If like me, you only engage with Twitter to the extent of clicking on a link that takes you to a Tweet, reading it and then getting the hell out before the brain dead replies consume what little remains of your soul, then can I recommend Googling up an addon for your preferred browser that redirects Twitter to Nitter as a way around this new barrier to entry.
Nitter unfortunately does not work right now due to this change. Hopefully they will fix this somehow (probably by changing user agent to googlebot, because they still allow web crawlers)
Most of those servers are dead though (including some nitter instances). You will need to manually disable those that don't work and it's pain in the ass.
The second golden age of the internet is officially over.
Unfortunately the golden age was just a mirage, it was actually VC funds killing the ecosystem and offering impossible free services for over a decade.
We'll see if the internet can rebuild, but under the weight of spam and regulation and habit and clout chasing I'm not sure.
This is just going to speed the growth of Twitter alternatives like Mastodon, which is great, but it's sad to see such a once-innovative, widely-used platform degrade to this level of shittiness. All because of a deranged wealthy idiot with an unchecked ego. This was a communication platform, FFS!
seems like a great idea to me! everyone will rush to mastodon because this one actually costs them money and not just ideals and their soul which they have no use for right this second!
Absolutely wonderful. I love looking at art on Discord, opening the tweet to get the high res pic to save (Yes, I'm aware of adding ?format=jpg&name=large at the end of the URL, already had to do it for some pics), then being blocked. Or trying to see some sports news, then being blocked again.
I highly recommend using nitter instances to look at content from Twitter. And with the excellent LibRedirect extension, the process becomes seamless and you can bounce between instances as you please.
I really like being able to confirm that something isn't made up or blown out of proportion, being able to quickly check stuff like 'how many people even agree with this take (a lot of times people leave out the engagement of a post)' and 'is this a genuine person in the first place (check out their profile or other posts)' to not poison discourse with made-up issues
That said, as others in this thread have pointed to, libdirect should be encouraged so they can discourage traffic to the actual site
e: though nitter sadly seems to be out of commission for new tweets, rip
I'm pessimistic that this will actually change much, or drive users to Mastodon. Just like, as much as I've been loving my time with Kbin/Lemmy, I don't think people are ever going to leave Reddit. Most people appear to have a way, WAY higher bullshit tolerance than I do. It's sad. The old guard are unusable, and the new options are withering on the vine.
I totally agree on reddit, they will replace the mods and life will go on over there. But twitters appeal was the big audience, no? Lots of public service announcements, service status updates and public statements are posted there, tweets are often linked in newspapers etc.
All of that makes way less sense when tweets are not publicly available.
Mastodon has already become viable. I switched when there was court decision that Musk had to buy twitter and deleted my account there. At that time Mastodon was ghosttown - posts related to US were very very few and refreshing the page after a minute gave handful of posts. It changed as it achieved critical mass. By that time I had gotten used to mastodon which is not very user friendly and is different from twitter. Kbin/lemmy are much similar to reddit in that regard.
Now it does the main thing twitter did for me - telling me the news - what is happening around and what others think about that. And it is much better than twitter which was mostly clickbait. It lacks in terms of depth on specific topics, but general topics are there - though you have to know how to curate those.
The Fediverse has always been about following the right people. I've been there since 2017 and while the twitter refugees did add to the total amount if posts, tgere was plenty before. It's possible you didn't see it because you weren't following enough people.
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