This is pretty terrible really. Governments, cities, states use twitter for alerts and news. Now I have to agree to be tracked and monetized to view information from my government. I think everyone needs to write to all your cities, states, schools, law enforcement etc and demand they stop using twitter for anything. Our taxes should not go to padding twitter's wallets.
Now that Twitter has become what it is, I'm somewhat offended that my local government makes announcements on it. Hopefully this will be an impetus for them to stop... although many agencies use Facebook too, and FB and IG have been this way for years.
Lemmy is exactly what government bodies need. Anyone from other instances can see, vote and comment. They can limit sign up to only employees and their users immediately have an official seal of authenticity. @obama@whitehouse.gov
would be so cool.
They absolutely should be setting up lemmy or mastodon as official announcement sites. That would be a perfect platform.
I think they also want to be on twitter, fb etc for the distribution potential though.
I think Mastadon might be better for that.
I've worked in local level government communication. Most of the time your just trying to hit as many places as possible in a hopeless effort to keep an interested public informed. The price is usually low, the audience is there, and information can be duplicated to other platforms easily, so it generally makes sense to use social media.
That said, low engagement on a platform would be a great reason to consider cutting it out. A citizen with feedback is enough to spark the flame too.
As much as I hate the idea of Yet Another Social Media App, I kind of wish there was some sort of official government-specific platform that was only available to state/local/federal government(s) or organizations for making important announcements. No memberships required (other than posters or commenters), no likes, upvotes, or retweeting or whatever, just postings of information that people can get to from anywhere. Something completely untied from any corporate entities.
They could easily have their own websites based on Mastodon or Lemmy, not federated with anything.
The Brazilian government send SMS to people for alerts. It’s independent of apps, and everyone with a phone can get them.
Seems like a good solution for important warnings.
Omg, I went to twitter.com and it requires a login now. That's the end of that, I guess. Most people aren't going to sign up to see a random sentence written by some person that was linked to by some random website.
Same thing happened to Insta back when I used to lurk on it. They start requiring a login to view any content, so I just noped out. I don't care enough to make an account on every social media site.
Is the suggestion here that Twitter now requires a login to even view a tweet?
That's what I'm experiencing. Every tweet and even going to the main url results in a redirect to a log in splash page.
Well if that's the case Twitter is as dead to me.
Spez has talked about how he's trying to model Reddit on Musk's "success" with Twitter.
It would be hilarious if Musk set up Spez to take the publicity fall to cover Musk's plan to force Twitter for authenticated consumption only.
Twitter is way more prominent than reddit. I doubt that there's a secret plan
If anything, Splez is too dense to notice that Musk seems to be intentionally/unintentionally ruining Twitter. It's really hard to imagine how someone could look at "ad revenue down 70%" and think wow, that's what we need to emulate!
Why does there always have to be a secret play involved with musk? Can’t they just both be incompetent at leading a social media company? This is just another example of Hanlon‘s Razor…
People have a hard time with the fact that the richest man in the world isn't a genius.
Maybe not a secret play but definitely a dick move by Elon that surely benefits him.
To second this, it seems to be happening to me today too, as of this morning.
It's not a suggestion. It's what they're doing right now.
can you also tell me in what universe this wouldnt be a shotgun to the ~~knee~~ face?
My statement is use of speech clarifying what @rooster_butt@lemm.ee is communicating, and its been confirmed as "yes".
Yep. I wonder what this is going to do to their traffic. I know I’m not signing up.
I bet Reddit will follow suit.
Is there a way to control the image size?
There isn't an image size that makes Jeremy Clarkson look attractive, don't bother.
Good question, I have no idea. I wasn't even sure this was going to post. I just pasted the images in from the clipboard.
darn
Fuck Twitter. Garbage anyway.
The day I realized it was actively trying to make me furious by pushing notifications of incendiary tweets from people I didn't know existed or cared about writing about stuff I didn't find interesting but extremely toxic and offensive I stopped using it. It was before Elon took over, but when he did I deleted the account. It's such a toxic hellscape, I wish the official outlets I followed would just publish to Mastodon instead, but I'd rather just not see anything from that page, it's absolutely worth it.
It's the sewage of the Internet, and the rats there brutally fight each other for the silliest of reasons.
The fediverse really needs to work on usability, but this is yet another example of why monolithic services can never be the long term solution.
What makes this worse is that using Twitter pretty much requires one to give them your phone number. Accounts without one will often or eventually get locked for "suspicious activity" and given option to unlock the account by providing phone number.
So anyone thinking about creating throwaway account to browse twitter, don't bother.
Is Nitter working for you? Having trouble with a number of hosts this AM
So this must be a regional thing since I can get around the login page using a VPN. My personal opinion on the matter is that I'm at least expecting backlash from governments since officials like using twitter for official announcements. I do not expect this playing well for twitter since they are holding a public forum hostage.
Same here. I only browse, so I don't have an account and I don't plan on making one. This sucks.
Does it? It will only help to kill it off faster.
Especially once you are mostly on alternative sites, privacy redirect is top tier.
Thank god, I deleted my twitter account this week.
Wow, these companies are making it really easy for me to walk away. Thanks for the 15 years Twitter (I barely used you for the last 6 or so).
Maybe users will stop posting link to this site now that a lot of people can’t see it.
I see this as a plus.
I could have sworn I read that the project was on hold, and it was advisable to use LibRedirect instead.
I'm in panic, here in Portugal now I can't read the President's and Prime Minister's tweets. I'm gonna kill myself! s/
[Edit:] Nitter instances aren't working, guess I'll have to delete my forgoten account in that shitty site.
I can't wait for this stubborn jackass to kill off twitter to the point it becomes an unrecoverable decline.
Why does the internet seem to just continue getting shittier
Many of the services are ran by huge companies that are simply running out of ways to grow. This makes them try to gain more out of existing user base often through questionable ways.
Same thing has been happening for the game industry as well with premium games now having season passes, battle passes gambling, micro transactions and online only requirements.
[edit] corrected duplicate mention of season passes, intention was to mention battle pass instead.
I deleted my mostly unused account shortly after Musk started showing his crazy. Anything that makes it harder to use it accidentally is fine by me.
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