Oof. I did a last pass migration last night, and noticed that movetodon was broken then, but I assumed it was due to load, rather than... this.

End of an era; Twitter is dead. Whatever is left, it's not Twitter.

> End of an era; Twitter is dead. Whatever is left, it's not Twitter.

Am-I the only one surprised the site still hasn't had a major (multi-hour) outage at this point?

Considering the waves of resignations that hit the automated content filtering and bot mitigation teams, it's no wonder they are getting desperate.

Twitter still has like 1000 heavily dedicated (either because they love elon or getting fired means getting deported) which means they can fight a lot of fires and keep things going.

  > getting fired means getting deported

i wonder what percent of workers left are in that position?

Wait, didn’t it? I recall a prolonged period when no-one could log in (and a few prolonged periods where no-one using 2fa could log in)

> Am-I the only one surprised the site still hasn't had a major (multi-hour) outage at this point?

Twitter has had at least one multi-hour global outage since Musk took over. This is in addition to at least one outage in Australia, plus outages of other critical services. The API outage happened before the after-the-fact announcement, login and 2FA outages kept people out of the app, etc.

For what it's worth, I cannot access Twitter right now, and DownDetector suggests I'm not alone, so we might be having another outage starting just now.

Many people with large Twitter following who use Twitter as the commenting system for their website (think John Gruber) have complained that Twitter mentions ahve been reduced to nothing. It's a silent failure that no one at Twitter has mentionned or acknowledged.

All things considered, that’s not surprising that a company doesn’t want their free API/resources used to make moving to a competitor easier.

It's still anticompetitive. Can't wait to see Twitter get destroyed in court for this.

Very true, they don’t have to give access to their API for free. My question is, why don’t devs use Puppeteer to spin up a Chromium instance and access Twitter’s data that way?

That’s part of the reason that “it’s to stop the bots” is BS. Academia and other similar uses will pay or just stop. Bots and other malicious uses will find work-arounds and just change where the game of whack-a-bot is being played.

Twitter could add anti-bot protection like Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA. I’ve seen that make a site unusable with Puppeteer. By “unusable” I mean that correctly solving the CAPTCHA either just gives you another CAPTCHA, or gives the “click if you are human” thing, and clicking that just goes to a CAPTCHA or another “click if you are human”.

It didn’t even require doing anything to/on the page with Puppeteer. Merely using it to open a browser window and then waiting, and using that browser window by hand during the wait to go visit the site that was using Cloudflare anti-bot protection ran into the problem.

I actually face the same issue on Firefox with some websites except I’m not using Puppeteer. I thought it was a glitch with Cloudflare but guess not.

IIRC, puppeteer/webdriver things generally work by injecting JS through extension, and their presence can be detected by looking for those objects/functions from JS.

Isn’t there a stealth plugin that can hide the injected JavaScript?

I think anyone can request a download of archive of all their data, and removing that would violate at least GDPR. And then do whatever they want with this archive, including uploading to anywhere else. So while it disrupts the current process, it cannot really take the competitors out.

I would honestly love to see a poll of Mastodon users just to see if they understand that administrators can read everything in an instance, even direct messages between users.

It's going to take a few scandals for this to sink in, but it's such a recipe for disaster.

On Twitter, you at least know that it's only three letter agencies reading your DMs. On Mastodon, it could be some Reddit moderator type that makes it their life mission to destroy you.

How is that any different from threaded news groups, forums, and reddit threads?

And because this must be true for every admin on every server on the internet... thank you dang (when you read this)!

If you're targeted or sharing sensitive info, it's best to use encryption.