The UK and… in fact, no. I’m glad it’s not us this time. Lets roast France some more.

Large open source projects like Signal don’t really rely on individual donations, but instead survive off wealthy supporters or sponsors.

No, I got rid of my discord so don’t have any. But you’d have to find new links anyway. The invites all expire after a while. Another reason why discord sucks.

Agreed, those subs were easily the best.

A lot have moved into Discord, which makes these things even more difficult. In general discord servers are insular little clubs. They tend to have strange unique rules and require you to jump through so many hoops to get initiated.

The Discord format is like plugging into a stream of consciousness, so doesn’t exactly lend itself to info-seeking like the forum format does.

Funnily enough, I do. I’m an SRE myself.

Services like Akamai have tools that are literally designed to block requests from known bad locations and IP ranges.

No, you’re correct. Service accounts can consume data way faster than a human user ever could. A smart business always implements rate limits or you could bankrupt them with a simple curl command. They could bankrupt themselves in testing with a simple loop!

This can be fixed in many ways, not just by putting limitations on credentials but also on source addresses. If a certain address or range of addresses seems to be running multiple service accounts and pulling huge amounts of data, you can deny requests from those IP’s.

In short, this AI angle smells like BS to save face. Musk effectively fired the SRE team who looked after critical infrastructure. It was their job to ensure service reliability, so it should not be a surprise that Twitter now has issues with service reliability.

Almost certainly this isn’t anything to do with scraping. Like with Reddit, those with a stake in Twitter stand to benefit from AI and, as far as I know, there’s no mass reposting (retweeting?) effort to something like Mastodon.

That would be trivial to block anyway, since it would be easy to identity the service accounts and source IP’s of the requests. No need to impact average users.

What’s more likely is he hasn’t paid the bill for his cloud infrastructure and no longer has the capacity to serve so many users.

IMO, that’s what you get when you fire half of your staff.