angelo, 10 months ago

Ok, false alert, sorry! After double checking actually most t.co links are working and also the #twitter archive contains a field "expanded_url" with the full URL! So the situation is much better than I initially thought.

Thanks for double checking and making me aware
@mittelwertsatz @jonny @brewsterkahle et al.

It is still a big risk, that twitter has the power to wall in those #links

#gatedcommunities #fediverse #web

jonny, 10 months ago

@angelo
@mittelwertsatz @brewsterkahle
you are and were 100% correct to not trust the shortened links tho. it's a good lesson to learn about how we can be made vulnerable to platform enclosure in ways we don't anticipate.

petrichor, 10 months ago

@jonny @angelo @mittelwertsatz @brewsterkahle not a false alarm but a timely warning: afaict they really were pushing t.co links through a login last weekend, as well as blocking access to tweets to non-logged-in users. this now seems to have been reversed, but they have now demonstrated that they're both willing and able to do this.

dalias, 10 months ago

@angelo How does that work? An extra level of redirection thru twitter.com now? Because t.co domain has no access to your Twitter session cookie.

angelo, 10 months ago

Someone should scrape all t.co links and build.up a database with the original links, or we will lose all of it eventually. Even the archives twitter gave us only contain those broken t.co links

graue, 10 months ago

@angelo Could be a legal angle here. That means the download your data tool doesn’t actually download your data — it’s missing the links you posted.

brook, 10 months ago

@angelo last year when I exported my archive, there was a tool I ran that expanded all of the shortened links to their full versions, I believe it was https://github.com/timhutton/twitter-archive-parser

Although with the change to require a login to access the shortened links, I'm not sure if it would work if you ran it now... :thinkingg:

brewsterkahle, 10 months ago

@angelo

https://t.co/xDhrGl9NmU works for me in incognito mode. so are they gated?

And the @internetarchive 's Wayback Machine has a large collection of archived t.co redirects.

angelo, 10 months ago

@brewsterkahle @internetarchive true it works. I only did test 2 or 3, perhaps I was wrong or something changed. Nevertheless we should not rely on it

brewsterkahle, 10 months ago

@angelo @internetarchive did the Wayback Machine have the ones you did not find? prepend web.archive.org/ to the URL.

jonny, 10 months ago

@angelo
the full links are actually in the backups (or at least they were the last time I made one) just not in the interface.

mmu_man, 10 months ago

@angelo well it's not like nobody warned about that…

chiefgyk3d, 10 months ago

@angelo this is why I'm eventually making my own link shortener for myself

Lockdownyourlife, 10 months ago

@angelo I'd been putting off moving all my threads over to other sites, guess it's finally time to do that. Le sigh.

esther, 10 months ago

@angelo one of those “we told you so” moments again

kkarhan, 10 months ago

@angelo #LinkShorteners are just bad - period!

stooovie, 10 months ago

@angelo does this also mean embedded tweets in like news articles won't show unless logged in?

jomo, 10 months ago

@angelo did they change that again? Or does it only apply to new links?

This one appears to be working: https://t.co/xZ6UzqXC67

float13, 10 months ago

@angelo

I'm curious what this will do to all the embedded twitter/instagram/etc. crap in news articles and everywhere else on the web.

Relying on a remote, dynamic, and in my humble opinion, hostile image/ embed source for archival, news, and general information purposes was a mistake from the beginning.

The dude's job in 1984 was literally to change these things on the fly as the powers that be see fit and they literally built the technical mechanism for doing that.

Right clicker is the right mentality.

jonny, 10 months ago

@float13
@angelo
after people started changing their usernames to be slurs and whatever when their posts would get embedded i was surprised to see news orgs continue to direct embed, but hey some lessons are hard to learn I guess🤷