I wrote a thing about the new Twitter.now project yesterday. I said I was "cautiously optimistic" but I'm erring more on the side of cautious now. I think the two guys who started this thing might be in over their heads. There was a massive spambot attack going on all afternoon, flooding the feed with thousands of pics of cartoon catgirls and crypto bullshit for hours, and then they finally shut it down when the racist 4chan style nonsense started piling on.
You can still access the landing page, but I'm getting "a server with the specified host name could not be found" when I try to visit the app.
Before the spam started, a user pointed out that it was oozing personal information like emails and birthdays. Someone said you can bypass the fee altogether and create an account for free but I don't remember how and I can't search the post because it's offline. Update: posted on Bluesky that you could bypass the signup form and create a free account directly from Firebase. The AI moderation system they called VERA was doing fuckall, so they took it offline earlier that day before everything went down.
It's a whole shitshow over there.
If you do a web search for "Twitter now" you'll still see big news sites running with the story about its launch as recently as four hours ago. None of them mention any of the fuckery from last night.
It's easy to fall for nostalgia. Especially when it's hyped up to be some revolutionary "fuck you" to Elon Musk and promises to bring back that cozy public square vibe we had in the old days of Twitter. The fact that you had to pay for it gave it this sense of exclusivity; you can get in on the ground floor of this awesome new social network. It feels like a crypto scam without the crypto. Maybe that's the new grift? Forget about all the digital ponzi money; just charge users to make an account on a new house of cards and pull the rug after people hand you money for nothing.
To be completely honest, a part of me wants to believe Elon Musk is sitting at his laptop, bundled up in his favorite Snuggie, personally carrying out the spam attacks all on his own — tears streaming down his face and into that stupid fucking sink he carried into Twitter HQ the day he took it over.
In reality though I think it was just a vibe coded fever dream from a guy who knows more about trademark law than software development. Bad actors noticed some big vulnerabilities and went in for the kill.
For a social network that sells trust as its main feature, I don't trust a goddamn thing about it. Of course I'll still follow up and start poking around on there again if it ever goes back online, but it's pretty sketchy right now, to say the least. I would've felt a little better if there was a blog where anyone who paid money for an account could check for updates, or at the very least an email blast explaining why the site is offline and what the plan is going forward.
It's a reminder of just how well places like The Atmosphere and Fediverse are being built; all the planning and security measures that were taken to make sure it won't all evaporate overnight — and that you can't trust every vibe coded app some LLM shits out.
It's also a reminder of why I was so excited to join Bluesky when it was new, and why I've been so cozy over there ever since. If anything, it's a great advertisement for how resilient and well thought out the more established platforms like Bluesky are. I like to see innovation and new takes on social media; I like seeing new things being built on the web. I don't even condemn vibe coding if you're using it as an extension of your own skills, but this... does not feel like that. And I'm no developer either, so this take is 100% an end user's perspective. But as an end user, I expect a thing I paid for to work and not to leak my personal data or let it get to the point of racist shitheads taking over before deciding to do anything about it.
It was almost surreal watching it go from classic 2010 era Twitter vibes to the dumpster fire it became after Elon's hostile takeover, all in the span of two days.