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Twitter should not care about having an onion service. Great example of a distraction that the Musk downsizing properly removed.

kakwa_ 3y ago
Maybe, but then, why the onion service is still up? This feels more like uncontrolled infrastructure rot/lack of maintenance rather than a conscious decision to cut unnecessary parts of it.
avs733 3y ago
Did they properly remove it or does no one there even know it was/is happening. They didn’t shut it down, the seem to have left the lights on with nobody home. Bigger picture - given the role news making and sharing in real time has always played in Twitter, it seems logical that services which may not provide obvious returns but which build a platform that journalists find useful would help do that.
- stathibus 3y ago
  I agree, it seems like they left it to rot instead of shutting it down. But again it is irrelevant to the business so who cares?
  - rmwaite 3y ago
    My understanding is the onion service was launched to provide access for people in places where Twitter is blocked. How is this "irrelevant to the business"?
    - pests 3y ago
      "Profit over everything." I think it was laudable that Twitter ran one in the first place. Sad to see it languish.
    - dfadsadsf 3y ago
      What's benefit of onion service vs run of the mill VPN? I assume if you can access onion, you should also be able to access VPN
      - anonym29 3y ago
        I'm not someone who's ever used the onion service, but as someone who accesses the site regularly over VPN, I can testify that it's a huge PITA. Tons of very aggressive captcha-type challenges (various tasks, never simple text recognition, but not Google ReCaptcha), often 5, 7, or 10 to be allowed to proceed.
  - depereo 3y ago
    If it's a safety mechanism that people relied on, leaving it to rot and getting people in the habit of clicking through on an expired or invalid certificate warning is irresponsible. A degraded service can be worse than an offline one.
adfhoinionio 3y ago
It broke because there's no one left at the company who knows how to keep it online.
- onion2k 3y ago
  That's unlikely. Even though Elon gutted the team at Twitter, the previous devs were good and certainly documented things. Besides, renewing a cert and applying it to an onion service isn't very hard, so the current team could fix it if it was a priority. Its much more likely that it just isn't something they want to spend time on.
justapassenger 3y ago
If they really care about free speech and citizen journalism, they totally should have working onion service. Of course they don’t care, not only because Musk is full of shit, but also because of billions from Saudis.
Atreiden 3y ago
Why not? For an international communication service with a "historical" significance on freedom of speech, is this not a natural extension of the platform? Something like this does not cost very much money to operate. "distraction" implies that it does not align with the rest of the company's objectives, and that it costs an inordinate amount of time or resources. A service like this can be administered by a single person as a tertiary function of their role, is it really any significance to their bottom line?
bastawhiz 3y ago
Serving a valid tls cert takes virtually no effort. It's far more likely that Musk's downsizing killed off infra that was doing this job correctly and inexpensively for many years. If Musk actually cared about free speech like he says he does, onion services would be a priority. But obviously that's just hot air. You can't have it both ways.
- justinclift 3y ago
  > infra that was doing this job correctly Twitter's Onion handling hasn't been reasonably functional for years, so in this particular case it's not that.
  - bastawhiz 3y ago
    The infrastructure that issues and replaces certs isn't the same infra that performs onion handling.
    - justinclift 3y ago
      Am not personally seeing how that changes the relevance of our statements? :)
      - bastawhiz 3y ago
        The post is about the cert expiring in March of this year. So your statement that this issue is years old is simply untrue. There might be a separate issue, but the cert being invalid has nothing to do with that.
        justinclift 3y ago
        My statement had nothing at all to do with this certificate issue, but was more pointing out that Twitter's Onion handling has been broken in various ways for years.
AlexandrB 3y ago
If you think running an onion service is distracting, wait until you see how distracting trying to become an "everything" app is.
zen928 3y ago
It's so funny to me seeing variations of this post in response to anything related to what could be seen as a weakness to the actions taken after acquisition, while also seeing this in posts promoting twitters relative stability. It's just so transparent to what your motivation is and laughably pathetic how you feel the need to reaffirm and defend your stance on musk (lowercase) at any opportunity that projects any positivity on his decision making. Oh, right, the topic that neither of us were actually taking about. Yep, I don't think anyone reasonably minded would be using a twitter tor exit node with twitters current reputation. Probably best to remove a service that no one would ever trust you enough to use.

kakwa_ 3y ago

Maybe, but then, why the onion service is still up? This feels more like uncontrolled infrastructure rot/lack of maintenance rather than a conscious decision to cut unnecessary parts of it.

avs733 3y ago

Did they properly remove it or does no one there even know it was/is happening. They didn’t shut it down, the seem to have left the lights on with nobody home. Bigger picture - given the role news making and sharing in real time has always played in Twitter, it seems logical that services which may not provide obvious returns but which build a platform that journalists find useful would help do that.

stathibus 3y ago
I agree, it seems like they left it to rot instead of shutting it down. But again it is irrelevant to the business so who cares?
- rmwaite 3y ago
  My understanding is the onion service was launched to provide access for people in places where Twitter is blocked. How is this "irrelevant to the business"?
  - pests 3y ago
    "Profit over everything." I think it was laudable that Twitter ran one in the first place. Sad to see it languish.
  - dfadsadsf 3y ago
    What's benefit of onion service vs run of the mill VPN? I assume if you can access onion, you should also be able to access VPN
    - anonym29 3y ago
      I'm not someone who's ever used the onion service, but as someone who accesses the site regularly over VPN, I can testify that it's a huge PITA. Tons of very aggressive captcha-type challenges (various tasks, never simple text recognition, but not Google ReCaptcha), often 5, 7, or 10 to be allowed to proceed.
- depereo 3y ago
  If it's a safety mechanism that people relied on, leaving it to rot and getting people in the habit of clicking through on an expired or invalid certificate warning is irresponsible. A degraded service can be worse than an offline one.

adfhoinionio 3y ago

It broke because there's no one left at the company who knows how to keep it online.

onion2k 3y ago
That's unlikely. Even though Elon gutted the team at Twitter, the previous devs were good and certainly documented things. Besides, renewing a cert and applying it to an onion service isn't very hard, so the current team could fix it if it was a priority. Its much more likely that it just isn't something they want to spend time on.

justapassenger 3y ago

If they really care about free speech and citizen journalism, they totally should have working onion service. Of course they don’t care, not only because Musk is full of shit, but also because of billions from Saudis.

Atreiden 3y ago

Why not? For an international communication service with a "historical" significance on freedom of speech, is this not a natural extension of the platform? Something like this does not cost very much money to operate. "distraction" implies that it does not align with the rest of the company's objectives, and that it costs an inordinate amount of time or resources. A service like this can be administered by a single person as a tertiary function of their role, is it really any significance to their bottom line?

bastawhiz 3y ago

Serving a valid tls cert takes virtually no effort. It's far more likely that Musk's downsizing killed off infra that was doing this job correctly and inexpensively for many years. If Musk actually cared about free speech like he says he does, onion services would be a priority. But obviously that's just hot air. You can't have it both ways.

justinclift 3y ago
> infra that was doing this job correctly Twitter's Onion handling hasn't been reasonably functional for years, so in this particular case it's not that.
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  The infrastructure that issues and replaces certs isn't the same infra that performs onion handling.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Am not personally seeing how that changes the relevance of our statements? :)
    - bastawhiz 3y ago
      The post is about the cert expiring in March of this year. So your statement that this issue is years old is simply untrue. There might be a separate issue, but the cert being invalid has nothing to do with that.
      - justinclift 3y ago
        My statement had nothing at all to do with this certificate issue, but was more pointing out that Twitter's Onion handling has been broken in various ways for years.

AlexandrB 3y ago

If you think running an onion service is distracting, wait until you see how distracting trying to become an "everything" app is.

zen928 3y ago

It's so funny to me seeing variations of this post in response to anything related to what could be seen as a weakness to the actions taken after acquisition, while also seeing this in posts promoting twitters relative stability. It's just so transparent to what your motivation is and laughably pathetic how you feel the need to reaffirm and defend your stance on musk (lowercase) at any opportunity that projects any positivity on his decision making. Oh, right, the topic that neither of us were actually taking about. Yep, I don't think anyone reasonably minded would be using a twitter tor exit node with twitters current reputation. Probably best to remove a service that no one would ever trust you enough to use.