It’s increasingly apparent that relying on the ability to reliably access or even link to internet content outside of the truly open web is a fool’s errand.

I had problems today building even this little blog, receiving a lot of “Failed to get JSON resource” errors. The culprit turned out to be my use of a Twitter shortcode, which my blog software kindly provides in order to make it easy to embed tweets in their full interactive glory.

To date it’s always been possible for someone who is not logged in to see an individual tweet and for tweets to be embedded on sites. There are sites that almost entirely consist of embedded tweets and some commentary on them, for better or worse (usually worse).

I’m totally guessing, but I’m going to assume that the sudden failure of this method of embedding tweets was a side effect of Musk’s “surprise” change to prevent not-logged in users from seeing anything on Twitter. As well as stopping logged in users, even the rare ones that actually pay for the privilege, from seeing as much as they might want to on Twitter.

This and the ongoing Reddit API fiasco makes me wonder whether Ryan Broderick was right in a recent edition of his newsletter to imply that the only future-proof option for the average user to share even very mainstream content these days is to post screenshots. Doubly so for any content on any site popular enough in in theory be bought by some ideologically incompatible billionaire. How web 1.0.

While trying to track down the actual hyperlink to a post I found a screenshot of on a closed social network I was struck by how on an internet full of closed platforms, broken embeds, and crumbling indexes, the last reliable way to share anything is a screenshot. In other words, the camera roll is, at this point, the real content management system of the social web.