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

[hudebnik]

Interesting! All choices that a UX designer could have made either way, depending on what the company wanted to optimize for.

[cellio]

With a large dose of "you can change it if you're sufficiently motivated". The Mastodon code is open-source and federated servers communicate through a common API, so if you wanted your server to behave differently but in a way that's still compatible, and you wanted to spend the time coding, you could do that.

While looking for Twitter alternatives I came across another site that clearly started with Mastodon code, but it's not Mastodon. It's not federated, so it's not playing in the larger fediverse. I assume that was an intentional choice -- not sure why, since it seems to be "big tent" rather than some specialized closed community, but I didn't dig.