Rate Limit Exceeded

[rynling]

Yesterday, Elon Musk rolled out a new policy for Twitter. There are now "daily reading limits" for different tiers of accounts. This policy was implemented without much thought. For example, opening a tweet thread counts as "reading" all of the comments on all of the tweets in the thread, meaning that it's possible to the exceed your daily limit with just one tweet. Given the giant protests in France and Israel, and well as the recent Supreme Count decisions and mass shootings in the United States, this isn't as unlikely as you might think.

Because Twitter had to send out so many error messages to users, it has essentially staged a DDS attack on itself, causing several service outages yesterday afternoon.

Based on reporting by NPR and the Washington Post, a probable cause for what's going on is: (a) Musk fired roughly half the staff at Twitter, and the team is suffering from a severe labor shortage, and (b) Twitter has lost so much money during the past year that they can no longer afford to pay their server costs.

This is obviously frustrating, but Twitter has been in severe decline since last November. Everyone threatened to move to Mastodon, but all of the accounts I've seen there are lonely and sad and have no engagement. Instagram is becoming more hostile with each passing week as it tries to mimic the endless scroll of videos on TikTok, and many creatives have abandoned the platform entirely over the past few months. TikTok continues to be the death of culture.

Meanwhile, Reddit is even more of a trashfire than usual, with the "Reddit blackout" protest against API changes going on for almost a month now. Half of the boards are dark, and the other half are unmoderated. As a result, a lot of Reddit users have migrated to Tumblr (which means that I now have all sorts of people jumping onto my posts to try to explain Legend of Zelda to me). All the while, Tumblr continues to roll out site updates that make its user interface even more difficult to navigate.

The internet continues to burn. What a great time to be an emerging creative. 🙃

Comments

[lassarina]

There was a really good article somewhere (I will try to dig it up sometime when I am not about to run out the door to meet friends) about how Mastodon is intentionally newbie-unfriendly and thus people will not migrate to it without migrating to the Really Big clusters, which both makes the cost of hosting those prohibitive and destroys the idea of "small distributed clusters all talking to each other."

[lassarina]

Aha, I found it with one google search, I'm amazing: https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/06/12/why-did-the-twittermigration-fail/

[rynling]

Thank you so much for sharing this blog post. It's really interesting, and I've shared it on a few Discord and Slack servers. People who know way more about computers than I do responded to say that everything in the blog post and its comments is 100% true, and that the writer is actually being very levelheaded and polite.

It seems like everyone is migrating to Bluesky Social this time around. I joined their waitlist, but alas. I haven't yet been able to get a coveted invite code. I'm having flashbacks to when I had to start aggressively harassing everyone I know in fandom to get an invite to AO3. 🙃

[lassarina]

Given the OTW's everything at the moment, that seems ominous.... XD

Yeah, I thought the blog author did a good job of pointing out the flaws in Mastodon et al. without getting too deep into proselytizing one way or the other. I say this as someone who uses Linux at work and Mac at home and occasionally does run face-first into "I need this thing that only works on Windows": that 2% failure rate can really chap one's ass when it's something that would make your life way easier. And frankly most people cannot handle Linux. Hell, I do this for a living and some days I can't handle Linux.

I hope your invite comes through soon!

[feast_of_regrets]

This is the best summation of our present train wreck I have seen. Life in interesting times!

[rynling]

And now, not even a week later, there's the whole mess with Threads.

Interesting times indeed. 🫠