It seems a needlessly self destructive move, certainly an odd decision to make. Guess they still think they are too big to fail?
However, for me at least, 600 tweets doesn't seem that much? I used Twitter a lot yesterday looking at the chaos, and didn't even hit that limit. I guess I don't use Twitter in the same way that others do.
Still, this decision does affect "powerusers" of Twitter, who are the people they really don't want to push away. And it seems to have done so, some accounts I follow have moved off, and I've seen like 10 new people post to hashtags I follow on Mastodon overnight. Just wish people hadn't moved to Instagram only...
Amusingly, Twitter has a "people to follow" box, and it's having trouble recommending me people who actually still use Twitter (2 of the 3 have their most recent posts being "I'm not on Twitter, find me elsewhere").
I do wonder if companies who use Twitter to update people will reconsider that now that non-logged in users can't access it.
Amusingly these restrictions (both the rate limit and login requirement) are apparently temporary (I don't believe it either) and in response to either a DDoS attack or "mass scraping". Coincidentally, Twitter also had a bug where it would DDoS itself if the homepage failed to load. https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639435788921057 .
By the way, if you are using Telegram or Discord, you can append "vx" before the "twitter.com" to get the embed working and see the tweet in the message, at least for now. e.g.
https://vxtwitter.com/silverfox5213/status/1674758096475004929