Tag: twitter

I flipped the switch yesterday on my one remaining Twitter account, @tonzylstra, my original one. I registered in December 2006, so the account didn’t quite make it to 18 years. My Mastodon activity started spring 2017, so let’s see where that will be 11 years down the road.

I had stopped using my Twitter account (posted a redirect to my Mastodon account in 2018) and a year ago deleted the other ones I had (including that of my company), but held on to this one for nostalgia I think. Because even if at the end of 2006 I felt I was late to Twitter (I was an avid Jaiku user, a European better alternative that got acquired and was immediately killed by Google), my user ID and first (SMS!) message were well within the early phase of Twitter.

Last time I looked at my following timeline even that had deteriorated. Bad enough certainly to overcome any lingering nostalgia.

My user ID is number 59923, registered on Tuesday December 12th, 2006. Judging by the time, 10:36am, I registered during my regular 10:30 coffee break.

One minute later I posted my first message. It had ID 994313, so my Tweet was just within the first million messages on Twitter

Me in Everyone’s So Nice Around Here! (Best Before: See Back), after Musk acquired Twitter in November 2022.


A last look over the shoulder


Gone.

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Bookmarked Nitter is shutting down (by Alternative.to)

Nitter is a useful service to take a look at some content on Twitter without having to touch Twitter yourself. Sanitary gloves as it were, to access public Twitter content. It was also useful for sites to avoid embedding Twitter content directly and thus participating in their adtech tracking. It is now mostly impossible to look at Twitter content without being logged in, and Nitter helped solve that by providing an alternative front for it. I still have a Twitter account, but am never logged in, and I don’t intend to restart logging in regularly either. Nitter worked by using guest accounts on Twitter, a possibility that has since been discontinued by Twitter. Twitter is blocking calls from guest accounts to their APIs, and blocking the accounts when spotted it seems.

Zed, the developer behind the free and open-source Nitter project, has announced that the project is discontinued and not working anymore.

Altenative.to


Screenshot of a context menu of Twitter.com when clicking on the three dots at the top-right of an ad you want to remove. At the bottom is a new option ‘Report EU illegal content’.

Twitter (yeah, I know, but whatever) has added a reporting feature as a visible part of their European Digital Services Act (DSA) compliance efforts. There’s more interesting bits to the DSA to comply with for Twitter, and I wonder how many of ‘the DSA is thought police!*!$!?!!!’-types will submit false reports.

Bookmarked een tweet van Frankwatching

Niets is zo persoonlijk als een machine je hartekreet laten schrijven! Technische mediatie brengt je alleen maar dichter bij elkaar. Ik hoop dat het team van Frankwatching de ironie ziet van hun eigen tekst.

Hoe zet je AI in … om persoonlijker te communiceren?

Frankwatching

(overigens valt me ook op dat het opslaan van losse tweets in The Web Archive niet lukt. Eerder lukte me dat wel. Dan maar een screenshot, met de gebruikelijke caveat)

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It had been expected, Tweetdeck is now no longer available to me to follow Twitter topics and lists. Tweetdeck is only available to paying Twitter accounts. Earlier today it still worked for me as a non-paying account, now no longer. It went web-only a year ago before Twitter’s transition of ownership. Last month it became clear Tweetdeck would be limited to paying accounts. With Tweetdeck gone the last remaining shred of utility of Twitter for me dissolved.

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Twitter’s new management seems to want to limit the use of Tweetdeck to paying users only.

For many years, at least since the algorithm decided the timeline, I’ve used Tweetdeck as circumvention and as my interface to Twitter. It’s how I search for specific topics, follow some accounts, lists, tags etc. I had until recently some 70 columns in my Tweetdeck. Last year Tweetdeck became web only, and I suspected it wouldn’t be a net positive for my Twitter usage. It wasn’t. Mostly because it split up my different Twitter accounts over multiple tweetdeck set-ups where there used to be 1, and then made it harder to easily switch between accounts for posting and interacting. This last week it became mostly impossible to see any tweets when not logged in (which I never do on mobile).

All in all it looks like it’s time to discard Twitter fully. I haven’t posted in my accounts the last months, but kept the accounts if for nothing else than place holders. If even accessing Twitter is hobbled, then it’s finally time to let it go. One more platform that lives shorter than my own site.

Back in 2008 in presentations I used to share this list of what I shared online in which channel. Almost all of that is gone or disfunctional, where it used to be an integral part of my online interactions with my network.


A 2008 overview of social tools I used at that time. Slide from my 2008 talk at Politcamp Graz on networked life and work. Most of those tools no longer exist or I no longer use. Except for this blog.

I see lots of potential for social software still, and even again, just not social media.

[Update 2023/07/05: I have deleted all my topic oriented Twitter accounts and a few legacy ones, as well as my public main account (ton_zylstra). My private one (tonzylstra), I may keep for a while longer, unused though it is.]