Apparently Twitter is now going scorched earth on linking out to other social media profiles because they really want people to stay on their site, and also something about tracking a private jet through legally publicly available data because that seems to be the new thing. I remember hearing about how Instagram was removing links to Neocities sites at some point, possibly because the parent company had some experimental “website builder” in massive quotes thing, where it was more about making a collage of random images and I forget what it was even called, so clearly it must have gone well. I think the name had something to do with eggs? I’m not even sure what it was and I’ve tried to search my previous posts for it because I think I poked fun at it once. Really the only reason to find what it was would be to poke fun at it again.
Anyway, Twitter, a site that also had something to do with eggs at one point, seems to be blocking all kinds of random social media and remotely related pages, including but probably not limited to Facebook and its properties, Mastodon servers, some notoriously ultra-conservative platforms (perhaps a little late on that there), even Linktree for whatever reason because that could possibly have links that are “bad” on it I guess. However, as far as I know, the things I’m currently using haven’t been blocked, at least yet. Given how much I’ve been using those and not using Twitter, if that old account suddenly stops existing then I might have a good idea as to why. Maybe I’ll check later and laugh at the insecurity of billionaires if that’s the case. Something about the obsession of pursuing every last alternative and saying “please don’t go to alternatives in this list I’m making of websites that are bad which includes some really bad ones but the rest are just guilty by proxy”. Sure, every site has its assholes, but when it’s run by them, then it’s not a good idea to get attached to it. Also somehow Tumblr has been excluded from what I can tell for the moment, but only a matter of time.
The idea of blocking links to other pages that aren’t harmful like viruses, scams, or promotion of harmful ideals that more often than not result in people getting harmed, that just goes against the whole “Internet” thing where pages link to stuff and it just keeps linking to other stuff most of the time. They’re really just trying to keep people from finding alternatives so they don’t have massive drops in active user counts, and yet search engines exist. They would have to block search engines themselves, and given how Google, for example, is a search engine backed by a megacorp, that would be highly improbable. Of course, megacorps in general are prone to back alley deals so who knows. And of course there are alternative search engines as well. So regardless of if someone’s trying to find an alternative social platform or website host or plane information, they can most likely find it somehow. Also I feel like people aren’t posting plane tracking information on certain sites for sake of aiming rocket launchers or laser pointers, rather to mock the higher ups who usually put out the orders to track civilians in case they want to not buy something or not be heterosexual or whatever it is they take issues with. The people who actually gather the information seem to just be doing it because it’s there in public because it’s a certain type of government thing, as opposed to the other types of government things that are kept secret.