X limits hot takes from freeloaders to 50 a day

Personal Tech

How will they manage? It’s not like anyone can see their posts anyway

The Amalgamated Union of Influencers, Trendsetters, Microbloggers,
and other professional brand ambassadors is up in arms, and threatening an industry-wide strike (please note: this is not in any strict or meaningful sense true).

Elon Musk is tightening the ties that bind, in bad news
for enthusiastic social media personalities on X who aren’t monetizing successfully enough to pay for it yet. On the site’s help page, punitive restrictions on non-paid users are laid out.

The current technical limits for accounts now are:

• Direct Messages (daily): The limit is 500 messages sent per
  day.
• Posts: 50 original posts and 200 replies per day for unverified
  accounts. The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller
  limits for semi-hourly intervals.
• Changes to account email: 4 per hour.
• Following (daily): The technical follow limit is 400 per day. Please
  note that this is a technical account limit only, and there are
  additional rules prohibiting aggressive following behavior.
• Following (account-based): Once an account is following 5,000 other
  accounts, additional follow attempts are limited by account-specific
  ratios.

We know, and we sympathize. How could anyone cope with being limited
to just 50 tweets and 200 replies a day? All the same, some of the Twitterati are not
happy.

If you are interested in moving up to a premium account, hilariously,
at the time of writing the Premium sign-up page compares
the benefits of Basic, Premium, and Premium+
accounts with this vivid and enticing description:

In case of problems, the help page suggests checking the Status page, which, as the
icing on the cake, currently appears to be down:

And yes, we checked. Perhaps the site is simply deluged by legions of
Digital Storytellers and Tastemakers who are
desperately trying to pay to extend their reach.

Meanwhile, other social networks remain available. Bluesky has
been open to all comers for a couple of years now. Former CEO Jay Graber, who now serves as Chief Innovation Officer,  has some enticing
rhetoric, such as this post
from October:

Be warned, though, she does have a strong
position against strikes:

If Bluesky sounds just a tad corporate, then we suggest the
Fediverse, best known through its most famous implementation and site,
Mastodon. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a guide
on how to join. ®