I had a Twitter account for about a week that I posted with, after that I made a new one and never posted. The most toxic disgusting social media site I have ever been on. The one and only good thing about it was how the local governments where I lived used to make all announcements with it. I plan to bring my kids to the reading event at the library, better check Twitter. Oh it got moved an hour later. Also the local mass transit system used it.

Elongated Muskrat throttling legitemate twitter users to keep AI out the door seems to be a good thing for the Fediverse & Mastodon in particular.

Plus that makes two services on their way to the grave on the guise of "keeping AI out." *slow clap*

I just need a good worldnews and news sub on lemmy and I’ll be set. I enjoy following the Ukraine war through the worldnews sub.

You might want to also replace Discord if you care about your data.

It is like a manager at an oil company just torching the wells or a store owner closing the doors.

I said this when the sale first happened. Those billionaire Saudis didn't loan him the 8 bil needed to finance the sale, they gave it to him as payment for a job. And it's 100% the long tail of the Arab spring reaction

I don't think it's anything so specific, but the rich and powerful most definitely want to keep social media under their control so as to keep populations under control.

Though that's not about always preventing protests. They likely want destabilization to happen, just only in the countries they want it to happen in.

I mean if the goal was to prevent ALL protest, twitter would be boosting only happy thoughts and photos of kittens and puppies right now. But instead it's pushing some fascist shit. Not exactly stuff that promotes stability.

I never thought I'd get any enjoyment out of Twitter, but that is actually amazing.

It's about making it more difficult to get access to download all of Twitter for use in training AI. chatGPT was trained using Twitter and Reddit. And large language models like chatGPT are HUGE money makers and have insane potential. The AI industry is exploding right now, so Twitter, Reddit, and others are adjusting how you can access their content so they can charge big companies money for the right to use their data.

t could be due to coding issues

It's self inflicted. This is what happens when you turn API's off or make them unaffordable.

instead of using a low resource API entry, sites now switch to full on scraping which uses huge amounts of resources.

I feel like part of what caused it to explode is that some celebrities joined up early and it provided a tangible way for fans to interact directly with them. This was totally novel and completely unprecedented. Prior to Twitter you could watch Entertainment Tonight and read People magazine. Twitter let you directly contact celebrities.

I really couldn't care less about celebrities, which I have always thought is part of why Twitter has always felt kind of pointless to me.

But I fully recognize that for some people that's a huge draw and I do think it's a big part of what makes Twitter popular.

Each time a platform reaches enough popularity to attract an average voter, people starts to blame the platform for being stupid. I'm waiting for the day we collectively realize it's not the platform we hate, it's the average person.

It's the same thing that makes any social media attractive: everybody else is there and it's where things are happening. This critical mass of users is the hardest thing for a website to gain and the hardest to lose.

Unfortunately, I'm just seeing a wave of "here's my Bluesky account" tweets from the few holdouts I still followed on Twitter.

That's cool and all, Mr/Ms Internet Celebrity, but none of us peasants have access to that site.