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Comment by rippercushions | Hacker News Reader

There are two ways this could have happened:

1) Twitter/Elon has made the conscious decision to censor all references to Mastodon in an attempt to retain market share.

2) Somebody shared something bad with a mastodon.social link, and Twitter's always-creaky moderation systems, now nerfed and defunded by Elon, completely failed to realize the implications and added mastodon.social to the same global domain ban list as viruses4u.ru and freeviagra.xxx etc.

My money is actually on #2, because the ban only appears to impact mastodon.social and not any other Mastodon instance, but I guess we'll find out once this hits mainstream news and Twitter has to make a public decision on this.

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As others have said, it is not allowed to post links with tweets to any Mastodon instance (see https://sigmoid.social/@thegradient/109521197175376332 for a screenshot)

Is there a nitter equivalent for Mastodon? Something that allows a link to be viewed without Javascript?

I didn't realize Mastodon only worked with JavaScript enabled. That sucks. I like Mastodon a lot, but this decision feels hostile.

Edit: Seems like they don't plan to change it either: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/6186

You can get an RSS feed for any account by appending .rss to the URL, i.e. https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon.rss

Not sure if that helps

Yeah, that actually works pretty well! Thanks!

Aside from alternative web clients like https://brutaldon.org, CLI ones, desktop ones etc. It has an open API, see https://joinmastodon.org/apps for an incomplete list.

Forgot about that, that's awesome!

> this decision feels hostile.

No, an uncompensated developer doing something that's easier for them is not hostility.

That's fair. Mastodon seemed like a pretty mature platform, so I guess I was just surprised. Considering that 1) the majority of the modern web doesn't work properly without JS, and 2) Mastodon is designed with third-party clients in mind, it's not a big issue I admit.

https://brutaldon.org

So apparently the edit ban only affects mastodon.social, but links to any mastodon instance even those that don't have it in the name, are flagged as unsafe and require a clickthrough. It's very uneven.

I can rule out #2, because as of this AM I can't post my Mastodon account in a Twitter message, and it's https://toot.community/@TomSwirly

Toot is a small, high-quality Amsterdam server with a very civilized userbase.

infosec.exchange and hachyderm.io appear to be affected as well -- at least, I can't tweet links to them, nor put links to them in my bio.

I think it's a fair assumption that #2 happened, but as time goes on with no transparency (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598858533608431617), it begins to look like #1.

> "... the ban only appears to impact mastodon.social and not any other Mastodon instance, ..."

This turns out not to be the case. It's looking like nearly all, if not actually all, Mastodon instances, including mine.

Some evidence towards "all": The 600-user Halifax, NS instance, halifaxsocial.ca, is affected.

Links to androiddev.social are banned on Twitter as well right now.

Maybe https://mastodon.social/@elonjet

mtsdn.social (or the similar domain) is coming up with a "this is a harmful url" prompt.

https://ibb.co/kx0cdFK

It's 1.

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