some Twitter-related links

[cellio]

If you are using your Twitter account to sign in to other sites ("the "sign in with Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc" system), you should stop doing that now. Also, if you are using SMS for two-factor authentication with Twitter, that same article has advice for you. Some parts of their 2FA setup have stopped working, and apparently SMS validation is now unreliable.

There is an outstanding thread -- on Twitter, natch -- about the kinds of things that SREs (site reliability engineers, the people who keep large systems running) worry about. Parts of large systems fail all the time; in a healthy setup you'll barely notice. Twitter is, um, not healthy.

Debirdify is a tool for finding your Twitter friends on the Fediverse (Mastodon), for those who've shared that info. It looks for links in pinned tweets and Twitter profile ("about") blurbs.

I'm at https://indieweb.social/@cellio, for anyone else who's there. I'm relatively new there, like lots of other folks, but so far the vibe takes me back to the earlier days of the Internet -- people are friendly, help each other, presume good intent, and have actual conversations. It is not Twitter; some intentional design choices appear to encourage constructive use and hinder toxicity. I hope to write more about Mastodon later.

Comments

[siderea]

Re whole people: some people have multiple accounts, same as here and on Twitter. I'm noticing my friends who are power users all have at least two accounts. The whole people model tends to be terrible because of context collapse, and how mingled signal becomes noise.

Re retweeting: it is counterintuitive to me, at least, that trying to prevent discussion fragmenting would be a social good. It thwarts completionism, but it allows critical conversation to happen separately. The boost model actually drives critical readers back to the source to confront them.

On Twitter, if a friend retweets something that's, say, a Nazi dog whistle they didn't recognize as such, one can @ them right back, "hey, that's a Nazi dog whistle" and they and their other readers will see it.

On Mastodon, if a friend boosts a Nazi dog whistle, your reply to that toot doesn't go to them. If you hit reply and type, "hey that's a Nazi dog whistle" you just said that to the Nazi, not your friends. You just started a fight with a stranger (and all the stranger's friends).

If a friend retweets something you think is mistaken or wrongheaded, you can start a discussion with your friend by replying to the tweet. If a friend boosts something you think is mistaken or wrongheaded, you can argue with the person who originally said it.

This seems an engine for randos showing up to argue with people, instead of groups of friends discussing things amongst themselves.

[cellio]

People don't have to be "whole people", of course; separating personal and professional accounts is common across the Internet, and people sometimes isolate other interest areas (like an SCA-specific account). I meant that "off topic" isn't really a thing the way it is in other places, so if you want to talk about all the things you're interested in, you can.

Those are good points about retweeting. I'm not sure how I feel about the Mastodon approach yet. One thing it does is to make linking to Mastodon posts exactly as easy or hard as linking to things elseweb, so if I want to use someone's Mastodon message as a starting point for my own conversation, that's the same as using a blog post or a CDC page or a Reddit thread or a news article in that way. Whether that's good, bad, or neutral, I don't know yet.