The mention of RSS and Atom is kind of ironic and telling about the state of the web, yeah who knew decentralizing technologies like that were a good idea? Just everyone 24 years ago.
One of my favourite features of Friendica is that I can follow RSS feeds just as easily as I can follow people on Mastodon or Diaspora. To me it makes no difference whether a company chooses to post their status updates on a social media account or on RSS.
TBF smtp was more designed to be decoupled and not decentralized. Trusted peers and closed networks have left a plethora of engineers spending their days combating and expanding the email protocol to bake in security, anti spam, etc.
I just went to their status twitter; it showed me a status update from 2021, then one from 2020, then one from 2022. I... can see why they might want to avoid this. (It's unclear to me whether the random ancient tweets thing is a 'feature' or if Twitter is just broken).
If a service can't keep its own status page up (Twitter's has been an SSL cert error for months), you should perhaps consider not using it for yours.
Sure, but what are the majority of their customers going to do? X is an unstable platform that confuses most users, never mind the moderation problems.
Would be nice if they were adding a Mastodon account, but I can't blame any company that chooses to retire Twitter presence at this point.
The real problem with walled gardens is that people actively avoid going outside the wall. Who is actually not going to Slack's own status page when slack is down? People who would rather be wrong than inconvenienced.
In its heyday, using Twitter as an aggregator of alerts in a place that I was already receiving casual updates from was incredibly convenient. Tying that to conversation, it was easy to discern if this was a global impact caused by, for example, a failed deploy, or local, say a failing CDN endpoint. I truly don't think this is a case of folks opting solely for convenience over accuracy, so much as it added both convenience and context. Not to mention it was a useful canary in the coal mine, as declaring incidents on large platforms trigger SLA contract provisions, so we often see quite delayed reports from first-party sources.
To be fair, Twitter has began pushing algorithm mess onto their users far before the Musk take over. We really can't blame him for that. I was kind of hoping he would have at least tried to reverse it though.
Twitter profile pages showed all Tweets linearly from inception until about 9 months into Naughty Old Mr Car's tenure; he can absolutely be blamed for that.
The algorithmic stuff was only ever for users' feeds, not Twitter profiles.
Exactly. We could always see a user's own tweets in order by going to their page.
It's made the whole business of status updates completely unusable. If I want to find out why the fire helicopters are out, I can no longer see that on the fire department's Twitter page (even though they do post it!). If I want to find out if my local lake is closed due to algae, I can no longer see it on the park's page (even though they do post it!).
Pretty soon all these organizations are going to realize that their pages are worthless and leave Twitter.
> To be fair, Twitter has began pushing algorithm mess onto their users far before the Musk take over. We really can't blame him for that.
I don't think this is a very fair and honest take on the toilet flush spiral where Elon Musk placed Twitter. Screwing up the timeline made available to non-registered users is a recent development, and one that lands squarely on Elon Musk's rule over Twitter. So does the shitshow that was the verified badge policy changes and opening the floodgates to racist and anti-semitic content.
In fact, I dare say that there was not a single change to Twitter that spawned from Elon Musk's takeover that had any positive or neutral impact on the company in general and service in particular.
In all fairness if there is an active post it will be at the top and that's the main value of a status page, not so much about the right order of years-old outages.
No it won't. At least not for me, a not-logged-in user. What's an "active post" anyway? A pinned post is at the top, but what status page constantly pins and unpins their latest post?
When I go to most Twitter pages, now, I see completely random posts from years ago at the top.
That is not necessarily true. I don’t have an X account; if I go to Musk’s X page I see his pinned post followed by something from 2022. So Slack could always pin the most recent post but they’d still lose the progress of the incident.
> Sure, but what are the majority of their customers going to do?
Providing a status monitor/canary page does not force anyone to register an account or subscribe to a service. They can provide all sorts of push/pull notification options they can conceive. Once Elon Musk's Twitter restricted access to their API I'm afraid Twitter lost any relevance for this type of use case.
If I'm a random person who just heard that Joe Biden tweeted something, I can't see that tweet by going to his Twitter page. That's a pretty goddamned terrible experience right there.
It's also not clear that I'm just seeing the most popular tweets — no other social network has that experience for logged-out users.
If I've heard someone tweeted something, it's almost always in the context of a news article which embeds the tweet. Even if the embed doesn't work, the direct link to the tweet should.
I agree wholeheartedly that Twitter shouldn't be the primary vehicle for official communication from just about anything (except maybe Twitter itself).
In Japan, it’s not uncommon for companies or governing bodies to announce something _only_ on Twitter.
This can be anything from websites announcing maintenance to a public safety announcement. For example, the district I live has a disaster announcement account on Twitter.
At least for people here, using Twitter only for status updates while not logged in is a very common thing.
> In Japan, it’s not uncommon for companies or governing bodies to announce something _only_ on Twitter.
Not just in Japan.
But the practice, much like the one of using Facebook or other such service exclusively, has always been a Very Bad Idea. Perhaps such entities will finally abandon it entirely.
I want to see what someone is tweeting -> go to a site that isn't Twitter is not really the response that sparks joy. They're really risking the network effect with this round of mad strategy. If people can't read tweets there is a massive gap for competitors to move in to.
Although I do enjoy the sublime wonder of how between Twitter and the Twitter clones everyone in this space has concluded that to display a 280 character text message they require somewhere between a full Javascript web app or that and an account. It is a pity that HTML is not up to the challenge of these hard times.
> If you're not signing up, there's no network effect.
This is blatantly false. In the past, Twitter links, both to tweets and to user timelines, were widely shared through third-party services, including major news outlets.
I want to downvote your comment, but it's really X and their engineering team I want to downvote.
I don't want to use a third-party client to access a fucking website for it function logically.
I want X to always show me the most current post someone has made. I'll decide to scroll down on my own if I want.
This is also why I don't use it much. To be fair, Twitter had this same problem - at least so far as I can remember, it did. I didn't see much value in Twitter and I don't see much value in X, at least not in it's current state.
> I want to downvote your comment, but it's really X and their engineering team I want to downvote.
The issues you mentioned were not engineering problems. They are all Product Manager diktats. Screwing over the timeline of non-authenticated users is a business requirement, and one which Elon Musk's Twitter decided to change recently.
>> It's unclear to me whether the random ancient tweets thing is a 'feature' or if Twitter is just broken
They started doing this a few months ago. It means if you want to see a persons latest tweets, you have to login/create an account. It's infuriating. A stupid growth tactic. My workaround for now is using Nitter. I can see how businesses linking to their Twitter (e.g. as a source for 'updates' on anything) would have issues with this.
> It means if you want to see a persons latest tweets, you have to login/create an account. It's infuriating. A stupid growth tactic.
It's a dark pattern, and one which only the most desperate services implement as their last desperate attempt to force users to register and login at the expense of eliminating any value the platform has to them.
Oh, yep, I know they've been doing it for a while, but I'm unclear on whether it's actually _intentional_; it could be a really stupid product decision, or just more brokenness.
Yeah this is easily the worst change I have seen on Twitter since the takeover. I have completely stopped using the site because of it. I need to use Nitter or Google Previews when looking up an account and even then it's bad. It pretty much has forced me to just never rely on twitter for any at the moment information and use other sources.
I can't find a bad tls cert for any twitter front end ATM.
9/10 times TLS cert errors are bad cacheing, clashing between browser cipher suites, bad intermediates/roots being on devices etc. Especially on mobile, more especially on android.
But, I also can't find this status page you mentioned. So maybe I'm missing it and twitter actually is incompetent?
I got the same on the Slack one, and also just checked my own profile while logged out and it just redirects to a login page. I wonder what makes an account get shuffled vs not shown at all.
... Wait, so they _have_ a working one... but https://status.twitter.com, which has been the status location for about a decade, has had a broken cert for months?
Is there anyone left working there at all, or is it just Elon roaming the empty corridors as Jason Calacanis follows him telling him how marvellous he is?
If you accept the invalid cert (which is apparently a wildcard cert for *.twimg.com of all things) then it redirects to https://status.twitterstat.us/, so I guess that's the new one? Super unprofessional to leave the old one with an incorrect cert for so long.
The company renowned for their CEO using a pocket knife to unplug servers straight from the server room is not expected to do stellar work managing certificates.
Yes, because a company like Slack lacks the resources to implement a frontend that posts updates in multiple places...
Joking aside, I'm a bit shocked that X is being used for Twitter, and we just have to go along with this. I can't understand how a letter is allowed to be a trademark. It feels wrong like allowing a company to call themselves The University or The Army.
Strangely, I'm not sure why Sting's old band doesn't iritate me with it name.
Anyone can use such a name and maybe even get a trademark filed, but my understanding (IANAL) is that defending their trademark (i.e in court) will be much more difficult. Just a quick search on USPTO.org shows a ton of "X" trademarks and some even relating to social media that aren't Twitter's.
Sure, anyone can use any name, but should they? For instance there have to be some limitations on calling yourself General Hospital unless you actually have a medical license.
There are other laws around how you can use names. For example, only companies with a banking license can be called a bank. That's why many holding companies are called Bancorp.
It's intentional that trademark registration is reasonably easy, but enforcement is more thorough. When (say) 99% of trademarks are not contested, this saves the government agencies substantial resources.
Think of it like a software optimisation where edge servers cache files when they are requested for the first time, but not proactively when 99% of files are not requested.
> Yes, because a company like Slack lacks the resources to implement a frontend that posts updates in multiple places
Twitter killed their free API and apparently their replacement doesn't work properly[0]. Probably not worth trying to work around it for Slack any more.
> The company wants to ‘focus resources on those most widely used by our customers.’
I wanted to do the same last year, but interestingly nobody of my audience went off from X to mastodon, so I still have to post my film industry updates to X.
Similarily when WhatsApp changed its Terms of Use to be incompatible with german privacy laws (using whatsapp content for facebook profiling), I had to give up whatsapp as primary communication medium in the local club I'm leading. But nobody else went to Signal, so now we are back again with whatsapp. Nobody cares
On the other hand NPR found that leaving twitter had no impact on traffic[0]. I'm sure the millions of accounts following NPR didn't move to other platforms, so that leave the conclusion that Twitter was never a great driver of traffic for certain platforms to begin with.
Of course I'm sure this depends on each accounts circumstances.
"No impact" doesn't seem quite accurate considering they lost more than half of their Twitter traffic. It did only account for a small part of their total traffic though so I understand what you mean.
With this said, it sounds like NPR had no idea why they used Twitter. My best news source is a paid service that summarizes every article in the headline. It gives them both money and tremendous power to set the narrative but few clicks. NPR instead measured their success in CTR which seems like a strange measurement for the genre, especially when you don't get your main funding from ads.
I think it’s just the start of the “the emperor has no clothes” iceberg that is social media. I actually think GP is on to something with their “nobody cares” bit, because if people aren’t going to follow you outside of X then they probably don’t really care about what you’re sharing. There is obviously a lot to be said about the large “community” but in many ways but if it’s just a lot of “talk” then where is the actual value in it? If “hits” don’t correlate to actual product sales then it’s just a waste of time, and how likely are you really to sell your product to people who won’t even bother following you outside of X?
> If “hits” don’t correlate to actual product sales
But that's kinda what I was targeting. I have friends that make a living by successfully funnelling their Twitter followers to Substack. What is a product sale for NPR? For some reason, NPR's KPI is measured by CTR for tweets like this:
"Disney's animated hit movie Moana is getting a live-action remake, the company announced Monday. The new version of the 2016 movie is under development, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who played the character Maui, said in a video."
Why would anyone click on that? It doesn't make much sense to me.
That’s a mental shortcut. Social circle you decided to be in doesn’t care.
On the other hand I did research on WhatsApp vs. alternatives and decided to promote Telegram. Sure, it’s not that/very secure, but UX is on completely different level than Signal. It was much easier to transition people on aesthetics alone in comparison to Signal which has its own “quirks” (making sense from security standpoint but perceived as anti-features for casual user e.g. history transfer).
I took the phones of my parents and siblings to install Telegram on them myself ;) My brother and sister use it sporadically, but I still can send them messages knowing they will read them sooner or later. My parents are more proficient with it than me, now :).
This was always the problem. Your social media environment and opsec too relies largely on your social graph that you have no control over. Maybe LLM based scraping/automation solve this mid-long term?
Moving to telegram doesn't make sense at all if you are worried about your privacy, it's not encrypted and they have access to all of your messages, a huge downgrade.
If one entity controls: the server, the protocol and all possible clients; then you are still trusting the intermediary.
Its not like its a significant difference honestly. I know people beat the E2EE drum and they definitely should: but that only makes sense if the clients are disconnected from the transport. IE: ensuring that collusion between them is less possible.
Though storing things on the server is something telegram then has to secure on your behalf, it does provide a tangible UX improvement.
There is still a significant difference between "the company could theoretically mitm your communications with some effort" and "tech support can read your logs for the lols". Telegram is cleartext and by 2023 standards complete ass.
I think you're still attributing more effort than is actually necessary to sideline your protection from encryption.
Telegram supports open source and third party clients, so if you wanted the benefits of E2EE with a popular chat network then that's a better way to go. Custom clients on the telegram network.
It is best is to use something like Element/Matrix though, for sure. But if you're trading UX for convenience then materially the difference really is a lot smaller than you imply.
Let's not forget that telegram does support e2ee. And having an open source client means that you can trust it actually being e2ee much more than you can with whatsapp.
Except that they are too cool to use peer-reviewed reasonable encryption protocols.
By switching their optional E2E encryption from their weird proprietary thing to the Signal protocol, Telegram could at least display some goodwill – but only making that the default would show that they actually care about their users privacy.
Last time I used whatsapp on desktop (admittedly a few years ago), the user experience was that I needed my phone around to unlock it every once in a while, because the desktop client was disconnecting every time the phone went into a deeper power save mode.
The desktop client requiring me to constantly have the mobile with me defeats the purpose.
It doesn't do that anymore, but I'm guessing that the way it's done now comes with a privacy cost.
Still... It's an excellent product. Default e2ee, notifications on partner key changes. The main thing I'd like from it would be an option to block me from sending messages until I reauthenticate the partner, or a colour coded system like threema that serves as a reminder that without authc you really don't know who you're chatting with.
Meanwhile WhatsApp and Signal's privacy model ensures everyone you talk to has your phone number which means they have the ability to make your device buzz at any time of the day and night. It also excludes people who do not have a phone number.
On Telegram, I can be in rando messaging groups of people and have a username rather than a hard-to-change, legacy voice traffic routing number that's widely used for tracking.
The only improvement is if they could get rid of the requirement that you use a phone number to sign up for these services, which is a regression from AIM, MSN, ICQ, IRC and Jabber/XMPP.
> The only improvement is if they could get rid of the requirement that you use a phone number to sign up for these services, which is a regression from AIM, MSN, ICQ, IRC and Jabber/XMPP.
That would only lead to one thing: absurd amounts of spam.
And as far as I know, Telegram still requires a phone number (or some crypto nonsense) as a primary identifier and for signups. They just allow you to hide that from your contacts.
Yup, I do. It's a great place to talk to myself and nobody else.
A bunch of people I know who play video games are on Telegram. I'm pointing out that I can talk to them without sharing my phone number which I can't do on WhatsApp/Signal.
Not being stalked by weirdos is a higher priority for a lot of people than anything involving spooky Edward Snowden stuff involving the NSA, FSB, GCHQ, Mossad and Five Eyes etc.
Element is already better than most other Messenger Frontends. Matrix is becomming incredibly sexy. Also Element is working on element-x android and ios that is using the Matrix Rust SDK.
Also matrix spaces is more elegant than telegram folders.
> Moving to telegram doesn't make sense at all if you are worried about your privacy
Depends on the threat model. If you're being in opposition to Western governments, you can be relatively sure that Telegram will stick the finger to them and not cooperate beyond occasionally shutting down public channels that promote violent terrorism and thus garner media attention.
A private company having apparently access to all my messages (it's not true, there is encryption) is still somewhat better than meta AND the whole US government having access to my data
Who has the keys?
What exactly is encrypted? 1-2-1 chats? Group chats? Attachments? Are metadata handed over? Dear Autumn12 don't just read the marketing material.
In a real example: Apple's Cloud has a copy of most users' data as (by f...g default) when you activate an iphone it enables them all. I remember the case with that terrorist (was it the Boston Marathon guy?) that Apple wouldn't hack the device but they handed everything they had on their cloud to FBI.
Op claimed it's not encrypted. Which again is simply wrong. Other than that you'll find details about their p2p encryption here https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end if you want.
I don't know what you want to say with your example, but there are dozens of examples where telegram did not give out data even thought they likely should have. It's definitely a more private choice to apple or meta
Who didn't see this coming from a million miles away? Federated protocols are a disaster for the average user. (And yes - that ABSOLUTELY includes email).
> interestingly nobody of my audience went off X to mastodon
Did you really expect otherwise? A niche platform only cared for by a niche of a niche of a community?
When X has 500million users and Mastodon 10million. 400m monthly daily users verses 100,000. Tens of millions of app downloads vs not even 250k total...
I just don't see it. Even just raw numbers and probabilities it would be unlikely
And then compare interesting discussions and engagement you have on this much smaller Fediverse already with your few-follower account. Xitter is broadcast-mostly influencer garbage network.
> but interestingly nobody of my audience went off from X to mastodon, so I still have to post my film industry updates to X.
There's lots of products which allow you to post to both at the same time. Unless you're posting to alternative networks, the next person will run into the exact same issue, and the one after that, and...
100%, and if you try to force it you just find that people are just more inactive and won't answer.
So it's either prioritize your social life or digital privacy.
yeah i know how you feel on the whatsapp/signal, I quite involved in a sports club of 400+ people and along with that and most of my friends couldn't get anyone to leave whatsapp behind, so still with it...
After all the data scandals and leaks you'd think people would be beginning to care but no one does
> Similarily when WhatsApp changed its Terms of Use to be incompatible with german privacy laws (using whatsapp content for facebook profiling), I had to give up whatsapp as primary communication medium in the local club I'm leading.
Did they do that in Germany? The ToS didn't change in France precisely because it was incompatible with GDPR and previous EU rulings[1], and I thought their new ToS didn't apply to the EU at all.
Indeed, I haven't visited an X link in awhile, more and more of the things I follow are cropping up in other places - this person seems to have been defeated quite easily.
There is a non-zero chance that something bad could happen with the domain,
or something else that would prevent people from visiting the status page.
Using an independent 3rd party provider for such communication is, in my
opinion prudent.
I believe that there are a few companies who run services for it.
Personally, I do not want the hassle of having to set up, and
maintain a list of various RSS, ActivityPub, pubsub, whatever else for every tech vendor I am in contact with.
It is a good use case for Twitter.
(even though they suck)
It already happened that some company messed with the domain of one of their products and was not able to communicate it on a status page hosted on that very domain. The usual workaround was to check their Twitter page but that's less and less likely.
To recap: it's better to have separate domain for status reports.
> There is a non-zero chance that something bad could happen with the domain (...)
If something happens with the domain that prevents you from accessing the service, the page works as intended by being down. I mean, what do you think users will say when they go to the domain and their browser shows an error?
What exactly leads you to believe that each and every employee of Slack would fail to notice that each and every single service accessed through the domain slack.com was down?
> - If they have a fix ETA
I never saw a single status page that provided that. At all. In fact, the most reliable status monitoring services tend to be crowdsourced third-party services, which obviously do not track ETAs for fixes.
> Any other problems related to their service which I haven't noticed
I see no reason why that could not be provided through the company's domain.
> Domain / IP could perhaps be inaccessible only from certain locations, and staff could be unaware in that case.
Your hypothetical scenario either involves a regional deployment being down, which I would be very surprise if any non-amateur setup didn't tracked with canaries, or if there's a problem with how the internet is being routed, which is something that's beyond the control of any team but canaries would also flag.
> what do you think users will say when they go to the domain and their browser shows an error?
- Is my internet down? Can I access any page?
- Is that a region accessibility issue for my location?
- So they killed the status service and I won't know when the main service is back.
The outage scope and estimated time to be back online may not matter much if you just want to check the latest memes. But if you're coordinating some product launch / promotion, this may be very important info. Even more so if that idea of "everything app" ever materialises and the question becomes "so when can I make that payment".
...and in a few seconds the same user opens google.com. What then?
> - Is that a region accessibility issue for my location?
Why does a user care? A user only cares if they can access the page from where they are at that moment.
> - So they killed the status service and I won't know when the main service is back.
Users check if the main service is back by hitting F5 to try to access the main service. Either it's up or down. If they can't access the service, it makes no difference if they can access the status page or not, because they already have their answer.
I think you're trying very hard to overthink and overcomplicate something that's quite simple and straight-forward. All a canary does is check if the service is up, and possibly track uptime as well.
> Either it's up or down. If they can't access the service, it makes no difference if they can access the status page or not, because they already have their answer.
This is just categorically false. The difference between "something went wrong", "we're looking into it", "we've found the problem and are working on a fix", and "we have a fix and are deploying it region-by-region" is huge. If an upstream dependency of mine is having issues, I need to communicate it to my clients/users as well, and they also want to know this stuff. E.g. a lot of people use Slack with external users for support and collaboration. The scope of the outage will determine if I should try to onboard them to a new system as quick as possible or wait it out.
But this isn't just about Slack. It could be any service operating at any scale, with varying levels of support. Employees might be asleep, it might be that just my subdomain/project is having issues, it could be planned maintenance, maybe an issue with the hosting provider. As a customer I want to know all of that, and as a business I feel obliged to provide it.
> The difference between "something went wrong", "we're looking into it", "we've found the problem and are working on a fix", and "we have a fix and are deploying it region-by-region" is huge.
It's also a figment of your imagination.
No service provider provides those fine-granular updates. Even AWS shows their services as up when they are clearly major outages going.
The only reliable services tracking outages are third-party canary services that rely on crowdsourced reports, and obviously those don't come even close to providing any insight onto progress.
I think you're confusing your own wishful thinking with real-world implementations of status reporting services.
Isn't there the same chance that any domain has that chance? I'm struggling to see how Slackstatus.com is any safer than status.slack.com. Genuinely curious - I'm not trying to start an argument:)
A change that is capable of bringing down slack.com will probably take down status.slack.com too. Whereas slackstatus.com would (hopefully) be more isolated from such failures.
It's true that your overall chance of failure is now higher, what you really don't want is for both to be down at the same time.
Not necessary true. As long as status.slack.com is it's own separate A record, as long as you don't change the DNS Zone for slack.com, they are pretty much separate. Now, if they use a WildCard SSL for *slack.com and that goes down, then yeah. But other than that, having it on a sub domain shouldn't be a major issue. Also, I'd much more trust the status.slack.com subdomain than slackstatus.com, which might be some 3rd party thing.
I can't help but wonder why a company retiring a script that syndicates status update to another website is at all newsworthy (or a good enough idea to be worth the possible confusion this might cause to consumers who find it valuable to receive status updates via that medium.)
_In itself_, it's not. But the death of Twitter as a semi-reliable place to put status updates (it doesn't really work at all for non-logged-in users for this purpose anymore) is arguably noteworthy. Maybe we'll even see an RSS renaissance!
> or a good enough idea to be worth the possible confusion this might cause to consumers who find it valuable to receive status updates via that medium.
I assume they're trying to _avoid_ confusion. If you go to their status twitter right now, unless you're logged in, it shows you an incident from 2022.
Meanwhile a recent survey published last week showed that Twitter reach in Sweden was at an all-time high this year. Newspapers left with the argument that no one uses the service, despite there being twice as many real users as when they celebrated the site. Now this claim from Slack that they don't have resources for autoposting messages?
The death of Twitter seems quite questionable and mostly political.
An unspecified survey in Sweden claimed that more people were using Twitter? Oh, well, my apologies, showing incidents from the last four years in a random order must be a sensible way to run a status page, then.
Like, seriously, what on earth are you talking about?
I'm replying to his claim about "the death of Twitter". Unfortunately I can't edit my original comment to add the source but now when I'm on my computer I can provide it here. It's a yearly survey from the organisation in charge of the top domain .SE
So the question asked was:
> Question: What social networking sites/social media have you used in the past 12 months?
And it is noted elsewhere that the survey was taken before the rebrand in June. So I don't think this _actually_ tells you as much about Twitter in 2023 as the title implies. What this really says is that more people claimed to have used Twitter in 2022 than in 2021, maybe with some overlap into 2023 at the edges. Of course, it also says nothing about the nature of that use.
Anyway, that's irrelevant, as I didn't say Twitter is dying, I said:
> the death of Twitter as a semi-reliable place to put status updates
I absolutely stand by that; again, it is showing random incidents from the last four years in random order on their status twitter unless you're logged in. That makes it clearly unusable for status updates.
I would not, by the way, that even if it meant what you thought it meant, it would not be _great_ evidence against the death of Twitter, in that it's scoped to a single country. On that basis, you could claim that Orkut, or Bebo (depending on country chosen) was the dominant social network of the late noughties.
Could I ask you to point me to the part of the report that shows that Twitter reach in Sweden was at an all-time high this year? My Swedish isn't great, so I'm having trouble finding it.
Because social media is at an inflection point. That is of interest.
And the small pieces of signal related to that are of interest, because while incomplete and noisy, they are the best indication we have of what's next.
Edit you work for Discord my friend surely you can see that something is happening here?
For me it’s an indicator, we used to see social media / Twitter as convenient and accessible, to the point of being able to use it as a status page; now a popular company has decided that it will no longer do that.
Clicks. There are no articles every time a new service starts using Twitter. And there are thousands every day. Each time one stops using Twitter, there's an article, and people click and comment. As to why people are interested in people and companies leaving Twitter, your guess is as good as mine. I suspect a lot of people are annoyed with the state of social media today and are cheering for its demise.
This seems to be a key element of Twitter's success that Musk does not understand.
Much of the utility of Twitter was that it provided a record of all sorts of public communications, from automated updates about a museum being closed, to weird jokes that went viral across different social networks, to a rambling thread about a sex worker's trip to Miami that was made into a movie, to updates from people who were near the epicentre of earthquakes, to resignation statements from prominent politicians.
People like Musk who spend all day on Twitter might plausibly pay for it. But part of the reason for that is because everyone not on Twitter could see that important things happened there, and everyone who was on it got to feel like they got to be part of the first draft of history.
If you try and research internet drama (including internet drama of wider import) from a few years ago, you simply run into the impossibility of seeing embedded tweets w/ replies or accessing whole threads.
> Moving forward, the Slack Status site, https://status.slack.com, will be the source of truth for all incident news. Alerts will also be available through the RSS and Atom feeds linked at the bottom of the Slack Status home page.
I am surprised how this was not what they went with originally — a dedicated, google-indexed status page that they have full control over, and an RSS feed for those who really want to be notified. It just is so more mature and self-reliant than posting service updates to a social network...
It is what they went with originally. Posting updates to Twitter was an additional channel for status notifications, a channel which they are now ending.
Because that's where people are. A status page is only usable when you already know about the issue and check to see if it's known and on their end. A tweet on the other hand makes you aware about the issue even before you've noticed. It's like getting a notification on breaking news so you turn on the TV or click through to read about it.
> Air France, according to an April message, no longer does customer service over X direct messages “since Twitter has changed their conditions”
This is a pretty sad news. For a while you could publicly shame a company and exert some pressure to get things moving a little. We're back to ticketing systems only, and I don't think it's a good news
devolution of the old social-media-glued-together internet will be a great opportunity. Its poison was its focus on censorship, and ironically even the removal censorship is proving to be poisonous. I find all social media, including reddit to be insufferably high on censorship, to the point where i have to ask myself how much different is china nowadays. More and more people who matter are leaving to closed groups or back to the decentralized media. The followers will follow
I like 9Gag precisely because it’s uncensored. But it’s clearly ground zero for both superpowers’ propaganda. It’s like an unpoliced area, flush with crime.
