Twitter's new login requirement will make embedded tweets a thing of the past
Twitter has started blocking unregistered users from viewing tweets. Even when those tweets are embedded on other platforms — messaging apps, blogs, mainstream news sites, etc. — readers will only see plain hyperlinks unless they have logged-in Twitter accounts.
Blogs, newsletters, and mainstream news publications have long relied on embedded tweets to pluck interesting content from Twitter. But most readers don't use Twitter. The platform's 396.5 million users are only ~5% of the global population.
Even if you assume that the readers of certain publications (like Indie Hackers) are more likely than average to be Twitter users, more likely than average isn't enough.
For example, I assume 65% of the people reading this Indie Hackers post can see the tweet below:
But I'm not cool with 35% of you staring at an ugly, useless link. And I'm not alone in this.
So here, have a screenshot instead:
Why would you NOT buy my product?
I think this legitimizes the need for decentralized social media that's built on open source code
If you assume people care about this change, for sure. In the other hand It could not bother me enough to care. Never had a twitter account. The last social media I used was back in Orkut days.
Younger people don't know, but forums just like this one we are right now. Was the default place to exchange experience.
If there is something that all this social platforms are doing, is probably helping "tribes" realize that maintain your own forum was not a bad idea after all.
Don'g forget about USENET.
I do a bit of twitter, but agree with your post.
Forums are fair better than social media if you are actually serious about a topic.
Would love to see a resurgence.
Google has removed its Twitter integration just now.
I guess the rumors about not paying the Google Cloud bill are true
https://bsky.app/profile/doublepulsar.com/post/3jzmhqhaxea2u
The initial drive to increase advertising revenue seems to have been abandoned. Twitter is full of crappy gadget ads (perhaps badly targeted at me tbh) and I can't remember seeing an ad from a blue chip lately.
Everything seems to be pushing people, and companies, to pay for a subscription now, which is understandable, but the impact might be those that who resolutely will not pay for it leave for somewhere still free. I've seen lots of UK news/political types join BlueSky lately.
To be fair, it might just be that the time for freemium Twitter is over as it is no longer subsidized by ad revenue.
Those crappy gadget ads are now showing up about every 2nd or 3rd tweet for me.
Seems they have killed Tweetdeck as well...
Yeah, everything is stuck on "loading" for me.
Well. Its up and running. With a revamped UI. Looks Great
Everyone knows what Elon Musk is thinking, but they can't figure out why he thinks that way.
Good idea of having a screenshot.
Very meta, isn't it?
The first draft didn't have a screenshot. Only a link to the tweet. But then right before I hit "publish" I realized that adding the screenshot would be a nice finishing touch.
I also sent an embedded tweet in my newsletter yesterday, knowing it might be a bad idea.
I considered adding a screenshot as well but it was a thread and I wasn't sure how to capture it nicely.
Elon, making things hard for us 🤣
Haha, right!
This explains it. I was struggling to get this working in a PDF and settled for a hyperlinked screenshot instead.
It's funny to read this now, after Threads release... I am guessing folks at Meta got some bonus points for launching in the midst of all of this 😁
Prediction: someone will publish a tool to crowd-source screenshots of tweets
screenshot missing? -> don't show div, fetch screenshot from twitter and upload
screenshot fresh? -> render div and serve screenshot
screenshot stale? -> render div, serve screenshot and do a client-side If-Modified-Since
I don't really know how Same-Origin works, but if twitter allows embedding generally it shouldn't be an issue, right?
Note that I do not condone this kinda behavior! Just tryna predict the truth truly ;)
it seems to have been backtracked
I would strongly suggest that you just stop using Twitter, or trying to use it for story generation. Look elsewhere. Communicate and network elsewhere. It's beyond time to move on.
Cool!
I'm really wondering whether they at least considered that traffic from embedded tweets or they just needed to fix some thing on the other end of the product and this broke as a by product. 🙃
This is why you should never embed 3rd party content. Not only it can disappear, but it can always turn into something else, like an ad to your competitor for example.
I think your screenshot technique is an elegant solution
funny enough that sort of proves that embedded tweets aren't dead, just going to be presented in a different way.
In SEO news, that's probably better for load time tbh
The first draft didn't have a screenshot
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I disagree that there has been total transparency. This change came out of nowhere. The inability to view tweets publicly completely changes how useful Twitter is.
There is no clear timeline on when this will change. Its also not clear if the rate limit is permanent or not.
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I don't believe Twitter is under a DDOS attack. It is literally unbelievable to me that a company that operates at the scale Twitter does could suffer a DDOS attack that would require them to restrict how many users can access their product. Cloudflare (and other services) have built infrastructure to prevent this. Any developer can leverage similar services these days.
I also don't think Musk is claiming that they are being DDOSed. He said that this is because of "EXTREME levels of data scraping". He thinks that they are losing money based on people monetizing their data.
Some tweet embeds work now, others do not.
As a Twitter user, I see no reason to give Musk the benefit of the doubt or take him at his word these days.
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Oh, so that's why I can see the tweet, despite not having a Twitter account. Looks like it was temporary - at least for now.