12.14.20
Gemini version available ♊︎Thanks for All the Fish and Goodbye, Twitter
After nearly a million tweets it’s time to say “goodbye“
Summary: Today I quit Twitter (the account will be rendered just a bot) and here’s why; in short, Twitter as a Web site (with Web pages) is shutting down officially
TEN DAYS ago we wrote about Twitter's latest suicidal move (after cutting off third-party access by APIs, deprecated entirely in 2018 — akin to IBM cutting off CentOS users!). Why they do this one can guess… and it seems to boil down to business/profit rather than popularity or widespread use. No money? Goodbye!
“Twitter continues to show complete and utter disregard for the very people who made its business exist.”Long story short, today is the last day Twitter can be accessed as a Web site rather than a program (proprietary JavaScript or official “app”). That leaves so many people out in the cold and makes pervasive surveillance obligatory.
But something even more irksome happened some hours ago. Twitter has a serious bug which prevents me from reading replies to tweets, which are automatically exported there. I typically check replies once a day, but this time I cannot see anything older than an hour. In effect, people are telling me something, but I cannot see that. Twitter is preventing it. These people might think that I snub them. So much for social, eh? Social control media…
Sinister plot… calling it social.
So the new so-called ‘policy’ is, “no reply” does not imply ignoring; it just means I am not present.
Either way, in light of these events, I will no longer access Twitter, not even to check notifications (seeing that Twitter prevents much of this anyway). Months ago the account became write-only, in effect just a bot (copies of posts in Diaspora). Over a week ago I started implemented my own ‘suckless’, self-hosted and JavaScript-free platform as well. It updates in real time (e.g. this page for today).
It’s hardly a secret that any time one accesses such a site (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) it gives its corporation more value and another opportunity to harvest data about people’s minds. I’ve figured that, for now, treating the account there as a mere bot is the best compromise. Totally disappearing or deleting the account would mean loss of data or deletionism. Those things present a problem in their own right.
Techrights was never in Twitter. From now on neither will I; there will be a bot there, sure, but it’ll get disregarded as irrelevant and won’t be accessed by me. Twitter continues to show complete and utter disregard for the very people who made its business exist. This abuse/exploitation ends today. For me at least. It’ll be interesting to see what the FSF will do, knowing they deemed Twitter “OK” just because JavaScript wasn’t mandatory (that’ll end today). Free software supporters won’t be able to access Twitter without proprietary software by the end of the day (Richard Stallman and I spoke about that in person back when this wasn’t the case). I’ve downloaded my full Twitter archive (it’s over 5GB, compressed). I have some fond and some bad memories. Now that account is just a bot. Not my problem… and also Twitter’s own fault. █
ᶃ Gemini Space
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