- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Attached: 2 images This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself. The Twitter home feed’s been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying. In the first video, notice the error message that I’m being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right. The second video shows why it’s jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon’s latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in. This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS. Unbelievable. It’s amateur hour. #TwitterDown #MastodonMigration #DDOS #TwitterFail #SelfDDOS
There’s some real fallout from it though. I ditched Twitter probably a decade ago, as soon as I picked up Reddit, honestly. But I do have a friend of mine that’s an author, and Twitter has been instrumental in promoting his books and establishing his fan community. There are so many people like that, and for their sake it’s a damn shame Musk has decimated Twitter.
Bingo.
“Just switch to Bluesky or Mastadon” doesn’t work for artists who have spent years building up their customer base on Twitter.
It’s a hard lesson to learn, but putting your eggs in one basket sometimes leads to losing all your eggs. Monolithic social media servers are attractive due to their ease of use, but this is the risk.
Of course, this is a very fair point. Ideally, people would be willing to leave Twitter to join the artists, authors, etc. they follow. But unfortunately, many just won’t care enough about Elon’s buffoonery to ditch the convenience that Twitter provides.
However, I think there’s a middleground between staying on Twitter and moving all operations to Mastodon. People could establish a profile on Mastodon for the people that do care so that those people can move knowing that they’ll still be able to see their favorite artists. Unfortunately, I imagine this is more difficult to do with Elon’s ban on links to alternatives (unless that’s been reversed at some point).