Goodbye Tweetbot

I have been actively using Twitter for years. I joined in late 2009 and have fond memories of using it. From a desktop first, then an iPod Touch using the official Twitter app, and then my old Sony Ericsson K790i by SMS-ing tweets, before switching over to using smartphones and using apps.

I did use the default Twitter app for a bit, but Tweetbot was the first iOS app I bought on the App Store in 2013, and added it immediately onto my dock where it stayed ever since. I have used Tweetbot since then. I continued to use Tweetbot through the years by buying / subscribing to new versions, despite the Twitter API always limiting third-party clients and not supporting all of the features the official apps and websites had.

And I lived with that deficit, because Tweetbot felt like home. Over the years, I have tried using the official app multiple times (and always have the app on my phone), but it has always been terrible. The experience of using Tweetbot was always so much better than the official app. Tweetbot didn’t have ads, only showed me tweets from my (curated) followers list, had a chronological timeline, maintained my point in the app even if I fell behind, was customizable, etc. But most of all: it had a so much better user experience that put me first. It never felt cluttered and made Twitter inviting.

Over the last ~3 years, I had reduced tweeting but I still consumed from it fairly regularly. Twitter was still an enjoyable experience when I wanted it because I had Tweetbot. The negativity since Elon Musk got involved in March 2022, though, has been overpowering, and I removed Tweetbot from my dock in early December 2022.

Tweetbot shutting down after Twitter abruptly disabled its APIs, though, does convince me to wane my use of Twitter even further. Twitter without Tweetbot doesn’t feel right. Trust me, I have tried! Mastodon is interesting, but it isn’t a Twitter replacement. Not yet atleast.

We’ll see where this journey goes, but until then, goodbye Tweetbot 🫡. Thank you for giving me such a pleasant Twitter experience for almost a decade. You will be sorely missed.

What Will be the New Normal?

On January 31, 2020, when USA started restricting entry into USA from China, I felt lucky that it happened then, and not 20 days earlier when I was flying through Beijing on my way back to USA. Little did I imagine then that it was only the beginning of what was to come in the next few months (years?).

Over the last 6-weeks, SARS-CoV-2 (2019-nCoV) has transformed the world as I knew it. During this time, I have been thinking a lot more about what this will do to us as a species, us as human beings, and us as citizens. Watching TV shows where people are not distancing from one another, hanging out outside their home or even going to an office, feels weird!

This is a non-exhaustive, unorganized (possibly updating) list of things I think will change as we tackle this pandemic and thereafter.

• I hope we start giving each other 6 feet of distance, everywhere, always.
• Masks will become commonplace during flu season, allergy season, any outbreak, or just all the time.
• Handshakes are a thing of the past? Maybe.
• Relationships that have strong communication will weather the storm, but those that rely on physical presence will take a hit.
• Work places will change to become more distributed.
• We will become more considerate about the daily struggles of our families, friends, peers and colleagues.
• As we are already beginning to see, the types of work that are impactful and ‘essential’ will start gaining the respect they deserve. My sincere hope is that their monetary remunerations grow to the same degree.
• Some form of Universal Basic Income concept will start to gain a lot more traction.
• Investments in healthcare (equipment, staff, facilities, medications, vaccinations, awareness, etc.) will grow.
• Educational efforts, especially in developing countries, will be overhauled to be able to be conducted remotely.
• A reduction in consumerism, fast fashion, and all their friends, wouldn’t be a bad thing.
• I will start buying more locally, supporting local businesses and shops, instead of chains.
• Global order will change. USA’s response to the pandemic has been one of woeful unpreparedness. The center of global power is shifting. Where will it go is anyone’s guess, but it could just as well be the start of a long-term power struggle.
• Travel. Oh, travel. As someone that wants to travel everywhere, I am probably going to revisit all my future plans and be conservative about where I go and if I truly want to go.
• We will cherish what we have, when we have it.
• The outdoors, the parks, the hikes, the rides, the runs. I am only beginning to realize just how important these are to me.
• We will accept that we do not have to be in the same restaurant, coffee shop, bar or city to hang out with our favorite people. A FaceTime or Zoom call can be as heartwarming as a hug.
• The real leaders that care about us, are decisive, responsible, thoughtgul and considerate will stand out from the crowds.

Instagram has Terrible Account Security

A few days back, someone reached out to me suspecting that their Instagram account had been hacked. What followed was me helping them work through every available way to lock down their account and then convincing them that they had done everything and it didn’t seem like it was hacked. In the process, though, as a proof-of-concept, I followed the same procedure I helped them go through. That brings me to what I learnt about Instagram and its account security practices.

I am obsessive about the security of my online accounts, including ones that I only use occasionally. I don’t repeat passwords, I have 2FA enabled on all such services, and I use an authenticator app for it to avoid the possibility of SIM swapping. I am not an expert, but I am curious, cautious and fairly literate on security best practices. With this, I started investigating what different ways exist to identify if an Instagram account had been hacked, and what can be done to salvage it.

Instagram offers a simple ‘Login Activity’ page that provides a list of locations and devices from which your account was accessed. A quick glance at it and I suspect it comes from the IP address location provided by ISPs. (Instagram does not have access to the location data on my phone.) It potentially has duplicates of the same device, so is not foolproof, but it is a good sanity check. If there’s no device-location pair on this list that you don’t recognize (and haven’t received an email from Instagram telling you about a recent login), there’s a low probability that your account could be hacked. Great.

But what if there is an unknown device there? What do you do then? Well, you try to kick them out. Step one would be to log that device out, but that leaves the possibility that it will be able to log back in, almost immediately. Why, you ask? Well, Instagram has a surprisingly ridiculous setting, ‘Saved login information’, that is turned on by default, and saves the login information to the mobile app. So, even if you log a device out, chances are that it can log back in almost immediately given the login information is saved. Not good, but not alarming either. After all, it is a Facebook product.

So how do you actually force a login from every device? Astonishingly, there’s no way to do this. Articles all over the internet will tell you to change your password, which will force a password entry on every device. I tried that, and it worked, but only sort of.

At this point, Instagram logs out every other device that was previously logged in to the account. Cool. However, when you try to login again, it gives you a choice: a) Use Facebook to login, or b) Enter the new password (without a 2FA prompt or email notification about login). (b), in and of itself, is terrible, but it is (a) that got me even more worried. I disconnected my Facebook account from Instagram a few years back. And despite Instagram’s constant attempt to lure me into re-connecting them with dark patterns, I have resisted and consciously ensured I do not connect them together.

I tapped ‘Use Facebook to login’. Lo and behold, I was in my Instagram account! No new password, no 2FA code, no email from Instagram about a new login, no email from Facebook about my Facebook account being used to login to another service. I was in. Business as usual.

I was dazed. I checked Facebook to see if any other ‘app’ was connected to my account or had used Facebook for login. Nada.

To recap, I changed my password on a 2FA enabled, Facebook-disconnected Instagram account. On a different device, I could login to my Instagram account without my password, 2FA code or authenticating my Facebook account. I didn’t receive an email from Instagram or Facebook about the login.

In real world, what this means is that if someone gains access to your Facebook account, they can probably extend it and gain access to your Instagram account. Someone will keep chasing a red herring and try to beef up their Instagram security, all while the perpetrator can conveniently gloss over all of those changes by simply using Facebook to login to Instagram every single time, with not even a whiff to the victim.

Ludicrous.

Using Instagram in 2019

8 years. That’s how long I’ve had an Instagram account. My Instagram profile is a curation, it is a reminder of everywhere I have been, some of my best photographs, akin to a portfolio. I have seen it go from a niche, Facebook acquisition, ads, it becoming a popular app, adding stories and messages. I’m not a fan of most of Instagram’s changes, so here’s a little bit about how I use Instagram these days, in 2019.

• Instagram rose to popularity with a simple photo sharing model. Traditionally, photos have been a weird beast, with everyone shooting them in different sizes and resolutions (ask Flickr or 500px). Instagram offered to level this field by forcing a square photo. Square photos, that’s it. You choose what you will crop out, but the end photo must be a square. That was the allure to me. It forced users to be creative and critical. Much like Twitter with its 140 character limit, Instagram’s square was culture-defining. Heck, Apple added a ‘square’ mode to the iOS camera app a few years after Instagram was first released, because some people exclusively shot photos to post on Instagram! So, that’s what I do on Instagram, even today: Post square photos.
• I have posted a few photos over the years that were not squares, but made such by using tools to add borders. I think that’s fine, every once in a while. What I don’t think is fine, though, is the posts that have borders on all 4 sides; it doesn’t add anything to the value of the post. Instagram posts are tiny, and by putting borders on all 4 sides, you are essentially playing your followers to force them to tap on it from your profile page.
• I do not post stories on Instagram. I will post them fairly often to Snapchat, but never on Instagram. I think stories are an abomination on Instagram. The baggage of who you are, what exists on your profile, the followers and how that mashes with your ‘personality’, forces people to spend more time on creating stories than enjoying what is in those stories. That pressure doesn’t exist on Snapchat, where a story exists to tell a simple, quick and dirty story (literally) of what you are doing. Blurry? Doesn’t matter. No caption? Better! On Instagram, it is to showoff, not to have fun.
• Instagram is not how I communicate with everyone I know; that’s Messages or WhatsApp. I refuse to follow everyone I have ever run into (I already have Facebook for that!), because seeing their posts or stories do not bring value to my life. I use Instagram to see the work of some of the best photos and read captions that will enrich the photograph by supplementing it. In fact, I regularly curate my following list and unfollow people who do not add value to my feed.
• I love the messages features on Instagram, it is a simple, great way to share posts with people, who I care about, and share something they will enjoy.
• I think the whole concept of Instagram influencers is flawed. I understand ads and sponsored content on YouTube, because it is video and no one does video like YouTube. It is not feasible to host, encode and transmit videos as easily as text or photos over the internet (yet?). But since most content is photos on Instagram, if it is your own content, it deserves to be elsewhere. We have had blogs since the advent of the internet for this exact reason: for people to own their own content! If you have content that is worthy enough that people would go where you are to see it, great, host it in a place where you own it. If not, you are not really an influencer.
• I am not a fan of the ads, but eh, whatever.

There was a time when I loved Instagram. It saddens me that I do not feel as strongly about it anymore.