Google has reportedly removed much of Twitter’s links from its search results after the social network’s owner Elon Musk announced reading tweets would be limited.
Search Engine Roundtable found that Google had removed 52% of Twitter links since the crackdown began last week. Twitter now blocks users who are not logged in and sets limits on reading tweets.
According to Barry Schwartz, Google reported 471 million Twitter URLs as of Friday. But by Monday morning, that number had plummeted to 227 million.
“For normal indexing of these Twitter URLs, it seems like these tweets are dropping out of the sky,” Schwartz wrote.
Platformer reported last month that Twitter refused to pay its bill for Google Cloud services.
Elon going to complain about another conspiracy going on while in reality it’s just that when crawlers are not able to open a certain URL they simply assume that the page doesn’t exist anymore. Google certainly didn’t “retaliate”, bots simply couldn’t find those pages anymore.
The headline is actually wrong. Google did not do anything to Twitter. Twitter fucked up their own SEO by removing access to its content.
This is correct.
Yeah, that’s a pretty easy and reasonable conclusion to come to if you think about if for more than five seconds. I’m not sure Elon has any toes left after he keeps shooting himself in the feet.
If your company cares about it’s SEO rankings, you don’t make changes like these without considering the SEO implications.
Not even a month later and said company rebranded itself without checking trademarks. Now we have “X”, a brand that non only risks infringement of quite a few registered eu-trademarks but didn’t even apply for an own eu-trademark…
Just like reddit. Looks like the Speztic and the Elongated Muskrat are caught in an ouroborus of like-minded stupidity.
Elongated Muskrat 🤣
The latest in a seemingly never-ending series of self-owns. Apart from the stress it must put on their devs, it’s been entertaining
They have more than one dev left?
No it’s just one guy called Dev.
And he’s on a H1B visa and can’t leave.
Dude was just a marketing intern and is mad stressed and knows he’s in WAY over his head now.
Fake it 'till you make it.
Or the multibillion dollar company collapses into a heaping, flaming pile of slag as a result of your actions. One or the other.
It’s a win/win
They screwed up his name tag, because reasons.
His name is actually Dave. But there aren’t any other Dave’s working there anymore so he is ok with being called Dev.
Deb on the other hand is pretty pissed off.
Please kindly accept my upvote - made my day!
My understanding is there’s group of people whose visa is sponsored by Twitter. If they leave the company, they may well have to leave the country.
That’s a big yikes and I hope they will find another way…
Coercing workers built America! They can’t leave… because of the implication.
Yeah, he lives in the break room on a cot.
Twitter still has devs?
Twitter’s dev(s)
Crawl issues I am sure but also user experience issues. Google is sensitive to sending visitors to sites where metrics indicate users do not, like bounce rates etc. I don’t use twt but if it is the case you have the be logged in to see anything now, a non-logged in user will click a link from Google hit a login page, and use the back button. I would assume Google will see that as a bad search result and use it less.
I wonder if Google prioritized recrawling all those Twitter links.
If I were making a web crawler, I would make it so that if a crawler finds a domain that appears to have changed dramatically or gone offline it will re-crawl the domain and flag already-crawled pages as potentially obsolete.
The word bots triggers the muskrat.
Removed by mod
Elon, please buy Reddit and repeat your amazing ideas over there. You are so smart.
Spez is already doing his best work to fuck over the platform. Are you certain Elon could do any better?
Spez already said he admires how Elon is running Twitter.
The best part is that Elon is proving to be a pro at losing money left and right while simultaneously inventing new ways to make a social media platform suck to use.
I mean there’s admiring a ruthless mob boss - and then there is admiring a petty thief that keeps getting arrested and all his plans blow up in this face.
Spez is losing his tiny mind.
Oh, there’s scope to introduce “official” Reddit user badges for 10 bucks a pop and all of sorts of suicidal Musk shenanigans
Wait until you have to be logged in to read any posts on Reddit.
Didn’t we achieve this by turning all subreddit NSFW?
deleted by creator
Ah, I see. I only used reddit through Apollo, and was only sent to new reddit page by NSFW links, after i deleted my account, it seems.
but isn’t there no ad revenue on NSFW subs? I thought I read that
I’m down, Spez. What’s bad for Reddit is good for us.
Honestly… We’re all (or a massive chunk of us are) Reddit refugees. I don’t give many fucks about that place. If it thrives, whatever. It’s out of my control. I’m not going to hate post here with fantasies of spez seeing it and being like, “WHYYYYY?”
What little I’ve seen here seems like a disproportionate amount of passionate and quality users came over here. Users that were likely a bit more than casual; ie we we invested enough to use 3rd party clients, some of us are probably former mods who got disillusioned, etc.
We’re all giddy and it is the honeymoon phase and I HOPE HOPE HOPE the users’ enthusiasm doesn’t fizzle like Mastodon seems to but I would say, just use this. Enjoy it. Post worthwhile things. I don’t think Reddit is necessarily going away, but if it’s just some weird bot riddled, low effort posts sort of place, why would we want to be there anyway?
The fediverse will probably last as long as the internet does, if the BBS is anything to go by. And I’ve seen people starting to realize federation is an actually decent option at the very least.
I saw people unironically saying this and being upvoted for it in hackernews, completely turned me off from the site lol
I am genuinely curious. What’s the role of the new CEO if this turd keeps doing everything he can to burn this ish to the ground?
She straight up admitted that she was essentially a sock puppet CEO and would offer no friction to anything Musk wanted.
Musk is a manchild who can’t handle being told “no”, so that’s a given.
But it’s smart of her to put that out in advance. It informs Musk that she will stay out of his way, and she doesn’t have to take the blame for idiotic decisions made by him.
He’s the child of an emerald mine owner. Do people think that men like that choose wives based on how good a mother they’ll be? Doubt.
I think it’s called a ”Fucker-Upper“
Someone needs to make this Musk’s official title. Chief-Fuck-Upper. I also heard Chief-Twit circling around.
Can we perhaps add a list of notable titles to his Wikipedia entry?
“CFU of Twitter” does have a nice ring to it
Then Spez could be CFU of Reddit. I kinda miss Ellen Pao. And Chooter.
Edit: A word.
deleted by creator
Lol
Lol, this made me chuckle! 🤭
Gotta have someone to push off the glass cliff
Thanks for sharing, I hadn’t heard of that expression or phenomenon.
Both Musk and Huffman seem to think the E in CEO stands for “Enshittification.”
Edit - typo
Ever heard of the glass cliff? You might even see a name or two on that list that you recognize.
Yup, I remember the absolute outrage when Ellen Pao became CEO of reddit, though it is nice at least to finally see her vindicated on there now. I hadn’t heard of the glass cliff until long after she left, but people have been referencing it left and right on reddit recently. Turns out, Ellen Pao wasn’t the problem…
Yeah that’s crazy, I was furious when they fired Victoria back in the day. It’s nice to see that Alexis Ohanian is the one who deserves the blame for that massive fuckup. Man that gives me a pang of nostalgia for the old days of reddit though. Interesting that the Wiki article points to Obama’s presidency and the 08 financial collapse as a “glass cliff” event.
Remember this?
-( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)╯╲___卐卐卐卐 Don’t mind me just taking Ellen Pao for a walk
Good. Hopefully they remove links to pinterest, quora and facebook too while they’reat it.
Doesn’t sound like retaliation to me, it sounds like their scheduled web crawlers are finding that content they used to index is now no longer viewable and this removed from search results. Pretty standard. My guess is that there were 400 million URLs listed and as the crawler uncovers that they are no longer available, that number will keep dropping to reflect only content publicly viewable. If only 500 URLs are now publicly viewable (without logins) then that’s what they will index. Google isn’t a search engine for private companies (unless you pay for the service) they are a public search engine so they make an effort to ensure that only public information is indexed. Some folk game the system (like the old expertsexchange.com) but sooner or later google drops the hammer.
God, I hated expert sexchange so much. It was a blessing when stack overflow started.
I’m only an amateur but I’m happy to give it a go
I don’t think Twitter would rate limit the Google indexer, though.
It’s probably the increased bounce rate, as people click Twitter links in the search results, get Twitter’s login wall and click back to continue searching instead of creating an account.
I tried to access twitter by impersonating a googlebot. I was denied. The bots aren’t so much rate limited, but unable to access tweets as they don’t have a Twitter account.
Impersonating a Googlebot user-agent isn’t a perfect test though, since you’re supposed to implement IP verification too - either checking against a known list of Google crawler IPs or doing a PTR lookup. See https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/verifying-googlebot
Question is whether or not Twitter has competent software developers implementing stuff correctly anymore. Anyone’s guess at this point.
It’s funny how Spez idolizes a guy who doesn’t pay his bills. It’s also funny watching the hate pplatform Twitter get absolutely destroyed by its owner. The internet in 2023 is a wild and crazily changing place.
At this point I’m half convinced spez was such an asshole to Reddits users because of how the community turned on his idol elon. I remember not longer than two years ago Reddit was basically musk circlejerk but this genius fucked up even that.
I think it’s even stupider than that. Spez didn’t realize he pissed off the Apollo dev, and the shock of that first Apollo post made him ashamed and angry. He’s kept a lot of vitriol aimed at the Apollo dev. Spez fucked reddit because he got mad.
That was just the tipping point. Reddit has been in a decline for a few years but we were all like frogs in boiling water but we accepted it because we didn’t know where else to go. RIF shutting down forced my hand and now I’m here. Hopefully to stay.
And for the better too. People will come to realize that there are better ways to socialize on the internet.
I can’t believe how fast the fediverse is growing thanks to both reddit and Twitter simultaneously imploding. I honestly welcome it, despite the growing pains this feels more like early 2000s reddit than the modern version ever did.
Can’t wait for genZ to welcome the return of spaces that aren’t optimized for monetization over communication first.
You’ve heard of a “walled garden”.
But this… this has become a “walled right-wing dumpster”.A “walled swamp”,
What’s there not to like?!
They’ve always wanted to build a wall. Hopefully they wall themselves off from the rest of the world.
Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It’s part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism’s status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.
The specific moment we’re in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn’t be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.
I like this take, but this is a conspiracy theory take. Change a few words and this would be something regurgitated by Q fanatics.
You know how conservatives project? Think about it as the truth, but with a small change in detail such as the guilty party renamed to an enemy scapegoat. Now rethink what you said.
Conspiracy theories that parallel real conspiracies are the best way to stop people thinking about each view on its own merits. They conflate dumb q stuff with the legitimate similar thing and then refuse to engage intellectually. This is why the internet is so noisy. They KNOW that the Streisand effect will be counterproductive so instead they spam dark strawmen and noise until you just tune out because of the difficulty to process information.
Climate activists drowned out with astroturfed strawmanned groups such as extinction rebellion which de-legitimizes and generates hatred towards activists and allows the passing of totalitarian laws to prevent future protests etc.
Examples
- Climate activists -> Extinction rebellion
- Animal rights activists -> PETA
- Anarchists -> Sovereign citizens
In the end you will hate all the legit groups because of the astroturfed false flag strawmen groups.
This is such a good way to word this kind of phenominon. Conspiracies as distraction.
Its also funny, because its a conspiracy about conspiracies lol
astroturfed strawmanned groups such as extinction rebellion
What’s wrong with XR?
People who aren’t going to do anything either way like to blame XR’s protests for their own inaction.
I’ve thought long and hard about why we fail to make change and I’ve thought about whats best and most reasonable within my own personality, skills and weaknesses. For me, I need to refine my views and then spread awareness, while also reducing our wasted efforts because of false consciousness. Do you want to suddenly become aware that you wasted years of your life to a false idea or would you rather some annoying rando accuse you of having in a false idea, then think about it honestly and reject the false idea years earlier?
As an example. Lots of people fell victim to what you suggest… nazi philosophy was painted as “we have the cure! just blindly follow our legit seeming propaganda” and then people acted instead of thinking… you know what happened after. People like me were trying to deprogram nazis but then we had to run or got holocausted. Also, do you notice how National socialism has a strange… misdirection that doesn’t line up with its stated name? MEGAHINT HINT. also tankies cough cough
What do you think is wrong with conservatives? They work hard for the values they haven’t investigated
You are absolutely right about us needing to take action, i just worry the average person will be super counterproductive with all the noise intended to misguide us.
I would have explained in more detail before but its hard to write a small book each reply haha. I’m glad you asked. So with XR there are a ton of things I can say but I’ll probably ramble, so my apologies.
XR popped up at a time when revolutionary energies especially around the idea of climate apocalype type emergencies were at a local high. They openly stated in their website or whatevs that they allow police and landlords which if you are in the know, you know. Landlords and police are some of the most primary enablers of the climate apocalypse and capitalistic evils. Then there’s their method of making change, which if you watch mass media, shows that they glue their unshaved armpits to the road or paintings, in the most “hate me, hate us” type of way possible. Effective climate activism doesn’t come in the form of “hate us” activism, it comes in the form of making leaflets and dropping them in a thousand mailboxes, making community groups to discuss and spread truth about our govts complicity and support of negative and increasing changes that are damming us etc etc. I could list a lot more… ugh :(
Each step of XRs path helped them to pass law after law to reduce our legal rights to protest while also making the general population hate protest+climate activists. Imagine getting blocked from getting to work by what the idiot box calls hippies. You’d slowly hate your heroes. Unfortunately lots of unthinkers fell into the XR bandwagon, even myself to some degree before i realised they allowed cops and had expensive non representing their base(humans) matching signs and uniforms. Easiest way to spot astroturfed groups is money spent on media like signs and uniforms. Any legit group will be censored to hell and will struggle to even have a website up.
Sorry for the mess.
I think it’s far more simple that humans have a tendency to fractionalize everything they’re apart of than it is a projection global conspiracy.
Some animal rights activists believe humans can have beneficial, symbiotic relationships with animals, like working dogs/horses, free range chickens that are well cared for, stuff like that.
Some animal rights activists think the concept of a working dog/horse as abhorrent because animals can’t actually consent to that, the power dynamic makes it unethical, and utilizing the labor of an animal for personal gain is basically just slavery for a creature with less intelligence.
These two groups are closer to each other than they are to any right person that doesn’t care at all for animals, but are still so dynamically opposed that they simply couldn’t operate together because their end goals are dramatically different.
I’m a hardcore progressive. I will work with a capitalist democrat to get my goals met, but I wouldn’t associate with them if I had a better option.
What you and I are saying can happen naturally as well as artificially. I’m mostly talking about how that regardless of if they are co-opting delegitimisation propaganda in origin or natural in origin, that the incorrect one gets amplified through common media in clearly suspicious and divisive ways. There certainly are a lot of differences in each group, some legit and some not. What if the different groups can have a correct subset and an incorrect subset? We are meant to discuss and reject the incorrect subset.
You know how conservatives tend to have this one cherry picked crazy example of us sometimes? Those always feel like propaganda campaigns and if you trace and investigate them more you can see they have questionable roots. An example would be the /r/antiwork mod that interviewed on television. notice how he was the worst possible example of us and went on tv after everyone said that it was a lose/lose scenario, that if they air it, you lost, and if you win they wont air it therefor you still lose.
Why does every group have a very heavily advertised and mysteriously promoted subset that betrays the movement in effect but looks valid superficially? I’ve seen a hundred times more about sovereign citizens than I’ve seen about actual anarchists talking about ideals.
I’m a hardcore progressive. I will work with a capitalist democrat to get my goals met, but I wouldn’t associate with them if I had a better option.
This hurts :( My whole life feels dishonest because I cant find the right people to associate with in real life. I feel your pain.
Well said, thanks for doing the good work of pointing this out.
See other “grassroots” movements such as the Tea Party, Moms for Liberty, TPUSA, etc for the other side of this. These groups have clear and documented funding from billionaire interest groups and conveniently allow corporate media to conflate such far right groups with progressive movements as the same level of extremism.
This sounds a lot like Hanlon’s razor. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Do you really believe that people like spez, Zuckerberg, Musk behave like they do because they want to do favors for other billionaires? Isn’t it much more likely that they’re just … disturbed? That they are narcissistic, megalomaniac, maybe idealistic in their own believe. And in being that, they make stupid decisions because they literally work differently than regular folks.
I’m picking at nits here… but
This sounds a lot like Hanlon’s razor. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Are you really suggesting that no action has ever been malicious that seems stupid? Copying people on the internet doesn’t make
youtheir idea right lol. I personally believe that phrase is damaging and possibly propaganda in origin, same as “absolute power corrupts absolutely”As for the other things you said, I think you can both be correct at the same time.
Well said. Razors are guides in developing theories, not evidence. To present them as evidence is a fallacy. The above conjecture isn’t better explained by stupidity, thats the whole point.
Thank you. I think this is an important nit to pick in the context of this particular discussion.
Ignoring the evidence of Musk’s Twitter nonsense benefiting the same people who helped fund his Twitter buy out is something you could attribute Hanlon’s razor to.
Yeah, I also seriously doubt there’s a big conspiracy happening where ultra rich people are helping each other. Have you looked at those people? Most don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves.
Musk bought Twitter around the time he was fighting with this guy that had the private jet tracker. I think it’s more reasonable to believe that Musk bought Twitter just to shut that down and now it’s a toy he can play with, where every time he merely touches it, media jumps on it, which feeds his ego massively. And once Twitter is dead, he’ll discard it and move on to the next thing. Like a cat playing with its prey.
Normally I would tend to agree with you, but look where Musk got his “loans” to buy out Twitter. Saudi Arabia and Russia where big “lenders”.
I think it’s more reasonable to believe that Musk bought Twitter just to shut that down and now it’s a toy he can play with, where every time he merely touches it, media jumps on it, which feeds his ego massively.
That’s definitely true. I think it’s also true that the people who financed it were doing so to take advantage of that to their own ends.
The only person in the world you can ever truly know is yourself.
So when I ask myself “If I were spez/zuck/musk why would I do this?”
The answer is usually “because someone gave me a lot of money”
I don’t know about Spez but I don’t think that’s how Musk and Zuck are motivated. The money is a secondary effect of their goal of being “Great Men” in history. Seen through that lens, taking control of the main public square, changing the nature of discussion there (and taking as much credit for it as possible) is an end unto itself for Musk. Especially when you consider that, if he is able to both control and maintain Twitter as the main locus of online discussion, it allows him to try to reshape the wider narrative about the value and importance of his work in general.
I’m not so sure Musk is actually motivated by his own hype, I think that’s part of his professional self branding that he relies on to juice the valuation of his companies. Seen through that lens, taking control of the main public square is a way to juice his rep further and make even more money.
I’m skeptical of ascribing immaterial motives to billionaires.
EDIT Oh! Also, I think the reason enshitification has accelerated so much recently is because of high interest rates. It’s why Silicon Valley Bank imploded, after all. Companies are scrambling to be profitable after the free investor cash has dried up. It’s not good enough to be maybe profitable in an undefined future, they need to be profitable now so they can justify investment. The bubble is deflating - though fortunately, it seems like it’s going to be a soft landing instead of a pop.
While I don’t think there is a specific conspiracy, I do believe that the upper classes enforce class interest and still have a strong sense of class solidarity, something they worked very hard (through their hegemonic control of the media) to excise from the societies they inhabit and predate upon.
Someone like Rupert Murdoch won’t necessarily take action on behalf of specific individuals, but he will fight tooth and nail for the privileges of his fellow billionaires.
I’m glad I’m not the only person thinking about this. I had no idea about the Saudis owning Twitter like that. All decisions made by the rich are for MoneyTM. Usually it’s MoneyTM in either the form of growth (profit, short term) or investment (power, stability, long term). Some of spezs actions are easily explained by MoneyTM when you take into account LLMs mining reddit. But that does not explain being so insanely hardline with their API. There was absolutely a resolution to that that was profitable and didn’t continue giving away “their” information for free. This is where I think a 3rd MoneyTM comes into play: existential investments. These are actions they take to ensure the other two forms of MoneyTM continue to function the way they want them to. Such as tanking the two most significant online tools for organizing collective action against them.
Decisions at that level are made for power. Sometimes money is part of that
I mean, yes, but I think “sometimes” really underestimates role money plays in a capitalist world. Money is power. People who tell you otherwise are trying to sell you something.
While I like both takes, I don’t think even the dumbest billionaire or government wouldn’t recognize the value one centralized tool has. It would have been sufficient to control both Twitter and Reddit, moderate the hell out of topics they don’t like and put them offline in crucial moments. Destroying them without a clear, centralized alternative isn’t really sensible.
I personally expected the Reddit IPO to be the end of any “subversive investment advice”, that might have been on Reddit.
Agreed. It’s no coincidence that both Twitter and Reddit are shitting the bed at the same time.
Elon is pretty clearly an actual idiot, and has managed to get by thus far by just having a seemingly endless supply of fuck you money, but this is just capitalism doing the Predator bicep meme with foreign oligarchs to consolidate power.
I mean, it sort of is. Unless the fed is involved in this billionaire conspiracy also (which the nature of conspiracy theories will undoubtedly have someone saying of course the fed is in on it with the billionaires).
The simple answer really does make the most sense here. Interest rates are on the rise, and platforms like twitter and reddit have been around for a very long time and none of the venture capital backing them has ever turned a real profit despite the money being pumped into them. Investors will pull out money from the riskiest items first when interest rates rise, and the riskiest items are social media platforms that haven’t demonstrated monetization potential even after a decade of use and monolithic control within their spaces. If a link aggregator like Reddit, which is really the only major player in its brand of social media can’t turn a profit with basically no competition why would you continue supporting it?
Great point, and I do think you’re right because that is the most sensible answer to what the motives behind these recent decisions are. There has been a nonstop flow of cheap debt for years that the fed is just now tightening up on.
But these business decisions also happen to align with the interests of deep pocketed bad actors. The why’s of that are conspiracy theories.
Saudi Arabia murdered Khashoggi because he was defying their army of Twitter trolls with a network of volonteers he bankrolled.
Great. Do Pinterest next.
deleted by creator
I feel like Google is going to have to find a way to effectively index federated content at some point. The only way to really get human information is from sites like Reddit and Twitter. And both of those platforms seem to be dedicated to completely imploding at the moment.
There’s nothing about the content being federated that makes it hard or impossible to index. Each instance is just a website with a public webpage that a bot can read. That all a search engine needs to index it. The worst case scenario is the bot will find the same content on multiple instances.
I did read that the website is loaded entirely through JavaScript and that maybe the Google bot doesn’t execute JavaScript so can’t see the text. I don’t know if that’s still a problem in 2023, though.
This article says it’s not a problem, but I didn’t read past the tl;dr, so maybe there’s a caveat. Like maybe it has to use a popular framework like React or something to work.
https://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascript-heres-learned-220157
Googlebot does execute Javascript, but since rendering JS needs much more resources, JS crawling will happen significantly less then simple http crawling. That’s why all big sites still return server side rendered content.
Rendering with JS definitely makes a difference, it’s part of the reason SSR is such a big deal for SEO.
Fuck Google, if Lemmy continues to take off we can just develop better search tools within the fediverse. The wider internet has been colonized, the path forward cannot rely on big tech corporations.
I’m not a programmer/developer so I don’t even understand the scale of the work that has yet to be done. But I am deeply committed to upsetting the status quo, and this platform feels distinctly revolutionary. Can’t wait to see what the future holds for Lemmy.
It’s all well and good to have a revolution, but if nobody knows you’re having one then nothing really changes. There are still benefits to centralised services, one of which being scale. To effectively index so much data you need scale, which is why smaller search engines tend to be just white labels of things like Bing.
100k people isn’t nobody. Centralized services can be useful at times, but there is no fundamental law preventing a decentralized system from providing the same functionality.
The value of indexing data drops drastically when much of that data is junk, as is the case in the wider internet. Because Lemmy is a federation, there is a built in system to filter the junk.
Ask and ye shall receive. Just saw this post!
I want a federated wiki. But bad actors resistant somehow.
Lol nice. The pace of development of Lemmy is unreal. I’ve only been here a month and it’s already so much easier to use than in the beginning.
It’s already indexing it.
duckduckgo (who uses Microsoft’s index I believe) is able to find Lemmy instances already.
problem is since every instance has its own domain you cannot search all of Lemmy or the more obscure fediverse.
lemmy.world,beehaw.org,programming.devare all different “websites”.I append “reddit” to my query when I want to search reddit for a human answer to a question. Can’t do that with Lemmy, unless the instance is branded as Lemmy.
Unless there will be an org or volunteers that indexes federated instances and makes them available to search engines to they can be differentiated, finding stuff in the fediverse might be difficult…
Would be lovely if we could just start a search with
fedi:oractivityPub:
Isn’t it automatically indexed? I mean, I can go to lemmy.world in a browser and see the content, wouldn’t Google’s indexing bots do the same?
Isn’t it automatically indexed? I mean, I can go to lemmy.world in a browser and see the content, wouldn’t Google’s indexing bots do the same?
yes, they have web scrapers that auto index according to the sites robot.txt, you can see what twitter asks to allow scraped by visiting here
It already is.
Just put ‘site:lemmy.world’ into Google to see what it has indexed on that instance for example. I don’t think Lemmy is optimised for search yet, but I saw some GitHub threads around the topic.
Honestly, and I hate this, but I doubt they will. The majority of people will never go federated, even though it’s so easy, because they suck.
It’s the difference between a mom and pop restaurant and McDonald’s.
We don’t need everybody to go to the mom and pop restaurant. Just enough of us to keep it afloat.
People at large really need to remember not every kind of growth is good: it has to be sustainable, and only happen until where it’s needed.
Unlimited growth is basically cancer, and that’s what big corpos feel to society tbh.
Maybe, I’m a bit more optimistic though. I think even if they just did something like a read only service that pulls from other federated sources like their web crawlers do for regular sites they would basically be done.
The only concern there would be people trying to block them like everyone has been doing to Meta.
The Porndex says otherwise
That sleeping giant has woken up. And it has morning wood.
yes
Isn’t it automatically indexed? I mean, I can go to lemmy.world in a browser and see the content, wouldn’t Google’s indexing bots do the same?
You can tell from how many upvotes this has that there are just as many idiots here as on reddit lol
Google can definitely index Lemmy
Blocking users who are not logged in has farther reaching consequences that aren’t readily apparent. For example, there was an AMBER Alert a few days ago with a short link to see more info. The link goes back to a Twitter account/tweet. All that time sensitive, useful information was behind a wall where you can’t see it unless you log in. Most people aren’t going to create an account just to do that.
This is such an incredible and incompetent failure for the amber alert system too though to be fair
Yeah. Moronic to use Twitter for anything even remotely important like emergency alerts
I disagree.
Twitter was one of the largest social media platforms on the planet, and was especially huge in the US. Before Musk bought it it didn’t show any signs of failure. It lasted over a decade, and had enough reach that I think it made a lot of sense for things like emergency alerts, government officials, etc. to use it as one means, even a main means, of disseminating information. It was really effective at that until what, a year ago?
I don’t think anyone really predicted Elon Musk buying Twitter and running it into the ground within a year. Yes, it was hypothetically possible in our capitalist system, but there was no indication that it would until Elon made a joking tweet.
Because of how the modern internet has organized itself, it was inevitable that critical systems would utilize Twitter for it’s reach.
I think you’re applying hindsight and expecting people to have made decisions based on events that hadn’t happened yet. Before musk bought Twitter it wasn’t at all unreasonable for people to rely on it for information from government officials because it was the format millions of people were accustomed to receiving that information in every day.
Well then since this is hindsight then I hope everyone is learning now that we shouldn’t be relying on single corporate entities to deliver our emergency notifications.
“Retrospectively, it was a bad idea” makes more sense.
It’s like this. Ambulance use the road even if the the hospitals didn’t build it. Now imagine, twitter is the road.
Oh I bet the actual employees are painfully aware. But the lack of funding and government red tape? That’s the real failure.
I’m always totally surprised how willfully European governments have put so much power into the hands of Twitter. Nearly every organization and politician has a Twitter account to be used for official and semi-official communication. And Twitter isn’t and was never really very popular in Europe compared to Facebook and other social networks, which these same organizations and politicians demonized to the max. I hope this is a wake up call: there are no inherently good centralized and commercialized social networks fit for communicating important information to an audience of potentially everyone.
Yeah, I’m still baffled by the fact that all these officials are still on Twitter.
I hope this results in companies no longer using Twitter for their communications. It’s completely inappropriate.
I’ve missed two trains and had to take and Uber until I recently found the only place the train company reliably posts updates was Twitter, over their own damn website.
Using twitter for any kind of emergency communication is a very bad idea in the first place.
Twitter is doing everyone a favor by demonstrating exactly why that is.
Heck i couldn’t easily check if diablo 4 servers were wonky because I can’t check the blizzard Twitter. Obviously this is less important than an amber alert. As another reply said, I think police need a better way to disseminate emergency information and that is on them. However something like server status is a perfect use of Twitter that is now close enough to impossible to do. If public agencies are going to continue using Twitter for these purposes, then something needs to change. Personally I’d be ok with the government having a little more say in things if we are going to continue viewing Twitter as a public service.
Alternatively, it’s probably better long-term if those functions become replaced with official Mastodon instances that are for official announcements only.
eg If there were a California.Gov Mastodon instance with a [email protected] and a [email protected] then everyone in that area could just sub to those communities and if there was something to announce it could go out via those. Of course that presupposes that enough people are in the Fediverse for it to be a good platform to share that info but structurally it’s probably far better than letting a third party commercial interest host these things.
I haven’t looked at Mastodon at all yet so I don’t really know how it works, but from what I have gathered, it is not dissimilar from lemmy but for microblogs. I suppose the main similarity is its distributed network which I agree is a better solution than a centralized server. Hopefully that statement ages well.
For one thing, this is sad because even more of the Internet is no longer reachable. The Internet shrinks, and will continue to get smaller as enshittification continues.
But on the other hand, this is really starting to look like the death knell of Twitter. It’s quickly becoming extremely inconvenient to see any tweets on Twitter now.
Fine by me. I never saw any value in it, even well before Musk took over. The character limit is guaranteed to eliminate any nuance, and the interface makes it incredibly difficult to follow what discussion there is.
I think originally when Twitter was created, the idea was that it would also be accessible via SMS and so the limit was imposed in order to allow a a tweet to fit into one SMS message.
We’ve had Twitter since SMS cost per-message on most plans.
It was great for following breaking news and not much else.
It worked quite well as an internet notice board where everyone could post important information to be shared/linked to.
Now whenever that is tried I just get a login screen
I think it’s more along the lines of:
Musk: You can’t see tweets unless you’re logged in.
Google: Challenge accepted.
For one thing, this is sad because even more of the Internet is no longer reachable. The Internet shrinks, and will continue to get smaller as enshittification continues.
This was only a problem because of improper centralization in the first place. From that perspective, this is the Internet self-correcting a defect.
Yes, but it will suck in the meanwhile. People expect these links to last. But instead a huge amount of content will no longer be reachable.
Was already pretty shit with embeds, now it’s just shit all around
decimates
Twitter absolutely DESTROYED by RATE LIMITING and ELON
Um actually 🤓 decimating it would be 47 million links 🤓 not 227 million
Um actually a word’s etymology does not define its modern usage. 🤓
It does if people use it correctly
Found the language prescriptivist! Linguists, let’s all point and laugh at them!
Hah hah! Oh wait…
You’ve fallen victim to one of the classic blunders
You do realize that there are multiple definitions for the word “decimate”, yes?
Found the language prescriptivist! Linguists, let’s all point and laugh at them!
Good goob, booby froob.
proscriptivists btfo lmao
Except when that word still has a literal meaning which is used by people to represent the original idea.
Removed by mod
Your first paragraph illustrates the point you were making very well. The last paragraph was absolutely not necessary.
Calm down
Um ackshually, decimating only means removing 1/10th, so what happened is actually many times worse than a decimation.
Well that’s what happens when you don’t want to pay the bills.
Musk is moving on to the FO part of FAFO.
