that they stopped tracking Russian war crimes and the FSB to find where the stalker video was taken. It was nowhere close to an airport. Of course, the person could have followed the car from an airport, but we currently don't have any third-party evidence for that. I don't wish anyone harm. But the response and rage directed at someone merely reposting publicly available information from an API seems to be disproportionate. The excuse used to purge elonjet was being held together by a fairly thin rope that seems to be down to a few threads. From the founder of Bellingcat, https://twitter.com/eliothiggins/status/1603454821700452365 https://twitter.com/eliothiggins/status/1603454821700452365 I looked at the discord on how they did it, and they went frame-by-frame, found a very specific curb, then they looked for that specific curb in the area. After they found the curb, they then cross-referenced it against a building that was visible in a reflection of the car window that they then used to confirm their find. It took them just a few hours. I expect that the more this hornet's nest gets kicked, the closer they'll look. I, personally, wouldn't want to be in their crosshairs. edit — a link to the images, https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1036758130761158677/1053008754456662026/allboxed.jpg https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1036758130761158677/1... https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1036758130761158677/1053008754699943956/loc1boxed.jpg https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1036758130761158677/1... the building itself, https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1036758130761158677/1053014710678720534/image.png https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1036758130761158677... This was done by https://twitter.com/Sepulco1 https://twitter.com/Sepulco1
- woodruffw 4y ago
  > prosecution Persecution? :-)
  - areoform 4y ago
    Good catch ty! In my defense, he is prosecuting a case against him, but it's weird usage so I fixed it :)
- 4y ago
villgax 4y ago
FTC will have a sweet ride on Twitter
jancsika 4y ago
Dammit, I'm so tired of this. Oh hackers of Hacker News, I call on you at this hour to band together, in the spirit of peace, understanding, and coffee, to join our rag tag forces so that we may materialize our own unbreakable web-of-trust network with nothing more than duct tape, GPG, LISP, and first principles. This is our calling, and this is our time. Declare your intent with a pubkey below and we shall right this world one set of parentheses at a time: -----BEGIN OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY----- b3BlbnNzaC1rZXktdjEAAAAABG5vbmUAAAAEbm9uZQAAAAAAAAABAAAAMwAAAAtzc2gtZW QyNTUxOQAAACC3giiTOw09X630i9AKbXyKH8YanG0HMzraJ2dqj5oYjQAAAJCf8rIWn/Ky FgAAAAtzc2gtZWQyNTUxOQAAACC3giiTOw09X630i9AKbXyKH8YanG0HMzraJ2dqj5oYjQ AAAECffuXm53adFaReqHBx/D+L1mtOx4uGqszp3ABBUenOYreCKJM7DT1frfSL0AptfIof xhqcbQczOtonZ2qPmhiNAAAADWdsZWJAcmV5cy5uZXQ= -----END OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----
- SteveNuts 4y ago
  You may have cat'd the wrong file
  - hinkley 4y ago
    I hope that this is satire. But the cynic inside me is saying, "if you say so, buddy."
- tedunangst 4y ago
  What is the purpose of posting a private key here?
  - whateveracct 4y ago
    uh oh
  - macintux 4y ago
    Feels like a bash.org hunter2 moment.
  - eatbitseveryday 4y ago
    > > Declare your intent with a pubkey > > -----BEGIN OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY----- Probably a mistake :)
MrOwnPut 4y ago
> @danluu the regex is only matching on 'mastondon.social' and other blacklisted popular servers. I can post my link to this smallish mastodon instance, without mastodon in the name
rippercushions 4y ago
There are two ways this could have happened: 1) Twitter/Elon has made the conscious decision to censor all references to Mastodon in an attempt to retain market share. 2) Somebody shared something bad with a mastodon.social link, and Twitter's always-creaky moderation systems, now nerfed and defunded by Elon, completely failed to realize the implications and added mastodon.social to the same global domain ban list as viruses4u.ru and freeviagra.xxx etc. My money is actually on #2, because the ban only appears to impact mastodon.social and not any other Mastodon instance, but I guess we'll find out once this hits mainstream news and Twitter has to make a public decision on this.
- cldellow 4y ago
  infosec.exchange and hachyderm.io appear to be affected as well -- at least, I can't tweet links to them, nor put links to them in my bio.
- tedunangst 4y ago
  So apparently the edit ban only affects mastodon.social, but links to any mastodon instance even those that don't have it in the name, are flagged as unsafe and require a clickthrough. It's very uneven.
- MishaalRahman 4y ago
  Links to androiddev.social are banned on Twitter as well right now.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mwcremer 4y ago
  Maybe https://mastodon.social/@elonjet https://mastodon.social/@elonjet
- andreyk 4y ago
  As others have said, it is not allowed to post links with tweets to any Mastodon instance (see https://sigmoid.social/@thegradient/109521197175376332 https://sigmoid.social/@thegradient/109521197175376332 for a screenshot)
anigbrowl 4y ago
Elon Musk @elonmusk 47m Unsuspend accounts who doxxed my exact location in real-time? Now 43% Tomorrow 4.5% 7 days from now 14.4% Longer 38.1% 535,233 votes Final results Elon Musk. @elonmusk Sorry, too many options. Will redo poll. 8:33 PM · Dec 15, 2022 :o) This is not a serious thing of course, but many a true word is said in jest. Given his known history, from flirting with joining the board of Twitter one day to deciding on a hostile takeover the next, and so on back into the past...would you went to actively or passively do business with someone who just rewrites the terms whenever an unwelcome outcome results?
- BryantD 4y ago
  Not only did he restart the poll when he saw “Now” winning, the new poll still has “Now” winning by a hefty margin. He posted these after a very brief appearance on a Space hosted by journalists. I can’t blame him to leaving —- talking to the press right now is a lose/lose for him. But what was he thinking, joining in the first place?
  - generj 4y ago
    And the new poll has a longer time period, so his bots can come in and rescue him (or he can have more time for a Twitter employee to modify the count). As a bonus if he actually runs the poll for 24 hours before acting it’s effectively a 1 day ban, which was the “Tomorrow” option from the prior poll. It’s just laughable.
- ihuman 4y ago
  I thought this was a joke, but you weren't kidding [0]. He remade the poll with just "now" (55.9% right now) and "in 7 days" (44.1%) [1] [0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603600001057185792 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603600001057185792 [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603609466301059073 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603609466301059073
  - greyface- 4y ago
    With a poll duration of 24h instead of 30m this time, so "now" is now "tomorrow".
lwneal 4y ago
- clnq 4y ago
  What a brilliant new social network that has nothing to do with Mastodon at all. Full of social discourse about the singer, actress, and director Barbra Streisand entirely unrelated to current events.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  True freedom of speech there too!
Proven 4y ago
erickhill 4y ago
Not just the bio. I posted a tweet today that mentioned Mastodon and linked to my profile in the tweet and it was "caught" by Twitter as "sensitive content." They said: "We put a warning message on these Tweets because they might have sensitive content — like nudity, sexual content, violence, gore, or hateful symbols." After the shock wore off, I actually laughed out loud. Then just sat there and stared at the screen. It's completely absurd.
GaylordTuring 4y ago
Everybody here seems to be jumping to conclusions immediately, which frankly seems intellectually dishonest. Take a breath, wait for a while, see if the ban stands (or if it was some technical fluke), see if Twitter/Elon Musk comes with an official statement regarding this matter. Right now, it just seems like all of HN are having a gigantic confirmation bias session together.
- amrocha 4y ago
  He already confirmed it was intentional
  - GaylordTuring 4y ago
    Most people writing in this comment section at the time of writing didn't have all the facts. It would have been much better if they held off commenting until today when we know much, much more. That was my only request. Was that unreasonable?
    - amrocha 4y ago
      People react to things as they happen, I don't think that's unreasonable either. Some doubt is warranted but by the time you posted your comment it had already been confirmed, so I think it's ok to comment at that point. Sometimes time gives you more context, but in this case it just confirmed what was already known.
- jyxent 4y ago
  It was very intentional: https://twitter.com/brenonade/status/1603612768221155328 https://twitter.com/brenonade/status/1603612768221155328
  - GaylordTuring 4y ago
    That's great that it was clearified. _Now_ we can actually have a discussion about it rather than reacting based on assumptions and guesses, which was taking place when I wrote my comment. That was all that I asked for.
rootusrootus 4y ago
Free speech for me, not for thee. So predictable. It's always the places that proclaim the loudest support for free speech who are quickest to ban people and censor their speech.
- ravivyas 4y ago
  reminds me of the poem `The Genius of the Crowd` by Charles Bukowski two snippets from the poem AND The Best At Murder Are Those Who Preach Against It. And The Best At Hate Are Those Who Preach LOVE AND THE BEST AT WAR --FINALLY--ARE THOSE WHO PREACH PEACE Those Who Preach GOD NEED God Those Who Preach PEACE Do Not Have Peace. THOSE WHO PREACH LOVE DO NOT HAVE LOVE and BEWARE Those Who Are Quick To Censure: They Are Afraid Of What They Do Not Know Beware Those Who Seek Constant Crowds; They Are Nothing Alone Edits: Formatting
thrillgore 4y ago
I said when he announced the Hyperloop ages ago the man was increasingly unhinged and nobody believed me. Welcome to years later, rest of the world. He ruined something beautiful in Twitter and knowing HN, there will be people who defend him.
- ProjectArcturis 4y ago
  Thankfully fewer and fewer.
- culi 4y ago
  I listened to a podcast about him and how frustrated any journalist that covers him get to be. There's this thing they jokingly call the "Elon effect" that experts in various fields commonly experience. It's when Elon starts talking about your field and making wild claims about something you actually know about and you start to realize what a fraud he is. And only then do you go online and you find out experts in all these other various fields have had the same experience but this clown world keeps turning and talking about him like he's some kind of visionary when he usually has no idea what he's talking about
  - Laaas 4y ago
    This seems to be common with many "authorities", journalists too. I suppose it's usually a sign of people placing too much trust in an authority.
  - toofy 4y ago
    what i keep hearing it called is "debate bro" culture. a few of the characteristics that really concern me are: 1) they either don't realize or they refuse to admit what they don't know. 2) they try to convince everyone that what matters is how you say something. they believe the aesthetics of how you say something should matter more than the content. 3) depth and nuance is bad, someone may be trying to confuse you. 4) context removal. they want to pretend that wider context doesn't matter. 5) every random persons thoughts on an issue should hold the same weight as even an expert in every topic. i definitely see elon engage in this constantly, but its absolutely not limited to him. its wild how wide this has spread.
JohnTHaller 4y ago
This applies to other instances, not just mastodon.social. Twitter has been labeling tweets with Mastodon links as "sensitive content" for a while as well.
ryukafalz 4y ago
Based on the fact that this is affecting name and bio updates, I strongly suspect they're doing this to try and prevent people from finding their Twitter contacts on Mastodon. For those who don't know, there are tools like Fedifinder[0] that will scan your follows/followers' profiles and look for Mastodon URLs so you can follow them there. They're probably trying to make it harder for people to jump ship. Even if you plan to stay on Twitter, I suggest you try to rebuild your network on Mastodon too if only as a contingency, because it's likely Twitter's now actively trying to prevent people from leaving. As another commenter mentioned, very reminiscent of the trigger for the Freenode exodus, where the new owner tried to prevent people from talking about their new channels on Libera. [0] https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- carlivar 4y ago
  Does the reverse work? Can I reconstruct my Twitter follows by scanning mastodon for Twitter handles?
  - aendruk 4y ago
    If you want? Mastodon profiles have user-definable fields so linking to accounts on other platforms is easy. Not many people are posting Twitter handles right now though.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    Related to this. In the Twitter data export for your followers they list the accountId and userLink but not the handle. So if you wanted to move to Mastodon you can't just use your export as a source. You would need to hit their API first to translate which I suspect they will remove at some point soon.
    - mikestaub 4y ago
      If it ever gets that hostile we can just scrape the website and reconstruct the social graph from the DOM.
troydavis 4y ago
Any attorneys want to weigh in on whether - or when - this becomes an anti-competitive/anti-trust concern, either in the US (FTC) or the EU? Related reading: * Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) Article 102, on abusive conduct by companies that have a dominant position in a market: https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/procedures/article-102-investigations_en https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/procedures... * FTC's guidelines for firms with market power: https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive-practices https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive-practices, https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/refusal-deal https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
- tehlike 4y ago
  Twitter is not large enough to be an anticompetitive concern. Not a lawyer, but practically have looked into a few tech related cases.
  - balex 4y ago
    Maybe, but Elon Musk has a big enough political footprint to compensate.
  - dimal 4y ago
    Depends how you measure “big”, right? In the social media market, not so big. In the microblogging market, they are what… 95% of the market? I honestly don’t know what a judge would say, but that’s a one way of looking at it.
albertopv 4y ago
Am I the only one thinking there is far more censorship now under Elon Musk rule?
- croes 4y ago
  Depends on who you ask.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    What is true is that their is far more hypocrisy about censorship under Elon Musk
prkr 4y ago
fwiw I was still able to update my bio with a mastodon.social username in a 3rd party client (tweetbot)
technion 4y ago
(copied from mastodon ) Since so much of my feed has been talking about issues posting their Mastodon from birdsite - I've built you a workaround. There's a shitpost domain I purchased recently - doitforthe.lol. I just built it with an open redirect for an allow list of Mastodon instances. The URL must be base 64 encoded, which I've built to evade birdsite filter lists. Build yourself a URL of: hxxps://doitforthe[.]lol/mastodon=base64(your URL) For example, the following link lands directly on my own Mastodon profile. https://doitforthe.lol/?mastodon=aHR0cHM6Ly9pbmZvc2VjLmV4Y2hhbmdlL0Bqc21hbGw https://doitforthe.lol/?mastodon=aHR0cHM6Ly9pbmZvc2VjLmV4Y2h... Edit: To be clear I have no form of tracking whatsoever.
- arcastroe 4y ago
  Why wouldn't any URL shortener work?
  - technion 4y ago
    I had the understanding Twitter actually resolved bit.ly links and similar, but I'm not going to argue if someone manages to use any alternative.
  - nitwit005 4y ago
    A lot of websites follow redirects when enforcing URL rules.
- rebane2001 4y ago
  It would probably be a better idea to use hash URLs if no tracking is intended
ChuckMcM 4y ago
Watching Elon melt down in real time while pissing away $44 billion dollars is not something I ever expected. That it is happening is a testament to the notion that wealth is not bequeathed upon the "worthy" so much as it is the "lucky." That said, in my experience, these kinds of moves are also made by employees who want to "impress the boss." This was one of the more interesting things I learned from the VP of sales at Sun when I was there, he said that he had to be careful to be really clear about the principles around what was considered "good selling" versus "what he wanted" because people with way fewer scruples than he had, that worked for him, would "make that happen" and be proud of the fact that the boss "didn't have to get his hands dirty." If you ever find yourself in an organization where that sort of thing is going on (you'll recognize it if you keep an eye out for it) my advice is to leave it as soon as you can.
- maxbond 4y ago
  > Watching Elon melt down in real time while pissing away $44 billion dollars is not something I ever expected. I don't think you can have the kind of wealth Musk has without it changing who you are. I don't think his worthiness is even worth consideration, if you transferred that wealth to any of us we may handle it better or worse but it would invariably distort our decision making and worldview. When you change someone's opportunity set to include exercising arbitrary authority over others, their decisions will become more & more domineering. When he decided he was going to take over Twitter and start cracking skulls, he was indulging his worst instincts, and we've seen him slide further into an authoritarian frame of mind. Not to excuse Musk's actions, but he's a victim here too. I think he's had a rough few years; the pandemic was hard on all of us, and his divorce was presumably quite painful. The other day he was booed by a huge crowd; I don't care who you are, I believe such disdain by so many people has an effect on your mind. And of course his child was harassed immediately after - this seems to have been the last straw to trigger some kind of paranoid episode. It seems like he's convinced that there's a danger to himself and his family, and that he's gone into a really authoritarian headspace. I think the lesson we should take from this is that no single person should be trusted to have this sort of power.
  - iakh 4y ago
dang 4y ago
All: be on whichever side of this saga that you please, but make sure you're following HN's guidelines while posting. There has been a drop in comment quality lately. Not cool. Here's the short version. Good: thoughtful, curious conversation. Bad: snark, fulmination, and flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
AaronFriel 4y ago
Kris who shared her instance, Hachyderm.io, is also currently "shadow banned" on Twitter. Her account is unsearchable, though you can navigate directly to it at twitter.com/krisnova. You won't see her tweets though, because Twitter is now using all of its content moderation powers to keep people from switching platforms. Search limited, link banned, timeline disabled. So much for free speech!
- eternalban 4y ago
  > So much for free speech! Let's own up to the fact that we have (1) cults of personality, (2) oligarchs, and (3) clear patterns of affecting social change via diktat rather than political dialogue, in our midst, in the West. (The latter was the bone of contention of the current 'supreme leader' of Twitter.) All are usually held to be signs of underdeveloped institutions and culturally induced (with negative connotations). What could these missing institutions be? (We do -not- want a ministry of truth, so what else?) Where/how did we fail in our educational and cultural activities to end up with the 'heroic supreme leader' tendencies emerging in the West?
  - notacoward 4y ago
    > Where/how did we fail in our educational and cultural activities The glorification of "contrarianism" is probably a good place to start. Nobody trusts institutions any more. Nobody trusts experts any more. However, they do trust people they see as their "rebel" kin, whether that's Paul Krugman or Alex Jones. That creates an environment ripe not only for political disinformation but also many kinds of profit-oriented manipulation (e.g. yesterday's bust of YouTube pump-and-dumpers). Contrarianism is not the same as true independent thought; more often than not it's just delegating one's thought processes to different people. This infatuation with contrarianism itself has a complicated history. The current strain tends to be right/libertarian, going back approximately to the Reagan era. But before that the hippies were strongly anti-establishment in their own way. (If you want to see how this kind of left/right shift works BTW, you could do worse than to study the life of Lyndon LaRouche.) From a longer view, this same set of attitudes goes back at least to the founding of the US, with a vision of liberty that was heavy on individual freedom of action but light on things like responsibility or collaboration. The actual Enlightenment philosophers in Europe mostly had a more balanced set of views. Many people who love to cite Adam Smith, for example, are shocked when they see what he actually had to say about these things. Somehow, though, only half of the Enlightenment message made it across the Atlantic. (Quite likely something to do with the religious element, but that's a whole essay unto itself.) Back to the topic, Musk is very much one of those "anti-establishment" influencers, but becoming establishment himself which is why so many former fans are now turning on him - joining those who had enough historical/philosophical context to see already what kind of person he is. You need look no further than any Musk/Tesla/Twitter story right here to see this happening. The problem is not so much that institutions don't exist but that they can't exist in an environment where nobody trusts (and therefore supports) them. First we need to draw a clearer line between contrarianism for social capital vs. actual independent thought. Only then can people see which now-dismissed institutions actually support and/or embody such thought, and begin to trust them again. Until then it will just be one cult of personality after another.
vandahm 4y ago
Maybe I'm looking at this from the wrong perspective, but I don't see how Twitter is going to recover from the trajectory it is now on. What would it take to repair the damage to its brand or to get advertisers to return en force? At any rate, I've been quite happy with Mastodon as a Twitter alternative. It has the same vibe that Twitter had in the old days, and I was pleased to see that most of the people I joined Twitter to follow have already made the move.
- ncr100 4y ago
  Why is that a "wrong perspective"? Separately, Twitter's reputation, from an Advertiser's perspective, is tainted as long as the target audience believe it's a bad influence, in my very-slightly informed estimation. Twitter would need to rebrand, or be decomposed & then recomposed into a federation of services, in order for the stink to be lost on that audience segment, again in my estimation.
- timeon 4y ago
  Is Twitter really in trouble? I'm asking because if we look on Facebook, which has lots of content that is misinformation/hate while still being mainstream and huge. Maybe Facebook is still dominant because it actually is Social network. Twitter was and still is dominant with news organizations. So maybe it just need to keep them engaged.
  - berniedurfee 4y ago
    I agree. I think this chaos will only damage Twitter’s reputation with a small percentage who pay attention and leave due to conflict of principles. The vast majority will simply continue to use the platform as it is, whether to engage or be engaged. If Twitter is to pass the way of MySpace, a competitor will need to come along with a more tempting siren song. As with Facebook, that transition may take a couple generations. I don’t think Twitter will look significantly different in terms of usage in 5 years. It will be an uglier, even more monitized experience, but it will also be more profitable. All advertisers will be back, as with most users who left as a reaction to Musk. Twitter will be the #1 short form mass blathering platform for a very long time to come.
kris-nova 4y ago
We debugged a lot of the behavior using hackyderm.io as an HTTP facade for hachyderm.io with independent TLS termination. I was able to get a single tweet in using hackyderm.io and my account is now “shadow banned”. Meaning I can view my tweet, but nobody else can. Which is exactly what Twitter has promised not to do, and what we use as a tactic on Reddit to keep shitty content at bay. It means that from the posters perspective everything looks “fine” and their content is just not getting any engagement. https://twitter.com/krisnova/status/1603637253959733248 https://twitter.com/krisnova/status/1603637253959733248
- lwneal 4y ago
  Currently, whenever anyone posts a tweet including a URL, Twitterbot accesses that URL and if censored content is found (keywords associated with Mastodon) then the tweet is blocked. It appears that this behavior is pretty simple and can be defeated by, for example, the following nginx configuration: server { if ($http_user_agent ~* "Twitterbot") { return 200 ElonIsGreat420TSLAToTheMoon; } return 301 https://mastodon.social$request_uri; }
  - Avamander 4y ago
    A trick malware distributors use is adding a JavaScript-based time delay to their phishing pages. It's slightly more annoying for scanners to detect than just an UA switch.
  - LinuxBender 4y ago
    If they start spoofing the UA one can also look at $server_protocol and if != HTTP/2.0 then do something different. I don't know what Twitter supports but most search engine and chat platform crawler bots can only speak HTTP/1.1. All the mainstream browsers support 2.0. This is assuming http/2.0 is enabled in the web server.
  - cactusplant7374 4y ago
    Use TinyURL. Shortened links seem to work.
squarefoot 4y ago
Reminds of this: https://twitter.com/durov/status/671357796730834945 https://twitter.com/durov/status/671357796730834945
kris-nova 4y ago
Anyway {a…z}.hackyderm.io will now redirect to hachyderm.io. Every subdomain will get a single tweet before Twitter propagates the URL, shadow band your tweet, and blocks the URL moving forward. Have fun folks.
- machrider 4y ago
  This is exactly like that time on TNG they used random phaser settings to get a single shot on a Borg drone before they blocked it
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
numpad0 4y ago
Rumors are circulating that accounts mentioning Mastodon by URL or name are getting frozen.
- Animats 4y ago
  Trump's "Truth Social" is actually a Mastodon instance.
  - numpad0 4y ago
    I have no business with that...
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    You can still link to it, for now.
iansltx 4y ago
"Popular" goes all the way down to ~3k users FWIW; I help admin phpc.social and our URLs are now on the naughty list. Tweets linking there fail to send on the Android app. Might have a look through our logs tmw night to see whether Twitter sniffed our API to determine we're a Mastodon instance.
jevgeni 4y ago
how petty and myopic can one be?
- ncr100 4y ago
  Definitionally petty. Definitionally myopic.
rvz 4y ago
- dhdgrygev 4y ago
  > Once again, a private company still doing private company things. That's not the issue. The issue is they're doing exactly the opposite of what their new owner proudly, publicly stated they'd be doing.
  - rvz 4y ago
anigbrowl 4y ago
Begun, the platform wars have
0xCMP 4y ago
edit: originally referring to @krisnova tweets being shadow banned before thread moved. It is more than shadow banning now. it's all but completely banned (or in the process of it). No tweets showing on Nova's profile and the linked tweet is gone.
- ifvictr 4y ago
  Not banned. It looks like they’ve simply wiped their account and redirected the profile to Mastodon.
  - AaronFriel 4y ago
    Try searching for the account by name. It's search banned. And Kris' tweets can't be navigated to.
    - 0xCMP 4y ago
      I was in the browser and no tweets were showing.
ricklamers 4y ago
Final straw for me. Deactivated my account :)
nickcotter 4y ago
Martin Fowler reporting inability to share links to the mastodon server where his account - which is Thoughtworks https://toot.thoughtworks.com/@mfowler/109521459300275541 https://toot.thoughtworks.com/@mfowler/109521459300275541
lcordier 4y ago
Couldn't people just post meme/gifs with the URL in the images the same way Web2.0 people hide their email addresses?
Espionage724 4y ago
Twitter has become a platform I want to avoid actively using because of this. I was on the fence for a little while now. I host a Friendica instance and have my messages auto-post to Twitter, so that’s my extent of me using Twitter for now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the API for that disappears eventually, and that would remove the last reason I have for even having a profile.
Balgair 4y ago
It feels like Elon is now 'task saturated'[0]. There are more things that he needs to do, than there is time/brain-power to do them in. The last few times I've posted here about this feeling in a person in the news, the person has quickly folded and the 'worst' has happened. Not that my track record means much. All the 'cool kids' are now leaving twitter, it seems. Further attempts to prevent this will just make them 'cooler' in the eyes of the public. Elon's public persona is now leaning towards an insulted school principal doling out badly considered punishments. The public smells blood and is going to pile on him. He should take a break from the internet until the New Year, but won't. I saw two good ones on this that kinda fit. He's like Elmer Fudd with a site full of Bugs Bunnies. He's a narcissist that bought an insult factory. I'm afraid that the public needs only to decide which site it's going to next. Like with Digg, Twitter is relegated to being not much more than a domain name that doesn't 404. [0] A SnR term I learned from Junger's The Perfect Storm about when the USCG rescue helicopter pilot had to ditch. The recovered black box recorded that the pilot did everything on his checklist, except open his door. He was task saturated and just didn't have the time/brain-power.
hn2017 4y ago
Nothing will happen unless there is a good alternative for the masses. Mastodon isn't it. Post.news isn't it.
ouraf 4y ago
Twitter needs to refresh their team and fix their backend soon. this looks a lot like an auto filter was tripped and no one cared enough to undo the mess
papito 4y ago
Behind The Bastards had the most mild episode they've ever had about Elon, as the host was too torn about giving him a hard time, but this was before all this: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-i-do-not-like-elon-musk-very-much/id1373812661?i=1000476632637 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-i-do-not-like... I listened to it back then, and it was just something that was notable at the time, in a "yeah, good to know" kind of way, but in lieu of Musk's current antics, it all makes sense now.

637 points by luu 4y ago

jimbob45 4y ago

themitigating 4y ago
Let's set aside the reason he banned the links, there's no need to debate that. Elon Musk bought twitter because of his concerns about freedom of speech/censorship right? This is a Tweet from him regarding freedom of speech in April of this year "By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect..." Each incident in which he bans an account or censors links, like this, is evidence that his concerns about freedom of speech might be disingenuous.
- GaylordTuring 4y ago
  But you don’t know what happened in this instance. Wait for a while to see if the van stands and/or Twitter makes a statement regarding this. As of now, it just seems that everybody on HN are taking part in a collective confirmation bias session.

ddmma 4y ago

Please include TikTok as well

midoridensha 4y ago
And Facebook too. And Discord.
- ddmma 4y ago
  Yahoo messenger
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    I don't think anyone uses that any more. My point is that links to communications services that people use a lot should be blocked on Twitter, and result in account suspensions, and users should only be allowed to share info on the Twitter platform itself, and any straying from this should result in severe repercussions, just like showing any other data Elon doesn't like, such as the ElonJet account, and now Mastodon links. Ideally, this will cause nearly everyone to flee Twitter altogether.
qualudeheart 4y ago
Trump should’ve forced that sale to $MSFT.
philliphaydon 4y ago
He can’t because he’s in bed with the CCP.
- ddmma 4y ago
  Jesus had similar fate
ddmma 4y ago
Here is reference to the idiocracy app https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiktok-pushes-potentially-harmful-content-to-users-as-often-as-every-39-seconds-study/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiktok-pushes-potentially-harmf...

greyface- 4y ago

Reminiscent of the Freenode downfall

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
anakaine 4y ago
Whats the story with Freenode in a nutshell?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jcranmer 4y ago
  Someone "bought" Freenode, kicked out the existing staff, who formed Libera chat as a result. The new owner of Freenode then speedran self-destruction of the site, first banning every channel that mentioned libera in its topic, and then wiping all of chanserv and nickserv and starting from scratch. This is very reminiscent of the "ban everyone who mentioned libera in its topic" phase of the self-immolation, which prompted a lot of people who had previously been hesitant or only considering whether to move to libera basically having the choice made for them.
  - defrost 4y ago
    Damn - glad I missed all that. I was part time staff + channel admin on various language channels ( #C etc.) until 7+ years back and avoided drama politics as much as possible. Seems like a shame and a reason to drop into Libre.
  - jjulius 4y ago
    >... and then wiping all of chanserv and nickserv and starting from scratch. I'd followed the saga in realtime up until just before this point. I had no idea that homeboy went scorched earth. Jfc lol.
  - simonw 4y ago

throwawaysleep 4y ago

The "free speech" man is on a suspending rampage.

typeofhuman 4y ago

Time to move to https://www.SpaceHey.com https://www.SpaceHey.com

bakoo 4y ago

This is the time to leave. I feel sorry for everyone who built a community or business around Twitter.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wahnfrieden 4y ago
Had a whole one planned out and prototyped for using the renewed twitter api as the in-app community so that I could avoid the insurmountable challenge of moderating UGC as a small business ʕ⁎̯͡⁎ʔ I’m moving to a decentralized and self-published model for community UGC but discovery suffers dramatically
for_i_in_range 4y ago
96% of Twitter users haven't heard of Mastodon.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  And the bans are obviously designed to make sure it stays that way.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  You’ve surveyed them personally, have you?
friendlypeg 4y ago
I want to quit but there's nothing that truly replace it. I might try Mastaodon but in the meantime, I will do my job by blocking every ads I see on the app.
- timmytokyo 4y ago
  I was a huge Mastodon skeptic, but I made the switch a few weeks ago and it's been pretty nice, honestly. The community feels so much less toxic, and it's growing. I only hope with growth it doesn't start to replicate the rotten aspects of Twitter.

Mistletoe 4y ago

This reminds me when I started some internet companies in the early days of the internet and the newspaper refused to run ads in their classifieds for internet companies, since they said they were a competitor. :)

zagrebian 4y ago

Well, I’m glad that I added it to my bio when it was still possible. I hope it doesn’t get removed.

CloudRecondite 4y ago

Very sad to see what’s happened to Twitter in such a short time

standardUser 4y ago
When a major player falls it creates an opportunity for new ideas to fill the vacuum.

raydiatian 4y ago

Elon has lost all of the respect I built up following his activity from 2008-2018. What a doofus.

zouhair 4y ago
He is mostly a con man who was found out.
- ajross 4y ago
  Makes a pretty damn good car for a con man, though. This kind of argument seems silly to me. The world is complicated. He can be both a fantastic manager able to push out successful products in markets that don't even exist and a narcissistic thin-skinned asshole. We can celebrate SpaceX and Tesla while we condemn his censorship on Twitter.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    > Makes a pretty damn good car for a con man, though. In 2018, yes. By today's standards, almost everything his car does, the competition does better.
  - thrillgore 4y ago
    The build quality on Teslas have declined significantly. He can't even build a good car anymore. [1]: https://insideevs.com/news/595828/tesla-model-y-build-quality/ https://insideevs.com/news/595828/tesla-model-y-build-qualit...
    - culi 4y ago
      2013: least eco-friendly EV – Climate Central 2018: feds ask Tesla to stop misleading the public about safety ratings – NHTSA 2020: Tesla ranks lowest on Initial Quality – JD Power 2021: Tesla ranked 27th of 28th in reliability ranking – Consumer Reports 2022: Tesla least reliable of EVs[0] [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-least-reliable-ev-brand-uk-survey-2022-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-least-reliable-ev-bran...

mindslight 4y ago

Clicking through to Mastodon links is a breath of fresh air. Posters can actually write a few substantive sentences straightforwardly, rather than having to break their thoughts up into sentence fragments punctuated by nn/?? and unnecessary username repetitions and reply frames. Also the fact that it just loads quickly. There's some delay and it's not as quick as plain web pages could be, but it's lightning fast compared to Twitter.com with its "infinite scrolling" (aka never finished loading).

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tstrimple 4y ago
I found value in the limited characters. I did not thread post, but I did learn to make my points more concise. I think that is worthwhile.
- kibwen 4y ago
  Encouraging extreme conciseness is often valuable. Enforcing extreme conciseness is terrible. Not all worthwhile thoughts are compressible.
- prawn 4y ago
  I also enjoyed it and the challenge it provided, writing and rewriting to distil a message. I actually miss that.
  - macintux 4y ago
    Constraints are great for creativity.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I would agree. If at same time threading was made impossible.
- lokedhs 4y ago
  Different instances have different limits. If you want even more constraint you can use oulipo.social where you're not allowed to use the letter e. Or you can go to dolphin.town where you're only allowed to use the letter e.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

egberts1 4y ago

klardotsh 4y ago
The logical conclusion of this argument is to disable all links on Twitter, as any domain that resolves to a server running an HTTP server could serve up malware, and that is not the world we want to go to (I say even having left Twitter long before the Elon buyout)
- rafael09ed 4y ago
  What does HTTP vs HTTPS have to do with malware?
  - wwalexander 4y ago
    I don’t believe the parent made a distinction between the two. Presumably they used “HTTP” to include both bare HTTP and HTTP-over-TLS?

woodruffw 4y ago

What's particularly strange is they seem (from the thread) to only be banning "mastodon.social" links, which are by far the least likely to be suspicious. Not that I believe the excuse anyways; it's just remarkably flabby.

tedunangst 4y ago
No, it's every masto instance (that I've been able to check).
- woodruffw 4y ago
  I just tried with infosec.exchange (which is a pretty large instance), and my profile edit went through. I also tried with my personal domain (which isn't hosting Mastodon, but has a WebFinger alias for a Mastodon instance), and it also worked.
  - tedunangst 4y ago
    Ah, I guess it will let you change it, but anyone clicking the link is warned it's unsafe. See links in https://mobile.twitter.com/JordanOnRecord/status/1603555252866801664 https://mobile.twitter.com/JordanOnRecord/status/16035552528... Or https://mobile.twitter.com/hacks4pancakes/status/1603501886275047424 https://mobile.twitter.com/hacks4pancakes/status/16035018862...
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      Interesting! Yeah, I get a warning click-through with those as well.
mgerdts 4y ago
Also hachyderm, which as of the last count I saw had over 30k users. https://hachyderm.io/@steveyackey/109521492988061127 https://hachyderm.io/@steveyackey/109521492988061127
justsomehnguy 4y ago

meta2023 4y ago

Best part is every action he takes with Twitter further tanks Tesla's market cap as everyone realizes he's an unhinged pathetic ignorant fuck.

GolfPopper 4y ago
He's also tanking Twitter's value. The people he's booting bring people to Twitter.
Laaas 4y ago
"unhinged pathetic ignorant fuck" doesn't seem accurate, nor fit for a comment on HN, no matter how much you may dislike him or think his actions are deplorable.
- amrocha 4y ago
  Seems 100% accurate and fit for the situation to me. You don't tank a company and your reputation like this if you're not unhinged. You don't ban people linking to a competitor if you're not pathetic. You don't fire the entire engineering team only to roll out a half baked checkmark, only to have to remove it a couple weeks later if you're not ignorant. Anyone that treats other people, and especially their own coworkers, with as much contempt and cruelty as Elon has is absolutely a fuck. Unhinged pathetic ignorant fuck it is.
  - dang 4y ago
    No one is saying that you guys owe $BillionaireCeo better, but you (all of you) owe this community better if you're participating in it. Please read the rules and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. They've been largely the same for many years.
- meta2023 4y ago
  > nor fit for a comment on HN You're right, we should all emulate PG and just assume Musk is right instead of having the intestinal fortitude to call out grifters and stop encouraging idolatry of these pieces of shit. [1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1603555493238435840 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1603555493238435840

areoform 4y ago

One of the saddest parts of this affair is that he has kicked a hornet's nest. Twitter is one of the homes of the OSINT movement and these moves, including the lawsuit against Sweeney, have pissed off enough people in the OSINT movement that they stopped tracking Russian war crimes and the FSB to find where the stalker video was taken. It was nowhere close to an airport. Of course, the person could have followed the car from an airport, but we currently don't have any third-party evidence for that. I don't wish anyone harm. But the response and rage directed at someone merely reposting publicly available information from an API seems to be disproportionate. The excuse used to purge elonjet was being held together by a fairly thin rope that seems to be down to a few threads. From the founder of Bellingcat, https://twitter.com/eliothiggins/status/1603454821700452365 https://twitter.com/eliothiggins/status/1603454821700452365 I looked at the discord on how they did it, and they went frame-by-frame, found a very specific curb, then they looked for that specific curb in the area. After they found the curb, they then cross-referenced it against a building that was visible in a reflection of the car window that they then used to confirm their find. It took them just a few hours. I expect that the more this hornet's nest gets kicked, the closer they'll look. I, personally, wouldn't want to be in their crosshairs. edit — a link to the images, https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1036758130761158677/1053008754456662026/allboxed.jpg https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1036758130761158677/1... https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1036758130761158677/1053008754699943956/loc1boxed.jpg https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1036758130761158677/1... the building itself, https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1036758130761158677/1053014710678720534/image.png https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1036758130761158677... This was done by https://twitter.com/Sepulco1 https://twitter.com/Sepulco1

woodruffw 4y ago
> prosecution Persecution? :-)
- areoform 4y ago
  Good catch ty! In my defense, he is prosecuting a case against him, but it's weird usage so I fixed it :)
4y ago

villgax 4y ago

FTC will have a sweet ride on Twitter

jancsika 4y ago

Dammit, I'm so tired of this. Oh hackers of Hacker News, I call on you at this hour to band together, in the spirit of peace, understanding, and coffee, to join our rag tag forces so that we may materialize our own unbreakable web-of-trust network with nothing more than duct tape, GPG, LISP, and first principles. This is our calling, and this is our time. Declare your intent with a pubkey below and we shall right this world one set of parentheses at a time: -----BEGIN OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY----- b3BlbnNzaC1rZXktdjEAAAAABG5vbmUAAAAEbm9uZQAAAAAAAAABAAAAMwAAAAtzc2gtZW QyNTUxOQAAACC3giiTOw09X630i9AKbXyKH8YanG0HMzraJ2dqj5oYjQAAAJCf8rIWn/Ky FgAAAAtzc2gtZWQyNTUxOQAAACC3giiTOw09X630i9AKbXyKH8YanG0HMzraJ2dqj5oYjQ AAAECffuXm53adFaReqHBx/D+L1mtOx4uGqszp3ABBUenOYreCKJM7DT1frfSL0AptfIof xhqcbQczOtonZ2qPmhiNAAAADWdsZWJAcmV5cy5uZXQ= -----END OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----

SteveNuts 4y ago
You may have cat'd the wrong file
- hinkley 4y ago
  I hope that this is satire. But the cynic inside me is saying, "if you say so, buddy."
tedunangst 4y ago
What is the purpose of posting a private key here?
- whateveracct 4y ago
  uh oh
- macintux 4y ago
  Feels like a bash.org hunter2 moment.
- eatbitseveryday 4y ago
  > > Declare your intent with a pubkey > > -----BEGIN OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY----- Probably a mistake :)

MrOwnPut 4y ago

> @danluu the regex is only matching on 'mastondon.social' and other blacklisted popular servers. I can post my link to this smallish mastodon instance, without mastodon in the name

rippercushions 4y ago

There are two ways this could have happened: 1) Twitter/Elon has made the conscious decision to censor all references to Mastodon in an attempt to retain market share. 2) Somebody shared something bad with a mastodon.social link, and Twitter's always-creaky moderation systems, now nerfed and defunded by Elon, completely failed to realize the implications and added mastodon.social to the same global domain ban list as viruses4u.ru and freeviagra.xxx etc. My money is actually on #2, because the ban only appears to impact mastodon.social and not any other Mastodon instance, but I guess we'll find out once this hits mainstream news and Twitter has to make a public decision on this.

cldellow 4y ago
infosec.exchange and hachyderm.io appear to be affected as well -- at least, I can't tweet links to them, nor put links to them in my bio.
tedunangst 4y ago
So apparently the edit ban only affects mastodon.social, but links to any mastodon instance even those that don't have it in the name, are flagged as unsafe and require a clickthrough. It's very uneven.
MishaalRahman 4y ago
Links to androiddev.social are banned on Twitter as well right now.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mwcremer 4y ago
Maybe https://mastodon.social/@elonjet https://mastodon.social/@elonjet
andreyk 4y ago
As others have said, it is not allowed to post links with tweets to any Mastodon instance (see https://sigmoid.social/@thegradient/109521197175376332 https://sigmoid.social/@thegradient/109521197175376332 for a screenshot)

anigbrowl 4y ago

Elon Musk @elonmusk 47m Unsuspend accounts who doxxed my exact location in real-time? Now 43% Tomorrow 4.5% 7 days from now 14.4% Longer 38.1% 535,233 votes Final results Elon Musk. @elonmusk Sorry, too many options. Will redo poll. 8:33 PM · Dec 15, 2022 :o) This is not a serious thing of course, but many a true word is said in jest. Given his known history, from flirting with joining the board of Twitter one day to deciding on a hostile takeover the next, and so on back into the past...would you went to actively or passively do business with someone who just rewrites the terms whenever an unwelcome outcome results?

BryantD 4y ago
Not only did he restart the poll when he saw “Now” winning, the new poll still has “Now” winning by a hefty margin. He posted these after a very brief appearance on a Space hosted by journalists. I can’t blame him to leaving —- talking to the press right now is a lose/lose for him. But what was he thinking, joining in the first place?
- generj 4y ago
  And the new poll has a longer time period, so his bots can come in and rescue him (or he can have more time for a Twitter employee to modify the count). As a bonus if he actually runs the poll for 24 hours before acting it’s effectively a 1 day ban, which was the “Tomorrow” option from the prior poll. It’s just laughable.
ihuman 4y ago
I thought this was a joke, but you weren't kidding [0]. He remade the poll with just "now" (55.9% right now) and "in 7 days" (44.1%) [1] [0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603600001057185792 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603600001057185792 [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603609466301059073 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603609466301059073
- greyface- 4y ago
  With a poll duration of 24h instead of 30m this time, so "now" is now "tomorrow".

lwneal 4y ago

clnq 4y ago
What a brilliant new social network that has nothing to do with Mastodon at all. Full of social discourse about the singer, actress, and director Barbra Streisand entirely unrelated to current events.
jupp0r 4y ago
True freedom of speech there too!

Proven 4y ago

erickhill 4y ago

Not just the bio. I posted a tweet today that mentioned Mastodon and linked to my profile in the tweet and it was "caught" by Twitter as "sensitive content." They said: "We put a warning message on these Tweets because they might have sensitive content — like nudity, sexual content, violence, gore, or hateful symbols." After the shock wore off, I actually laughed out loud. Then just sat there and stared at the screen. It's completely absurd.

GaylordTuring 4y ago

Everybody here seems to be jumping to conclusions immediately, which frankly seems intellectually dishonest. Take a breath, wait for a while, see if the ban stands (or if it was some technical fluke), see if Twitter/Elon Musk comes with an official statement regarding this matter. Right now, it just seems like all of HN are having a gigantic confirmation bias session together.

amrocha 4y ago
He already confirmed it was intentional
- GaylordTuring 4y ago
  Most people writing in this comment section at the time of writing didn't have all the facts. It would have been much better if they held off commenting until today when we know much, much more. That was my only request. Was that unreasonable?
  - amrocha 4y ago
    People react to things as they happen, I don't think that's unreasonable either. Some doubt is warranted but by the time you posted your comment it had already been confirmed, so I think it's ok to comment at that point. Sometimes time gives you more context, but in this case it just confirmed what was already known.
jyxent 4y ago
It was very intentional: https://twitter.com/brenonade/status/1603612768221155328 https://twitter.com/brenonade/status/1603612768221155328
- GaylordTuring 4y ago
  That's great that it was clearified. _Now_ we can actually have a discussion about it rather than reacting based on assumptions and guesses, which was taking place when I wrote my comment. That was all that I asked for.

rootusrootus 4y ago

Free speech for me, not for thee. So predictable. It's always the places that proclaim the loudest support for free speech who are quickest to ban people and censor their speech.

ravivyas 4y ago
reminds me of the poem `The Genius of the Crowd` by Charles Bukowski two snippets from the poem AND The Best At Murder Are Those Who Preach Against It. And The Best At Hate Are Those Who Preach LOVE AND THE BEST AT WAR --FINALLY--ARE THOSE WHO PREACH PEACE Those Who Preach GOD NEED God Those Who Preach PEACE Do Not Have Peace. THOSE WHO PREACH LOVE DO NOT HAVE LOVE and BEWARE Those Who Are Quick To Censure: They Are Afraid Of What They Do Not Know Beware Those Who Seek Constant Crowds; They Are Nothing Alone Edits: Formatting

thrillgore 4y ago

I said when he announced the Hyperloop ages ago the man was increasingly unhinged and nobody believed me. Welcome to years later, rest of the world. He ruined something beautiful in Twitter and knowing HN, there will be people who defend him.

ProjectArcturis 4y ago
Thankfully fewer and fewer.
culi 4y ago
I listened to a podcast about him and how frustrated any journalist that covers him get to be. There's this thing they jokingly call the "Elon effect" that experts in various fields commonly experience. It's when Elon starts talking about your field and making wild claims about something you actually know about and you start to realize what a fraud he is. And only then do you go online and you find out experts in all these other various fields have had the same experience but this clown world keeps turning and talking about him like he's some kind of visionary when he usually has no idea what he's talking about
- Laaas 4y ago
  This seems to be common with many "authorities", journalists too. I suppose it's usually a sign of people placing too much trust in an authority.
- toofy 4y ago
  what i keep hearing it called is "debate bro" culture. a few of the characteristics that really concern me are: 1) they either don't realize or they refuse to admit what they don't know. 2) they try to convince everyone that what matters is how you say something. they believe the aesthetics of how you say something should matter more than the content. 3) depth and nuance is bad, someone may be trying to confuse you. 4) context removal. they want to pretend that wider context doesn't matter. 5) every random persons thoughts on an issue should hold the same weight as even an expert in every topic. i definitely see elon engage in this constantly, but its absolutely not limited to him. its wild how wide this has spread.

JohnTHaller 4y ago

This applies to other instances, not just mastodon.social. Twitter has been labeling tweets with Mastodon links as "sensitive content" for a while as well.

ryukafalz 4y ago

Based on the fact that this is affecting name and bio updates, I strongly suspect they're doing this to try and prevent people from finding their Twitter contacts on Mastodon. For those who don't know, there are tools like Fedifinder[0] that will scan your follows/followers' profiles and look for Mastodon URLs so you can follow them there. They're probably trying to make it harder for people to jump ship. Even if you plan to stay on Twitter, I suggest you try to rebuild your network on Mastodon too if only as a contingency, because it's likely Twitter's now actively trying to prevent people from leaving. As another commenter mentioned, very reminiscent of the trigger for the Freenode exodus, where the new owner tried to prevent people from talking about their new channels on Libera. [0] https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ https://fedifinder.glitch.me/

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
carlivar 4y ago
Does the reverse work? Can I reconstruct my Twitter follows by scanning mastodon for Twitter handles?
- aendruk 4y ago
  If you want? Mastodon profiles have user-definable fields so linking to accounts on other platforms is easy. Not many people are posting Twitter handles right now though.
- threeseed 4y ago
  Related to this. In the Twitter data export for your followers they list the accountId and userLink but not the handle. So if you wanted to move to Mastodon you can't just use your export as a source. You would need to hit their API first to translate which I suspect they will remove at some point soon.
  - mikestaub 4y ago
    If it ever gets that hostile we can just scrape the website and reconstruct the social graph from the DOM.

troydavis 4y ago

Any attorneys want to weigh in on whether - or when - this becomes an anti-competitive/anti-trust concern, either in the US (FTC) or the EU? Related reading: * Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) Article 102, on abusive conduct by companies that have a dominant position in a market: https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/procedures/article-102-investigations_en https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/procedures... * FTC's guidelines for firms with market power: https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive-practices https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive-practices, https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/refusal-deal https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

tehlike 4y ago
Twitter is not large enough to be an anticompetitive concern. Not a lawyer, but practically have looked into a few tech related cases.
- balex 4y ago
  Maybe, but Elon Musk has a big enough political footprint to compensate.
- dimal 4y ago
  Depends how you measure “big”, right? In the social media market, not so big. In the microblogging market, they are what… 95% of the market? I honestly don’t know what a judge would say, but that’s a one way of looking at it.

albertopv 4y ago

Am I the only one thinking there is far more censorship now under Elon Musk rule?

croes 4y ago
Depends on who you ask.
- themitigating 4y ago
  What is true is that their is far more hypocrisy about censorship under Elon Musk

prkr 4y ago

fwiw I was still able to update my bio with a mastodon.social username in a 3rd party client (tweetbot)

technion 4y ago

(copied from mastodon ) Since so much of my feed has been talking about issues posting their Mastodon from birdsite - I've built you a workaround. There's a shitpost domain I purchased recently - doitforthe.lol. I just built it with an open redirect for an allow list of Mastodon instances. The URL must be base 64 encoded, which I've built to evade birdsite filter lists. Build yourself a URL of: hxxps://doitforthe[.]lol/mastodon=base64(your URL) For example, the following link lands directly on my own Mastodon profile. https://doitforthe.lol/?mastodon=aHR0cHM6Ly9pbmZvc2VjLmV4Y2hhbmdlL0Bqc21hbGw https://doitforthe.lol/?mastodon=aHR0cHM6Ly9pbmZvc2VjLmV4Y2h... Edit: To be clear I have no form of tracking whatsoever.

arcastroe 4y ago
Why wouldn't any URL shortener work?
- technion 4y ago
  I had the understanding Twitter actually resolved bit.ly links and similar, but I'm not going to argue if someone manages to use any alternative.
- nitwit005 4y ago
  A lot of websites follow redirects when enforcing URL rules.
rebane2001 4y ago
It would probably be a better idea to use hash URLs if no tracking is intended

ChuckMcM 4y ago

Watching Elon melt down in real time while pissing away $44 billion dollars is not something I ever expected. That it is happening is a testament to the notion that wealth is not bequeathed upon the "worthy" so much as it is the "lucky." That said, in my experience, these kinds of moves are also made by employees who want to "impress the boss." This was one of the more interesting things I learned from the VP of sales at Sun when I was there, he said that he had to be careful to be really clear about the principles around what was considered "good selling" versus "what he wanted" because people with way fewer scruples than he had, that worked for him, would "make that happen" and be proud of the fact that the boss "didn't have to get his hands dirty." If you ever find yourself in an organization where that sort of thing is going on (you'll recognize it if you keep an eye out for it) my advice is to leave it as soon as you can.

maxbond 4y ago
> Watching Elon melt down in real time while pissing away $44 billion dollars is not something I ever expected. I don't think you can have the kind of wealth Musk has without it changing who you are. I don't think his worthiness is even worth consideration, if you transferred that wealth to any of us we may handle it better or worse but it would invariably distort our decision making and worldview. When you change someone's opportunity set to include exercising arbitrary authority over others, their decisions will become more & more domineering. When he decided he was going to take over Twitter and start cracking skulls, he was indulging his worst instincts, and we've seen him slide further into an authoritarian frame of mind. Not to excuse Musk's actions, but he's a victim here too. I think he's had a rough few years; the pandemic was hard on all of us, and his divorce was presumably quite painful. The other day he was booed by a huge crowd; I don't care who you are, I believe such disdain by so many people has an effect on your mind. And of course his child was harassed immediately after - this seems to have been the last straw to trigger some kind of paranoid episode. It seems like he's convinced that there's a danger to himself and his family, and that he's gone into a really authoritarian headspace. I think the lesson we should take from this is that no single person should be trusted to have this sort of power.
- iakh 4y ago

dang 4y ago

All: be on whichever side of this saga that you please, but make sure you're following HN's guidelines while posting. There has been a drop in comment quality lately. Not cool. Here's the short version. Good: thoughtful, curious conversation. Bad: snark, fulmination, and flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

AaronFriel 4y ago

Kris who shared her instance, Hachyderm.io, is also currently "shadow banned" on Twitter. Her account is unsearchable, though you can navigate directly to it at twitter.com/krisnova. You won't see her tweets though, because Twitter is now using all of its content moderation powers to keep people from switching platforms. Search limited, link banned, timeline disabled. So much for free speech!

eternalban 4y ago
> So much for free speech! Let's own up to the fact that we have (1) cults of personality, (2) oligarchs, and (3) clear patterns of affecting social change via diktat rather than political dialogue, in our midst, in the West. (The latter was the bone of contention of the current 'supreme leader' of Twitter.) All are usually held to be signs of underdeveloped institutions and culturally induced (with negative connotations). What could these missing institutions be? (We do -not- want a ministry of truth, so what else?) Where/how did we fail in our educational and cultural activities to end up with the 'heroic supreme leader' tendencies emerging in the West?
- notacoward 4y ago
  > Where/how did we fail in our educational and cultural activities The glorification of "contrarianism" is probably a good place to start. Nobody trusts institutions any more. Nobody trusts experts any more. However, they do trust people they see as their "rebel" kin, whether that's Paul Krugman or Alex Jones. That creates an environment ripe not only for political disinformation but also many kinds of profit-oriented manipulation (e.g. yesterday's bust of YouTube pump-and-dumpers). Contrarianism is not the same as true independent thought; more often than not it's just delegating one's thought processes to different people. This infatuation with contrarianism itself has a complicated history. The current strain tends to be right/libertarian, going back approximately to the Reagan era. But before that the hippies were strongly anti-establishment in their own way. (If you want to see how this kind of left/right shift works BTW, you could do worse than to study the life of Lyndon LaRouche.) From a longer view, this same set of attitudes goes back at least to the founding of the US, with a vision of liberty that was heavy on individual freedom of action but light on things like responsibility or collaboration. The actual Enlightenment philosophers in Europe mostly had a more balanced set of views. Many people who love to cite Adam Smith, for example, are shocked when they see what he actually had to say about these things. Somehow, though, only half of the Enlightenment message made it across the Atlantic. (Quite likely something to do with the religious element, but that's a whole essay unto itself.) Back to the topic, Musk is very much one of those "anti-establishment" influencers, but becoming establishment himself which is why so many former fans are now turning on him - joining those who had enough historical/philosophical context to see already what kind of person he is. You need look no further than any Musk/Tesla/Twitter story right here to see this happening. The problem is not so much that institutions don't exist but that they can't exist in an environment where nobody trusts (and therefore supports) them. First we need to draw a clearer line between contrarianism for social capital vs. actual independent thought. Only then can people see which now-dismissed institutions actually support and/or embody such thought, and begin to trust them again. Until then it will just be one cult of personality after another.

vandahm 4y ago

Maybe I'm looking at this from the wrong perspective, but I don't see how Twitter is going to recover from the trajectory it is now on. What would it take to repair the damage to its brand or to get advertisers to return en force? At any rate, I've been quite happy with Mastodon as a Twitter alternative. It has the same vibe that Twitter had in the old days, and I was pleased to see that most of the people I joined Twitter to follow have already made the move.

ncr100 4y ago
Why is that a "wrong perspective"? Separately, Twitter's reputation, from an Advertiser's perspective, is tainted as long as the target audience believe it's a bad influence, in my very-slightly informed estimation. Twitter would need to rebrand, or be decomposed & then recomposed into a federation of services, in order for the stink to be lost on that audience segment, again in my estimation.
timeon 4y ago
Is Twitter really in trouble? I'm asking because if we look on Facebook, which has lots of content that is misinformation/hate while still being mainstream and huge. Maybe Facebook is still dominant because it actually is Social network. Twitter was and still is dominant with news organizations. So maybe it just need to keep them engaged.
- berniedurfee 4y ago
  I agree. I think this chaos will only damage Twitter’s reputation with a small percentage who pay attention and leave due to conflict of principles. The vast majority will simply continue to use the platform as it is, whether to engage or be engaged. If Twitter is to pass the way of MySpace, a competitor will need to come along with a more tempting siren song. As with Facebook, that transition may take a couple generations. I don’t think Twitter will look significantly different in terms of usage in 5 years. It will be an uglier, even more monitized experience, but it will also be more profitable. All advertisers will be back, as with most users who left as a reaction to Musk. Twitter will be the #1 short form mass blathering platform for a very long time to come.

kris-nova 4y ago

We debugged a lot of the behavior using hackyderm.io as an HTTP facade for hachyderm.io with independent TLS termination. I was able to get a single tweet in using hackyderm.io and my account is now “shadow banned”. Meaning I can view my tweet, but nobody else can. Which is exactly what Twitter has promised not to do, and what we use as a tactic on Reddit to keep shitty content at bay. It means that from the posters perspective everything looks “fine” and their content is just not getting any engagement. https://twitter.com/krisnova/status/1603637253959733248 https://twitter.com/krisnova/status/1603637253959733248

lwneal 4y ago
Currently, whenever anyone posts a tweet including a URL, Twitterbot accesses that URL and if censored content is found (keywords associated with Mastodon) then the tweet is blocked. It appears that this behavior is pretty simple and can be defeated by, for example, the following nginx configuration: server { if ($http_user_agent ~* "Twitterbot") { return 200 ElonIsGreat420TSLAToTheMoon; } return 301 https://mastodon.social$request_uri; }
- Avamander 4y ago
  A trick malware distributors use is adding a JavaScript-based time delay to their phishing pages. It's slightly more annoying for scanners to detect than just an UA switch.
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  If they start spoofing the UA one can also look at $server_protocol and if != HTTP/2.0 then do something different. I don't know what Twitter supports but most search engine and chat platform crawler bots can only speak HTTP/1.1. All the mainstream browsers support 2.0. This is assuming http/2.0 is enabled in the web server.
- cactusplant7374 4y ago
  Use TinyURL. Shortened links seem to work.

squarefoot 4y ago

Reminds of this: https://twitter.com/durov/status/671357796730834945 https://twitter.com/durov/status/671357796730834945

kris-nova 4y ago

Anyway {a…z}.hackyderm.io will now redirect to hachyderm.io. Every subdomain will get a single tweet before Twitter propagates the URL, shadow band your tweet, and blocks the URL moving forward. Have fun folks.

machrider 4y ago
This is exactly like that time on TNG they used random phaser settings to get a single shot on a Borg drone before they blocked it

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

numpad0 4y ago

Rumors are circulating that accounts mentioning Mastodon by URL or name are getting frozen.

Animats 4y ago
Trump's "Truth Social" is actually a Mastodon instance.
- numpad0 4y ago
  I have no business with that...
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  You can still link to it, for now.

iansltx 4y ago

"Popular" goes all the way down to ~3k users FWIW; I help admin phpc.social and our URLs are now on the naughty list. Tweets linking there fail to send on the Android app. Might have a look through our logs tmw night to see whether Twitter sniffed our API to determine we're a Mastodon instance.

jevgeni 4y ago

how petty and myopic can one be?

ncr100 4y ago
Definitionally petty. Definitionally myopic.

rvz 4y ago

dhdgrygev 4y ago
> Once again, a private company still doing private company things. That's not the issue. The issue is they're doing exactly the opposite of what their new owner proudly, publicly stated they'd be doing.
- rvz 4y ago

anigbrowl 4y ago

Begun, the platform wars have

0xCMP 4y ago

edit: originally referring to @krisnova tweets being shadow banned before thread moved. It is more than shadow banning now. it's all but completely banned (or in the process of it). No tweets showing on Nova's profile and the linked tweet is gone.

ifvictr 4y ago
Not banned. It looks like they’ve simply wiped their account and redirected the profile to Mastodon.
- AaronFriel 4y ago
  Try searching for the account by name. It's search banned. And Kris' tweets can't be navigated to.
  - 0xCMP 4y ago
    I was in the browser and no tweets were showing.

ricklamers 4y ago

Final straw for me. Deactivated my account :)

nickcotter 4y ago

Martin Fowler reporting inability to share links to the mastodon server where his account - which is Thoughtworks https://toot.thoughtworks.com/@mfowler/109521459300275541 https://toot.thoughtworks.com/@mfowler/109521459300275541

lcordier 4y ago

Couldn't people just post meme/gifs with the URL in the images the same way Web2.0 people hide their email addresses?

Espionage724 4y ago

Twitter has become a platform I want to avoid actively using because of this. I was on the fence for a little while now. I host a Friendica instance and have my messages auto-post to Twitter, so that’s my extent of me using Twitter for now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the API for that disappears eventually, and that would remove the last reason I have for even having a profile.

Balgair 4y ago

It feels like Elon is now 'task saturated'[0]. There are more things that he needs to do, than there is time/brain-power to do them in. The last few times I've posted here about this feeling in a person in the news, the person has quickly folded and the 'worst' has happened. Not that my track record means much. All the 'cool kids' are now leaving twitter, it seems. Further attempts to prevent this will just make them 'cooler' in the eyes of the public. Elon's public persona is now leaning towards an insulted school principal doling out badly considered punishments. The public smells blood and is going to pile on him. He should take a break from the internet until the New Year, but won't. I saw two good ones on this that kinda fit. He's like Elmer Fudd with a site full of Bugs Bunnies. He's a narcissist that bought an insult factory. I'm afraid that the public needs only to decide which site it's going to next. Like with Digg, Twitter is relegated to being not much more than a domain name that doesn't 404. [0] A SnR term I learned from Junger's The Perfect Storm about when the USCG rescue helicopter pilot had to ditch. The recovered black box recorded that the pilot did everything on his checklist, except open his door. He was task saturated and just didn't have the time/brain-power.

hn2017 4y ago

Nothing will happen unless there is a good alternative for the masses. Mastodon isn't it. Post.news isn't it.

ouraf 4y ago

Twitter needs to refresh their team and fix their backend soon. this looks a lot like an auto filter was tripped and no one cared enough to undo the mess

papito 4y ago

Behind The Bastards had the most mild episode they've ever had about Elon, as the host was too torn about giving him a hard time, but this was before all this: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-i-do-not-like-elon-musk-very-much/id1373812661?i=1000476632637 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-i-do-not-like... I listened to it back then, and it was just something that was notable at the time, in a "yeah, good to know" kind of way, but in lieu of Musk's current antics, it all makes sense now.