And just like that, without a warning, Twitter changed policies again, and you now need a Twitter account and be logged in to see public tweets: Twitter has started blocking unregistered users (The Verge). Though I learned it first via Mastodon, of course.

For example, this is what happens when you go to twitter.com/wikipathways:

Screenshot of the Twitter login page.

Fortunately, WikiPathways does have a Mastodon account, that anyone can see without having a Mastodon account. You can even follow WikiPathways’s account with its RSS feed. Dissemination should not be paywalled.

Maybe Musk has been talking to Elsevier and Springer Nature.

Tip: Finding Mastodon accounts with Wikidata (a few SPARQL queries)

Update: Musk said this was a temporary measure. The problem was scraping of content, you know, the content we openly share on Twitter. Maybe they could have done this with APIs. Oh wait, they closed those behind a very expensive paywall.

Update 2: Another rumor is that the forgot to make a deal with a cloud provider and suddenly were left with a fraction of the computing power.

Update 3: The access has been restored, so you can start scraping/archiving all interesting tweets again.

This post was originally posted as https://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/2023/07/twitter-exits-fair-and-is-no-longer.html.