This reminds me of how I hacked twitter 10+ years ago to get free SMS delivery for a web app I built. Before Twilio, custom SMS notification delivery was hard and expensive.
At the time, twitter allowed you to receive SMS notifications of tweets posted to a followed account. I created a private account and used twitter's API to post tweets to with the notification content I wanted to send. I then had "dummy" accounts follow the "notification" account. These dummy accounts had recipient phone numbers with SMS notifications turned on.
The flow was: Web App -> Twitter API -> Tweet from "notification" account -> followers received SMS notifications. Free SMS delivery!
It was clunky and SMS notifications looked like they came from twitter (they did) but it solved my use case perfectly.
Twitter used to be a wonderful platform to hack on. I feel like the early days of developer and poweruser friendliness helped keep the platform from dying in some niche microblogging category.
It was originally a base for which people made all kinds of neat things like TwitPic. But then Twitter started integrating everything and competing with all the people who made them great; sometimes even suing them.
I started using Twitter via SMS and before the age of modern smart phones (I was on my Palm Treo. The girl in the cube behind me just got an EDGE eyePhone) and for all my university friends, we used it as a big SMS-based group chat room. It was kinda fun, the total opposite of what Twitter is today.
If you want to hack on platforms and build tooling around them, I suggest people look at ActivityPub implementations: Pleroma, Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed and others. ActiviyPub is really where a lot of the neat federated social networking stuff is happening, and having more devs hacking on it and making more implementations can help keep it diverse and falling into the state where modern E-mail is.
I have similar memories from college. It's weird to think that API Craze was an apex for hacking culture, but things haven't felt as exciting since.
Or maybe I'm just reflecting on a younger period with nostalgia and have lost touch. Maybe those Instagram stickers and TikToks are equally as hackworthy as the things we spun up in the ol' days.
The experience of people getting their business fucked by platforms when they get traction mean that less people will try it again with those new ones.
I think a key difference is the Twitter API externalized things (people building on top, creating an ecosystem) whereas IG/TikTok stickers are inclusive and focused on people building within
One favorite recollection of the Twitter API usage was this guy who hooked up a pressure sensor to a Twitter account, and placed the sensor under his newly married friend's bed - and the thing would tweet when the couple got in bed. [0]
Lol I may or may not currently be using a Twitter account and cron to broadcast any changes to my (non-static) home ip address, encrypted, so I can ssh into my workstation when I'm on vacation.
A friend of mine convinced me to get us a Fortinet appliance at home - it’s good, I can’t deny - but integration with th rest of our Ubiquiti kit would be nice.
Yep, free dynamic DNS still exists, for example NoIP https://www.noip.com/ However, you have to refresh it each month by filling out a "I'm still using it" web form they email you. So, you can't just set it & forget it.
Works in the free tier as set and forget. As long as you keep updating it (with whatever API), it works. Filling out a form manually makes NoIP sound like a horrible service.
it really isn't that hard to set up dynamic dns yourself. like maybe a day of work. just don't forget to upgrade your dns server software when exploits are discovered
Running your own DNS server (if that's what you're suggesting) just for dynamic DNS is extremely unnecessary. Not to mention the case of someone who doesn't have another server with a static IP to host the DNS on.
All but the worst of the worst providers have an API of some sort and if you're savvy enough to set up BIND, you can handle writing a curl command to post your IP to the API and sticking it into cron.
I did first try to setup email, but I couldn't figure out how to do that without providing a static ip address. This was a "what can I make work in the two hours before we drive across the country" solution lol.
A lot of domain registrars offer dynamic DNS for free using the original protocol or variants supported by inadyn. I’ve been using domains.google for the past 5 years and been pretty happy with it.
Back then most Canadian cell providers used to (maybe still do) forward SMS from emails sent to a special address that was basically just <phone number>@telus/bell/whatever.ca. They would do the opposite to, as SMS replies would get send back as an email.
I used to SMS friends from my email client and later my iPod touch using email.
A filter in GMail labeled some important incoming mails based on my criteria. My Google App Script checked for this lable every 4 hours, & if found, extracts some info, & post it as a tweet to a private account. The followed account gets a SMS notification
I originally created a Twitter account back in 2007 for this same reason. To this day it's still my only account. Having great insight and vision, I could foresee no usefulness or future for "social media", except as a way to send free SMS messages, and only Twitter had that.
Was this your own personal setup or part of some product? Because you would have had problem if end user really had a real Twitter account with the same number. right?
There's some irony in that Twitter have moved on from the 140 character limit, and now cutting off SMS. Both were core features of the platform when initially launched, so that it coupled nicely with mobile/cell phones (obviously in the pre smartphone era).
Similarly ironic: that Twitter essentially now requires a phone number for continued use of their service – by freezing all new users' accounts, soon after minor activity, until a phone number is provided. But, they won't let you use that phone endpoint for reading/posting.
That infuriated me last year when I finally tried to create a Twitter account.
During registration I was given a choice between providing an email address or a phone number. I provided an email address, only to immediately have my account locked until I provided a phone number. Well, I wouldn't have given my email address if I knew a phone number was required anyway! It wouldn't even let me visit my account settings to delete my account, and I never got a reply when I emailed Twitter support.
I had a similar experience. In my case they allowed my account to be opened without a phone number as I requested that they delete the account because I didn't want to provide my phone number. I deleted my account soon afterward anyway.
Be careful, my 10 year old account was permanently suspended without warning and support is no help; I suspect it's because I didn't have a phone number on my profile.
I had one account that got locked because of that and it took a lot of digging to find the right support link, but eventually I made a support request saying I didn't want to give them my phone number and violate my privacy and they finally unlocked that account. It wasn't easy though.
On the flip side, the experience is remarkably similar now to what it was a decade ago. It’s materially the same, which is rare for unicorns of this time.
For me, an occasional reader without a Twitter account, the experience became much worse in the past decade. That's because Twitter switched of RSS feeds and when opening links to individual tweets nowadays there is this ubiquitous "Something Went Wrong, Try Again" on first page load.
If this happens to a client attempting to load a single page in isolation (which it does, a lot), you are a failed web site. They may be a very successful mobile app, but as a website, they've failed miserably.
I love nitter and threadreaderapp. They make reading Tweets tolerable. The stock UI is just a confusing cluster fuck of Web 5.0 bloated webpacked Javascript bullshit.
There is absolutely nothing the original UI offers that I want, it's all bloated all I want is the content. Unfortunately when I'm looking at a tweet I want to see the whole conversation with replies and such, but nitter doesn't show it, only some of the threads that start at the given tweet, so if I want to read it all I have to click everywhere and open 10 tabs. I wish there was a frontend that loaded the whole conversation in one go, the way HN or old reddit do
Twitter is getting worse on a monthly basis. Just the fact that they have begun adding random tweets and accounts to follow while you're trying to read an existing conversation makes everything more confusing and toxic.
On desktop, I use https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ which handles multiple accounts, doesn't have ads and keeps everything in the order I expect. Only thing I wish it had but doesn't is the ability to paste in an image screenshot rather than save and upload from a folder.
In some ways that's the problem with Twitter. A decade ago people used to post what they ate for lunch and any random thoughts that entered their head. It was true "microblogging". Now it's mostly politics and bots, and the service itself hasn't evolved at all to handle them.
I’ll disagree. Twitter’s default experience leans towards politics but with some effort you can curate your twitter experience to focus only on topics you care about. My feed is pretty much only about tech, programming, creators and people building products. I have learned way more from people who are sharing their knowledge on twitter than any other platform. People working with companies creating all sorts of products or value are overwhelmingly active on twitter.
You’ll have to do at least two things -
1. Train the algorithm to drop politics from your feed by actively liking content on other topics.
2. Use Lists to curate timelines on a particular topic.
After this learn to use search and mute filters well. There’s a lot to gain from twitter if you follow and interact with the right people.
I want to say that my reddit usage will go way down, but I know that's probably not the case.
On the other hand, I know a few of the old-timers at reddit still use old.reddit, so that might help keep it alive.
In theory reddit can rebuild as an alternate front end, or someone else could do it. A good chuck of it is open source. You'd have to do a lot of work integrating the new APIs though.
Reddit's new GQL API uses different oauth tokens than the old API uses, and Reddit doesn't issue those tokens to third party apps. Until that changes, you can't build an alternate front end that has feature (or should I say misfeature) parity with the new site.
It's a shame that the most important chunk of Reddit isn't open source any more. I recently found bugs in both the old API (introduced in 2011, detailed at [1]) and in PRAW regarding bulk flair updates. Since PRAW is open source, I submitted a pull request [1], and their bug was promptly fixed. On the other hand, Reddit is no longer open source, so instead of submitting a pull request like in the old days, I'll have to make a submission to /r/bugs or message the current admins and pray that an engineer sees.
You can follow people. But if the people you follow "like" a political post, then you might see that. You can also tell Twitter to "Show you less" of any kind of post.
I used to think that worked, and at some point it (maybe) did. There were/are also magic strings you can mute.
I think currently your only hope is to use the "latest tweets" timeline, complete with periodically resetting your preference when Twitter decides to change it for you, which is abusive behavior on their part.
I prefer the chrono timeline and no "likes are stochastic retweets" nonsense, so that's a happy convergence for me. Who knows how long it'll last; Twitter seems to despise their users and I'm quite convinced no one in power at the company actually uses the platform.
Sorry, it's actually on the timeline. On twitter.com, look at the stars to the right of "Home" right at the top. Click that, then "See latest Tweets instead"
A twitter-like service whose only ban-able TOS violation (besides obviously illegal stuff) is to post any political content... that sounds amazing! I’d be there in a heartbeat.
The thing is, everything is political. Take LGBT people, especially trans people. Their entire right to existence is a hotly debated topic. Same for abortions. Religions. Sport events. Porn preferences. Sex work. Even such utterly mundane things as lipstick.
Take that out and you'd be left with essentially a feed of cute animals and still get fights between people arguing if dogs or cats are cuter.
That's true, but even more so than your list suggests. It's not just socio-cultural controversies that are political, but even basic elements of the economic status quo. Why do I have health insurance but not my Uber driver? Is my labor worth more than his? Is it OK that Pat Bowlen owns the Denver Broncos, or should the city of Denver own it instead (a la the Green Bay Packers)?
Only if 2FA doesn't open up customer support channels that defeat the point of 2FA, like the common "oops I lost my phone lol" channel attack that gives you access to an account if you can provide the other factor.
I'd say 2FA is often worse than 1FA because customer support systems are rarely prepared to say "sorry, can't give you access to your account :/". Because 99.9% of the time, it really is a user accidentally locked out of their account.
That has nothing to do with 2FA, has it? Having a recovery procedure that escalates up tp direct phone contact is the norm with or without 2FA. This system is probably older than the Internet, with banks operating on similar principles (of course, it escalates up to physical presence there).
Not if you live in a surveillance state such as many middle-east countries.
Many Telegram accounts were compromised in Iran a while ago because of this. https://www.wired.com/2016/08/hack-brief-hackers-breach-ultr... Similarly I know for a fact that in many countries your GSM provider stores your texts so you can view/reply them from their web portal. (As you can imagine despite an attacker might not have your SIM card, they might find your user/pass to log in your GSM provider's portal.)
Also state-sponsored actors do tap into GSM operators since SMS is not end-to-end encrypted. Add this to the previous attack vector and you'll see that wiretapping inbound SMS is surprisingly not that hard.
In all such cases the cost of engineering/operations time to keep these services alive overshadows pretty much everything else. So it's not cost per SMS that they are worried about, but rather the time spent maintaining and fixing these systems compared to how much they are used.
You might not realize just how expensive SMSes can be. Based on AWS SMS pricing, they cost 6/10ths of a cent to US destinations each, so each deal sent to 90,000 people in the article would cost twitter $540. That's not even getting into Europe that can cost over 10 cents per SMS, but I doubt twitter supported that.
SMS prices in Europe varies from country to country, but I would say that they are, on average, around 3-4 cents. You have cheap countries like Portugal (1-2 cent), intermediate countries like Spain (2-3 cents) and France (3 cents) and expensive countries like Germany (6 cents) or Belgium (6 cents).
From the top of me head, Azerbaijan is the most expensive country in the world, at 10 cents per SMS.
Source: Running a SMS hub in Europe for the last 15 years.
For extremely generous definitions of "works." I am constantly amazed at how long (and how many attempts) it often takes to load a single tweet page. The SPA-initializing state is usually measured in minutes on my iphone regardless of what kind of connection I'm on, and the result is often that message that the page failed to load because my browser made too many attempts. I don't know how you can possibly do this badly at delivering what should be the smallest web pages ever.
My standard practice on mobile now is, no joke, take the URL of the tweet page I'd like to read and paste it into a new FB post because it's faster and more reliable to get FB to fetch preview the content than it is to load it with my own browser. (edit: and note this is while using FB in my mobile browser. Think about how much more complicated a FB page should be than a single tweet, and it's still 100x faster to load.)
I've come to the conclusion that this is very intentional because they'd really like me to install the app and therefore have no incentive to improve the mobile experience, but I absolutely will not install an app for content that could very easily be delivered as a simple web page. I hope the trend of companies pushing their apps hard eventually reverses.
I just loaded a link to a tweet in a private browsing window on my iPhone in some sub-second amount of time. So whatever issue you're running into is a bug, not intentional.
Interesting how different our experiences are. This is a two-month old iphone, fully patched and with very few apps installed. Same experience as my previous iphone and android phones. Just verified: I sat and watched the "loading" spinner for over three minutes before starting to write this response. No idea how long it actually took, but it finished with just a blank white page with a twitter logo and a search bar. Maybe it's my mobile network (AT&T), who knows. But the experience is basically unusable, and I see at least one other person in this thread mentioning the error that indicates requests are being throttled, so I know I'm not alone.
I get frequent failures for various reasons on multiple connection types, including Google Fiber. Referrer seems to be part of it. Mobile does seem much worse (WiFi or cell network) which makes it feel intentional.
The mobile website's been broken for me for something like a year. It just shows "Something went wrong" with a Try again button that doesn't do anything. This happens for me on two different iPhones (a 6S and a XS).
Twitter has degenerated into one of the least friendly things to build an app for. I've had a better dev experience with Gab, ffs.
Not only that, but also their community building and tending is abysmal too, so your app will end up used mostly by the kind of user that brings infinitesimal value with them.
This is quite unfortunate. In countries where whether the people have access to internet or not is under the control of the government, this was a neat work around to get voices heard. In the recent history, an 'internet lockdown' has been the MO of many (oppressive) governments, including India.
edit: removed a comment on about 2-FA as it takes away from the intended point.
I don't think there are any countries with government controlled internet that don't also have government controlled mobile networks, and SMS is sent in the clear?
>The protests began in December when the government passed a law that uses religion as a criterion for determining whether illegal migrants in India can be fast-tracked for citizenship. The measure favors members of all South Asia’s major religions except Islam, India’s second largest faith. Muslims worry that the law will be coupled with a citizenship test and used to strip them of their Indian nationality.
They're very different situations, but the common thread is people feeling their rights are not being respected, and protesting that.
It's pretty well discussed among those who actually care about free expression and/or censorship circumvention.
I intended it to be a comment on how security is a reason why this was purportedly removed and that I understand, but I see that I muddled my statements there.
I mean, Twitter over SMS made perfect and necessary sense back in the first decade of its life.
But honestly the time has long since passed where it still makes sense to support. Smartphone notifications with the app are far superior in every way. (And if you don't want to install the app? I mean, just don't use Twitter then.)
And the only people who don't have smartphones these days are the kind of people who have made an intentional choice to reduce their always-on digital connection. They are the very least likely people to use Twitter anyways.
It's a good thing when a company is able to simplify its software architecture to remove code that's expensive to maintain and keep protected from security vulnerabilities.
> the only people who don't have smartphones these days are the kind of people who have made an intentional choice to reduce their always-on digital connection
This needs to be qualified: with respect to Twitter's target audience.
It's empirically not true that smartphone penetration is universal. Only ~350 million smartphones exist in India for 1 billion people, for example (source: McKinsey Global Institute's "Digital India" report publication from April 2019).
It's a fair statement to say that the majority of prospective and current Twitter users have smartphones, which justifies this decision.
Totally agreed. I'm wondering if Twitter still supports SMS in India, but unfortunately can't locate any page that lists the countries they're still supporting.
Bizarrely, the relevant link in their help center is broken:
I "lost" 250,000 followers back in the day due to a Twitter change.
People used to think we— @Twitter_Tips —worked for Twitter. When Twitter forced us to change our username to @TweetSmarter, @Twitter_Tips became a "new" account (that no one could use) that started with zero followers. In a few weeks it racked up over 250,000 followers—that were "ours"—because of all the press, blogs, lists, good will, etc we had on that account.
We supported the great software ecosystem that grew up around Twitter, and watched closely as Twitter killed it all off.
I remember when the ability to use Twitter via SMS was touted as a way to help people communicate around firewalls and internet outages or restrictive data plans. I'm not sure if there was ever a strong case for that, but the idealist in me feels that this is a loss for some of the least connected.
So Dan was a freeloader, instead of HIM paying the cost to notify HIS subscribers (aka TWITTER followers), he externalised/rolled off the cost to Twitter. Now that Twitter wants to do some cost-cutting and Dan has to pay HIS own "phone bill" for HIS customers, Dan is calling out on Twitter? Suck it up bro.
When I hear people complaining that "in our office they changed the coffee to a shittier one", I know what this is a prelude for avalanche of cost cutting measures. SMS in Twitter are being switched off? Blame the folks that created their business on someone else's £€¥$ and the Twitter shareholders came calling for more profit.
I wonder what are the savings that Twitter is making by flipping that switch off...
Wow, it’s been more than 10 years since twitter was born. Can’t believe they’ve been running txt based version for this long. Does it mean the mobile web has finally penetrated enough countries where browsing is as cheap and accessible as text?
Author’s claims are valid. SMS is still relied upon in countries without stable internet connection. Twitter should use its resources to fix the vulnerabilities and not just kill it off. Seems like they are straying away from their mission of allowing everyone to create and share ideas without barriers.
Nowadays SMS take longer to deliver than WhatsApp. Have tried to use SMS being in very remote areas with bad cell coverage to tell my wife where I was, they never arrived. WhatsApp delivered as soon as I overcame a hill crest and there was a sliver of 3G signal.
twitter had/has so called "zero rated" deals with most carriers, cut way back when. They dont(at least they didnt used to) pay anything per SMS, for most carriers.
However, the infrastructure to go direct to that many international carriers is/was quite complicated, from both a technical & ongoing business management PoV (carriers are awful to deal with in both categories). i imagine the savings from no longer having to maintain either are quite substantial.
At the time, twitter allowed you to receive SMS notifications of tweets posted to a followed account. I created a private account and used twitter's API to post tweets to with the notification content I wanted to send. I then had "dummy" accounts follow the "notification" account. These dummy accounts had recipient phone numbers with SMS notifications turned on.
The flow was: Web App -> Twitter API -> Tweet from "notification" account -> followers received SMS notifications. Free SMS delivery!
It was clunky and SMS notifications looked like they came from twitter (they did) but it solved my use case perfectly.