Twitter in the ICU
By We may have reached the end of Twitter. Yesterday came a bunch of maladies, which I won’t list because my interest is not in deciphering what might be the disturbances in the code. The maladies affected a large number of Twitter users, how many is hard to guess.
Along with others, including Farley, I sat smugly in front of my Tweetdeck layout, which looked about as it always had. For some reason, Tweetdeck proved robust to Elon Musk’s dicking with the system. Until this morning.
My notifications no longer show up. I can still see my follows, those that are still posting during the deathwatch. I can get to notifications through a mildly convoluted process, but my ability to easily converse with others is severely damaged.
A great migration took place to Bluesky yesterday, so much that they had to disable new signups because the site was getting glitchy. It looked to me like a number of people who had signed up there as a backup suddenly became active yesterday.
Not only are my Twitter notifications gone, but threads don’t work well on Tweetdeck, although, as for the notifications, there’s a work-around. I will continue to monitor Twitter because there are people and accounts I want to continue to hear from.
It’s not clear what happened this time around. There is an ominous post from the former Twitter head of trust and safety. One of yesterday’s maladies was a message saying the user had exceeded their rate limits.
Twitter’s been good for many things. Paul Musgrave wrote a eulogy to the networking it allowed. It’s possible that Elon will be able to fix whatever he broke this time around. Or maybe not.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner