1mo ago

Apparently Bluesky lets you require a sign in to view a post

You have become the very thing you swore to destroy

37 comments

Could it just be any post that is 'friends only' or if the user has blocked anyone?
Sounds like it's not systemic like Twitter or Reddit requiring logins for virtually anything.
- They require login for all "sensitive" posts, so yes it is a systemic issue. For anyone annoyed by this, just use LibRedirect and enable forwarding of BlueSky to the 3rd party web client https://skyview.social/
  
  Good to know, thanks!
- twitter is fucked and requires a login for everything, but reddit seems to work fine without a login.
  
  Unless you’re on a vpn, in which case the whole site is restricted unless you sign in.
  
  Anything that's marked NSFW requires a login on Reddit.
  
  You can bypass that by just replacing "www.reddit.com" with "old.reddit.com", which shows exactly the same content using the old Reddit UI without login. It has no more restriction than just clicking an "I am over 18" button.
  e.g.:
  https://www.reddit.com/r/GoneWild
  https://old.reddit.com/r/GoneWild
  
  I can't fathom how people have been using the redesign in the first place. Old.reddit was the only way.
  
  I never moved to the new UI. I assume that users using the new UI is a combination of:
  Many, probably most of the existing userbase came in after the redesign -- Reddit kept growing. Probably not even aware of it.
  A lot of users -- especially today, though not back when the site was created -- are browsing the site using a smartphone, and the old UI, while usable, is not designed around a small smartphone screen. (That's a two-edged sword; to some extent, I think that the new UI is poorly suited to a personal computer.) That being said, Reddit, like many Web-based services, pushes hard to get mobile users on the official app -- more access to a user's phone and data-harvesting potential, I suppose -- and I'd guess that a lot of smartphone users use the official app these days, rather than the mobile Web UI. I think that Reddit mostly sees the mobile Web UI as a way to help lower the bar to feed new users in, but that's not where they want mobile users long-term.
  Reddit added inline images to the new UI, but not the old.
  There is a small amount of incompatibility...I'd have to go back and look it up, but IIRC backslash-URL-escaping for URLs has slightly different edge cases, so you can get a link that works in the old UI but not the new and vice versa.
  You really need a browser extension to fix up links to redirect to the old UI, since otherwise links that users on the new UI use will just direct old users to the new UI. We actually kind of have a similar problem on the Threadiverse too -- while we can use !community@instance syntax to link to a community and have the user stay on their home instance, today we have no way to link to a comment or post and do so -- if I paste a link to it, it'll take a user off their home instance. There's a Firefox addon, Instance Assistant for Lemmy & Kbin, which sticks a button in the sidebar of webpages to view a given post through your own home instance, which is kind of a half-solution.
  On the other side of the balance sheet, I haven't played with the new UI enough to know what didn't make it over, but I don't know if the subreddit wikis -- each subreddit came bundled with a wiki -- ever made it over. They weren't accessible from the new UI when it came out.
  
  pretty sure thats just on mobile, could be wrong tho
  
  The mobile website doesn't let you view NSFW-flagged subreddits without using the Reddit app -- you can't view them in a browser at all, by default, login or no. You can bypass that by flipping your web browser to request desktop mode and viewing old.reddit.com too.
  
  twitter is fucked and requires a login for everything,
  They will show you a login screen at the home page. However. You can view specific tweets without an account. You can also view some content from a user.
  You're crippled important ways in that as far as I know, you can't sort by reverse date order (to see a user's recent tweets, which is kind of important), and AFAIK you can't search, but you're not completely blocked out.
  Here's Michael Kofman's tweets:
  https://x.com/KofmanMichael/
  And here's a specific tweet of his:
  https://x.com/KofmanMichael/status/1627309427907854336
  Both should be visible without a Twitter account.
  EDIT: Oh, interesting. It looks like he is either mirroring (dunno if he's still updating the Twitter account) or has moved to Bluesky anyway, though. Hadn't noticed that before now. Glad I looked. Had kind of stopped viewing his stuff when Twitter clamped down.
  
  Twitter's even worse than that. Sometimes they require login to view a tweet. Sometimes you can see every post on an account. Sometimes there are certain posts missing in a timeline but you can't know without logging in.
  Ridiculously annoying.

37 comments