goodbye twitter

The following thread marks the end of my time on twitter. Multiple issues, such as data failing to update, data being cached in some instances but not others and thus causing weird behavior, etc made me decide I will trust this app no longer. It could lead to life threatening issues. These are the final Tweets for @derekriemer from Thursday, February 02 2023, 19:26 MST explaining my reasoning.

bye y'all. I'll likely delete this app soon. The idiots in charge don't leave me feeling confident that it's going to remain a useful place to receive emergency info like it once did, and the community that was here is practically dead. I'll likely go onto masto at some point.

As it stands, I regularly see tweets on mobile where the tweet contents change when I click the tweet in my timeline to view it. Thus, the people who remain are incapable of keeping caches from being poisoned. I can't trust the data I'm seeing to be current any longer.

There are other ways to receive necessary emergency information I need. Although, having a masto instance for emergency services, and community updates for things like wildfires would be amazing. That's one thing Twitter did well, but can't be trusted with if caches are poisoned.

Now, if @NWSBoulder and @NWS could get on the mastodon bandwaggon life would get better. Guess where I found about the Marshall fire, before anything really? It was here. It won't be any longer when I can't even trust that the data I see is accurate.

Blind twitter, and tech twitter have either mostly died, or devolved into something useless, and will completely die in the upcoming days as apis blink out of existance. Bots I followed both for productive and interesting means will die once the api changes are made.

[readers note: Twitter has announced they are about to make their api pay for use, and it's clear that most services that once paid for it will not pay, because the cost won't necessitate the benefit. Some of the people who were using these apis were delivering emergency info, etc. This info will stop working at some ndetermined date.]

You can find me for professional means on linked in, and you can find me on derekriemer.com to get in touch or follow my blog. I'll mastodon when I get around to it, and maybe I'll use facebook for some emergency info, but likely will use radios and other things.

If you remain, you need to be very aware that things aren't what they seem. This site is huge. Notifications can fail to be received from sources where you once received them, and data is often being cached, and not updated, or updated in spotty ways.

I've seen situations here where I clicked a tweet and got shown a completely different tweet. I've seen tweets fail to load, and I've seen my own tweet contents cached where clicking it revealed someone else's tweet. This cache poisoning is extremely dangerous. Cache poisoning in the software industry can regularly be cause for p0 the world's on fire level bugs. It means you might one day retweet a tweet, only to retweet natzi propaganda or similar. Cache poisoning means you get an alert about a wild fire, and the data you see is 3 hours old, or contains data that has been deleted already. It means you cannot trust absolutely anything here, at least on mobile.

[readers note: you also might be seeing the data of one user attributed to the wrong user entirely.]

When Elon took over he claimed to be shutting down Thousands of unnecessary microservices. I guarantee that some of these were doing things like updating caches, detecting user intent to optimistically load data, scrubbing blocked tweets, syncing servers, etc.

These sites are huge, and it's clear that what I'm seeing is a crumbling mess caused by a cooperating network of computers that's now starting to fail to communicate. Goodbye. You won't see many more tweets here.

I've been immersed in the world of storage systems for the last 5 years or so. When I see data being mislabeled as other data, that makes me recoil in disgust.