• Whirlybird@aussie.zone
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    1 year ago

    Twitter’s already relatively tiny user base

    Twitter’s MAU count is around 450 million active users. You’re not going to find many bigger user bases.

    • HeavyDogFeet@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Where did you get that number from? Best I’ve seen is ~350M and dropping. For reference, Pinterest is ~465M.

      Twitter had an outsized impact but it’s not at FB or Insta or Youtube numbers, and it’s already struggling to keep working under the load of mostly text and static images.

        • HeavyDogFeet@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Interesting. Looking into the sources that Statista uses, you find this graph that paints a very different picture.

          Also how has twitter been struggling to keep working?

          Did you not hear about all the limiting they had in place recently? 600 or 1000 posts viewable per day for non-paying users, 6000 for paying users. I know the official reason given was to (somehow) limit data scraping, but come on, we all know that’s bullshit. And outside of that, there have been a bunch of issues with outages, basic things like search breaking, etc. It’s a platform in decline.

          • Whirlybird@aussie.zone
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            1 year ago

            That graph literally says “significant anomalies in source data”, so they’re even saying that it’s not an accurate picture though.

            Rate limiting isn’t “struggling to keep working”. It isn’t like it was crashing due to people using it too much. Saying “we know their reason is bullshit” doesn’t make it true. Nothing indicated that they were having trouble with uptime or performance.

            • HeavyDogFeet@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Yes, it says there are anomalies—that doesn’t mean it’s wrong, just that it’s unusual. Almost like there was a moron in charge of the company who was making erratic changes to its infrastructure and driving a mass exodus of users. And even if that number is wrong (it probably is) it’s not like the previous number isn’t heavily outdated. There have been massive changes to Twitter since then, it would be stupid to assume old data is still accurate.

              It was crashing in part because Twitter was DDOSing itself. Twitter rate-limited itself on purpose because they were fucking their own system up, but they gave a BS reason because it would be embarrassing for Musk to have to admit he fired too many people and the skeleton crew that’s left can’t keep up with his stupid decisions.

              Remember, this is a website that primarily serves short text-only posts and was largely stable when it was bought. It’s not rocket science, and yet Musk’s still managing to make it look hard.

              • Whirlybird@aussie.zone
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                1 year ago

                I didn’t say it means it’s wrong, just that it’s not going to be an accurate picture. It might be right, it might be wrong, we have no idea - which is why they put that qualifier there.

                There’s nothing indicating twitter isn’t still largely stable.

                Also that’s not a DDOS since there was no denial of service. Those calls are likely all just getting stopped at a cloudflare (or alternative) level anyway.

                • HeavyDogFeet@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  There was no denial of service because they rate limited accounts. That’s the entire point. Had they not done that, it’s likely they would have overwhelmed their servers and crashed the service, resulting in denial of service.

                  • Whirlybird@aussie.zone
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                    1 year ago

                    But no one knows when that repeated call was added to twitter - it could have been there for years. Like I said, it also likely just gets caught by cloudflare etc when it’s doing that, meaning it’s not going to overwhelm anything.

                    You’re saying that they did a release, realised it was going to DDOS itself, so then rate limited accounts in another release rather than simply roll back the broken release or fix the call? That doesn’t make any sense.