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Twitter has flagged all the major Mastodon servers as malware

130 points by kris-nova ↗ HN
URLs containing any of the popular Mastodon servers are rejected by the Twitter API. Profile bios and URLs are now rejected if a user attempts to change them. All the major Mastodon sites are flagged, and Twitter is even checking 3XX redirects, transparent proxies, and URL/link shortening services for Mastodon related responses.

18 comments

[ 212 ms ] story [ 1229 ms ] thread
proc0
What's the point of moving to Mastodon if you still need to promote your posts on Twitter? This seems like cognitive dissonance... rage quit Twitter, only to gripe about Twitter features. Just use Mastodon.
akmarinov
Help others do the same and take away as much traffic as possible away
bnt
Why? Mastodon will never take off.
yread
If Mastodon wasn't taking off they wouldn't have to block the links
rvz
Twitter did it before in the past [0] and Mastodon still didn't 'take off'. Today it is no different, and just like before in tech circles, this outrage will just subside as it is not the end of the world.

Other than the techies getting emotional and screaming at Twitter, little to no one of the 200M+ people still using Twitter daily care to delete their account(s) and leave for something worse.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31607941

proc0
So they should facilitate losing their own users? And people think that it's somehow bad that they won't go along with it? I'm pretty sure YouTube won't let you advertise other video platforms in videos. It defeats the purpose of the platform, and it's a dumb ask. Obviously they will not allow that to the best of their abilities.
kybernetikos
That depends on what the purpose of the platform is, and since the owner had previously made a point of being keen on free speech, it's interesting that it's actually not being run in line with those ideals at all. We're now seeing that the carve outs from free speech include things that might reduce profit, and the reposting of public flight data.
proc0
Yeah but then no one believes in free speech. It was much worse before, and the people who are leaving Twitter were the ones (presumably) justifying that other censorship.

My perspective is that at least now it's out in the open.

q1w2
The irony is that the people complaining about Elon's censorship were pro-censorship before his takeover.
kace91
Why?

I am very much in favor of premarital sex, but if the Pope is seen tomorrow in an orgy I'll certainly point the hypocrisy.

smoe
Plenty of Youtubers with millions of subscribers regularly advertise their content on other video platforms such as Nebula. Doesn't seem to be an issue.
sebazzz
Would it be an issue if YouTube took offense to that and added a clause to the ToS to disallow it?
smoe
At least for the creators I follow, they use alternative platforms for additional content (not replacement for their YT videos) for things that don't perform so well trough the YT algorithms like long form, in-depth videos that are less advertiser friendly than pure infotainment, and e.g. music educators doing song analysis which is too risky to do on YT although to my understanding it falls perfectly under the fair use doctrine.

I don't even see them as competing platforms, they offer very different products via the same medium. Legally, I don't know if having such ToS would be a problem, but as a user I would find it extremely frustrating to not have to ability to discover content that YT seemingly doesn't want to focus on itself.

ricklamers
Final straw :) Deactivated my account
q1w2
Thank you for leaving.