[NB: Check the byline, thanks. Updates to appear at bottom of post. /~Rayne]
Because you people will NOT stop whining about the bird-logoed crustpunk Nazi bar sinking even further below the waterline, I am putting up a dedicated post for that subject.
RULE NUMBER ONE: Nothing but Twitter and social media related comments allowed in this thread.
RULE NUMBER TWO: Do NOT take your comments about Twitter and other social media platforms to other threads.
RULE NUMBER THREE: See the first two rules, and don’t expect this site to have any power to do anything to change the crustpunk Nazi bar or other similarly centralized social media failures like Reddit and that scofflaw Meta (home of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp).
~ ~ ~
UPDATE-1 — 8:30 P.M. ET —
Here’s a rough tick-tock leading to today’s huge uptick in new Mastodon account sign-ups —
Wednesday, May 24 — Ron DeSantis’ live campaign launch via Twitter Spaces was an utter disaster; DeSantis’ supporters try desperately to put a positive spin on it.
Thursday, May 25 — Twitter’s chief engineer resigned.
Friday, May 26 — Apparently Twitter had not paid the software company which provided service for live video feeds used in Twitter Spaces.
Sunday, June 11 — Engadget reports there may be problems ahead for Twitter:
More platform instability could be in Twitter’s near future. In 2018, Twitter signed a $1 billion contract with Google to host some of its services on the company’s Google Cloud servers. Platformer reports Twitter recently refused to pay the search giant ahead of the contract’s June 30th renewal date. Twitter is reportedly rushing to move as many services off of Google’s infrastructure before the contract expires, but the effort is “running behind schedule,” putting some tools, including Smyte, a platform the company acquired in 2018 to bolster its moderation capabilities, in danger of going offline.
Thursday, June 29 — Some folks observe difficult sporadically with accessing Twitter links.
The New York Times reported new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino ordered Google to be paid after she spoke with the head of Google’s Cloud division.
Friday, June 30 — Persons attempting to access any Twitter page are unable to do so unless they are a logged-in registered user.
Elon Musk later confirmed access has been deliberately cut off for all outside users, claiming Twitter is being scraped aggressively.
There is a lot of speculation the service is degrading because Twitter didn’t pay Google, but NYT’s report suggested otherwise.
Saturday, July 1 — Twitter users note Twitter is down. Musk also tweets that users will be rate limited on the amount of tweets they can read each day.
Before the widespread outage, observers noted Twitter had been DDoS-ing itself:
Sheldon Chang 🇺🇸 @[email protected]
This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.The Twitter home feed’s been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.
In the first video, notice the error message that I’m being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.
The second video shows why it’s jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon’s latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.
This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.
Unbelievable. It’s amateur hour.
#TwitterDown #MastodonMigration #DDOS #TwitterFail #SelfDDOS
Jul 01, 2023, 11:03 · Edited Jul 01, 13:02
You can see the videos he shared at the link above.
Techdirt’s Mike Masnick offered his opinion about the rate limiting:
~ ~ ~
Meanwhile, at Mastodon:
Mastodon Users @[email protected]
12,916,975 accounts
+4,614 in the last hour
+34,484 in the last day
+108,119 in the last week[Graphic alt text: Four time-based charts
Upper blue area: Number of Mastodon users
Upper cyan area: Hourly increases of number of users
Lower orange area: Number of active instances
Lower yellow area: Thousand toots per hourFor current figures please read the text of this post]
Jul 01, 2023, 19:00
~ ~ ~
If there is more news in the next 12-24 hours about Twitter, I will update this post.