For people in Europe to get a better idea of the size of just one of the largest fires in Quebec right now, it is 12,599 km² (about 88% the size of Northern Ireland 14,130 km² or 57% the size of Irish province of Ulster 22,067 km²). 16/
It's probably obvious to move of you, but a big difference between the commercial social media platforms and the fediverse is that as those commercial platform grow, they get additional revenue from ads, from selling personal information, and otherwise monetizing their users. While that is turning out to not actually pay the bills for them, in the fediverse, just about every instance is run by volunteers and funded by donations or out of the volunteers' pockets. It's a labor of love and a hope for a better future. When traffic grows, we need to expand our capacity.
That is why I am asking, if you are able, please consider donating to the instance you on to help keep the fediverse ecosystem going. Typically the /about web page will have details on how to donate.
Note: I am well aware that many of you are not in a financial position to donate - and that is OK. We are here to serve you as well. Donations are completely optional.
Woot woot, Twitter is dying.
Here is a screencap of the http response of upload.twitter.com and it's response time has been tied closely to use of the site, tracking with big events and daily usage patterns (Japan!). It also hasn't seen as big of a hit as other endpoints where emerald mine Sack's enthusiast hasn't cost cut just to make sure that his Saudi VCs don't recall him to their consulate in Istanbul.
Even though people thought bird.makeup would die this weekend with the login wall, it's actually more popular than ever!
The process I use to get information from Twitter still works but has a 40% percent error rate it seems. It's also much higher for accounts followed for the first time. It's very likely that's it's coming from their internal service being flaky and not actual ban enforcement. I'll see over the week if this improves otherwise I'll start figuring workarounds for those cases.
the elon google cloud bill thing doesn't actually affect the actual prod site
nothing about the real website actually ever lived in the cloud at all
the only shit that ever ran in the cloud was acquihire products (periscope, smyte)
and some very experimental t3 TLS-terminating reverse-proxy point-of-presence shit to improve first-byte latency
twitter the website lives in physical datacenters. always has.
this has to be a desperation move related to the migration off of google cloud rather than anything involving scraping
Lest anyone doubt that Twitter was idiotic enough to release code that would cause a race condition and result in its own users doing a DDOS attack on it, here's the network console readout from Firefox showing all the network requests blasting away.
Unbelievable. It's amateur hour.
@fishcharlie Seems like Elon has fired all the backend engineers, so all the new stuff since he is here is just UI changes, including this. Backend stays the same.
But it seems the twitter backend is becoming super flaky, often failing to return results (getting 404, failing to return videos, etc). So I will have to figure out a way to reliably get the info I need, or have graceful degradation when I don't get everything
Open source developer. Wikidata, IPFS, Linux, Ethereum. /r/fuckcars enthusiast. I tend to boost funny stuff.