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)

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.

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.]

Bookmarked Twitter Has Stopped Working in NetNewsWire (by NetNewsWire)

By the end of the month the free tier of the Twitter API will disappear. Some apps using the API will stop doing so because of too high costs to continue, such as Brid.gy. Others are being kicked out by Twitter itself even before the deadline at the end of April, such as Netnewswire. These steps have one thing in common: they disable the ability of reading Twitter without using Twitter directly. Tightening the walls of the silo, in short. The Web is much better off with at least semi-permeable boundaries between services, so that one can interact and read from their own preferred perch. That of course clashes with various business models, although at this point I’m not sure Twitter knows what its businessmodel is supposed to be.

Twitter suspended NetNewsWire today. …. Twitter has stopped working a little sooner than expected. We’ll have updates to NetNewsWire soon that stop trying to connect to Twitter

Bookmarked So long, Twitter API, and thanks for all the fish (by Ryan Barrett)

The Twitter API is moving to paid tiers for anything but the tiniest use cases by the end of the month. I’ve been using Brid.gy to get back webmention notifications about interactions on Twitter with my blogposts here. Brid.gy depends on the Twitter API obviously, and the scale of their needs puts them above the free and affordable tier, even if well below the more expensive tier above it. Therefore Brid.gy will stop supporting Twitter. Silo’s gonna silo I suppose.
It does help remove an action from my backlog: changing the way I show such backfeed on my blog without going counter to Twitter users’ common expectations of where their interaction and avatar might end up.
Unless Musk changes his mind once again, or can’t find an employee capable of implementing the changes.

…assuming it sticks, Bridgy Twitter will stop working on April 29, if not before.

Ryan Barrett