Notification: Twitter Rate Limits
Yesterday Elon Musk set Rate Limits on the number of tweets that you can view but even worse than that he made it impossible for anyone to view tweets unless you have a Twitter account (and therefore a log in). My website uses Twitter as an information source and I often embed tweets which is relatively easy as Twitter provides the embed code.
According to Musk, so much data was scraped “that it degraded the service for normal users.” In a later tweet, he clarifies: “Almost every company involved in AI, from start-ups to some of the largest companies, was scraping massive amounts of data. facilitating excessive valuation of an AI start-up”.
Since Friday, the web version of Twitter is no longer accessible to users who are not logged in. The platform asks users to log in with a screen-filling pop-up. If they don’t, they’ll be sent back to the social medium’s homepage.
Rate limited due to reading all the posts about rate limits
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
Is this what you want? Did this “rate limiting” nonsense come from your new WEF appointment Linda Yaccarino. Is her next move employing Dylan Mulvaney to promote twitter?🤣https://t.co/GGayhBnYH8
— Moses Hopes (@MosesHopes) July 2, 2023
I don’t know how this will effect the website. Tweets that contain videos may not work because the viewer might get a Twitter log-in screen. I reached my rate limit yesterday when he imposed a limit of 600 (now increased to 800) for non-subscribed accounts. Verified (subscriber blue tick accounts have a limit of 8,000) I assume that 600 is the number of posts you view but you can scroll down a page with 20 tweets in a second without reading any. Also there is no “counter” so you do not know if you are reaching any limit. Therefore I think this is about limiting the information flow and the reach of information for certain accounts. I think it is a form of censorship. Also he wants everyone to upgrade to monthly subscription (paid accounts).
The reason I use Twitter is because the EMBED function allows me to simply copy and paste code and insert a tweet on this website. This means if I want to post a document or image I can display a post that is on the Twitter servers and not one that fills up the limited space that I am allocated on my server. So, I get a free ride.
As far as other apps that resemble Twitter none come near with the reach or functionality. Gab does not embed properly neither does Mastodon. I checked out the above BlueSky but they use gatekeepers (you need an invite to get on) and I don’t even know if they have an embed function. I thought that Nitter might be a good option because all you need to do is substitute Twitter.com with Nitter.net in the embed code. Nitter is like a copy (scrapped) open source (no adverts or menus) of Twitter. Perhaps one of the reasons Musk did this was to take down Nitter and tighten information control. See this thread if you are interested:
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/919?ref=upstract.com
Information War
We are in an information war and they want to shut down the free flow of information. I will continue to use Twitter until it is no longer possible simply because there are few other options as good. If the tweets do not display properly for my readers they need to let me know. To this end I have created an email address that is to be used exclusively for technical issues (do not spam me or ask irrelevant questions). Just let me know if the tweets are not working and what sort of browser you have. Let me know if you have to log-in to Twitter to view the tweets. Take a screenshot if something looks odd. I will check the email every now and then and monitor it for problems:
Send an email to:
biblaridion-blog@proton.me