10 ms·

Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API

125 points by OmarShehata 2y ago

toomuchtodo 2y ago
https://www.community-archive.org/ https://www.community-archive.org/ https://github.com/TheExGenesis/community-archive https://github.com/TheExGenesis/community-archive
ranger_danger 2y ago
> cheaply as possible (put everything in S3 yikes.
- OmarShehata 2y ago
  feedback is very much needed
  - diggan 2y ago
    For reference, this is the GitHub issue: https://github.com/TheExGenesis/community-archive/issues/72 https://github.com/TheExGenesis/community-archive/issues/72 Cheapest is to stay away from anything related to the big clouds, especially Amazon with their "premium bandwidth" charges. I'd probably spin up a storage box from Hetzner (or similar service for dedicated servers) as a first step, as you get unmetered connection. It should last you a pretty long while as most content will be fetched from caches.
- evv 2y ago
  To be charitable I hope the author refers to the S3 API here, of which there are several competitors and open source implementations. Many companies offer "object storage" which is compatible with the S3 API And there are some open source projects such as Minio which offer the same (and I forget what are the others?)
rasengan 2y ago
The trend of shutting down / charging steeply for API access has fundamentally changed the internet.
- flykespice 2y ago
  Back to the old web scrapping you go.
  - CaptainFever 2y ago
    Yep. Short-sighted companies don't realize that API was a truce, to save money and increase security (e.g. giving user/pass to third-party clients -> OAuth) on both sides. But anything that can be displayed, can be scraped... https://www.eff.org/issues/analog-hole https://www.eff.org/issues/analog-hole
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  I honestly don't know what to think of this time. On one hand it's sad in principle to see Reddit and Twitter lock down to the point they have. But on the other hand they'd both already become cesspools by that time, and I was still visiting them daily. And now I've quit them both which is a good thing.
- gary_0 2y ago
  The whole point of the Internet up until about 2019 was that it was so cheap to host information it was basically free. If your site scaled up, you covered the hosting costs with ads or donations or something. The expensive part was finding content, so "user generated content" sites had to entice users to post stuff. That resulted in an implicit social contract with the users; these sites lived in fear of the users taking their content elsewhere. Now the Web is expensive for some reason, and users have become so dependent on a small number of sites as a communications medium that the megacorporations running them feel like they have infinite leverage, and the social contract of user-generated content is completely forgotten.
  - bcrosby95 2y ago
throw0101a 2y ago
Many moons ago Twitter used to have RSS (Atom?) feeds for each user so you could use any old news aggregator to keep up to date.
- pavlov 2y ago
  But that's too sensible and user-friendly. It would be obviously weird and wrong if they inserted ads and Musk's tweets into someone's RSS feed. Yet showing those unwanted insertions is the whole purpose of the company now.
  - sunaookami 2y ago
    Twitter shut off RSS access over 10 years ago along with their popular 1.1 API.
    - pavlov 2y ago
      I know. Because it wasn’t compatible with their aim of showing ads. And nothing has changed after Twitter went private under Musk, except that the reasons for stuffing unwanted content into users’ timelines are slightly different.
      - xNeil 2y ago
        I don't think that's fair - getting back the chronological timeline itself made the purchase a good one in my eyes, alongside the For You feed, which seems to work wonderfully (for me). Not to forget you can literally turn off ads if you want. I seem to be a real minority, but I do genuinely believe Musk has done a great job with Twitter (or X).
- spondylosaurus 2y ago
  You could get SMS notifications whenever a user tweeted, too. Imagine signing up for that today!
  - 2y ago
criticalfault 2y ago
Users should just get off this continued tragedy and API access wouldn't be an issue
- OmarShehata 2y ago
  A lot of users/communities are stuck because of network effects & the long history of posts (they still reference them, like living wikis) These pipeline tools can help people migrate if they want without losing that history & network (my prediction is once people see what's possible with an open API, that'll further motivate user migration, or for twitter to open up again)
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > the long history of posts (they still reference them, like living wikis) As someone with a multitude of cat photo threads, 100x this. While I'm around on Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon, the "post history" aspect is my most pressing issue with Mastodon. Like, when you move your account, you cannot take your old posts to the new server - you're straight out of luck if your instance decides to call it quits for whatever reason. And even if the instance doesn't give up, being unable to view old(er) photos is something I very commonly notice on a bunch of Mastodon servers.
- yodsanklai 2y ago
  To me, Twitter is by far the most toxic social network. It has the power to turn the most interesting and smartest people into bitter trolls. Maybe some people get value from it, but it requires serious self discipline to not get dragged into stupid arguments.
  - gspencley 2y ago
    I've tried to "get" Twitter since the early days. I've created a couple of Twitter accounts over the years to support various creative endeavours but I've never found myself getting much value out of it as a user. I heard that it's original use-case was that back 2008 there were no good ways to do group messaging over SMS on a cell phone. That's a problem and solution that I can understand. But as a broader social network? I don't get it. Things that bother me to the point that they are deal breakers: - The character limits (there is nothing worse in life than reading through a x/N self-reply to read something long ... I'd rather file a tax return) - Showing me posts from pages I don't follow in the feed (in 99% of the cases I'm aware of that page/profile already and have chosen not to follow it because I don't like them) - Ads in the news feed Some have said that they like Twitter for getting news. I have way better options for that. I know that I'm not representative of the typical person, generally speaking, but Twitter is one of those things where I really can't understand why anyone likes it and uses it, let alone why it is so popular. And it's not that I'm hating on something I don't know anything about ... I've honestly tried to use it and get value out of it, but I've never found anything of value on offer.
jrm4 2y ago
Funny, just now I've been playing around with the various tweet deleters and trying to get something working; presently I think I'm about to settle on something involving a basic screen macro recorder thing, like one of the iterations of AHK. I'm somewhat surprised that this space feels relatively dormant compared to the more complex stuff out there. (APIs suck)
kypro 2y ago
> What if I could ask patio’s archive: “what are some good books to read about [topic]” or “what advice would you give to someone trying to get a job at Stripe” Or what if I could ask: "Given Omer Shehata's Twitter history, formulate a phishing scam that he would be likely vulnerable to". The problem I see with here is that there are far more bad actor use cases for identifiable user data than good. In my opinion the main reason most social networks have stopped doing public by default and now do private by default is because not doing so opens them up to Cambridge Analytica type scandals where people don't realise what they're signing up for. Personally if you do this, I would be very clear with your users that by submitting their data it will be made available publicly in an identifiable form. And that even if they revoke their data from your service it's possible for their data will continue to be archived by others, possibly for malicious reasons.
- theexgenesis 2y ago
  Dev here. Cognitive security vulnerabilities like this are the thing I'm most concerned about. I think it's right to be very upfront about risks like these, and I'm even considering if we want to walk back the fully public thing and make it private / invite-only instead.
lenerdenator 2y ago
[flagged]
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  The beauty/horror of network effects
- kypro 2y ago
  Twitter is excellent if you're looking for a social network where you can consume content and interact with domain experts in various fields. In my experience it's really only those who go there for politics that get annoyed by it – perviously it was the right-wingers who were angry because it was too left-wing, and now it's left-wingers who think it's too right-wing. Personally I've noticed practically no change.
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > Personally I've noticed practically no change. IME, there's two things that were a bad problem pre-takeover and exploded afterwards: porn spam bots (like bots, follow bots, reply bots) that just acted on keywords in your tweets and Russian disinformation bots that also act on keywords. It has gotten better the last few weeks with the various leaks and a Verfassungsschutz investigation in Germany that uncovered the "Doppelgänger" botnet, but it's still an absurd nuisance. > In my experience it's really only those who go there for politics that get annoyed by it – perviously it was the right-wingers who were angry because it was too left-wing, and now it's left-wingers who think it's too right-wing. Well... and brands. Brands don't want their advertisements to appear next to someone showing the Nazi salute, calling for executions or whatever garbage they're pushing, and it is measurable both in financial data as well as in the quality of the ads - it used to be household brands, now it's mostly dropshipping, fake mobile game and cryptocurrency scams. [1] https://qz.com/twitter-x-ad-revenue-tumbles-elon-musk-grok-1851624340 https://qz.com/twitter-x-ad-revenue-tumbles-elon-musk-grok-1...
  - juneyi 2y ago
    Agree. I don't even use the 'for you' feed, and even when I check occasionally I've been able to cater my algorithm so it's purely related to the domain I'm interested in which is rust, startups, and tech news. But my personal follow feed has all the interesting topics that I follow so it's easy to just stick to that.
abdullahkhalids 2y ago
To play the devil's advocate. If you were running a large public forum, and you knew that many companies had started to scrape all data off your site, and were going to cumulatively make billions off that data, and some of those billions will come from polluting your forum with crap content, would you continue running your site in the open? What is the game theory here? Twitter cooperates and OpenAI defects, and we call that a win?
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  This is a problem for literally every website that isn't completely paywalled. Twitter is not special in this regard.
  - miki123211 2y ago
    Twitter was "special" because they actually had an API. No other social media site (besides Reddit) had one. Facebook kind of tried, although theirs was always a lot more limited, and got shut down when it turned out Cambridge Analytica used it for widespread election fraud[1]. Both Twitter and Reddit did basically the same thing at roughly the same time, Twitter just had the misfortune to be under the control of Elon Musk, so the move was perceived as ideological. [1] As it later turned out, Cambridge Analytica was basically a "nothing burger", they claimed to be able to accomplish a lot while, in reality, accomplishing very little. The damage to interoperability was already done, though.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      Indeed. CA's impact on election outcomes was likely negligible; Antonio Martínez's "Chaos Monkeys" makes the case that Trump using CA was more indicative of the overall notion that Trump's team was spending money to try a bit of everything (online and offline) and the Clinton campaign wasn't. Their tactical failure was believing they could redirect the money to down-ticket races because Clinton / Trump was such an obvious matchup that they didn't need to spend to win. What CA did show was that Facebook's statements about protecting user privacy were fundamentally incompatible with the way their API worked, so they had to shut it down because the alternative would have been to just sort of... Let it hang in the air that it wasn't hard for a third-party to build a system to completely bypass user intent in scoping their information. (I had the misfortune of trying to write a Facebook app about fifteen years prior, and that was my takeaway at the time also... "Do people, like, realize that their whole process for protecting scraping the social network via third-party app integration is the honor system?" Turns out people didn't).
bravetraveler 2y ago
Neat boundaries on the Town Square
- electrondood 2y ago
  Where you need to pay in order for your most freedom-y of free speech to even be visible to others.
  - bravetraveler 2y ago
    Freedumb of speech, not reach! See also: Simpsons, "elected to lead, not read"
nunobrito 2y ago
It has been difficult to rescue data from Twitter even before purchase. On our case it was relevant because this is online digital history for the people in my country. The only thing we can is motivate more people to use open platforms like NOSTR where API or data/identity handling is completely different.
danielodievich 2y ago
The only useful thing on Twitter that I ever saw was the lovely and tender Dog Rates https://x.com/dog_rates https://x.com/dog_rates. You could read anonymously and be all aww and schucks about all those good dogs. They've thankfully stopped engaging with this cesspool that it became and moved somewhere else, Instagram perhaps? Somewhere where I can't read without an account, so I don't read it anymore.
- vlod 2y ago
  Here's a few more in my feed (no affiliation) - https://x.com/contextdogs https://x.com/contextdogs (out of context dogs) - https://x.com/_B___S https://x.com/_B___S (B&S) - https://x.com/buitengebieden https://x.com/buitengebieden (Buitengebieden)
- KomoD 2y ago
  > They've thankfully stopped engaging with this cesspool that it became and moved somewhere else No, they haven't. They're still actively posting on Twitter. It's just that if you are viewing a profile logged out you get the most popular tweets instead of the most recent ones.
bangaladore 2y ago
Here's a thought: someone "trustworthy" should maintain a Chrome extension or Tapermonkey script that automatically scrapes data from various social media sites in a fully anonymized fashion. As people browse Twitter, Reddit, or XYZ, the posts/comments are sent to some aggregation system. It might be against TOS, but certainly far less than scraping, and you couldn't tell, as it's the user driving what gets scraped. I don't use Twitter often, but I'd run something like that if there were strong anonymity guarantees. Seems like a win-win for everyone. Does anything like this exist today?
- yojo 2y ago
  Reminds me a little of RECAP (https://free.law/recap https://free.law/recap), an automated scraper/saver/sharer for PACER (the US court electronic records system). Obviously the content is very different, but the technology is basically doing what you’re talking about, minus anonymizing the data.
  - bangaladore 2y ago
    Good find. Yeah, pretty much exactly like this.
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    I use RECAP constantly and try to always upload everything I grab from PACER. I think this administration finally passed a law to make PACER free, which is good.
    - toomuchtodo 2y ago
      https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/fed-judiciary-says-yes-free-pacer-searches-here-are-details-so-far-2022-05-31/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/fed-judiciary-says-... | https://archive.today/2wddY https://archive.today/2wddY https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/egvbkwemjpq/jcus_mar_22_proceedings_0-1.pdf https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/egvbkwemjpq/...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
allkindsof 2y ago
[flagged]
fb03 2y ago
At this point, just nope out of it and use something like Bluesky
mrkramer 2y ago
Elon is trying really hard to destroy Twitter, isn't he?
xyst 2y ago
switched to mastodon, bluesky long ago.
- urda 2y ago
  I've been very happy with Mastodon.
molticrystal 2y ago
Twitter was originally a microblogging service that had rss feeds to syndicate things or monitor the microblogs of people/companies that were interesting, it has gone way far off into the fields. Same journey reddit is making, starting after it prepared to go public.
sandwichmonger 2y ago
[flagged]
OmarShehata 2y ago
Here is the washington post doing this with TikTok users to reverse engineer the algorithm!! https://thewashingtonpost.formstack.com/forms/help_investigate_tiktoks_algorithm https://thewashingtonpost.formstack.com/forms/help_investiga... they've got data from 800 users so far, with watch data on 55 million videos
qingcharles 2y ago
I hate to be the one that says this, but what's to stop someone poisoning this and uploading a file of someone else's fake tweets?
- pornel 2y ago
  The system should require multiple identical copies uploaded independently. The "independently" part is hard, could require some kind of web of trust.

125 points by OmarShehata 2y ago

https://www.community-archive.org/ https://www.community-archive.org/ https://github.com/TheExGenesis/community-archive https://github.com/TheExGenesis/community-archive

ranger_danger 2y ago

> cheaply as possible (put everything in S3 yikes.

OmarShehata 2y ago
feedback is very much needed
- diggan 2y ago
  For reference, this is the GitHub issue: https://github.com/TheExGenesis/community-archive/issues/72 https://github.com/TheExGenesis/community-archive/issues/72 Cheapest is to stay away from anything related to the big clouds, especially Amazon with their "premium bandwidth" charges. I'd probably spin up a storage box from Hetzner (or similar service for dedicated servers) as a first step, as you get unmetered connection. It should last you a pretty long while as most content will be fetched from caches.
evv 2y ago
To be charitable I hope the author refers to the S3 API here, of which there are several competitors and open source implementations. Many companies offer "object storage" which is compatible with the S3 API And there are some open source projects such as Minio which offer the same (and I forget what are the others?)

rasengan 2y ago

The trend of shutting down / charging steeply for API access has fundamentally changed the internet.

flykespice 2y ago
Back to the old web scrapping you go.
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  Yep. Short-sighted companies don't realize that API was a truce, to save money and increase security (e.g. giving user/pass to third-party clients -> OAuth) on both sides. But anything that can be displayed, can be scraped... https://www.eff.org/issues/analog-hole https://www.eff.org/issues/analog-hole
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
I honestly don't know what to think of this time. On one hand it's sad in principle to see Reddit and Twitter lock down to the point they have. But on the other hand they'd both already become cesspools by that time, and I was still visiting them daily. And now I've quit them both which is a good thing.
gary_0 2y ago
The whole point of the Internet up until about 2019 was that it was so cheap to host information it was basically free. If your site scaled up, you covered the hosting costs with ads or donations or something. The expensive part was finding content, so "user generated content" sites had to entice users to post stuff. That resulted in an implicit social contract with the users; these sites lived in fear of the users taking their content elsewhere. Now the Web is expensive for some reason, and users have become so dependent on a small number of sites as a communications medium that the megacorporations running them feel like they have infinite leverage, and the social contract of user-generated content is completely forgotten.
- bcrosby95 2y ago

throw0101a 2y ago

Many moons ago Twitter used to have RSS (Atom?) feeds for each user so you could use any old news aggregator to keep up to date.

pavlov 2y ago
But that's too sensible and user-friendly. It would be obviously weird and wrong if they inserted ads and Musk's tweets into someone's RSS feed. Yet showing those unwanted insertions is the whole purpose of the company now.
- sunaookami 2y ago
  Twitter shut off RSS access over 10 years ago along with their popular 1.1 API.
  - pavlov 2y ago
    I know. Because it wasn’t compatible with their aim of showing ads. And nothing has changed after Twitter went private under Musk, except that the reasons for stuffing unwanted content into users’ timelines are slightly different.
    - xNeil 2y ago
      I don't think that's fair - getting back the chronological timeline itself made the purchase a good one in my eyes, alongside the For You feed, which seems to work wonderfully (for me). Not to forget you can literally turn off ads if you want. I seem to be a real minority, but I do genuinely believe Musk has done a great job with Twitter (or X).
spondylosaurus 2y ago
You could get SMS notifications whenever a user tweeted, too. Imagine signing up for that today!
- 2y ago

criticalfault 2y ago

Users should just get off this continued tragedy and API access wouldn't be an issue

OmarShehata 2y ago
A lot of users/communities are stuck because of network effects & the long history of posts (they still reference them, like living wikis) These pipeline tools can help people migrate if they want without losing that history & network (my prediction is once people see what's possible with an open API, that'll further motivate user migration, or for twitter to open up again)
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > the long history of posts (they still reference them, like living wikis) As someone with a multitude of cat photo threads, 100x this. While I'm around on Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon, the "post history" aspect is my most pressing issue with Mastodon. Like, when you move your account, you cannot take your old posts to the new server - you're straight out of luck if your instance decides to call it quits for whatever reason. And even if the instance doesn't give up, being unable to view old(er) photos is something I very commonly notice on a bunch of Mastodon servers.
yodsanklai 2y ago
To me, Twitter is by far the most toxic social network. It has the power to turn the most interesting and smartest people into bitter trolls. Maybe some people get value from it, but it requires serious self discipline to not get dragged into stupid arguments.
- gspencley 2y ago
  I've tried to "get" Twitter since the early days. I've created a couple of Twitter accounts over the years to support various creative endeavours but I've never found myself getting much value out of it as a user. I heard that it's original use-case was that back 2008 there were no good ways to do group messaging over SMS on a cell phone. That's a problem and solution that I can understand. But as a broader social network? I don't get it. Things that bother me to the point that they are deal breakers: - The character limits (there is nothing worse in life than reading through a x/N self-reply to read something long ... I'd rather file a tax return) - Showing me posts from pages I don't follow in the feed (in 99% of the cases I'm aware of that page/profile already and have chosen not to follow it because I don't like them) - Ads in the news feed Some have said that they like Twitter for getting news. I have way better options for that. I know that I'm not representative of the typical person, generally speaking, but Twitter is one of those things where I really can't understand why anyone likes it and uses it, let alone why it is so popular. And it's not that I'm hating on something I don't know anything about ... I've honestly tried to use it and get value out of it, but I've never found anything of value on offer.

jrm4 2y ago

Funny, just now I've been playing around with the various tweet deleters and trying to get something working; presently I think I'm about to settle on something involving a basic screen macro recorder thing, like one of the iterations of AHK. I'm somewhat surprised that this space feels relatively dormant compared to the more complex stuff out there. (APIs suck)

kypro 2y ago

> What if I could ask patio’s archive: “what are some good books to read about [topic]” or “what advice would you give to someone trying to get a job at Stripe” Or what if I could ask: "Given Omer Shehata's Twitter history, formulate a phishing scam that he would be likely vulnerable to". The problem I see with here is that there are far more bad actor use cases for identifiable user data than good. In my opinion the main reason most social networks have stopped doing public by default and now do private by default is because not doing so opens them up to Cambridge Analytica type scandals where people don't realise what they're signing up for. Personally if you do this, I would be very clear with your users that by submitting their data it will be made available publicly in an identifiable form. And that even if they revoke their data from your service it's possible for their data will continue to be archived by others, possibly for malicious reasons.

theexgenesis 2y ago
Dev here. Cognitive security vulnerabilities like this are the thing I'm most concerned about. I think it's right to be very upfront about risks like these, and I'm even considering if we want to walk back the fully public thing and make it private / invite-only instead.

lenerdenator 2y ago

[flagged]

llamaimperative 2y ago
The beauty/horror of network effects
kypro 2y ago
Twitter is excellent if you're looking for a social network where you can consume content and interact with domain experts in various fields. In my experience it's really only those who go there for politics that get annoyed by it – perviously it was the right-wingers who were angry because it was too left-wing, and now it's left-wingers who think it's too right-wing. Personally I've noticed practically no change.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > Personally I've noticed practically no change. IME, there's two things that were a bad problem pre-takeover and exploded afterwards: porn spam bots (like bots, follow bots, reply bots) that just acted on keywords in your tweets and Russian disinformation bots that also act on keywords. It has gotten better the last few weeks with the various leaks and a Verfassungsschutz investigation in Germany that uncovered the "Doppelgänger" botnet, but it's still an absurd nuisance. > In my experience it's really only those who go there for politics that get annoyed by it – perviously it was the right-wingers who were angry because it was too left-wing, and now it's left-wingers who think it's too right-wing. Well... and brands. Brands don't want their advertisements to appear next to someone showing the Nazi salute, calling for executions or whatever garbage they're pushing, and it is measurable both in financial data as well as in the quality of the ads - it used to be household brands, now it's mostly dropshipping, fake mobile game and cryptocurrency scams. [1] https://qz.com/twitter-x-ad-revenue-tumbles-elon-musk-grok-1851624340 https://qz.com/twitter-x-ad-revenue-tumbles-elon-musk-grok-1...
- juneyi 2y ago
  Agree. I don't even use the 'for you' feed, and even when I check occasionally I've been able to cater my algorithm so it's purely related to the domain I'm interested in which is rust, startups, and tech news. But my personal follow feed has all the interesting topics that I follow so it's easy to just stick to that.

abdullahkhalids 2y ago

To play the devil's advocate. If you were running a large public forum, and you knew that many companies had started to scrape all data off your site, and were going to cumulatively make billions off that data, and some of those billions will come from polluting your forum with crap content, would you continue running your site in the open? What is the game theory here? Twitter cooperates and OpenAI defects, and we call that a win?

KerrAvon 2y ago
This is a problem for literally every website that isn't completely paywalled. Twitter is not special in this regard.
- miki123211 2y ago
  Twitter was "special" because they actually had an API. No other social media site (besides Reddit) had one. Facebook kind of tried, although theirs was always a lot more limited, and got shut down when it turned out Cambridge Analytica used it for widespread election fraud[1]. Both Twitter and Reddit did basically the same thing at roughly the same time, Twitter just had the misfortune to be under the control of Elon Musk, so the move was perceived as ideological. [1] As it later turned out, Cambridge Analytica was basically a "nothing burger", they claimed to be able to accomplish a lot while, in reality, accomplishing very little. The damage to interoperability was already done, though.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Indeed. CA's impact on election outcomes was likely negligible; Antonio Martínez's "Chaos Monkeys" makes the case that Trump using CA was more indicative of the overall notion that Trump's team was spending money to try a bit of everything (online and offline) and the Clinton campaign wasn't. Their tactical failure was believing they could redirect the money to down-ticket races because Clinton / Trump was such an obvious matchup that they didn't need to spend to win. What CA did show was that Facebook's statements about protecting user privacy were fundamentally incompatible with the way their API worked, so they had to shut it down because the alternative would have been to just sort of... Let it hang in the air that it wasn't hard for a third-party to build a system to completely bypass user intent in scoping their information. (I had the misfortune of trying to write a Facebook app about fifteen years prior, and that was my takeaway at the time also... "Do people, like, realize that their whole process for protecting scraping the social network via third-party app integration is the honor system?" Turns out people didn't).

bravetraveler 2y ago

Neat boundaries on the Town Square

electrondood 2y ago
Where you need to pay in order for your most freedom-y of free speech to even be visible to others.
- bravetraveler 2y ago
  Freedumb of speech, not reach! See also: Simpsons, "elected to lead, not read"

nunobrito 2y ago

It has been difficult to rescue data from Twitter even before purchase. On our case it was relevant because this is online digital history for the people in my country. The only thing we can is motivate more people to use open platforms like NOSTR where API or data/identity handling is completely different.

danielodievich 2y ago

The only useful thing on Twitter that I ever saw was the lovely and tender Dog Rates https://x.com/dog_rates https://x.com/dog_rates. You could read anonymously and be all aww and schucks about all those good dogs. They've thankfully stopped engaging with this cesspool that it became and moved somewhere else, Instagram perhaps? Somewhere where I can't read without an account, so I don't read it anymore.

vlod 2y ago
Here's a few more in my feed (no affiliation) - https://x.com/contextdogs https://x.com/contextdogs (out of context dogs) - https://x.com/_B___S https://x.com/_B___S (B&S) - https://x.com/buitengebieden https://x.com/buitengebieden (Buitengebieden)
KomoD 2y ago
> They've thankfully stopped engaging with this cesspool that it became and moved somewhere else No, they haven't. They're still actively posting on Twitter. It's just that if you are viewing a profile logged out you get the most popular tweets instead of the most recent ones.

bangaladore 2y ago

Here's a thought: someone "trustworthy" should maintain a Chrome extension or Tapermonkey script that automatically scrapes data from various social media sites in a fully anonymized fashion. As people browse Twitter, Reddit, or XYZ, the posts/comments are sent to some aggregation system. It might be against TOS, but certainly far less than scraping, and you couldn't tell, as it's the user driving what gets scraped. I don't use Twitter often, but I'd run something like that if there were strong anonymity guarantees. Seems like a win-win for everyone. Does anything like this exist today?

yojo 2y ago
Reminds me a little of RECAP (https://free.law/recap https://free.law/recap), an automated scraper/saver/sharer for PACER (the US court electronic records system). Obviously the content is very different, but the technology is basically doing what you’re talking about, minus anonymizing the data.
- bangaladore 2y ago
  Good find. Yeah, pretty much exactly like this.
- qingcharles 2y ago
  I use RECAP constantly and try to always upload everything I grab from PACER. I think this administration finally passed a law to make PACER free, which is good.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/fed-judiciary-says-yes-free-pacer-searches-here-are-details-so-far-2022-05-31/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/fed-judiciary-says-... | https://archive.today/2wddY https://archive.today/2wddY https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/egvbkwemjpq/jcus_mar_22_proceedings_0-1.pdf https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/egvbkwemjpq/...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

allkindsof 2y ago

[flagged]

fb03 2y ago

At this point, just nope out of it and use something like Bluesky

mrkramer 2y ago

Elon is trying really hard to destroy Twitter, isn't he?

xyst 2y ago

switched to mastodon, bluesky long ago.

urda 2y ago
I've been very happy with Mastodon.

molticrystal 2y ago

Twitter was originally a microblogging service that had rss feeds to syndicate things or monitor the microblogs of people/companies that were interesting, it has gone way far off into the fields. Same journey reddit is making, starting after it prepared to go public.

sandwichmonger 2y ago

[flagged]

OmarShehata 2y ago

Here is the washington post doing this with TikTok users to reverse engineer the algorithm!! https://thewashingtonpost.formstack.com/forms/help_investigate_tiktoks_algorithm https://thewashingtonpost.formstack.com/forms/help_investiga... they've got data from 800 users so far, with watch data on 55 million videos

qingcharles 2y ago

I hate to be the one that says this, but what's to stop someone poisoning this and uploading a file of someone else's fake tweets?

pornel 2y ago
The system should require multiple identical copies uploaded independently. The "independently" part is hard, could require some kind of web of trust.