Getting rid of the Twitter embeds, and enabling alternatives

[Pocket]

I know it's generally not done to bring up politics outside of P&R, but the owner of the site formerly known as Twitter is, as of last week, an out-and-proud neo-Nazi, and a number of communities have already responded by banning all links to the site. I and others would appreciate if steps were taken to at least discourage it:

• Remove X from the share buttons at the bottom of the site (or just get rid of them all; we're all adults who know how to click on the address bar and hit Ctrl+C).
• If it's possible, remove Twitter from the list of "approved sites" for the Media feature without erasing all existing embeds. Embedding directly from the x.com domain already doesn't work, and people have been resorting to manually editing the URL as a workaround.
• Find and install corresponding code to embed Bluesky and Mastodon posts. I could have sworn I've seen working Mastodon embeds already, but it's not listed when I click the Media button.

 

[Dekafox]

Mastodon posts do embed, but it embeds like a normal webpage preview rather than like how Twitter posts do. That one might be trickier to detect for also, given the multitude of instance names out there(rather than just having to check for twitter.com or bsky.app in the URL), but it would be nice if it were possible.

I know some forum software does have the ability to federate with Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse, but I don't know if what the Allspark runs on is one of those.

 

[Rhinox]

Not that it means anything, but I'd like to see this change as well. Elon does not need any traffic from the Allspark. I'd like to see that he gets none.
Thanks, Kal and Staff.

 

[Kalidor]

The only links currently restricted from The Allspark are currently porn links and links to illegal content.

I'll bring this up with the staff but my initial thoughts on this is I think banning links to a site to 'stick it to the owner' is a bit overly dramatic. Personally, I'd be happy if NO social media existed and everyone just hung out here, but that's not likely to happen anytime soon.

I am looking into replacing the share links with different sites. I'd just as soon block reddit as Twitter because frankly both are trash to some degree. But normal regular people use both so it seems more like avoiding those sites is more of a personal choice than being a mandate.

But like I said, we (The staff) will talk it over.

 

[Princess Viola]

I'll bring this up with the staff but my initial thoughts on this is I think banning links to a site to 'stick it to the owner' is a bit overly dramatic.

I know you're the site owner and all that (and you did say you'll talk it over with the staff) but people aren't asking for Twitter embeds to be disabled to 'stick it to the owner', people are asking for it because Elon Musk - the owner of Twitter - is someone who openly supports far-right extremist politics and openly did a Nazi salute twice while in public to celebrate the inauguration of Donald Trump.

Wanting the ability to embed tweets from the website owned by a supporter far-right politics to be removed is not 'sticking it to the owner' nor is it being 'a bit overly dramatic'. It's called having basic principles of 'making it harder to provide traffic to the site owned by someone who supports the far-right'.

 

[Shadewing]

Even Reddit, for as trash as it maybe, has subreddits that are starting to do the exact same thing of banning twitter links. This isn't some small thing, a good chunk of the internet is trying to excise anything Musk related after his nazi salutes. Its basically people trying to kick the Nazi out before it becomes a Nazi bar.

 

[Kalidor]

After a lengthy discussion with the staff it has been decided that no changes to link sharing will be made at this time.

In regards to the software being able to do embedded links from other platforms we will look into how that could be improved.

 

[Destron D-69]

thanks for looking into alternatives.