2y ago

Twitter locked behind login page.

So today I clicked a twitter link because companies like to use it for official announcements, only to be greeted with a login page. Was annoyed then I remembered nitter exists. It just prompted me to install Privacy Redirect which I should have done ages ago.

Github: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect

Chrome Web Store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-redirect/pmcmeagblkinmogikoikkdjiligflglb/related

Firefox Browser Add-ons: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-redirect/

Looks like twitter waited for the reddit API changes to do push this change to try to do it under the radar.

99 comments

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.
- Are all the news articles with embedded tweet widgets busted now?
  
  I just checked a random news article and embedded tweets seem to be working still. But when you click the tweet you get taken to the login page.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
- Our taxes should not go to padding twitter’s wallets
  Or just nationalize Twitter, make it a public utility like water, parks, roads, etc. Then it's not subject to the whims of some clownshow billionaire dictator. It could be the people's podium, not some damp troll cave.
Is the suggestion here that Twitter now requires a login to even view a tweet?
- It's not a suggestion. It's what they're doing right now.
  
  My statement is use of speech clarifying what @rooster_butt@lemm.ee is communicating, and its been confirmed as "yes".
  
  can you also tell me in what universe this wouldnt be a shotgun to the ~~knee~~ face?
- 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.
  
  To second this, it seems to be happening to me today too, as of this morning.
- 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.
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 not worth it.
  It's the sewage of the Internet, and the rats there brutally fight each other for the silliest of reasons.
- The only reason I use it is that not enough prominent people are on Mastodon and for me it's only good for being a quick way of seeing what's going on in media and politics.
  
  Downside is that it seems post elon twitter is far more far right infested, twitter algo pushes those agendas even when one constantly tries to block and press not interested on tweets and accounts.
  
  I wonder how many of those people are going to switch now that non-logged-in people can't even see their posts.
- twitter is the perfect place to have a screenshot of something you said in 2010 be put on blast so a bunch of college kids can scream about it and demand your corporation fires you
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.
- Can't believe I wasted 40 minutes on this, I shouldn't write this, but using Tor on Brave I was able to open an account without a phone number. Now I'll have to delete it...
Thank god, I deleted my twitter account this week.
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.
- beeing monolithic is not bad, its just an issue when its not FOSS.
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.
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).
Is Nitter working for you? Having trouble with a number of hosts this AM
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.
- Walled gardens are not a plus, no matter how much you might want to watch something wilt and die, restricting access to information doesn't help you nor I.
  
  It's good because open platforms will grow, this is how reddit got there. Actually this is how they all seem to start before greed takes over.
  
  No one should use Twitter for news and information considering how poorly it fights fakenews.
  If you wanna share something, use the actual source.
So are all social media companies racing to the bottom?
- I think we're reaching that point in the technology cycle where the money people have finally realized that running a social media platform is essentially unprofitable. People absolutely loathe ads and go to extremes to block them, and legislative and regulatory controls are starting to squeeze the manipulative aspects of social media such that what few ads the platforms can serve aren't as relevant anymore, and the data they collect from their users is protected in more and more jurisdictions.
  So they're bailing on the open platform idea. They're slapping paywalls up, putting things behind required-accounts, and trying to build a walled garden they can control.
  I wish them the best. I remember what happened to Prodigy, CompuServer, and AOL.
- Always have been
I can't wait for this stubborn jackass to kill off twitter to the point it becomes an unrecoverable decline.
- I never understood the appeal. I have friends that send me random twitter links and I'm like I don't understand wtf I'm looking at, it's difficult to tell who is talking to whom, and whatever it was isn't funny or interesting to begin with. I don't care what chucklefart69 has to say about a famous person. If I want to read the news, I'll read the news. I'm ok with not knowing about a major event breaking within the first 5 minutes of it happening.
  
  Right! I thought I was the only dumbass that found tweet structure extremely unintuitive and difficult to understand who was talking to whom
- the only way mastodon will ever get a chance, and even then, it's gonna be an uphill battle. even with zero competition, mastodon will struggle. Because its name fucking sucks. Dear gods. Who in their right fucking mind names a social media service after an ungainly lumbering beast that is world renowned for being EXTINCT.
  Maybe if they renamed the whole thing to something like "trunky", a bright and bouncy name like that might actually stick. Meanwhile, an elephant never forgets, etc. The unfortunate connection to the american conservative faction's mascot might still be a stumbling block, but it's not nearly as big a problem as it being currently called "mastodon".
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, gambling, micro transactions, season passes and online only requirements.
- Corporate greed and commercialisation of everything. Welcome to the dystopian hellhole we live in
  
  Yep, every company requires quarterly growth and hitting KPIs, so a bunch of assholes with no moral qualms about it will fuck everything to get higher bonuses.
  Its also why everything is subscription based these days.
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.
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.
Especially once you are mostly on alternative sites, privacy redirect is top tier.
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.
- Idk, it's given me a good reason to not load it
where were you when nitter die
i was at home shitposting on /g/ when phone ring
"nitter is kil"
"no"
This is super annoying. I was trying to read a news tweet but can't I don't have an account. They did this on a Friday and haven't commented on it means it's probably here to stay.
The enshittification continues. Cannot believe they are taking a page out of Pinterest, of all places.
...for a guy who doesn't like Facebook Elon sure likes to emulate it.
Reddit... And now Twitter can go right into the garbage. Not using the stupid official app and I am not making a Twitter account. Nope.
time to delete my already dead accounts
I could have sworn I read that the project was on hold, and it was advisable to use LibRedirect instead.
What nitter instance are you using? I'm getting an error message indicating an empty json document.
For you discorders, I noticed that fxtwitter is also broken due to an API change. Thanks Elon!
I wish Nitter plugins worked for Firefox Android.
- It does if you run nightly and set up a custom extension profile. I currently have all my desktop extensions on mobile.
Also nitter works no longer.
Either, or both. The Fediverse is the way forward for government announcements.
- It's pretty wild. Users are inherently lazy. Give a decent product where you can have a positive ROI on user engagement and sit back to rake it in.
  But actively be hostile to users and they are fickle as can be.
  I was on Reddit for 16 years with over 100k karma.
  And I've deleted the app I was using for it which they broke and switched app and habits over to Lemmy in less than 24 hours.
  Nothing like hubris with a dash of greed to ensure success for one's competition.
I thought Twitter had always required a sign in. I've never had a Twitter account so I'm always locked out.
- Lol, same
I don't know if I should be laughing or crying. It's readily apparent that Musk and Spez don't understand their product. Like, at all. Governments, politicians, NGOs, and businesses use Twitter because of the broad audience. It works as a platform for announcements because anyone can access it.
Locking it down to only Twitter users kills this. It isn't going to help ad revenue either to reduce the audience.
I saw some people say this was a tech issue and not a policy change, and that better be the case if Twitter wants to survive. They lose their last competitive advantage otherwise.
- My theory is that they are being sneaky and this is a trial to see how it will affect Twitter if they only made it to registered users. That is why they are calling it a "tech" issue. What a bunch of bollocks. This way they can backdown if they see a negative impact by claiming that they "fixed" the issue.

99 comments