I actually find Twitter’s mobile web app experience to be pretty good–they don’t nag me to install the app every 5 seconds, it’s reasonably performant, the back button works properly and even mostly preserves scroll position. All of the core functionality is there, except new features like Fleets I don’t care about anyway. I use it regularly and have been pretty impressed.

Reddit on the other hand is absolutely hostile and basically none of what I said above is true of their mobile web UI. I refuse to install their app simply out of spite for how aggressively they nag for me to use it. I’ve said no like 500 times at this point, will I change my mind on the 501st prompt?

My solution to this for past year: only use the laptop for most things. No more distractions in the pocket, feels pretty good!

They also restrict your ability to copy links and text in apps, so that you can't open things in a non-walled app browser. This I believe is why sites like Twitter also uses URL conversion... There is a wild variety of ways in which they can limit where those URLs go, and I've noticed sometimes it even makes externally pointing links not work properly (Which can be turned on and off at will by the link service owner).

Those URLs also mask origination when they point to other sites, so that site logs don't provide any real specific data on where traffic to them is coming from.

The most Internet/user hostile era ever is probably going on right now. Will be interesting to see where this all goes.

That makes it real easy, actually. No Reddit or Twitter

I used this to reduce my usage of the sites. It's so terrible I'm in and out in just enough time to check notifications

Having said that I find Twitter to be quite usable in a mobile browser, it's one of the few that isn't awful

Facebook is by far the worst, image posts overlap the edges of the screen, terrible for anything with text overlaying[1]. You can use the mobile version instead but then you can't use FB messenger at all

[1] e.g. https://img.imgy.org/-7p8.jpg

Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook (and mbasic.facebook.com), LinkedIn, etc. are all user hostile.

This gets amplified when using ad/tracker blockers at DNS level (NextDNS).

I just saw this in another article: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/banish-for-safari/id1632848430

I wonder if it can solve this problem since reddit/twitter/tiktok won't stop.

Actually twitter is fine on a mobile browser provided you use an account.

What I miss is the multi-container extension on fennec/firefox mobile. I keep using those sites in incognito mode but that mean I can only use one at a time.

It is infuriating that I can't browse certain Reddit pages because they want me to "use the app so they know I'm over 18". I first ran into this in my current attempt to play through Dark Souls 3. It seems like the community there has a lot of good discussions about beating certain bosses, but for some reason, Reddit has decided that the content in that sub-reddit needs age verification and they wall it behind the app.