If like me, you only engage with Twitter to the extent of clicking on a link that takes you to a Tweet, reading it and then getting the hell out before the brain dead replies consume what little remains of your soul, then can I recommend Googling up an addon for your preferred browser that redirects Twitter to Nitter as a way around this new barrier to entry.
Most of those servers are dead though (including some nitter instances). You will need to manually disable those that don't work and it's pain in the ass.
Nitter unfortunately does not work right now due to this change. Hopefully they will fix this somehow (probably by changing user agent to googlebot, because they still allow web crawlers)
The second golden age of the internet is officially over.
Unfortunately the golden age was just a mirage, it was actually VC funds killing the ecosystem and offering impossible free services for over a decade.
We'll see if the internet can rebuild, but under the weight of spam and regulation and habit and clout chasing I'm not sure.
This is just going to speed the growth of Twitter alternatives like Mastodon, which is great, but it's sad to see such a once-innovative, widely-used platform degrade to this level of shittiness. All because of a deranged wealthy idiot with an unchecked ego. This was a communication platform, FFS!
seems like a great idea to me! everyone will rush to mastodon because this one actually costs them money and not just ideals and their soul which they have no use for right this second!
Absolutely wonderful. I love looking at art on Discord, opening the tweet to get the high res pic to save (Yes, I'm aware of adding ?format=jpg&name=large at the end of the URL, already had to do it for some pics), then being blocked. Or trying to see some sports news, then being blocked again.
I highly recommend using nitter instances to look at content from Twitter. And with the excellent LibRedirect extension, the process becomes seamless and you can bounce between instances as you please.
I really like being able to confirm that something isn't made up or blown out of proportion, being able to quickly check stuff like 'how many people even agree with this take (a lot of times people leave out the engagement of a post)' and 'is this a genuine person in the first place (check out their profile or other posts)' to not poison discourse with made-up issues
That said, as others in this thread have pointed to, libdirect should be encouraged so they can discourage traffic to the actual site
I'm pessimistic that this will actually change much, or drive users to Mastodon. Just like, as much as I've been loving my time with Kbin/Lemmy, I don't think people are ever going to leave Reddit. Most people appear to have a way, WAY higher bullshit tolerance than I do. It's sad. The old guard are unusable, and the new options are withering on the vine.
Mastodon has already become viable. I switched when there was court decision that Musk had to buy twitter and deleted my account there. At that time Mastodon was ghosttown - posts related to US were very very few and refreshing the page after a minute gave handful of posts. It changed as it achieved critical mass. By that time I had gotten used to mastodon which is not very user friendly and is different from twitter. Kbin/lemmy are much similar to reddit in that regard.
Now it does the main thing twitter did for me - telling me the news - what is happening around and what others think about that. And it is much better than twitter which was mostly clickbait. It lacks in terms of depth on specific topics, but general topics are there - though you have to know how to curate those.
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