cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14106579
On Monday, it appears X attempted to encourage users to cease referring to it as Twitter and instead adopt the name X. Some users began noticing that posts viewed via X for iOS were changing any references of "Twitter.com" to "X.com" automatically.
If a user typed in "Twitter.com," they would see "Twitter.com" as they typed it before hitting "Post." But, after submitting, the platform would show "X.com" in its place on the X for iOS app, without the user's permission, for everyone viewing the post.
And shortly after this revelation, it became clear that there was another big issue: X was changing anything ending in "Twitter.com" to "X.com."
I'm by no means an expert at website things, but wouldn't it be way simpler to take any request to twitter.com and just redirect it to x.com? Pretty sure websites do this all the time, like if you type chapo.chat into the address bar it loads hexbear.net instead.
Actually they literally already do this in the opposite direction. x.com goes to twitter.com. So someone types twitter.com in a tweet, twitter filters it to x.com, then when you click on it it loads twitter.com. Great job Elon, 10/10 no notes.
This is a branding move. He wants the name "x.com" to show up more.
The rewritten url still hyperlinks to "twitter.com" and "x.com" still redirects to "twitter.com"
They didn't want to change domain names because that's a nightmare for backend tooling. I'll bet there's over a decade of internal tools that check for "twitter.com" in some response or something.
Damn that sucks, hope he didn't fire all of his experienced engineers who could have gone through the backend and made those changes.