I hope they took the Streisand effect into account... Tech users know Mastodon, others are now going to Google it based on mainstream media headlines. Big mistake.
Possible dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010112
Sounds like some awesome freedom of speech going on
BBC journalists also seem to refuse to share links to Mastodon :-)
Perhaps a work-around would be to have a landing page or redirector that when accessed by a bot just talks about how wonderful Twitter is but when a human accesses it you get redirected to a particular Mastodon instance. Is that doable in code? I know how to do this in Nginx and HAProxy ACL's. Do the Twitter crawlers use HTTP/2.0 yet? Google and assorted gaming/chat platform crawlers are still limited to HTTP/1.1.
Plenty of discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010112
What was that thing that that guy said... first they laugh at you...
Well, well, well. For years I've been talking about how bad this online censorship is [0][1][etc], but people here were pretty chill with what was happening. Turns out, when it started happening to their side, they all suddenly started behaving very hysterical. Who could have thought that social platform neutrality is a good thing?!
Absolutely insane that they would do this. It's like they thought "what's the most obvious anti-trust violation we could implement in a day using existing code?" and then did.