This is hilarious. Not only is today the first day of reddit without third party apps, but Elon shoots himself in the foot by making Twitter unusable.
self-promo in case you need a Twitter replacement
(By the way, if you need a Mastodon account to replace your Twitter, feel free to sign up at packmates.org which is also run by me.)
600 is way too low. I’ve never been into Twitter but whenever I see someone’s Twitter page they post like 30 times a day. Imagine how many posts the average Twitter user reads if they post that much.
This also breaks the algorithm-induced doomscroll feature of social media, and probably reduces advertiser value even further. Seems like a very obvious misplay even from the POV of an evil CEO.
The limit will probably be gone in a day or so. Elon just kneejerk reacts to things without consulting anyone, and this move is going to plummet user engagement. In the meantime, I hear Mastodon got a healthy user bump today.
I’ve heard this is happening because they refused to pay for their cloud hosting with Google and got cut off. They need to throttle the entire service to stay afloat until they get some sort of backup plan in place.
Now that seems more likely. Elon has a habit of creating problems and then attributing those problems to completely unrelated stuff so his followers think he’s always right. I originally thought that the backend was starting to finally crumble after he fired more than 75% of the company’s employees, so he had to limit the load on the system. But your explanation seems more logical.
I removed all my old posts and deactivated my Twitter around the same time I got rid of my reddit account. So it doesn’t exactly affect me.
But overall it is a very dumb move, and will only drive legions of Twitter users over to Mastodon or get lucky and get an invite to Jack Dorsey’s BlueSky.
How well that will go? I dunno. But till it is out of invite only, mastodon is the only real Twitter alternative.
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I only use Twitter for following artists who don’t post elsewhere. It took me five minutes today to hit the rate limit. I don’t know if it counted the comments as posts too or something but it’s literally unusable at this point unless you pay for a checkmark. Think I might just have to let Twitter go at this point, which is immensely frustrating considering how I won’t be able to support those Twitter only artists anymore.
Hoping BlueSky leaves invite only soon so there’s a viable platform to switch to. I haven’t been able to get an invite yet.
I almost hesitate to ask lest I sound argumentative, but what is it about BlueSky that you believe makes it viable versus the other alternatives? Is there something specific it offers?
Personally I don’t see much that makes it better then Lemmy, but other people seem to, and that’s why I consider it “viable”. Lemmy is nice and all but everyone I’ve suggested it to seems to be against it. I’ve heard things like it looks “outdated”, it doesn’t look “fully featured”, it’s too hard to use, they don’t trust it, so on.
While I don’t agree with many things others say about Lemmy, it’s up to them to switch in the end, and they won’t for their own reasons. BlueSky, on the other hand, people seem to trust for some reason. Many people I still follow and keep up with on Twitter have said they want to switch to BlueSky when it’s available. Again, variety of reasons other people want to switch to it, but the main thing most are suggesting is they trust the people behind it, like Jack Dorsey.
In the end, I personally just want to keep up with the people I’m following, and that requires them to be on a platform we both use. For just about everyone I follow on Twitter, that seems to be BlueSky for whatever reason. As for now though Lemmy works fine so I still intend to use it though.
I’m just waiting on Reddit to go full Twitter now
I could see them requiring people to log in to see posts, and limiting upvotes unless you have reddit premium…
I follow a few artists on Patreon and this just seems another kick in the teeth for them :c cuts down on their ability to connect and reach out to their audience etc. Unless they both are paying. I’m just drifting more to Lemmy since… Well so far it’s a good for me
It seems a needlessly self destructive move, certainly an odd decision to make. Guess they still think they are too big to fail?
However, for me at least, 600 tweets doesn’t seem that much? I used Twitter a lot yesterday looking at the chaos, and didn’t even hit that limit. I guess I don’t use Twitter in the same way that others do.
Still, this decision does affect “powerusers” of Twitter, who are the people they really don’t want to push away. And it seems to have done so, some accounts I follow have moved off, and I’ve seen like 10 new people post to hashtags I follow on Mastodon overnight. Just wish people hadn’t moved to Instagram only…
Amusingly, Twitter has a “people to follow” box, and it’s having trouble recommending me people who actually still use Twitter (2 of the 3 have their most recent posts being “I’m not on Twitter, find me elsewhere”).
I do wonder if companies who use Twitter to update people will reconsider that now that non-logged in users can’t access it.
Amusingly these restrictions (both the rate limit and login requirement) are apparently temporary (I don’t believe it either) and in response to either a DDoS attack or “mass scraping”. Coincidentally, Twitter also had a bug where it would DDoS itself if the homepage failed to load. https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639435788921057 .
By the way, if you are using Telegram or Discord, you can append “vx” before the “twitter.com” to get the embed working and see the tweet in the message, at least for now. e.g. https://vxtwitter.com/silverfox5213/status/1674758096475004929
600 tweets a day is nothing. One could easily do that in an hour or so. Not saying it’s the healthiest thing to do, but it’s very easy for regular twitter users to hit that limit very soon.
Maybe it’s because I’ve cut back on Twitter far more than I realized, but I never hit the rate limit despite expecting to. In any event, should I hit it, all that will do is improve my productivity for the remainder of the day.
I do feel bad for those who rely on maximizing exposure on that platform for income or awareness of topics or events.
I’ve yet to see any limit at all. I only use twitter to follow some artists these days.
