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Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel

1 year ago

Sadly, important content is sometimes still posted (only) in the form of Twitter threads.

Short of signing up for an account, is there currently a reasonable way of reading those?

Just accept that it's lost. Like tears in the rain, yada yada. Some people don't want permanent chains of information, they prefer sand mandalas that are broken after completion.

After all, it's just a big fake bullshit. There are “fabulous kids clubs” in school. There are “limited membership” snake oil selling and paper medal awarding companies. There are social network services relying on invites and other stuff to make public believe being there is something valuable. It is clear as day that Twitter is at the stage where it has to inflate usage stats by requiring sign-in, and hold user data hostage because it's one of the remaining ways to make some money. If people decide to have a nice chat in a building that is getting demolished without thinking about consequences, it's their choice, after all.

All historic MySpace data was thrown out at some point. Have people killed themselves over that? No, they simply forgot. And you will forget all that, too.

  • This is not about past content that is lost, this is about future content that is still being posted there.

    Including things like info about security incidents that affect me.

    At least I think most government authorities have stopped posting life safety information there.

    • Then login and just sub to those channels? This isn't life/death situation. It's not complicated.

What do you mean by important? If it's something related to public safety (civil defence for instance) then it's a real issue that you as a citizen should fight. For everything else you could just stop engaging and hope that enough others do for the content creators to get the message.

  • Unfortunately, waiting for them to ‘get the message’ is a losing battle. The main issue i find is that non-tech related folks just don’t care enough about this stuff to move to different platform.

  • Yeah, it's unfortunate as it took years for governments/municipalities/orgs etc. to start posting stuff to Twitter and embracing that modern "information pipeline" (as opposed to, at best, a rarely-updated website). Now it's taking years for them to adopt or figure out a self-hosted/self-owned alternative.

  • Often people who witness live event report what they witness on twitter. Like the boston massacre or Jan 6th attack had a lot of people reporting important eyewitness post right on social media