Mastodawn

@Pwnallthethings good time to redirect twitter.com to 127.0.0.1 in your `/etc/hosts` (or `C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts`)

@diracdelta @Pwnallthethings How can I do the equivalent of that on a Mac?

@jacquelinehoman mac should have it in /etc/hosts. You may need to modify the file as an administrator.

@diracdelta only problem is that hosts is not a directory in my Mac, and I'm NOT at all tech savvy and don't want to screw anything up I won't be able to fix.

@diracdelta

diracdelta

@jacquelinehoman you just need to add an extra line for:

127.0.0.1 twitter.com

at the end

@jacquelinehoman also, if you're happily using a terminal, I am questioning your claims of non-tech savviness. :)

@diracdelta Just because I can putter around a tiny bit in a terminal and know maybe 5 Linux commands at most, that doesn't mean I know how to do much else, LOLZ! I don't know how to safely do a redirect for a site/platform or anything like that. That's way over my head.

@jacquelinehoman
Something like this should work

@jacquelinehoman
Quick summary of what this does:

Whenever a http (or https request) is made from your browser, the browser needs to convert domain addresses, like twitter.com (in https://twitter.com/home) into IP addresses. The first thing that gets checked is the hosts file. 127.0.0.1 is your local computer. So a twitter.com request gets redirected locally. Since your computer is not running a server, your browser will simply fail to resolve the network request.

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@diracdelta Ah, I see! So basically, it's telling my computer to tell Twitter to go f*ck itself. I like that!

@diracdelta OK, I added that line to my hosts file, but my browser still takes me to Twitter. What did I do wrong? How come it don't work for me?

@diracdelta

@jacquelinehoman my guess is you need to restart your browser.

@jacquelinehoman

So if you're still getting actual requests, you may need to restart your browser. Your browser will sometimes cache the answer to "Hey, what's the IP for twitter.com?" so it doesn't have to query either the hosts file or the DNS server (which is what it talks to if it doesn't find the answer there).

Now that said, if this is working you should get this:

@jacquelinehoman the weird thing about this is you might initially expect to get a completely failed request as if you just typed 'localhost' into your browser, like this:

@jacquelinehoman The reason *that* doesn't happen is because browsers also have the ability to cache responses from a domain. In that case the browser skips the network request entirely.

@diracdelta Welp, I think I messed everything up entirely because both twitter and localhost don't work now

@diracdelta

@jacquelinehoman congrats! This is working as expected. :)

@diracdelta I restarted Google, and still get the same "site can't be reached" message for localhost, but now for Twitter I get this:

@jacquelinehoman This is, bizarrely, *also* expected. This was the thing I mentioned earlier about local caching.

@jacquelinehoman Essentially, twitter has previously cached a scaffold of the website. This is enough for it to render the UI that you see there, but when it attempts to actually talk to twitter.com to populate the feed, it fails (since it's talking to 127.0.0.1)

@jacquelinehoman Actually... I think I may have oversimplified what is going on here. Happy to go into more gory details if you like. But I think you should be mostly good to go at this point.

@diracdelta I'd love to be able to learn all this tech stuff, but between the tech jargon which totally loses me, and being a casualty (due to lifelong poverty) of the Digital Divide, I don't feel I'm smart enough to be able to grasp it—no matter how much I want to.

@jacquelinehoman if it's any consolation, I'm willing to bet that almost nobody really understands everything about how browsers work at this point. :)

Though happy to answer and expand on anything if you like. :)

@diracdelta I'd LOVE to be able to learn it!

@jacquelinehoman I need to get going at the moment, but feel free to tag me with anything.

I should probably start a separate set of posts so poor @Pwnallthethings isn't constantly being pinged (I presume he's muted this conversation by now though :) ) Sorry sir!

@diracdelta I'd like to apologize to @Pwnallthethings too. Anyway, I followed you so I can make a post about learning more of this tech stuff without bugging everyone else.

@diracdelta Especially at my age now (I'm 55).

@diracdelta See, I don't understand any of what that stuff means because the tech jargon 100% loses me ("cached a scaffold of website, for example"). About 9 years ago in my mid-40s, I was a Rails Girls participant trying to learn IT as a poor woman trying to re-enter the workforce, but I just couldn't succeed at it.

@diracdelta I didn't even have a computer of my own, or know how to use one, until I was in my 40s (lifelong poverty, Digital Divide, etc.). And I'm 55 now. I'd never be able to catch up to everybody else.

@jacquelinehoman what does localhost normally do? You *should* get "This site can't be reached" for localhost.

@diracdelta Oh, OK. See I don't understand all this stuff. I'm NOT smart at tech stuff. At all.

@jacquelinehoman should you need to ever access twitter for some reason, you can simply remove the line from the hosts file in future, and you should be good to go again.

@diracdelta Will adding that line mean 127.0.0.1 no longer takes me to localhost?