Rate Limit Exceeded
Week from Monday 3rd July 2023 - Elmo has caused an upset on Twitter again, in his never-ending quest to get people to pay for FREE SPEECH. The entire site broke down for half-a-day, while they added a 'temporary' new feature that limits the number of tweets you can engage with. Unless you rent your own BLUE TICK, of course. You now see regular signs that say "RATE LIMIT EXCEEDED" and all that. It's probably another spiteful ploy meant to stop people from blocking and muting all the adverts. Because we're ALL doing it. Except it works differently on some versions of the app, and not at all on others. Some folks have reported that they've already reached their daily limit just as soon as they've got up at seven or seven-thirty in the morning. Just LOOKING at a tweet counts as an interaction.
But if it's a "daily rate" as they claim, why does it come with a notice saying "Please wait a few moments then try again"?
Did I mention that they've also blocked us from embedding links to certain 'rival' sites in our tweets now? It won't be long before they disallow YouTube and Bandcamp links, then we're buggered for sharing 'content'...
At the same time, they're doing their best to kill off third-party Twitter apps like COREBIRD ("Ha ha! ya boo sucks! you can only use OUR app!"), while the 'official' TWEETDECK is becoming something that only paid subscribers can use. Which negates its purpose entirely! In some cases the banned apps have been shut down altogether, or they're getting seriously out-of-date and 'unsupported', or they've been removed from the App Stores and repositories, so you can't install one from scratch anyway. Now they've apparently hobbled anyone trying to view Twitter on desktop browsers loaded with ad-blockers and tracking cookie filters. This has now happened to me.
My FIREFOX has been struck with screens that say "The page isn't redirecting properly. An error occurred during a connection to twitter.com. This problem can sometimes be caused by disabling or refusing to accept cookies..." That's SUBTLE! But I'm not going to reconfigure my Fox's privacy and security settings just for the benefit of Twitter, thank you very much.
The ads are the MOST important thing now. Let's be honest, there's enough of them!
I also found that I couldn't post tweets or comments on my Android app for a time (Had I already reached my limit?), so I explored other ways of GETTING IN THERE via the desktop.
In order to upload pictures and other content to the site (the prime reason for my needing a desktop version), I had to transfer files backwards and forwards between the laptop and the phone.
I then tried installing a lightweight browser on the lappy JUST for Twitter. MIDORI comes in all the Linux repositories, so it wasn't to difficult to set up. It does its job as a PORTAL, but it's pretty archaic and ugly: The font rendering is pretty shabby and erratic, like an ancient version of Internet Exploder or Safari, and there's no DARK MODE, so it's a bit glaring on the eyes. Then I remembered that the 'Chromium' browsers that come with Linux have that feature that allows you to install a website as a stand-alone APP. So you can MAKE YOUR OWN!
It works a treat. I now have a little birdy icon on my 'favourites' menu, so that I can launch my own CLONED Twitter app, without needing to go through the tedious process of logging in every time. Of course, it goes without saying that it might not work for long. I refer you to the comments I made earlier regarding Corebird and Tweetdeck.
Wot larks eh? I sometimes think that folks take this stuff a bit TOO seriously, while it is more in my own nature to treat it as something to be poked fun at. The world is a RIDICULOUS place, so in order to keep your sanity, there's nothing you can do but RIDICULE it! What others see as PROBLEMS, I see as "ALL PART OF THE FUN" because I'm a cynical old bastard.
I'm not making any 'post-Twitter' moves myself, at this stage, because I'm not convinced that it is 'post'. I don't need to have any more unattended soshul meejer accounts just sitting around doing nothing. One glance at that pop-out menu down the side of this BLOGGYDIARYWOTSIT will show you that I already have TOO MUCH to look after, and no audience for it. I still have an untouched MASTODON site ready-built, sitting on one of the sparsely populated outer rings of the multiverse. In any case, soon after the weekend's little 'accident', everything twitterwise seems to have settled back to 'NORMAL'. As the inconvenience DID occur over a weekend, I probably missed the worst of it anyway!
Twitter is jampacked with all the material I need for my daily dose of soshul meejer interaction. The 'alternatives' don't have that. For all its faults, Twitter is where I'm most comfortable. Unless Musky decides to charge EVERYONE to use it, or make it totally impossible to use (No, it's not YET!), I staying.
The TOUR DE FRANCE has started and I finally have the opportunity to watch some PRO-CYCLING in 'real time'.
Only I don't want to.
Let's face it, LIVE SPORT on commercial telly is bloody tedious to watch. Everything stops for ADVERTS every ten minutes or so. The commentary team sit around in their studio box, forced to make inane SMALL TALK for seemingly hours on end, because nothing has really happened yet. Yesterday, I swear they did a good ten minutes on the size and colour of the riders' socks!
It's just too painful for me.
There aren't enough hours in the day and much better ways to spend 'em. I'm recording the HIGHLIGHTS show on the digibox, to watch before breakfast the following morning. Skip past the ads (and the silly 'competitions' and 'features'), skip past the boring, partisan big-ups for the pundits' 'favourites'... and straight to the important racing bits! Compact and watchable.
SO NO SPOILERS, PLEASE!
I dutifully paid my ten bucks to the Moonjune concern and downloaded the new SOFT MACHINE album "Other Doors", with the aim of doing one of my famous DIY projects. I'm a little bit confused by their marketing ploy(?) that the DIGITAL DOWNLOAD features three(?) tracks that aren't on the physical CD. WHY weren't they? The 'extra' tracks are only a couple of minutes long each, and the entire thing will fit comfortably on a disc anyway. Admittedly, one of the 'bonuses' is a DRUM SOLO, so I left that off my own copy, but still!
In other musical news, there was an absolutely magical performance of MAHLER's massive Eighth Symphony on the wireless, given in Hanover by the NDR Radio Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Ingo Metzmacher (with the required choirs making up the 'THOUSAND'). Dare I say it that the German radio chaps do a much better job of recording and broadcasting these huge orchestras than do the Beeb? Closer miking and better attention paid to the hall acoustics, perhaps? ...but Aah! such clarity, drawing attention to musical details that I'd almost forgotten were there.
But if it's a "daily rate" as they claim, why does it come with a notice saying "Please wait a few moments then try again"?
Did I mention that they've also blocked us from embedding links to certain 'rival' sites in our tweets now? It won't be long before they disallow YouTube and Bandcamp links, then we're buggered for sharing 'content'...
At the same time, they're doing their best to kill off third-party Twitter apps like COREBIRD ("Ha ha! ya boo sucks! you can only use OUR app!"), while the 'official' TWEETDECK is becoming something that only paid subscribers can use. Which negates its purpose entirely! In some cases the banned apps have been shut down altogether, or they're getting seriously out-of-date and 'unsupported', or they've been removed from the App Stores and repositories, so you can't install one from scratch anyway. Now they've apparently hobbled anyone trying to view Twitter on desktop browsers loaded with ad-blockers and tracking cookie filters. This has now happened to me.
My FIREFOX has been struck with screens that say "The page isn't redirecting properly. An error occurred during a connection to twitter.com. This problem can sometimes be caused by disabling or refusing to accept cookies..." That's SUBTLE! But I'm not going to reconfigure my Fox's privacy and security settings just for the benefit of Twitter, thank you very much.
The ads are the MOST important thing now. Let's be honest, there's enough of them!
I also found that I couldn't post tweets or comments on my Android app for a time (Had I already reached my limit?), so I explored other ways of GETTING IN THERE via the desktop.
In order to upload pictures and other content to the site (the prime reason for my needing a desktop version), I had to transfer files backwards and forwards between the laptop and the phone.
I then tried installing a lightweight browser on the lappy JUST for Twitter. MIDORI comes in all the Linux repositories, so it wasn't to difficult to set up. It does its job as a PORTAL, but it's pretty archaic and ugly: The font rendering is pretty shabby and erratic, like an ancient version of Internet Exploder or Safari, and there's no DARK MODE, so it's a bit glaring on the eyes. Then I remembered that the 'Chromium' browsers that come with Linux have that feature that allows you to install a website as a stand-alone APP. So you can MAKE YOUR OWN!
It works a treat. I now have a little birdy icon on my 'favourites' menu, so that I can launch my own CLONED Twitter app, without needing to go through the tedious process of logging in every time. Of course, it goes without saying that it might not work for long. I refer you to the comments I made earlier regarding Corebird and Tweetdeck.
RJ - So it turns out that Shit Sheldon did a weekend release of untested code that causes Twitter to make a data request twenty times a second, every time you look at any tweets, essentially causing a Denial of Service Attack by his OWN USERS... and then blamed it all on evil data scraping by the evil people who [checks notes] run the media companies that form most of his advertising revenue. I spent decades in software and even longer decades being a competent human. Every single bit of this breaks every basic rule...Needless to say, a lot of folks appear to be in a panic about it, and there's been a mad rush to check out the ALTERNATIVES again. As well as the MASTODON option (not really an 'option' for some, I notice, who still say "it's too complicated"), a few people have opened accounts with SPOUTIBLE, which looks to me like a clone of Twitter, but slower and with a smaller population. They're afraid that they'll lose contact with their 'communities' (i.e. cliques) and want all their chums to follow them OVER THERE. Others are saying that Meta's new "THREADS" is the answer, totalling ignoring the fact that The Zuck will only treat it as yet another opportunity to mine your private data for profit, as is already the sole purpose of Facebook and Instagram.
WRT - Twitter is too important to be run by this idiot as a vanity project. It's like inventing the printing press and limiting the franchise to Frank Spencer.
Wot larks eh? I sometimes think that folks take this stuff a bit TOO seriously, while it is more in my own nature to treat it as something to be poked fun at. The world is a RIDICULOUS place, so in order to keep your sanity, there's nothing you can do but RIDICULE it! What others see as PROBLEMS, I see as "ALL PART OF THE FUN" because I'm a cynical old bastard.
I'm not making any 'post-Twitter' moves myself, at this stage, because I'm not convinced that it is 'post'. I don't need to have any more unattended soshul meejer accounts just sitting around doing nothing. One glance at that pop-out menu down the side of this BLOGGYDIARYWOTSIT will show you that I already have TOO MUCH to look after, and no audience for it. I still have an untouched MASTODON site ready-built, sitting on one of the sparsely populated outer rings of the multiverse. In any case, soon after the weekend's little 'accident', everything twitterwise seems to have settled back to 'NORMAL'. As the inconvenience DID occur over a weekend, I probably missed the worst of it anyway!
Twitter is jampacked with all the material I need for my daily dose of soshul meejer interaction. The 'alternatives' don't have that. For all its faults, Twitter is where I'm most comfortable. Unless Musky decides to charge EVERYONE to use it, or make it totally impossible to use (No, it's not YET!), I staying.
The TOUR DE FRANCE has started and I finally have the opportunity to watch some PRO-CYCLING in 'real time'.
Only I don't want to.
Let's face it, LIVE SPORT on commercial telly is bloody tedious to watch. Everything stops for ADVERTS every ten minutes or so. The commentary team sit around in their studio box, forced to make inane SMALL TALK for seemingly hours on end, because nothing has really happened yet. Yesterday, I swear they did a good ten minutes on the size and colour of the riders' socks!
It's just too painful for me.
There aren't enough hours in the day and much better ways to spend 'em. I'm recording the HIGHLIGHTS show on the digibox, to watch before breakfast the following morning. Skip past the ads (and the silly 'competitions' and 'features'), skip past the boring, partisan big-ups for the pundits' 'favourites'... and straight to the important racing bits! Compact and watchable.
SO NO SPOILERS, PLEASE!
I dutifully paid my ten bucks to the Moonjune concern and downloaded the new SOFT MACHINE album "Other Doors", with the aim of doing one of my famous DIY projects. I'm a little bit confused by their marketing ploy(?) that the DIGITAL DOWNLOAD features three(?) tracks that aren't on the physical CD. WHY weren't they? The 'extra' tracks are only a couple of minutes long each, and the entire thing will fit comfortably on a disc anyway. Admittedly, one of the 'bonuses' is a DRUM SOLO, so I left that off my own copy, but still!
In other musical news, there was an absolutely magical performance of MAHLER's massive Eighth Symphony on the wireless, given in Hanover by the NDR Radio Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Ingo Metzmacher (with the required choirs making up the 'THOUSAND'). Dare I say it that the German radio chaps do a much better job of recording and broadcasting these huge orchestras than do the Beeb? Closer miking and better attention paid to the hall acoustics, perhaps? ...but Aah! such clarity, drawing attention to musical details that I'd almost forgotten were there.
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