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>>ZacnyL+(OP)
> There must have been an insane nest of logic that the devs had to tiptoe through to make the service workable as a private only service.

It seems that this statement can lead to different conclusions based on one's biases for or against Musk / freedom of speech:

1) The code base is a mess because the smaller, current team don't know what they're doing and/or management (i.e. Musk) is pushing them too hard and making poor decisions

2) The code base is a mess because the far greater number of engineers there before didn't know what they were doing and/or management weren't pushing them hard enough and were making poor decisions.

Both could be true but I'm going with something the more complex view that it's a little bit of everything, and that Twitter does seem to be moving in a positive direction overall.

>>brigan+bh1
Why do you say Twitter is moving in a positive direction? My experience is that I dislike their app and they killed the one I liked (Tweetbot), it's frequently down (I still get the "Something went wrong" error), and any kind of conversation is dead because blue-check replies (usually quite low-quality) are prioritised. There are other reasons to dislike today's Twitter that I needn't go into here, but these are enough to turn me away any time I decide to come back and check it out again.

>>smcl+ZL1
A few reasons, the first being that I can actually log in again after 2 or 3 years, as the login was broken for me for that long so I can't say I was a fan of what was going on before. I had several frustrations before but that, as you can imagine, pissed me off quite a bit.

The second being free speech, I'm a big supporter of that and there's certainly more of that now. It's not perfect but I'm not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater by arguing against perfection or pointing out some of the hypocrisies in play. It's a move in a positive direction.

They're comparisons against recent Twitter, which before Musk felt like an app with so many broken parts that were never going to get fixed (the login problem being the cherry on that cake for me). Now there's a feeling that things might get fixed, that new features definitely are coming, and that complaints might be listened to.

I also don't like the changes you've highlighted, though I do see them as inevitable at this point in internet history. We see Instagram and others moving towards paid verification, Reddit closing down its API and killing apps (and should we forget that Twitter has done this at least once before in one form or another). So, I don't think it's all rosy in the garden, but overall it's positive, and the negatives (mostly) feel inevitable.

Add to that, alternatives are now getting a bit of a look in from people that wouldn't have have bothered before. I don't think that Mastodon, to choose one example, is a direct replacement, but it's good that people are giving it a try.

>>brigan+gN3
It sounds like the login problem and the free speech policy (which I think we won't agree on but that's by the by) are the main issues. But it's interesting we have completely alternate impressions how it was before/after Musk. After the initial growth explosion when Twitter launched (and a few encounters with the fail whale) it stabilised and always felt pretty reliable for me. Whereas now downtime is commonplace again, and it feels a bit self-inflicted. Now that the company has axed staff, stopped paying bills and is going to attempt a rapid migration off AWS, I don't have much hope that this will get better.

But to your last sentence - I ended up trying Mastodon, found a nice server, downloaded a familiar app (Ivory by TapBots, the team who made Tweetbot - RIP) and found a pretty good bunch of people to follow so I'm pretty happy there. I probably wouldn't have otherwise tried it had I been able to continue using Tweetbot. I'd be happier if both existed and I could bounce between them, but if Twitter melts into obscurity I'll be a little sad but it would be fine.