Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ?
Why do the users agree to the limits imposed by them and let the platform decide who gets to see the content they posted ?
Because they're offering the infrastructure. The tech for such a network is now within reach of many, but these apps are heavily dominated by network effects and that makes it impossible for competing apps to take hold.
This is negative for society.
Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
People who don't have an account are not getting vital information because the company decided to restrict access to the entire network.
This needs to be regulated somehow. At least for public services and major news outlets - as a tax for the network effect these apps benefit from.
Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation.
Even FINGER had .plan files, where you could get status updates from people.
But how are you going to query whose plans you want to read, and who is going to moderate without centralisation?
It's the moderation in particular that dooms most federalised efforts. The web itself is only really moderated through the relative lack of discoverability, with Google and hosting providers having become a form of gatekeeper to remove the very worst of the web.
Twitter in the early days took off because it did solve a technological problem of the time. You only had your SMS enabled phone, no WAP or smartphone, and wanted to provide updates. They gave you a number you could text, which would post updates. Hence the character limit ( less than the SMS limit, to leave space for your credentials ).
Plenty of alternatives exist for getting information out, people just don't know where to look for it.
That technical problem disappeared, but it had by then grown to provide a service to rapidly get updates from people, one that had a sense of authority and the moderating effect and discoverability of centralisation is impossible to ignore.
The requirement for strong moderation only exists *because* of centralization. If I'm looking at a linear feed of content, it has to be curated by someone. In the old days, content on the internet was mostly links between webpages -- the "web" if you will. If i like the content on a page, it'll link to other pages i may like, and I'm free to follow those links at will, and no third party moderation is required.
Contrast with modern social media, where everything is condensed into a single list of algorithmically curated content, and we've implicitly eroded a lot of freedom (and handed control to Big Tech)
"Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation."
Does centralization actually result in moderation
How do we define "moderation" (cf. "curation", e.g., filtering out anything that does not draw sufficiently large audiences for advertising)
Is optimizing information retrieval for data collection, surveillance and advertising "moderation"
Section 230 was supposed to promote moderation
It did not
Instead it allowed a select few websites to grow to sizes where moderation is impractical and, ultimately, bad for "business"
Their "business" is data collection, surveillance and advertising services, not information services. Section 230 did not anticipate this "business model"
They don't work for internet users. They work for advertisers
Having used the internet prior to their existence I am not convinced that the internet is useless without them
Anyone who has made a fortune catering to internet advertisers will of course disagree
That's fine but we have to account for bias
Given what has happened to "search" perhaps more internet users will come to understand that "discoverability" is not a "solved problem" when the "solution" is a middleman that works for advertisers not end users, an easy target for governments that wish to work around limits on their ability to legally conduct data collection and surveillance
Open protocols always end up with a "backend engineer doing frontend" situation. Which is okay if end users are other engineers, but not okay when end user is my mom.
>Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
RSS. Website. Both have been around for a long time. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.
Did websites and RSS stop working and I missed it? With more people doing AI searches a website is even more viable now, it's better for AI scraping than x.com.
Bluesky attracted socialist progressives, furries, and kink-positive folks early on.
I'm not making any value statements, and there's nothing wrong with the userbase, but this is what dominates the feed for new users.
A lot of people are turned off by that when they see it as their first experience with the platform. Or they're actively turned away upon interaction. That's not how you build a big social network.
Mastodon is the exact same.
These platforms are also not winning people over by calling them "toots" and "skeets".
It's like Gimp refusing to adopt a Photoshop style UI for years and not changing their name.
Despite stated intentions, I think these platforms want to stay small and niche and non mainstream. If they wanted to grow big, they'd behave much differently. They'd try to get the Kardashians and would welcome posts about handbags and guns and sports.
I found this post from Nostr. I find it a saner alternative to fediverse, particularly because the identity is just a server-free public-private key pair
But I don't know when if ever we will have a significant mass there.
I believe that sentiment started to die out around the time people realized a Nazi gained control over the world's centralized communication hub. Whether that says more about the communication, the nazi, or the people is a question for the ages.
> Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
Government agencies have communicated to their citizens long before twitter has existed. There's a myriad of ways they can use today: websites (with or without RSS), email newsletters, text updates, other social networks (bluesky, threads, etc).
Choosing to give critical updates only on Twitter is definitely a choice and they are deliberately ignoring a very large segment of their population that doesn't have a twitter account.
I do not use this garbage product made only to make your day miserable because it's ragebaiting algorithm. It's not essentiall by any means, it's only designed so you feel that way.
Mine rarely shows rage bait and when it does I just block everyone involved or add words to mute list. I think people who see this a lot are in fact baited and it creates a cycle. Which isn't to say it's a good system, more that it's easily avoided
The Facebook of 20 years ago is very different from the Facebook of today. 20 years ago, one’s Facebook timeline was filled with whatever your friends were posting. These days—and I think this started about a year ago when AI made it really easy for “influencers” to post AI Slop—one’s Facebook feed is filled by random AI Slop accounts posting nonsense like, as just one of many examples, 80% of the women sleeping with 20% of the men. [1]
I am now using a project called Facebook Clean My Feeds [2] which cleans out all of this AI Slop, so that my timeline is like the timeline I had, say, five years ago, with only posts from friends, accounts I follow, and ads. The only problem I see with this plugin is that it is a Greasemonkey script, so I have to trust it to not do anything nefarious.
>Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ?
Because it is a private enterprise that you signed up for. You don't have a right to Twitter. You don't have a right to Facebook. If you don't like it, leave. The entitlement is massive here. These sites are poison in so many ways. Stop feeding the beast.
But I do have the right to the public information posted by people who intend it to be public information.
They're not posting 'on X', they're posting to the public and the only reason they do it on X is because there are no alternatives due to the network effect intrinsic for such services.
The 'network effect' part needs to be defined and taken into account by regulators and then regulate the companies such that they make the information available to the public if the poster intends so.
Regulation over communication channels is not only common through the ages, but expected and needed. There may not be literal landlines to worry about in the modern age, but the general idea of communication being an important medium that shouldn't be squandered by competition remains.
I prefer everyone to simply leave Twitter and to let it crash and burn, but I see the arguments to have stronger regulations on channels central enough for governmental entities to be using it as a communication hub.
I don't believe updates on X is an exclusive channel for vital alerts in Spain.
This just doesn't make any sense, maybe what they are posting on X is just some typical SMM slop.
To send nation-wide or localised alerts for forest fires, floods or natural disasters, Spain seems to be using an entirely different system called ES-Alert via cellular broadcast technology which makes a lot of sense.
I recently came to conclusion that x is deliberately used for psyops. After I made a couple of posts questioning the benefits of data centers on X, account was suspended for "inauthentic behaviors", restored, then suspended again, restored, and now X won't let me access it until I install an app on my phone and jump through hoops. In other words, doxx myself, it will not work with app on throwaway phone. X is clearly not a beacon of free speech it pretends to be
The competing app is e-mail. You can subscribe to important information by e-mail and send out important information to mailing lists.
> This needs to be regulated somehow.
Of course, this is HN so regulation is always the solution to all problems. Instead of making the people who are responsible for doing stuff and are getting paid for it get off their asses. They can easily post updates on government alert websites, on e-mail lists, and on social media and everywhere else to get the attention of the public.
A real shame. Even if you put all the political arguments aside it sucks when a site requires you to log in before you can read content on it.
For me that’ll mean I just don’t read content on there any more. Which I realise X doesn’t care about, I’m not monetisable anyway. But a shame nonetheless.
Both Imgur and Reddit have put a lot of roadblocks up lately as well. I think some of it is driven by trying to reduce bot traffic.
It's quite inconsistent though which is really frustrating. I can look at the imgur homepage feed, but if I go into a specific post and accidentally click anywhere it throws a modal up that can't be dismissed.
If I go on a specific subreddit or post I can freely look, but reddit homepage now pops a modal you can't dismiss.
This is on mobile browsers, of course both sites are pushing their apps.
I am sure it doesn't align with their incentives so they don't care, I will never have an account and never install the app, but why block me from viewing the site if I am still seeing the ads? Does the free ad model just not pay anymore, or is the selling user data model just that much more lucrative that they would rather no user at all if they aren't logged in?
> It's quite inconsistent though which is really frustrating. I can look at the imgur homepage feed, but if I go into a specific post and accidentally click anywhere it throws a modal up that can't be dismissed.
That's not inconsistent, that's a deliberate dark pattern that every social media site uses. Let them see the first page, then when they want to engage: force creating an account.
When you just put a "log in to see this page" up front, people will bounce. When you have them engaged a little bit, chances are they are already invested enough to create an account.
I remember using old.reddit to bypass login requirements and quite often it would let me read with VPN on (otherwise it kicks you out if you are not logged in with VPN on). Only recently did they introduce the same authentication blocks to the old.reddit, so I am assuming everyone was taking advantage of it
> Does the free ad model just not pay anymore, or is the selling user data model just that much more lucrative that they would rather no user at all if they aren't logged in?
Traffic from google is probably in the process of collapsing, so these sites are trying to capture all the users they can as registered users before it's gone completely.
And yes, the free ad model is probably in the process of dying, the information that was once given away for free in return for looking at ads is now more valuable sold to llm's who will have the eyeballs going forward.
This will presumably make many on this site happy, since for many years an ad supported open web was consistently railed against.
Imgur is 80% posts of text for people trying to post political messages vs what it used to be, interesting or funny pictures
I guess that's their traffic so that's their market but ugh. Imagine if flickr or some other photo site was run over by people posting photos of text messags.
Actually you can discard those annoying popups on reddit using some HTML element blocker (e.g. “hide distracting element” on safari or the picker tool from uBlock origin)
I had some success with these for logged-out browsing ever since old.reddit was locked down completely
Bots are the noisy excuse they can scream and point to. You look at the mobile reddit app or the new reddit interface and you think these javascript “devs” are capable of forming any valid opinion on these things?
This is the company that refers to its users as “daily active shitheads.” That’s a real quote.
They’re just screaming and pointing to anything they can so they can lock it down and gain more favorable data to sell and more legitimate accounts to show advertisers. That’s what it always is.
I’m never wrong and I’m tired of fake imposters devs telling me I am wrong at every corner of every single topic when I turn out to be right 100% of the time.
I recently deleted all of my Reddit accounts. The website had been unusable on mobile for a good while, with the constant and ever-more-aggressive nagging about switching to the app. Old Reddit was the one thing that made the site still usable. And now that requires a login.
So fuck that. Bye Reddit. I'll miss some of the communities.
Imgur has been totally unusable in the UK for a couple of years - it's an irritant, because it's used for so many image embeds and I'm reluctant to fire up the VPN just so I can see someone's meme that they posted on a forum thread. Nobody has ever used Imgur as a destination site, it's a utility, and any attempts to make it a destination or an app you'd deliberately open are futile.
Reddit isn't so badly impacted, but there are still age-walls around some of the content where it's been deemed "adult" (which encompasses more than just graphic adult imagery).
This is the sensible response. I'm always bemused by the reactions that go: "this is a garbage site but I am forced to use it every day". Be grateful that your social media addiction is now automatically mitigated! Go outside!
You don't have to comply with a cease and desist notice, depending on your risk tolerance. They're not legally binding, like court orders. Rather, they are threats, equivalent to "gimme your lunch money or I'll beat you up"
Yes and hiQ v. LinkedIn has already given us precedent that scraping is not inherently illegal, not to mention X's own scraping to train their AI.
Makes sense that they want to consult legal experts rather than just going with their gut though but I hope those legal experts will work something out that gets them back online.
Nice to see everyone taking a break from their day jobs at Google of continually breaking yt-dlp so it's impossible to use, to comment how this is an injustice.
To the aggrieved I say: 403 Forbidden.
In their defense, you're not getting the full YouTube experience without ads of an AI doctor selling you suppositories.
Reddit seems to have let this AI demand go to their heads.
I had multiple Reddit accounts, simply because I did not want my more "professional" account linked to the other accounts (some for more controversial opinions, some for more adult talk, etc.) Apparently that's a problem for them. So they banned most of my accounts. If I really was up to no good, I'd have used VPNs, etc. to hide my activities. But I just wanted to segregate my personas. e.g. I like discussing local SF and California politics, and often times take controversial positions. I don't want my activities as a respectable(?) member of the Linux Kernel group to be colored through my activities in these other groups. But now I can't do that.
Oh, and back in the day Reddit (when it wanted to pad its user numbers) didn't care for an email address or a phone number. Now, 15 years later, it suddenly wants to confirm the email address!
And don't even get me started on the moderation at Reddit. Typical example: "Hey! We deleted your comment. If you have any questions about it, email the mods." except ... they deleted the comment and now I don't even know what was wrong with it! :-D
(as a logged-in user) I just stopped using it the day they banned 3rd party apps and I don't miss it a bit. I visit some communities still, but only on PC with old reddit. Once that is gone, I'm gone as well.
> Reddit is the worst for this. I hate the disgusting, low class UX design where they let you read about 10-15 seconds of a page before locking you out.
When this happens I use uBlock origin to remove that popup and the grey background behind it.
Scrolling and loading more comments remains usable (unlike Facebook)
spez is a problem. And if it's not spez, then enlighten me. But they've taken years of built up network effects and absolutely wrecked it. It's so hostile when companies do this. They just ignore their users, straight up. That should be a firable offense. The customer is NOT 'always right', but you can meet them halfway
The EU is first and foremost a business club. So the majority of EU rules are there to create a common market. If one participant is trying to be dodgy, then oftentimes a rule valid for all market participants is created, to re-establish the common market.
Sometimes it's even the producers that ask the EU to regulate it. E.g. all of those classes for vegetables originated from the producers. As a result, an egg of size "M" from Netherlands has the same size as an egg of the size "M" from France. And both can be sold in e.g. Belgium, since we now have a common market and common attributes. A customer seeing an "M" sized egg in the shelves doesn't need to ponder, he knows what he gets.
If some website needs a login so that you can view contents is completely outside of this. That is actually common, many newspapers and magazines do that. Its entirely to their discretion if they allow free public access, limited access, or paid access. One doesn't need to be Google Search, one can also be Kagi, so to say.
Not only requires you to log in, asks you your username once you do log in, which means for me I can't log in because I had a random username and there is no email from them where it is mentioned
It's possible that the lack of these alternatives will decrease engagement enough that Twitter would loosen these rules. Perhaps not that likely, but it's possible.
I'd say that's practically a given. Everyone that wants to have an account already has one, everyone else will not make an account just because they are bothered into making one.
Nitter and xcancel traffic must be negligible, they're doing this just to pretend they're doing stuff to justify their legal department wages.
> when a site requires you to log in before you can read content on it.
Where does this come from? You can see the last few posts of an account [1], and the contents of a single posts, but minimal to no comments [2]. Videos play after dismissing the login popup.
I have no X account, but I read content there all the time without issue.
I received an Amber Alert a few days ago, which linked to a Twitter post containing the details, and the "x" in the "plz login" modal that blocked the entire screen was non-functional. I just sat there pounding on the x, and then a little hand gif popped up and pointed at the login button.
I don't know how it works, but it is very inconsistent.
On mobile right now, I can't scroll past the second post of [1] without getting blocked by an undismissable popup.
If I click on the "read more" button of the first post, I can't scroll down at all before getting that same non-dismissable popup. It makes it hard to read the post itself, because even scrolling a tiny bit (e.g. to get what I'm reading closer to the center of my vision) triggers it.
I've also had other times where I couldn't play a video someone linked to me, but sometimes I can, don't know why.
Not sure how you manage that - twitter, insta, and pinterest all begrudgingly let you see one, maybe two things, then lock down and prevent you from interacting without logging in.
It really gives the sense that you’re not wanted there.
Only if it's directly linked to you. Can't go scrolling on someone's profile without getting blocked by a pop-up. Also can't click a post and see replies.
Edit: also can't read a thread because each new post is considered a "reply", so blocked too.
Middle powers should heed Cory Doctorow's advice [0] and start offering legal protection in their jurisdictions for precisely this type of projects.
America is a hostile nation, who has sought to align everyone with its interests, under a false pretense of mutual benefit, while instead its tech sector has caused much harm at a global scale. America is now doubling down on value extraction, at an obvious expense to everyone else.
Middle powers should not be granting to America any goodwill whatsoever. There is nothing in it for them anymore, except irresponsible reliance on a bad faith actor.
>America is a hostile nation, who has sought to align everyone with its interests, under a false pretense of mutual benefit, while instead its tech sector has caused much harm at a global scale. America is now doubling down on value extraction, at an obvious expense to everyone else.
In India, recently, a bill was passed that can permit banks and the government to add charges on UPI transactions. UPI is one of the biggest digital payment systems in the world, and it was free until now. Insider information from multiple news sources suggests that this was done because of pressure from the US.
Sounds bogus, there's free payment services in the US as well, that's nothing special. What makes more sense in the India context is low value of volume per customer where even the minimal operating costs are difficult to cover. I say that from some amount of experience in the micro-finance world, where even money provided at zero actual interest in terms of the loaned money itself still ended up having to have somewhat painful interest rates just to cover true costs in low income countries.
Most middle powers have robust censorship regimes. As for America being a unique "hostile" phenomena in geopolitics, I believe you are either purveyour or a victim of propaganda.
> its tech sector has caused much harm at a global scale
Like what exactly? Whatever harm US (software) tech has dished out, it has also dished out domestically. What is your nationality and what are your nation's contributions to the rest of the world?
Exactly, what are we going to do? Impose sanctions? Tarriffs? We do that anyways without recourse. Bomb you? We might do that anyways without reasonable impetus. Y'all have no reason to temper your actions for fear of retribution; our President is threatening to rename a lake to Lake America because we "won't be doing business with Ontario anymore". Why? Does it matter? Could anyone have done anything that wasn't just abject groveling? No.
To hell with us. The rest of the world needs to move on from giving a crap what our government thinks of you.
The US is fighting wars with everyone on everything at the same time. They don't have the resources to do anything about it. Every country will develop their own independent payment networks.
China was right to block US tech companies to promote their own, most large and capable countries will do the same over time.
Doctorow's point is that the USA's trade policy is unilaterally capricious and malevolent toward the best of its allies, so other nations' actions ultimately cannot be said to have any mitigating causal effect. Might as well just go for it. F the DMCA.
i remember when, after 9/11, the US introduced webcams and fingerprint scanners, at airports to take pictures of incoming travellers and Brazil had a similar lo-fi response, with ink blots and cameras only for Americans. Something like this needs to happen more and everywhere now.
If even a few of the people freaking out here just recreated or rehosted nitter elsewhere out of their reach, we probably wouldn't have this problem. Be the change you wish to see
All due respect, but how would anyone survive, no less find a way to make anything like the average income of any of us on HN, in a world that made not just some 'patents' free but removed property and invention such as the extremities Doctorow's fiction often espouses? America is sorta known for pretense of mutual benefit. We sorta fumbled things after we, to put it bluntly, nuked the Japanese twice. Don't get me wrong, if you read my comments elsewhere you will see how I feel about people/companies claiming swathes of things for themselves too.
Everyone seems to think they either deserve more or they fall for believing people are inherently willing to remunerate fairly for what they use... Def. not my experience, at all... like what if people were all just assuming since your ideas exist, they were for sale or free, or 'offering' things you dont want or arent getting in return...? what if you dont want what they do with it in the first place? what if (heh) you just don't like the end user and you know they will irk you with it?
Doctorow is the furthest from a fair or good example, imho.
Maybe in the past, but who in the present who isn’t already rich is or would have the income hurt by eliminating IP laws? Keep in mind that most indie projects make barely any money, most of those that do are free + ads or Patreon, any software not under expensive DRM is easy to pirate, and AI companies pirate to train LLMs.
> what if you dont want what they do with it in the first place? what if (heh) you just don't like the end user and you know they will irk you with it?
What if you don’t like what somebody does with “your” ideas in their own personal bubble? Why care? Try to ignore them. I’d rather that than have somebody restrict what I can do with whatever ideas they claim are theirs.
The only reason why I needed nitter to access x is due to organizations still using it as their main communication solution to their customers. Even my local council uses it. I would like this to be the final push for people to get off x but I suspect its going g to stay and I guess I don't get to see news from my local council anymore.
I'm totally clueless, but aren't there rules requiring accessibility of public-facing government communications, to the extent that they shouldn't be allowed to use a gated platform when making official statements that are a matter of public interest?
Someone could certainly make a case in a lawsuit for an ADA violation. I bet if people organized, the city would listen before it got to that point
There are open meeting laws like the Brown Act but I think that only restricts relying on social media for deliberation. Not communication
There is also Lindke v. Freed (2024) which holds that public officials using social media can be sued under the First Amendment violations like blocking users or deleting comments.
I presume the post is referencing principal councils in England or Wales. They're powerful enough to make life difficult, but small enough to not get a lot of oversight. From what I've heard, it's like a government-backed HOA, and they're notorious for doing whatever they want, while not letting you do what you want.
Newspapers are still often required to be used for certain government publications and they cost money. TwitterX is free. I'm not clear what the controversy here is exactly.
No, and this policy goes back to publication in for-profit newspapers. Not an issue in the USA in general.
With a disclaimer that there's one zillion governmental entities on the planet overall, so its plausible that one requires no fee and no signup required.
It's not gated. You can read any non-adult post with a direct link. I'm seeing this perspective all over in here. As someone without an X account, I can only assume you all have X accounts to not know this!
Can't you submit written/oral comments on this? Write letters to your local paper etc. You might need to be That Guy for a few months but sooner or later you're going to connect with other people who feel the same way.
Web enshittification should be disallowed in public offices. It's so easy to create a news entry in Facebook or Twitter/X but they are always walling you from it unless you subscribe. This is unacceptable in public service sector.
You still have access to local council posts, without logging in. You need to log in to view the follow up discussions(comments) a subtle but important distinction
For example you can view the main post and included links in incognito not logged in, just not the "discussion"
Is Xitter still doing the "Your account was suspended for reasons, now you gotta dox yourself" dance? (EDIT: Yes, according to debazel's reply) That'd be a reason why "You could make an X account" isn't a reasonable suggestion.
Personally I had an account since 2008 and it got locked for no discernible reason. The website asks me to scan a QR code from my phone to prove I'm a human, and even after grudgingly installing the mobile app to try and complete this verification it just keeps throwing me into a loop.
Twitter has gone from relatively open to instagram / facebook level of closedness where I can't even share a video with my friends because it asks them to log in. I had to rely on nitter and xcancel for that... Now that no longer works either
I have one niche that I use twitter for. If it wasn't for that - would have deleted my account long time ago. Things like this push me towards that direction, though.
Just go ahead and quit! I had a niche use case for FB, but I decided to quit nevertheless because I didn't want to support the platform anymore. Today I don't miss it a single bit. (I never had a Twitter account in the first place.)
I actually paid for their dumb monthly subscription only so that I could download videos within the app to share with my friends who don't use X. Only after paying did I realize that by "download videos" it means "cache videos locally inside the app for offline playback". It still would not allow me to save the video to my local device. Misleading, tacky, possibly even desparate.
I know it is Meta-owned and is just as algorithmic, but Threads is a breath of fresh air in terms of access - the website is pratically the same in terms of UX as the app, and it does not require an account to browse at all. Just thought it'd be worth mentioning.
Actually, the correct solution is Mastodon, which is an open protocol which can not become a walled garden the way Threads (based on Meta’s activity with Instagram and Facebook) will inevitably become a walled garden.
There are many already. The code is not why people use those sites. In the case of Meta specifically, it's basically in spite of the user-hostile, garbage code.
The network effect / entrenchment means that any replacement has to be massively better in every dimension to have a chance. Otherwise people just stick to what they know, and then other people stick to it because the other people do. And so on.
I personally think Musk is a garbage-tier human who represents everything wrong with culture wars, and his brain is long blasted into a mush of worthless racist noise and stupidity by drug abuse, so I deleted my X account. Loads of others are too cowardly/selfish to do so.
I'm not sure why Threads makes your cut here, trading one walking negative externality of person in control for another is not really a sell to most folks.
it has Fediverse interop. Skepticism obviously is warranted towards the owners but you can at least interact with an open protocol or consume threads content from a Mastodon instance, say.
I am already on fediverse. My friends are too. It's where I post my dumb opinions on movies and pictures of my cats. But that is not what I used nitter for. I used nitter to pull posts of organizations and reporters to deliver breaking news in my area to me fast. I did this via the RSS endpoint in nitter. These journalists and organizations only post on twitter that fast. Their websites are updated much slower and often also don't have RSS feeds or APIs for me to scrape.
I wish these orgs post on fedi too but they don't. So what am I to do?
Nitter was for us people that have already left X.
An interesting new one for Canadians (that's built on AT and interops with bsky) is https://gandersocial.ca/. It uses our national postal service's identity validation, so it dramatically reduces foreign actors and bots, and without handing PII to shady private companies like Persona. They collect no PII either, they just get an "is_a_human" response back from Canada Post.
You can still do read-only things like see threads and follow users as an anonymous user. Just can't post or comment. Only thing I don't like is that it's app-only for now.
intersting take, I'm not Canadian but wasn't there some pretty draconian bills that were passed where you could be reported for voicing or sharing your opinions on some things ?
That already seems like a hard barrier for any sort of Canadian social network especially when you require your users to dox themselves and open themselves to all sorts of scrutiny.
The problem with all of this is that it creates a sterilized politically correct environment that won't have the same pull as a public square that upholds freedom of speech like American ones.
I don't post there anymore but I do still check my DMs once a week, because every now and then someone will find my work through there, and I need people to find my work in order to survive. I unfortunately can't easily trade that in for a platform that no one visits.
They all get to the point where anime contents start flooding in pinning the system at capacity 24/7, scaring the wrong set of people,
and then they chicken out and start dying a long death. This situation itself is downstream event of Twitter doing the same, in a sense.
I only use X (via XCancel etc) to read the updates from things like the local train company that they only post on X. They aren't on Bluesky or Mastodon. When I tried Mastodon, I found it too politically extreme, it felt like walking into an angry students' union meeting. It never seemed to catch on in the UK, it surfed a couple of waves of dissatisfaction with X, but people quickly drifted away.
All of these are seriously bad copycat alternatives of twitter. And since twitter's foundations are laid on moving bedrock.... the whole thing is a horrible abomination where the tendrils are these "alternatives".
I'll take the bait, what makes Bluesky a bad copycat? It's just old Twitter. I can't for the life of me see what makes it "seriously bad", it has a pretty large userbase, it's seemingly got a decent number of normies to move over from X, it's pleasant enough to use. It's been a success.
I don't think any of them are better, I especially do not want to be on bluesky. on X you could still do your own thing and not be tied to the political extremism but its not the case with bluesky, people automatically perceive you to support the founder's political views and it has nowhere the same reach as X which is why I think the negative connotations are stronger on bluesky than X
X is used internationally, especially big in Japan and has lot of adoption among working professionals. Just my two cents and I personally don't really like X much either. Threads also isn't that great either.
> We have received cease and desist letters. Awaiting legal advice at the moment, but for now expect all nitter instances to remain down for the foreseeable future.
[for all those who - like me - first check the comments before clicking on the link]
Yes and it's not like there hasn't been ton of precedent for scraping recently, including by X themselves, so why would they expect to not be able to win this?
Getting legal advice can absolutely take a long time, and the first thing they'll probably tell most people in this situation is "turn it off for now until we can do more research and collect money from you."
However, C&D's don't really carry any legal weight in the US to my knowledge... but I don't see any harm in complying ahead of time just to be safe. The only "damage" I can see is just by nature of the service being down temporarily.
If there is even a possibility that a court may find the service violating a law, I think the legal advisor would likely say to just leave the service down unless you have many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to fight it... you can most likely avoid the entire lawsuit altogether just by complying with the C&D. And this kind of suit is one that can easily ruin your company or even personal life... so avoiding it seems smart.
> Anyone can send an request.
As for emails, I think BIMI has solved this for some time now, at least for large companies.
1. Permanently take down nitter.net and the GitHub repository, and delete all "X Data" in both
2. Stop all use of the "Twitter" and "X" marks
3. Cease all access to X data, including copies
4. Delete all X account credentials and session tokens
5. Confirm compliance in writing within three business days
The claims asserted are breach of X's Terms of Service, Developer Agreement and Developer Policy; the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act; and the Lanham Act. It threatens litigation against me personally. X states it has also sent notice to GitHub and to my domain registrar.
Why not use those three days (or any time that can still be considered reasonable to respond to this) to contact the EFF before responding by taking down the site?
> 1. Permanently take down nitter.net and the GitHub repository[...]
This is the one that they know they have absolutely no grounds to demand, which is why they started with it. Everything else can be conformed with without even really damaging Nitter (the project.)
> 4. Delete all X account credentials and session tokens
could be trouble for individual servers, but is on legally shaky ground, and servers can simply go down at the first strong challenge and open back up under another name. Nitter the project doesn't need to have any credentials or tokens.
"For the forseeable future" doesn't sound very good. It's a vague phrase, but it usually isn't used to describe something that will change next week or even next month.
"For the time being" would have sounded like less bad wording than "for the forseeable future."
What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be? Clearly the exodus that happened when Musk took it over didn't kill it but I do seem to see fewer links to it than I used to.
Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
This is only tenuously related but every single Mac app I see advertised on X by verified accounts is malware. I reported one last week to them, they said it's not malware. I appealed it and said the install link is copy and paste obfuscated base64 into your terminal, and they said after review it doesn't break their terms.
So whatever else they do, they take money to knowingly promote malware.
> the install link is copy and paste obfuscated base64
This doesn't make it malware, as likely as it is that malware would hide itself like that. base64 encoding avoids issues with quoting and escaping in the terminal, and is an easy way to include a bit of binary data that might be needed by a command (or even just written directly to disk somewhere). "Obfuscated base64" is only saying something if you decoded the base64 and still got an obfuscated result. Install-time code execution is more dangerous in the sense that you can't review between installation and program execution; but custom installers come from the same source as the program, so it's the same number of parties to trust.
For that matter, PyPA still maintains bootstrap.pypa.io so that Python users can get current versions of pip by downloading and running a Python script that loads a base85 string, decodes it and writes a wheel file based on that. (It even duplicates some of the standard library `ensurepip` logic.)
If you want a malware report to be taken seriously, in general, you should expect to roll up your sleeves and be able to provide an analysis of concrete malicious behaviour.
I use it to follow people who either have ideas I find interesting or do stuff I find interesting, and typically I'm looking for accounts that are small enough that I know they will at least see my replies, and often interact with them. (Something like 3K-15K followers for most of them, I think.)
I also think it's indispensable for real-time commentary and niche commentary on current events: always requires grains of salt but there's just no better place on the Internet for that sort of thing, in part because...
It's the one major social network I'm on where it is easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order. A feed I TRULY control (and, if you follow the right people, insulates you from much of the nonsense on the site).
And every once in awhile, some insane viral nonsense pokes in that makes you say "how could I ever quit this site". There's a certain genre of satirical accounts that is very entertaining as well. Definitely a guilty pleasure component to it all!
>Is it still as popular as it used to be?
A quick search roughly aligns with my perception: it bottomed out a couple of years ago and has gradually recovered, though not to where it was pre-X.
> It's the one major social network I'm on where it is easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order.
Oh weird, I'd rate X as medium-hard for that amongst the microposting sites I look at. Mastodon and Bluesky both default to almost-that, varying mostly in whether you need to jump through hoops to not see reposts.
X was always the one that (a) doesn't default to it, and (b) would keep "forgetting" and pushing you back to the algorithmic feed.
The problem is that network effects are everything
You are using a relic of what-used-to-be-Twitter. That's what people signed up for. I happen to think what Musk has done - although I'm highly skeptical of him - is not totally insane - Twitter did used to have some pretty notable censorship. But you follow people because that's where the people are. Competition does not spring up overnight, companies know this, and so they're left to gradually (or quickly!) enshittify
"easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order"
Yes, well. That should be the standard. Companies that don't follow that standard should be turned into pariahs
I haven't left because there are still circles of people I follow that haven't bailed. Once a large enough majority move to Bluesky, I'll start browsing that app more.
On the other hand, I might start posting on Bluesky more because as of a week ago, I'm shadowbanned on X. I know people throw that term around, but nobody on the site can see any of my reply tweets, even me (unless I scroll my account's 'replies' tab); people who've followed me for years are asking why their tweet has a ghost reply.
I don't think X has that much of an incentive to filter out bots while keeping around accounts like me (200 followers, will never pay for Premium). The slightly higher effort bots that glaze tech CEOs will be basically indistinguishable from the real people glazing tech CEOs because they're wannabe founders trying to network/cloutfarm. And that style of dead internet is fine with Elon.
> Once a large enough majority move to Bluesky, I'll start browsing that app more
The problem is a network effect. Lot of people rage quit X and then they return to it because they realize the reach isn't there on Bluesky, and whenever that happens it just sends strong signals
I don't really like X either, I feel like the feed algorithm isn't very good and just shows the same thing repeated by multiple accounts.
I'm trying to objectively view the two platforms without the partisan rhetorics. There isn't that many places besides Threads.
I personally like the old php forums which had a real presence.
> as of a week ago, I'm shadowbanned on X. I know people throw that term around, but nobody on the site can see any of my reply tweets, even me
This is honestly the real value of nitter far beyond anti-Musk shriekers being obsessed with and addicted to X but not wanting to log into X. Nitter seems to simply give you everything - and you can plainly see which tweets are getting huge distribution and which ones nobody is seeing.
It's deplorable, but our president in Mexico recently was asked about some current affairs a d her answer was "ive written about it in X , go see it there" ...
As if X was an official government publishing channel . WTH, they should publish it on they official government pages.
There should be laws that require all government statements to be published on an official government site and be forever archived there no matter where or however else they were published. That way politicians can take advantage of the reach of social media sites while not requiring anyone to use them and also providing a means for those statements to be verified and preserved.
This right here is the thing that shows how much influence big tech has. Everyone has their anecdotal story about porn, spam, malware or whatever flooding Twitter meanwhile your local city government treats it as an official communications channel.
In a UK context, journalists are on there because politicians are on there... and politicians are on there because journalists are on there. It's politicians that need to pull the plug - if they left en masse the journalists would go where they went, even if they stayed on X too - but nobody has the balls to do it. (Aside from one politician who for all practical purposes seems to do absolutely nothing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyrx1ee2r4o).
They could at least use both. I'm pretty annoyed with Andy Burnham. He's had a Bluesky account that has been pretty active... right up until he became a PM. Would it kill him to get a member of his team to repost his tweets to Bluesky?
Thats sorta my situation, a scene I'm rather involved in has most the international users there, as such thats where things still live. Every other alternative has failed to gain enough traction for one reason or another.
Its usually either limited features, regional accessibility issues, or platforms like metas' just basically trading one big bad organization for another.
Companies and celebrities are a major use case here. Lots of them (especially ones from non-English speaking countries) still use the site as their primary means of communication. For example, Nintendo doesn't have an official presence on Bluesky, Threads or Mastodon, just Twitter.
There's a decent number of old school companies and creatives who either don't know/care about alternatives, or who tried them and went back to Twitter/X.
More of a political echo chamber than anything else. I mothballed my original account when things were getting spicy which was primarily focused on dev, UI/UX, and InfoSec news. I finally went back and have had some great interactions with people about technical stuff that interests me. Right now, the data center and AI discussions are getting intense along with Omarchy, lol. If you steer clear of the political stuff, you can find some good stuff still.
>> Is it still as popular as it used to be?
Probably not but it still ranks ahead of sites like Reddit. Its like the 13th, 14th most popular platform right now. I log on mainly just to see if I'm missing anything. Other than that, most of the engagement I have is curiosity and just fun stuff like seeing people posting retro games, stuff like that.
>> Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
X is now kind of the social media cul-de-sac . It used to be one of the go to places for breaking tech, popular cultural and political stuff. Now its usually two or three days late to the party on anything worthwhile. So the posts from the CEO probably made the rounds before you finally saw it on X. lol
It’s still fairly popular, but the statistics show that X usage is gradually declining. Elon claims that X is more popular than ever, but the platform doesn’t publicly release its own stats, and publicly available stats say otherwise.
If you like AI and tech, there are some pretty thriving sub-communities. AI stuff, and a lot of tech stuff happens on X first. Claudebot/OpenClaw/Hermes all began on X months before I commonly saw them appear on other platforms.
For one of the big use cases, you can look at the NCMEC's reports-by-ESP numbers.
For example, X has 816K and X AI has 135K reports. Reddit, despite having 200M (36%) more MAU, only has 65K reports. OpenAI, despite having about 8x MAU than X.ai, has 182K reports.
> What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be?
No idea comparatively, but an artist friend of mine tried out Bluesky and then complained about how there's way more of a limited reach and engagement there compared to Twitter.
I've made a lot of friends in Japan through shared interest communities that are mostly on twitter. Most are people I've actually met whenever I am in Japan.
Personally I have zero interest. If it's a big enough deal, it'll get to me somehow. Knowing about it 15s after it happened and then seeing a flood of uninformed speculation would be stressful.
Others do value that, no judgment, but for me it's be a net negative.
Bluesky Social is more useful for news. I can use custom clients such as https://sill.social/ which just aggregate the links and commentary from my feeds, and catch up on what news is important to the ppl I'm following.
Whenever I check X, it's always just misinformation, and it's impossible to see what people actually say because bluechecks are always the first to show up in the algorithmic ranking. On political commentary: they were dying hard for Graham Platner saying he was the only option, but then Troy Jackson who replaced him did better in the polls.
The biggest social networks can only die slowly. They have too much momentum for the the type of sudden exodus that was possible when the internet had not yet absorbed the entire population.
Its main use for myself was that posts were public by default so lots of government orgs and whatnot posted real time status updates. I never really used it except for occasionally checking those.
Now that more and more are going "walled garden" I don't get it at all
There are lots of interesting people/orgs on X from AI/ML circles, as well as Ukraine war OSINT accounts and UA army helpers. I stay on X pretty much for these two topics.
Guess one has to, because there are just too many people on there. I don't like it but what can I do. What I hate the most is that states/countries, prime ministers and kings post on there. And that the emergency services of some countries have that as primary channel. I understand cross posting to the most popular social channels, but primary? That SHOULD be a local channel, not some dystopian shit hole you could be banned from randomly.
A lot of interesting people who do interesting things post on X. You can follow them and have interesting feed. You don't get it on FB/Insta or Tiktok.
>>Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
Yeah just a big tech CEOs posting (or an author of a big project, or an engineer working for a top lab), nothing to see here. On to another dancing teenager on TikTok. Let's watch some pranks or a "beauty influencer" on Insta where we are at it instead.
twitter/x remains the domain of intelligence agencies worldwide. It is a semi-open (the world first virtual leader, the ayatollah affirms he exists from there ..) psychological operations platform that permits the avatars of "world leaders" to speak to masses and also hosts a parasitical community of grifters ("opinion makers" and "influencers") that feed off of the festering fetid matter served up by the Spook International.
a secondary purpose of the twitter/x is a reverse doomsday clock, based on above. As long as the ghost of this unprofitable "business entity" is kept alive by funny money and funny deals, we can sleep soundly at night knowing there won't be ww3 or any other such extreme negotiating tactics by global elite, since they are all 'playing their role' on twitter currently known as x.
I don't believe the extremism engine of Xitter is reducing the risk of global catastrophe. I think it's accelerating that risk. Certainly it helped elect Trump, and no one can argue that's been good for advancing the cause of peace on earth or avoiding several other causes of mass death.
I see many, many Twitter posts here. I flag every single one. Many of them are AI-related, and not something from a big tech CEO. It seems that many fans of AI don’t have any moral quandaries with using it. I will let you be the judge of whether that says anything about their moral compass in general.
All journalists and politicians are there, including left wing. If you want to know e.g. what the Prime Minister of Pakistan really said instead of some news spin, you have to read his tweets.
It is an elite club, and Musk wants you to pay for it.
I don't know why it is legal for EU politicians to use this walled garden for important messages.
Someone outside of the US jurisdiction (China?) has to keep xcancel.com running.
IIRC you can’t even read a single post without an account, it is equivalent to posting a link to a private Facebook group or whatever from an outsider point of view.
What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be?
Yes, because influential, non-evil people who should know better just will not fucking leave. The vast majority of public-minded ML developers and researchers, including people who compete with xAI, being an obvious example.
And because skilled, knowledgeable people who could create a replacement service just will not do so. At least not without finding new and innovative forehead-slapping ways to fail at it.
Incredibly frustrating that Xitter is still as popular as it is.
It's become just another doomscroll content mill like the rest. Public figures and well known names have been replaced with random content creators and repost bots.
I rarely use it (you need an account, so I need to add cancel to the url) but last time I had a "guest" account was two years ago and it was pretty much all bots. That being said, some (important) people or companies still use it for announcement but these are usually linked and xcancel works just fine.
I honestly have no idea if there are real people who actually use it daily. Who can read that stuff?
Incredibly unpopular opinion on Hacker News, but X remains the center of many circles, including tech. There is almost nothing posted on Hacker News that I haven't seen on X first, with better commentary.
Actually I retired from twitter before Musk, because twitter started to censor me. But of course once Musk took over, constantly raising his right arm, I knew twitter was dead. Here in Europe nobody wants to see selfish and ruthless right-wing nuts control ecosystems. Billionaires pulling the strings does not work; the USA need to learn this lesson first.
Terminally online, infighting and purity testing leftist weirdos who never have and never will achieve anything politically continue to push "nazi bar" rhetoric, but actual people just don't give a shit. Here's some far right nazis for your reference:
Musk is who you engage with on twitter. You're one of the people who makes his account the most engaged with. I follow tons of stuff on twitter, and have no idea what Musk is doing unless it gets in the mainstream news.
I made the mistake of searching it yesterday via a proxy while trying to search for local police news (why do our govts use these mechanisms to publish first) and ran into threads calling for ethnic cleansing of south asians from Texas. Not a great read.
Like all social media, your feed depends partly on who you follow and partly on behavioural cues their algorithms can determine about you (such as who you interact with, sites you visit).
It may be skewed one way or another more than other social networks, but even so, you should be careful saying a social media is a racist bigoted right wing echo chamber because it can sound not like a recital of popular media but more personal experience
There's people from all walks of life and all corners of the internet on there still, good and bad. Twitter was always a darned mess, the only difference now is you can't just report people and bully them off the site.
Contrast to me trying to open BlueSky, and seeing death threats and other insane things. I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem. Those two factors alone kept me from even trying it out.
What's really weird is there were a ton of claims that disappeared, about how X was full of bots, but X is the opposite of full of bots. Maybe there's one or another, but they're highly under the radar, X has improved their bot problem drastically.
Edit (tweaked some words, and wanted to add):
Then there was Threads, I am not in any way interested in "New Twitter" by Mark Zuckerberg, no thanks.
I really can't deal with BlueSky. I wanted to because I had a lot of good "starter packs" for NeoVim and OCaml development. Nerd stuff is the reason I visit these sites. The problem is, I start following people and it almost always turns into politics. I may even AGREE with the person's politics but I hate reading and talking about it. God forbid I ever disagree.
Funny thing though. I've heard the claims of "CSAM on Twitter" and now "CSAM on BlueSky". I've never had any of that ransomly show up. I do still have 2 or so random follows from clip-art female avatars with no tweets - per week. I've never quite figured out how that scam is supposed to work. I used to block 'em, now I ignore 'em.
If you look at the replies to basically any big post, you'll see all the blue checkmark bots in there. Usually just copying posts, sometimes doing a weird ai summary of the original post in a way that isn't actually replying to it.
I've got no idea if they're somehow making money off it or what's up
> I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem.
There really isn't, unless you mean anime content(of both SFW and NSFW alike) by "CSAM". In case you mean by that, then there is, otherwise no. It also appears to be highly locale dependent - some say they see timeline filled to the brim with fetish furry images and male gay nudity dressed with right wing politics, but my timeline is like just Twitter 2014 stuck at 3AM without any of those. I don't use any filters or blocklists, the place seem naturally nice-ish.
> about how X was full of bots
They appear to have largely given up and scaled back efforts to replace existing social graphs by funding African/Middle Eastern/Indian/South Asian content farms under the guise of revenue sharing programs, burning out talents west to east, likely with the conclusion that they're all equally incapable of understanding contents posted on Twitter even without the language barrier, let alone gaining popularity and even with literal algorithmic manipulations. Or they just burned through quite a deep talent pool globally.
That effort started after Twitter was bought, beginning around South Africa or Nigeria. So it's not an improvement, unless you count someone ceasing hostility as an improvement.
I did not plan to announce it yet as it is in a very early stage, I was targeting November, but I think it should be mentioned now: I am working on OpenWeb, https://framagit.org/open-web/open-web, a project which allows to access posts (at the moment only tweets but more platforms to be supported later) without any account nor tracking. It *downloads* them instead of proxying, with the goal to make the data public data.
Of course, it can't download the full twitter database, so the scope is limited to entities which *have a wikipedia page*. That's the criteria for "is it famous enough", as wikimedia already has good rules about who/what deserves a wikipedia page or not.
More on that project soon.
How can that be legal? You’re assuming anyone famous enough to have a Wikipedia page is granting you a license to republish their content? I think the only thing between your project and a cease and desist is lack of popularity. If proxifying gets you into hot water, downloading will be worse.
As I am not a lawyer, I can't confirm if this is legal or not. I do plan to contact legal people to tell me which kind of jurisdiction would allow that.
I am still hopeful because:
- This is only about public tweets
- The project does not add any context or interpretation around them
- The project links to the original content
- Speeches by public people such as politicians or corporations are usually fine to be spread around. They actually want what they say to be as spread as possible. It would not cross anyone's mind to sue a newspaper because they quoted a tweet of a famous person, saying that there is PI on the content of the tweet.
This project is more an "Internet archive" of the social networks. There is no follow button, no way to comment or interact or anything. It just puts the data in the open. It may still be illegal as much as archive.org is illegal. To be seen.
Whenever Meta is mentioned on HN, there will be HN users asking why people are still on Facebook or Instagram when we all know Meta hired psychology PHDs to make their products addictive yadda yadda. Usually you will just see people tell each other that they have gotten off Facebook before it became uncool. You hardly see anyone accusing each other of virtue signaling or having any kind of political slant.
But Twitter or X comes up, someone will say they don't use it, and people will start calling out their supposed virtue signaling and making wild speculations about their politics in no time.
Believe it or not but outside the USA there are over a billion people who use Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp services daily to conduct their daily lives and business. You do not speak for the average Indian or Indonesian and the world does not revolve around America.
Elon is much more explicitly/publicly on one side of US politics than Meta is. That's why people accuse his critics of playing politics (a convenient scapegoat).
For what it's worth people say Facebook helped get trump elected (through use of targeted campaigns using FBs analytics/targeting) the book Carless People covers it a bit, among many other distasteful happenings at meta.
I've never really noticed a difference in the trends for either. For the most part, all of the comments are about how anywhere but HN is complete shit and even HN is not as good as it used to be. There are always a few saying "but that's where everyone is". Inevitably, someone will post a link to something we all hate on constantly, be it one of these kinds of sites or a paywalled news article or whatever, and we're all just supposed to either know the currently working proxy or hope someone has already posted the link in the comments.
One thing I have universally noticed is it doesn't matter what it is or how many sides there are to it, someone always thinks HN is unfair to one side in favor of another. Usually multiple someone at the same time, and usually not even from the opposing side as each other claims.
And I don't know, maybe there is an 80/20 bias or something. I just don't know how I would or wouldn't reliably know that on intuition/things I notice rather than running the numbers on comment data.
Musk and his supporters project a lot. They have some neural condition or notoriety as popularity strategy or something that makes him/them hate everything, and they performatively state that "___ hates Elon"(often verbatim) out of that. It's not exactly organic.
On 24 August 2026 cease and desist letters have been sent by X Corp. demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project's repository.
nitter.net is offline and development has stopped for the time being. I'm seeking legal advice and won't be commenting further on the specifics for now.
Thank you to everyone who used, hosted, packaged, donated and contributed to Nitter over the past seven years.
— zedeus, 25 August 2026
I’ve been writing an HN clone that’s literally a clone. It copies all front page posts and comments. I just wanted to say publicly that dang is awesome. Instead of shutting down the idea, he’s been actively helping the project by answering periodic emails and… well, not shutting it down.
Not sure what to do with it yet. Maybe I could let users have custom filtering rules. But the point is, companies should support community projects like this, not throw around ToS violation claims like they’d hold up in court.
To be clear, no ads. I might have a donation link just to cover hosting costs, but I'm not trying to extract money out of this. I have a full time job for that. This is just an art project.
I don't mean to discourage you, and it's great that you've gotten that support; but I don't understand what purpose this serves. I had understood that Nitter exists exactly because of the forces that would make X leadership tend not to like its existence. HN is already not trying to sell things or make the interface obnoxious for logged-out users, and it makes very responsible use of JavaScript; what is there to filter out?
No discouragement taken :) Thanks for the question.
Some people have asked for a "No AI" version of HN. That's one possibility.
Another possibility is to just stop cloning comments, so that only the articles are mirrored, and then launch the site. There would be few comments, but that might be a feature. I sometimes miss when HN was small.
Is it available? Would like to peek around, I also made a clone. There are lots of little details about the HN ui that were difficult to get just right.
You’re absolutely right. It’s taken almost daily work from April till now, but I finally have almost everything. Navigation links were particularly tricky. I’d love to see yours too.
Right now it’s running locally on my laptop, but I plan to deploy it to https://news.ycombinator.lol soon. I was gonna make AI generated comments but the API costs are pretty high.
I also made a clone. I haven't touched it in months. I was going to put it on one of my domains and decided not to until I can sort out moderation and all that. I'm not sure I want to be on the hook for moderating a forum full time.
I would like for things to be so, but these platforms relief on you being on their platform, hooked on their algorithms, delivering them data. They need this in order to make money. HN is not monetized like this, so of course they're more lax. But I don't expect this to be possible for many other social media sites.
On related note I really like serializer.io to read HN (I disable other sites it supports) in chronological order and have it synced across multiple devices under unique URL
you're infringing HN users' copyright (and possible other rights as well), as they haven't granted you a license to copy, store and republish their content
Nitter is a great project, way lighter than using Twitter and gets the job done if you want to check few accounts. I have a list of 30 accounts that I'm checking with Nitter and it's absolutely fantastic for this. Oh well, I guess I'll live without following those accounts.
Nitter permitted perusing of twitter (x-cremente) without being tracked by whoever has the keys to the backdoors to twitter. This is why nitter is being killed - it destroys the surveillance capability provided by twitter/x/musk to interested parties.
I just noticed a couple days ago that when I paste a tweet URL in claude.ai to ask to explain it, sonnet 5 knew to look it up in nitter and xcancel to get the tweet and its context automatically. Shutting down these aggregators allows twitter to drive a harder bargain with Anthropic and OpenAI directly. I wonder whether this was the impetus for the C&D.
There’s still other ways the agents will figure out. They’re playing a whack a mole trying to stop bots but you really can’t have a site that shows a page to wide internet and also lock it down. It does seem they’re moving towards a login required to view anything kinda site. That’ll just kill their search ranking though
I work out of cafes a lot, so I use a commercial VPN often. This means that I am unable to read Reddit. (Not to mention I have to pass two Cloudflare captchas on most other sites.)
If I can't use Xcancel, then I won't be able to read Twitter on the rare occasion I want to.
Strangely, as someone who is online a lot, I seem to be getting gradually cut off from other Internet users. HN is kind of the last survivor for me.
Sorry to move the goalposts on you, but the specific feature whose elimination I am lamenting is anonymous, read-only access. HN still supports this. Making an account kind of defeats the purpose.
Once upon a time I used Twitter's API to scan for tweets that were talking about a particular Wikipedia page.
Doing semantic analysis, I did insert the tweets in the right place of the page. I did it as a student, using the free API.
Twitter was the open, technically respected network with a great engineering blog.
Now it's a political project to elect the extreme-right in Europe.
"The world's town square", where everyone could gather and see what was going on.
And, for more than a decade, it appeared to work pretty well. Governments, media outlets, public-facing services of all kinds came to rely on it as their main way to talk to the public.
But now it's impossible to use without a login, most of that value has been lost.
The best thing to do is to learn from what happened, and not allow a proprietary platform to become so central again.
I always cringed at that framing anyway, for two reasons. First, it was obvious to me that it was a private, centralized, closed-source, piece of software whose owner(s) could always manipulate or take away from people they didn't like. Second, it's genuinely depressing to think that the modern marketplace of ideas was supposed to take place in 180 (or whatever the hell it is now) characters or fewer. Yeah, sure- let's hash out the complexities and nuances of life and society in single-sentence messages. And we wonder why everything has become "polarized" and rage-bait-y. When all you have room to write is "This thing is bad", what the hell else are you supposed to do?
What a stupid platform. I can't believe it's still so popular.
I don't understand why they are so dead set on this anti-user short term profit seeking design. During the acquisition wasn't the general sentiment that "I understand this won't be super profitable but I'm doing it on principle"? Trying to chase this boyish fantasy of creating the "everything app" is incompatible with "worlds town square". Those are two different problems with different solutions.
> Now it's a political project to elect the extreme-right in Europe.
You people are completely out of touch with reality. You cannot accept that the reason of why we’re voting for the “far” right is because we experienced a whole decade of uncontrolled immigration policies that permanently reshaped the way of living of previously homogeneous countries.
Already succeeded in the US. Now it’s a project of whether it can be used to maintain power. Right wing populist movements ebb and flow quite readily:
- ebb: people realize that promises of change are empty and only enrich the few elite
- flow: people have forgotten that the promises were empty last time
Hopefully I’m correctly sensing the shifting of the winds.
Meta platforms are more responsible for atrocities in other parts of the world, e.g. Myanmar.
As opposed to the Jack Dorsey days of twitter where you would be banned for mildly right wing opinions, even if they were factually correct. That wasn't a political project?
> Now it's a political project to elect the extreme-right in Europe.
Certainly the policy of the opposition has nothing to do with the backlash. No definitely not. It's certainly just dumb people being tricked by the bad guys.
If these people could just get properly educated and shielded from the bad ideas surely they'd see the light.
So you're saying that the current management of Twitter does not favor politically-right messaging? Otherwise, your message is a non-sequitur.
The comment you replied to made no statement about the effectiveness of the project. It's like saying that George Soros is engaged in trying to elect left-wing leadership; nobody denies that.
Political stuff notwithstanding, I used to be an active X user with a large following, but stopped using it because I couldn't configure a client that reliably allowed me to 1) consume a non-algorithmic feed and 2) disable videos and photos in the feed. It's really quite a bummer to be forced into the engagement maximizing app.
same here, my videos and posts would hover close to a million on average. I covered europe mostly where I'm from and the happenings there.
After Nikita took over I found X to be significantly worse. They also realized paying people to repost viral videos wasn't drawing advertisers.
In fact one fo the reasons I think their algorithm is so bad now is because they lack advertisers (conversion on X remains the lowest out of all social media platforms) and have to rely on people paying for X premium who naturally wants to be seen and engage in echo chambers.
The real deal breaker for me is when X did not honor their freedom of speech philosophy and did not offer me protection when a certain European country got involved and became very aggressive that I had to leave.
Is there any jurisdiction where Nitter instances could be hosted while inconvenient Cease and Desist letters were... let's put it this way, rendered useless?
I need to start preparing for Redlib to meet the same fate, as this god-damned site will be the only other site I care about on the Internet left once that happens.
I was part way through setting up both redlib and bitter on my homelab when this hit. Every app I have used, every plugin, they all get stopped. Was hoping a web proxy would be the final solution.
Also add newpipe/YouTube proxies to the list. I miss the free and open internet
It's insane that their sign-up process now requires a phone number to complete on the web, and even basic features like playing a video in a tweet recently stopped working on x.com without an account. (In the past, searching for tweets, looking at an account's entire timeline, etc., never required logging in at all.)
But Twitter has and embraces that. The bots are all verified. Go on any tweet that mentions crypto or "my friends account got hacked" and dive into the deep well of hidden tweets.
Hiding tweets for users without accounts does absolutely nothing for either of those goals.
Email has federated pretty reliably. Granted, it's nearly impossible to host your own server, because the rest will automatically assume you are only sending spam, but the well-known servers all federate quite nicely. Worst case scenario is that some organizations put a footer on outside messages warning that it's not internal.
Rumors of the death of the fediverse have been greatly exaggerated. I'm following a vibrant community of nerds, creators, writers, game developers and interesting people on Mastodon right now, and there are numerous other platforms on the fediverse as well, with their own communities. Lots of people have been able to decide on one or more instances for themselves. I don't know why it's such an intractable problem for HN.
The fediverse is 90% left wing authoritarians who won't hesitate to send death threats if you disagree with Russia's actions in Ukraine, or China's actions re ethnic cleansing and Uyghurs.
I love the idea of the fediverse and tried really hard to make it work, but the community is comprised almost entirely of people who were so extreme that they've been banned from other social media platforms.
Twitter's been the worst about forcing you to log in.
Before Elon, Twitter would give him some login reminders roughly every 5-10 minutes if you viewed the site while logged out. It was a little annoying, but it wasn't that bad, and you could get rid of the reminder by just clicking the x button.
Now, under Elon, they force you to login to read any replies to posts. Currently, a person's 5 most recent posts can be viewed without an account, but none of the replies can be.
Reddit is now forcing people to login to view old Reddit. IIRC, old Reddit is posts that are from before 2009 or something like that. It's not that important of a loss in the grand scheme of things, but it might be the first step towards making the entire Reddit website login only.
I've been using XCancel to retrieve posts of an account via RSS, only posting vintage photos from my hometown. It was a small convenience, but I guess that's over. I'll never get what keeps people tethered to it.
Look, we should make a concerted effort—a huge one, I know—to strip away all that is potentially of value in X, and through pulling and separating it from the whole, establishing dignified alternatives to every single one of them.
Here's what X does "well":
- Witness media/citizen journalism.
- Text publishing (narrowed down to short-form and very opinion-based, but still).
- Link sharing (there are TONS of links to great pieces of media; the vast majority of posts containing links to pirated content are never removed).
- Self-promotion (art, video games, software, etc.).
Now, imagine all of these facets turned into dignified, decentralized, and uncensorable platforms or protocols. It might sound like wishful thinking or some kind of utopian aspiration, but I really think we're fighting a battle for Internet freedom RIGHT NOW. What we do in the next two to five years will establish how much of it we'll get to keep in the long term, because there might be no turning back.
Small pushback here: it (and bluesky too) is absolutely atrocious for art, at least as a consumer. Once in a while I stumble upon an artist who only posts their drawings on twitter/bsky, and it’s pretty much impossible to browse their historical works because the „media” tab is just an infinite scroll without any organization; and that’s assuming they don’t also post 10 photos of their cat or other life updates in between their art.
It’s obviously still popular for posting art for many other reasons (I just dislike putting „X”, „art” and „does well” in the same sentence). So IMO the replacements - and lots of these use cases already gave replacements! - struggle simply because of network effects, not their inherent quality.
I would literally stop opening twitter links, for me the utility of twitter is not having an account, but sometimes certain projects or governments and businesses use it for announcements. Before Musk put the login only for seeing tweets and comments, I would use regular twitter and when they did that I switched to nitter. (I had an account for some time but it was a complete was of time)
An anonymous group of devs should host the source on Radicle (over Tor) and the app itself on an onion site. Bonus, it may discourage some scrapers who can’t be bothered with setting up a Tor gateway.
If the operators are in the US, they probably don't want to risk it if they were anything less than very careful in not having their personal info attached to any of the data.
I've always found it baffling that more projects by folks that disagree with copyright, access controls, etc aren't hosted in places where the cease and desist won't work.
It's like, you're doing something to annoy a large company with lots of legal resources, and you host everything in the US? Why?
Because the US is the center of the tech world. The default AWS region is in the us. All large tech companies are in the us. If you use any cloud provider the default and cheapest region is in the us and so on. Everything tech is in English and the largest English speaking country is the us.
I'm sure this also ends the Safe Harbor protection they've enjoyed, then, if they're going to be in the business of dictating what content can be seen and where.
We get the message alright - everyone move over to alternative platforms. Biggest issue to get local government socials moved to something more open and accessible without an account.
Anyone familiar with the legal reasons Twitter might be able to prevent sites like nitter from working? I believe scraping is legal but I'm sure there are details that make this different
> X has documentary evidence that you are scraping X Data, circumventing X’s API access controls and rate limits, accessing X using X accounts and session tokens in violation of X’s rules, and republishing X Data to the public. X’s Terms of Service, Developer Agreement, and Developer Policy strictly forbid such conduct. See https://x.com/en/tos (“[C]rawling or scraping the Services in any form . . . is expressly prohibited.”). By your own description, Nitter “uses Twitter’s unofficial API” and routes all requests through your servers, and requires operators to supply real X accounts to function.
> Your actions constitute a flagrant breach of the contractual and legal obligations you agreed to when accessing the X services. Your actions also violate various state and federal laws, including, but not limited to, the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act (§ 143.001 and § 33.02) and the Lanham Act (15 U.S.C. §§ 1114, 1125).
if i understand correctly, in Meta v. Bright Data, the court ruled that brightdata was allowed to scrape public profiles because the user is unauthenticated. thus I do not believe that precedent is in favor of nitter currently
Whether or not it came to legal notices, these sorts of "use technology to make the other technology less-bad" tactics are always temporary games of cat-and-mouse. Fine in the short term, but not something that offers a full, stable replacement.
The other day in the bay there was an amber alert. it had a bit.ly link which opened up twitter (or i guess x) app. that wouldnt let me see the alert unless i logged in.
It's hardly unique to Twitter but it's so frustrating how much "content" online requires an account. Whenever my friends send me something on Instagram or TikTok or a restaurant puts their menu on Instagram, I'm barraged with a thousand dark patterns forcing me to log in. Even Reddit is doing it now. I do wonder how much of this is to boost engagement versus another "wonderful" side effect from LLMs since they need training data.
The other day someone on here gave me a useful framing. Non-publicly accessible sites are the dark web. If a project told you they were moving all their docs and support to the dark web they would sound crazy, but if they say they're moving it to discord (the same thing) then it's fine.
I prefer the older term "deep web" [1]. It's mentioned in Wikipedia that the terms are used as synonyms now, but I think it's important to differentiate between sites behind login/authentication/etc, and sites that are still openly accessible, albeit over Tor, i2p, etc.
> Don’t go there. Plenty of other restaurants to choose from. They just lost a customer due to their hostility.
This is a wild take to me.
Around here pretty much nobody posts their menu online on any website, the technical literacy is just quite poor.
If you limited yourself to places that did, you'd only get big fast-food chains.
Twitter was doing stupid growth hacks, like requiring login to view replies, even before AI scrapers were a concern. (And I suspect many of the scrapers are just using logged-in accounts.)
didn't the scrapers scrape everything well before concerns were raised. were the concerns raised after the LLMs were released and then people realized what happened? so, forcing logins just closed the barn door after the horses got out.
libredirect is very good for these kinda of things. But the platforms keep trying to make it stop working so is a constant battle of the frontents to build workarounds
what I like about xcancel is that it allows me to read but protects me from giving in to the temptation of wasting time by engaging in fruitless discussions. same problem with reddit. funny thing is that my current account just got permanently banned due to ban evasion ... that's fantastic as I can still join and read subs but I cannot post or comment.
From a legal perspective, I can guess why you think it's bad. But aside from some legitimate use cases (apparently some towns and cities only issue announcements on X, really?) if you hate the platform itself so much but still feel compelled to check out content there then this may be a great opportunity for freedom and growth.
Companies, celebrities, media, even state agencies all post (only) on Twitter. At least the last one is a shame, but there's a good excuse about reach.
Bluesky's blocking and muting tools are quite good. You don't actually have to interact with anyone that you don't want to interact with.
That and a default feed that is literally "posts from people I follow, in chronological order" with no concept of the platform inserting promoted or sponsored content in the feed. The worst I might see is someone I follow re-sharing / quoting something I don't want to see, and if that happens I can unfollow that individual, I can mute that post, I can mute the user the post originally came from, or I can block any of the accounts involved.
This is part of the enshittification of social media: Places which used to be open for anyone to read, logged in or not, have become walled gardens, where you can only read the content if you log in, allowing the social network to use browser fingerprinting to track you, even if you erase all cookies.
Of course, the content on Twitter/X has gone down the toilet. While I am anything but “woke” (you can my posts defending RMS from the “woke mob” a few years ago), having a lot of content showing a random <<person in group Twitter posters don’t like>> committing a crime, and none of the comments letting us know when and where the incident in question happened (and, back when anyone could ask Grok where a given incident happened, it would invariably be something that happened five years ago or eight years ago), but a lot of comments going full Stormfront, saying that’s how all people in <<group they are bigoted against>> act.
Nitter was useful for archiving threads on Twitter/X, since it’s not possible to archive the same threads when they are directly on X. Even though anyone sensible has left Twitter/X, I will miss being able to archive the kind of content (as much as it is garbage) that is on X.
Annoying, after disruptions last few years, ended up using extension that manually scrolls through timeline to build a daily digest of tweets, which is all I really need. Keep time spend on bird site to a minimum.
This thing of needing to log in to view public pages needs to die
It's not "security". You know it's not. I feel like Facebook started the whole thing in their desperate attempt to get more users (while simultaneously screwing around with privacy settings on posts). It's incredibly widespread (I refuse to sign up for Instagram)
"Scraping" isn't an argument (LLMs for example) either
The leadership of these companies, are incredibly ethically bankrupt
By making it login only, every potential user is turned into a sellable asset. And you convince the courts that it's a password restricted website so you "breached" authorization or something
I do not know if xcancel is going to survive this :(
As far as I understand, people use XCancel because they do not like X (and Elon) so do not want to give money or traffic to X. But they still want to read and share content posted there.
The added value of XCancel is they are not owned by Elon Musk.
Getting around Twitter's blocking of non-logged-in accounts predates Musk's purchase of Twitter. I don't know the specifics of XCancel, but the niche existed beforehand.
The open web is dead. The open web remains dead. And we have killed it.
I'm actually much less anti-Musk than the average HN commentator but it should be universally agreed here that a small handful of mega-corp websites dominating the majority of content on the web is a bad thing. Nitter was hardly a solution. Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed, and "free speech" platforms like X are "technically" closed.
IMO we all need to start vibe coding PHP bulletin boards again. 'RETVRN' etc.
If we reflect on the debate from years ago about whether to nationalize Twitter, all the downsides we were warned about have come true. They censor / promote whoever the state wants anyways, the CEOs was literally in the cabinet for a time, but now they also have to enshittify and degrade the experience for the benefit of an also-ran AI lab.
All of the downsides you listed started with Jack Dorsey, and were significantly improved once Musk took over. X/Twitter still has its issues, though.
I’d tell you to check out the “Twitter Files”, but it seems Wikipedia has been completely compromised.
And I’m hesitant to recommend you read about it on Grokipedia (you’ll assume there is major bias), but it does seem to be the most accurate retelling of the scandal that I can find online. Here are both though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Fileshttps://grokipedia.com/page/Twitter_Files
Censorship-wise… Twitter was worse than Reddit at its peak (before being bought).
Don't reinvent the wheel PHPBB, MyBB and others are still updated.
I hate the closed web purely for disrupting archiving efforts, you can add chat apps like discord, whatsapp, zoom and teams in that list as well. As a lot of communities have moved there.
Nothing, fedi is extremely anarchic by design. If you don't like a server you can move to a different one, or start your own. The big Mastodon servers put in a great deal of effort to police what their users can see and interact with (see FediBlock), but it's impossible to shut certain people or groups out of the network entirely. It's a double-edged sword, but it's a net good for the kind of network it was intended to be, which is a hacker's network; it wasn't designed for normies.
Maybe they're referring to defederation? It's quite common on Mastodon as I understand it, due to disagreements on things like moderation between server operators.
What does it even mean, period? MAGA losers are free to establish a community on Bluesky, the only difference between that and Twitter is that Bluesky isn't built to optimize for ragebait and culture war fighting. But they can still socialize among themselves on Bluesky even if no one else wants anything to do with them.
> I've heard that - what is your experience? Downvotes and exclusion? Are there more 'open' servers?
Fediverse has plenty of servers which are "free speech" adjacent, which most Mastodon servers close off since its easier for them to police what their users can see than let them do it themselves. The vast majority of them do not run the Mastodon software, and feel far more "wild west" with all the shitposters. But if you want to talk with actual hackers and are into that sort of thing, it's fun times.
XCancel is a different website, but they just put up a notice literally a few minutes ago saying that they're also shutting down until they get legal advice. For the past few hours, xcancel had been marginally functional (constantly giving you an error message if you tried more than 2 or 3 searches at a time), but now the website is down altogether.
Twitterwebviewer is still up, but I always preferred nitter and xcancel. And I wouldn't be surprised if twitterwebviewer also goes offline in the next day or two.
Sad for the project but unsurprising knowing how much SpaceX (sigh) relies on xAI which it mostly a shelf for a neocloud bootstrapped precisely from Twitter/X as a dataset. I imagine they will legally fight to close as much as possible in order to make it look like a valuable dataset that is exclusive.
Right now, I can do about two searches on xcancel before it gives me the "instances have been rate limited" message. Then if I completely close out of my web browser, clear my web history from the last hour, and go back into my web browser, I can do another one or two searches, before xcancel again gives me that message about ""instances have been rate limited".
In theory I can still read the same things I could read before on xcancel by doing an endless cycle of doing one or two searches, then closing out of my web browser and clearing history, and then going back to xcancel and doing another search or two. But certainly that process is very annoying.
Now, I'm not 100% sure if this is related to Musk's cease and desist letter. I've run into this problem or similar technical problems about twice a month before when using XCancel. Usually the technical problem is resolved within 2 or 3 hours and I can use xcancel normally again. So I guess I'll check back in a few hours and see if I can use xcancel normally again.
Edit: Xcancel is working perfectly if you first go to somebody's X profile, and then you turn the x in the url to xcancel. For example, here is Elon Musk's profile on xcancel, where you can still view Elon's tweets, Elon's replies, and the replies that people have made to Elon's tweets.
XCancel still has a problem right now where I can only make a few searches on the xcancel website itself before it tells me I'm rate limited, and I have to sign out of the browser and sign back in before I can make searches on xcancel again.
However, I occasionally have had this problem on xcancel even before today. And I'd assume that this probably isn't related to the cease and desist letter. If this was due to the cease and desist letter, I'd assume that xcancel would be completely down right now rather than having limited functionality.
> On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.
The service XCancel is stopped until further notice.
We are seeking legal advice and won't share more details for now.
Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel.
What I don't understand is why people insist on using a service when that service doesn't want them.
I mean, xcancel had bandwidth costs. Even if covered by donations, in what world does it make sense to pay to access twitter instead of moving your business elsewhere?
You'll say the "content creators" are there. Would they stay if they run out of viewers?
First Instagram and Facebook, then Reddit, now Twitter.
This is the new normal, paywalls and walled gardens everywhere. Not to get started on quickly increasing nation-state censorship and trail blazers such as China with the entirety of their national web locked down already.
We move to the fediverse, hyphanet, etc, and leave the normies in the slop shops. We build a high information quality environment for us which is not easily centralize-able or lockin-able, and eventually the slop shops fall due to the lack of our high quality communications. Enshittification will ensure the slop shops' ultimate failure in their futures.
xcancel.com is also displaying cease and desist now.
So you have to get an X account to get access to "your" own politicians. Similarly, on Truth Social hedge funds are paying $100,000 bribes to Trump for premium access (essentially frontrunning).
This is from the company (X is owned by xAI) that distilled OpenAI against the terms of service.
Just saying but a tor hidden service to access Twitter would be nicer than possibly having your behavior tracked by people who don’t care much about laws(I mean the unofficial ones) and I suppose the liabilities for a third party providing a proxy to that content on the open web for convenience(and or tracking) would be significantly reduced.
As long as people are using X and linking to it this pain will just go on. If you have an account there you will not notice how unusable it is for others. And that's by design.
This means that you need to stop posting links to it anywhere, unless you attach to the link everything you find interesting about it (so the discussion too, if it's interesting).
I have a Twitter account and even then I use xcancel and such because Twitter signed me out one time and then i couldn't read replies to tweets without being signed in, and I really hate being nagged to get a shitty app or sign in just to read some stuff.
I donated to xcancel because id rather support that than pay for Twitter blue or whatever.
Xcancel was my only window to X.com which I prefer for our hyperlocal news. With the mainstream media not covering hyperlocal news I am now denied a freedom access to our hyperlocal content. It is a shame that we are denied freedom access to content in this AI slop era.
Perhaps the ability to de-anonymize[1] users and algorithmically influence those remaining is more valuable to him than whatever ARPU is for Twitter, especially with significant elections coming up around thr world.
1. A lot of data vendors key information on phone numbers or email, that's why all rewards program are thirsty for it.
I use Nitter/Xcancel entirely because I don't have an account, and Twitter is now unusable without one. There's still content of some value there. People still link to it and now I can't read what they shared with me.
I have ignored many cease and desists from powerful entities, for years, with no problems. Call their bluff. They are almost always a baseless fear tactic.
If you guys are really going to stay down otherwise because you are worried, transfer ownership of the Nitter servers to me on paper and I will approve turning them back on and resume operations as usual.
I have zero problem telling Musk to fuck off. In court, if needed.
"Elites" of both left and right stay because no matter how much they hate Elon they still need to be in the same country club with other elites. That always takes precedence.
for all of elon's pratting on about crypto and open protocols for x to be a single reader application is insane. Wait the problem is AI scraping??!!? and yet Grok is hoovering the planet... what's good for me isn't good for you.
I left Twitter few years ago as active user, it was not really giving me anything in return for contribution, I was still passively reading few accounts I followed through Nitter and used also Nitter redirect for all Twitter links in news articles.
If Musk thinks by shutting down Nitter instances I will return to Twitter he could not be further from truth, it doesn't really provide me anything essential I would not find elsewhere. It's almost as Google thinking I will ever pay for Youtube premium, if adblockers would stop working.
as a former (and the best) mod of the Twitter subreddit and having a well attuned sense for how this will all play out it seems that X will very soon be a defunct service. We've all seen these patterns play out before.
Reminder that hosting your own won’t last long either if it got popular, as long as you don’t control your domain, you are always under the mercy of being shutdown.
I think it's less that "this place" loves X, more that there is a committed segment of folks with flagging privileges that really really like a certain South African business guy.
More accurately, there are people here who don't hate the guy with a burning passion, and find the rhetoric of those who do really, really obnoxious. Especially the persecution complex and the dark hinting.
This is sad. The government, in doing so, awards e. g. twitter/Musk a de-facto total control over the communication space. I think ALL protocols need to be made fully open, and everyone should be able to write clients adhering these protocols. Any "cease and desist" also must be instantly made public. Right now there is a rogue government running the USA, run by a corrupt orange clown king. All oligarchs who supported this system need to pay compensation money to the other taxpayers.
X makes a platform available. People choose to post on it knowing full well how it works. X makes money by running ads, charging for subscriptions and tracking users.
To me it sounds reasonable that you can't just take that content and repost it without their or the author of the post explicit permission. It sounds like a fair use case and copying the whole content is not that.
Now there are technical details: "are they really copying or generating on the fly for the user" but I don't think it matters. At the end of the day the content belongs to either X or their users. I think arguments against that are arguments against copyright in general.
If I ever posted something on X my expectations would be that if people want to read it they need to obey X's terms and conditions. I wouldn't be happy if there was a platform copying it somewhere else. If I wanted my post to be public I would post on freely available public website (and then maybe repost or link it from my X's account).
You really are the owner of all the posts who make online. When you post on X, you grant X a license to display your posts, but you still have the copyright to your posts. Same thing if you post on Reddit or Facebook or YCombinator or whatever.
This really is an absurd case, but nitter apparently really wants to err on the side of caution until a judge rules in their favor.
> Same thing if you post on Reddit or Facebook or YCombinator or whatever.
Personally if anyone asked me, I’d happily let them take all comments I’ve ever posted to Reddit or HN and repost all of them on their own site.
In fact, I would like to declare the following right now: All comments I ever have made and ever will make on HN are available to use for anyone and everyone who wants to under the terms of the CC0 license. You can point to this comment if questions about copyright ever come up in relation to wanting to copy my comments from HN and rehost them elsewhere.
It’s just a shame that I am not a particularly famous or interesting person, and my comments are not all that interesting especially if taken out of the threads they are posted in without the surrounding comments from others in those threads.
In order for someone to be able to fully replicate all of the user content from a site such as X or HN or whatever, they would maybe need similar permission from every contributor in every thread if there wasn’t already a permissive license the site itself had gotten its users to agree to let their content be distributed under.
Even if you could somehow get permission from each and every user on a site that you could rehost their comments, it might or might not be doing something wrong to download all of the content from the original site itself unless there’s an ok from the site itself to do so.
That’s a rather poor state of affairs but is surely an issue to take up with our local authorities. Is that their only communication channel? There’s no website, RSS feed or at least mirror feed on an alternative platform?
We should have prevented Twitter/X and other platforms becoming quasi-official communications channels for public institutions.
If your local town government for example only posts city updates to twitter, your options are to make a twitter account, use something like nitter, or miss out on updates.
There's that, and the fact that the "town square" for my city ended up being a city citizens page on Facebook. So we've got the city government and the sheriff's office posting updates to X and/or Facebook, and anything coming from the residents can only really be seen on Facebook. I don't want an X or Facebook account. I guess I'm just supposed to remain in the dark if I don't submit to corpos. The merger of corporation and state is very real, and I guess it often arrives unintentionally rather than intentionally.
I would not say astonishingly as most people are full-on addicted to these platform and addictions are hard to kick, but definitely doable (9 years for me)
my guess is many people use nitter to do automatic scraping of Twitter for various projects, i.e. they can't believe they "have" to do it because so many people still use Twitter.
Maybe it's just me, but I think it's time to stop giving any sort of traffic to the CSAM generator website operated by the guy who quotes the Turner Diaries, agrees with antisemitic tweets, and throws Nazi salutes at the inauguration.
If you were using these proxies, just move on. If you still have a Twitter account, well... C'mon, champ. Today's the day. Time to delete your account.
was still using nitter for the handful of accounts I follow without logging in. can't say I'm surprised — a polite read-only mirror of someone else's product was always going to meet a lawyer before a thank-you note.
Others have explained about not being able to see all content, profiles and such.
I’ll add another reason why I redirect to it: XCancel is/was a lot faster than X and had IMO a much cleaner UI, especially when reading larger conversations or groups of tweets. I don’t browse X much, but I already have an extension installed to redirect certain sites, so adding a redirect was an easy win. I’ll miss it.
That is the point. It's a way to get the value of a service you don't like, while signaling to everyone that you're too virtuous to use the service you're getting value out of.
I prefer not to share links that require the people receiving the link to create an account to read the content and it's replies or post to such websites for that matter. That's basic netiquette.
So that's supposed to be the motive? Frankly I think most users just see it as a path of least resistance to a tweet. You guys really aren't familiar with this Internet thing.
Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ?
Why do the users agree to the limits imposed by them and let the platform decide who gets to see the content they posted ?
Because they're offering the infrastructure. The tech for such a network is now within reach of many, but these apps are heavily dominated by network effects and that makes it impossible for competing apps to take hold.
This is negative for society.
Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
People who don't have an account are not getting vital information because the company decided to restrict access to the entire network.
This needs to be regulated somehow. At least for public services and major news outlets - as a tax for the network effect these apps benefit from.
Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation.
Even FINGER had .plan files, where you could get status updates from people.
But how are you going to query whose plans you want to read, and who is going to moderate without centralisation?
It's the moderation in particular that dooms most federalised efforts. The web itself is only really moderated through the relative lack of discoverability, with Google and hosting providers having become a form of gatekeeper to remove the very worst of the web.
Twitter in the early days took off because it did solve a technological problem of the time. You only had your SMS enabled phone, no WAP or smartphone, and wanted to provide updates. They gave you a number you could text, which would post updates. Hence the character limit ( less than the SMS limit, to leave space for your credentials ).
Plenty of alternatives exist for getting information out, people just don't know where to look for it.
That technical problem disappeared, but it had by then grown to provide a service to rapidly get updates from people, one that had a sense of authority and the moderating effect and discoverability of centralisation is impossible to ignore.
The requirement for strong moderation only exists *because* of centralization. If I'm looking at a linear feed of content, it has to be curated by someone. In the old days, content on the internet was mostly links between webpages -- the "web" if you will. If i like the content on a page, it'll link to other pages i may like, and I'm free to follow those links at will, and no third party moderation is required.
Contrast with modern social media, where everything is condensed into a single list of algorithmically curated content, and we've implicitly eroded a lot of freedom (and handed control to Big Tech)
All this to say: bring back webrings.
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"Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation."
Does centralization actually result in moderation
How do we define "moderation" (cf. "curation", e.g., filtering out anything that does not draw sufficiently large audiences for advertising)
Is optimizing information retrieval for data collection, surveillance and advertising "moderation"
Section 230 was supposed to promote moderation
It did not
Instead it allowed a select few websites to grow to sizes where moderation is impractical and, ultimately, bad for "business"
Their "business" is data collection, surveillance and advertising services, not information services. Section 230 did not anticipate this "business model"
They don't work for internet users. They work for advertisers
Having used the internet prior to their existence I am not convinced that the internet is useless without them
Anyone who has made a fortune catering to internet advertisers will of course disagree
That's fine but we have to account for bias
Given what has happened to "search" perhaps more internet users will come to understand that "discoverability" is not a "solved problem" when the "solution" is a middleman that works for advertisers not end users, an easy target for governments that wish to work around limits on their ability to legally conduct data collection and surveillance
Open protocols always end up with a "backend engineer doing frontend" situation. Which is okay if end users are other engineers, but not okay when end user is my mom.
>Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
RSS. Website. Both have been around for a long time. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.
> RSS. Website. Both have been around for a long time. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.
A "foo-announce@" or "foo-alerts@" mailing list.
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No one spends their time on websites.
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> are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
The fediverse is a viable alternative. But most non-tech people don't know about it.
Did websites and RSS stop working and I missed it? With more people doing AI searches a website is even more viable now, it's better for AI scraping than x.com.
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And it has much less users, I would say its max 1-5% of X users.
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> The fediverse is a viable alternative
Bluesky attracted socialist progressives, furries, and kink-positive folks early on.
I'm not making any value statements, and there's nothing wrong with the userbase, but this is what dominates the feed for new users.
A lot of people are turned off by that when they see it as their first experience with the platform. Or they're actively turned away upon interaction. That's not how you build a big social network.
Mastodon is the exact same.
These platforms are also not winning people over by calling them "toots" and "skeets".
It's like Gimp refusing to adopt a Photoshop style UI for years and not changing their name.
Despite stated intentions, I think these platforms want to stay small and niche and non mainstream. If they wanted to grow big, they'd behave much differently. They'd try to get the Kardashians and would welcome posts about handbags and guns and sports.
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I found this post from Nostr. I find it a saner alternative to fediverse, particularly because the identity is just a server-free public-private key pair
But I don't know when if ever we will have a significant mass there.
Hacker News 100 on Nostr: https://njump.to/nprofile1qqsfexztjz4sq05j972pv5h3s9w0gaqvay...
Whatever happened to "Twitter can do what it wants, it's a private platform"?
Have you heard of the Goomba fallacy?
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I believe that sentiment started to die out around the time people realized a Nazi gained control over the world's centralized communication hub. Whether that says more about the communication, the nazi, or the people is a question for the ages.
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Because it’s either this or tax payers money and corruption. Maintaining infrastructure and human labour is not free.
> Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
Government agencies have communicated to their citizens long before twitter has existed. There's a myriad of ways they can use today: websites (with or without RSS), email newsletters, text updates, other social networks (bluesky, threads, etc).
Choosing to give critical updates only on Twitter is definitely a choice and they are deliberately ignoring a very large segment of their population that doesn't have a twitter account.
It's time to repost content on bluesky
I do not use this garbage product made only to make your day miserable because it's ragebaiting algorithm. It's not essentiall by any means, it's only designed so you feel that way.
Mine rarely shows rage bait and when it does I just block everyone involved or add words to mute list. I think people who see this a lot are in fact baited and it creates a cycle. Which isn't to say it's a good system, more that it's easily avoided
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I agree with you. I hope you've had similar outrage for Facebook over the last 20 years.
The Facebook of 20 years ago is very different from the Facebook of today. 20 years ago, one’s Facebook timeline was filled with whatever your friends were posting. These days—and I think this started about a year ago when AI made it really easy for “influencers” to post AI Slop—one’s Facebook feed is filled by random AI Slop accounts posting nonsense like, as just one of many examples, 80% of the women sleeping with 20% of the men. [1]
I am now using a project called Facebook Clean My Feeds [2] which cleans out all of this AI Slop, so that my timeline is like the timeline I had, say, five years ago, with only posts from friends, accounts I follow, and ads. The only problem I see with this plugin is that it is a Greasemonkey script, so I have to trust it to not do anything nefarious.
[1] This isn’t actually true, as I detail at https://samboy.github.io/blog/80-20-myth.html
[2] https://github.com/Artificial-Sweetener/facebook-clean-my-fe...
> Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ?
Because that's not what happened.
Why have users given control over their content to X?
>Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ?
Because it is a private enterprise that you signed up for. You don't have a right to Twitter. You don't have a right to Facebook. If you don't like it, leave. The entitlement is massive here. These sites are poison in so many ways. Stop feeding the beast.
Of course I don't have a right to Twitter.
But I do have the right to the public information posted by people who intend it to be public information.
They're not posting 'on X', they're posting to the public and the only reason they do it on X is because there are no alternatives due to the network effect intrinsic for such services.
The 'network effect' part needs to be defined and taken into account by regulators and then regulate the companies such that they make the information available to the public if the poster intends so.
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>You don't have a right to Twitter.
Regulation over communication channels is not only common through the ages, but expected and needed. There may not be literal landlines to worry about in the modern age, but the general idea of communication being an important medium that shouldn't be squandered by competition remains.
I prefer everyone to simply leave Twitter and to let it crash and burn, but I see the arguments to have stronger regulations on channels central enough for governmental entities to be using it as a communication hub.
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Finally some variety by those who want to take over via social control-cults. It used to be all about protecting the children.
I don't believe updates on X is an exclusive channel for vital alerts in Spain.
This just doesn't make any sense, maybe what they are posting on X is just some typical SMM slop.
To send nation-wide or localised alerts for forest fires, floods or natural disasters, Spain seems to be using an entirely different system called ES-Alert via cellular broadcast technology which makes a lot of sense.
I recently came to conclusion that x is deliberately used for psyops. After I made a couple of posts questioning the benefits of data centers on X, account was suspended for "inauthentic behaviors", restored, then suspended again, restored, and now X won't let me access it until I install an app on my phone and jump through hoops. In other words, doxx myself, it will not work with app on throwaway phone. X is clearly not a beacon of free speech it pretends to be
The competing app is e-mail. You can subscribe to important information by e-mail and send out important information to mailing lists.
> This needs to be regulated somehow.
Of course, this is HN so regulation is always the solution to all problems. Instead of making the people who are responsible for doing stuff and are getting paid for it get off their asses. They can easily post updates on government alert websites, on e-mail lists, and on social media and everywhere else to get the attention of the public.
A real shame. Even if you put all the political arguments aside it sucks when a site requires you to log in before you can read content on it.
For me that’ll mean I just don’t read content on there any more. Which I realise X doesn’t care about, I’m not monetisable anyway. But a shame nonetheless.
Both Imgur and Reddit have put a lot of roadblocks up lately as well. I think some of it is driven by trying to reduce bot traffic.
It's quite inconsistent though which is really frustrating. I can look at the imgur homepage feed, but if I go into a specific post and accidentally click anywhere it throws a modal up that can't be dismissed.
If I go on a specific subreddit or post I can freely look, but reddit homepage now pops a modal you can't dismiss.
This is on mobile browsers, of course both sites are pushing their apps.
I am sure it doesn't align with their incentives so they don't care, I will never have an account and never install the app, but why block me from viewing the site if I am still seeing the ads? Does the free ad model just not pay anymore, or is the selling user data model just that much more lucrative that they would rather no user at all if they aren't logged in?
> It's quite inconsistent though which is really frustrating. I can look at the imgur homepage feed, but if I go into a specific post and accidentally click anywhere it throws a modal up that can't be dismissed.
That's not inconsistent, that's a deliberate dark pattern that every social media site uses. Let them see the first page, then when they want to engage: force creating an account.
When you just put a "log in to see this page" up front, people will bounce. When you have them engaged a little bit, chances are they are already invested enough to create an account.
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I remember using old.reddit to bypass login requirements and quite often it would let me read with VPN on (otherwise it kicks you out if you are not logged in with VPN on). Only recently did they introduce the same authentication blocks to the old.reddit, so I am assuming everyone was taking advantage of it
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> Does the free ad model just not pay anymore, or is the selling user data model just that much more lucrative that they would rather no user at all if they aren't logged in?
Traffic from google is probably in the process of collapsing, so these sites are trying to capture all the users they can as registered users before it's gone completely.
And yes, the free ad model is probably in the process of dying, the information that was once given away for free in return for looking at ads is now more valuable sold to llm's who will have the eyeballs going forward.
This will presumably make many on this site happy, since for many years an ad supported open web was consistently railed against.
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Imgur is 80% posts of text for people trying to post political messages vs what it used to be, interesting or funny pictures
I guess that's their traffic so that's their market but ugh. Imagine if flickr or some other photo site was run over by people posting photos of text messags.
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Actually you can discard those annoying popups on reddit using some HTML element blocker (e.g. “hide distracting element” on safari or the picker tool from uBlock origin)
I had some success with these for logged-out browsing ever since old.reddit was locked down completely
Bots are the noisy excuse they can scream and point to. You look at the mobile reddit app or the new reddit interface and you think these javascript “devs” are capable of forming any valid opinion on these things?
This is the company that refers to its users as “daily active shitheads.” That’s a real quote.
They’re just screaming and pointing to anything they can so they can lock it down and gain more favorable data to sell and more legitimate accounts to show advertisers. That’s what it always is.
I’m never wrong and I’m tired of fake imposters devs telling me I am wrong at every corner of every single topic when I turn out to be right 100% of the time.
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I recently deleted all of my Reddit accounts. The website had been unusable on mobile for a good while, with the constant and ever-more-aggressive nagging about switching to the app. Old Reddit was the one thing that made the site still usable. And now that requires a login.
So fuck that. Bye Reddit. I'll miss some of the communities.
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Imgur has been totally unusable in the UK for a couple of years - it's an irritant, because it's used for so many image embeds and I'm reluctant to fire up the VPN just so I can see someone's meme that they posted on a forum thread. Nobody has ever used Imgur as a destination site, it's a utility, and any attempts to make it a destination or an app you'd deliberately open are futile.
Reddit isn't so badly impacted, but there are still age-walls around some of the content where it's been deemed "adult" (which encompasses more than just graphic adult imagery).
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Hide distracting items is great on the iPhone to delete elements on the page intuitively and it remembers what you hid.
Indeed. I’d only reengaged with any Xitter content when I realized I could get it through xcancel. Without a door like this, it’s invisible to me.
[flagged]
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> I just don’t read content on there any more
This is the sensible response. I'm always bemused by the reactions that go: "this is a garbage site but I am forced to use it every day". Be grateful that your social media addiction is now automatically mitigated! Go outside!
You don't have to comply with a cease and desist notice, depending on your risk tolerance. They're not legally binding, like court orders. Rather, they are threats, equivalent to "gimme your lunch money or I'll beat you up"
Yes and hiQ v. LinkedIn has already given us precedent that scraping is not inherently illegal, not to mention X's own scraping to train their AI.
Makes sense that they want to consult legal experts rather than just going with their gut though but I hope those legal experts will work something out that gets them back online.
It depends on how deep your pockets are, not risk tolerance.
And the manbaby in charge will absolutely go after you.
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Nice to see everyone taking a break from their day jobs at Google of continually breaking yt-dlp so it's impossible to use, to comment how this is an injustice.
To the aggrieved I say: 403 Forbidden.
In their defense, you're not getting the full YouTube experience without ads of an AI doctor selling you suppositories.
There's a bit difference between breaking a scraper and sending Cease and Desist letters.
Also, blocking scraping is very rich (and expectedly hypocritical) for an AI company, which SpaceX is now.
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Most people on HN don't work at Google. And most would probably agree that both Google and Twitter are being user-hostile.
This might be the first HN thread I’ve seen where the statement “regiwalled content is bad” is somehow attracting a lot of negative reactions…
I don't get it, are you implying everyone who's not a fan of this change is a Google employee?
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This. It bugs me that we can’t read without logging in, and other UX decisions that basically made me quit using it for like 7 or 8 months now.
You should've removed your account too.
You won't miss much.
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Reddit is the worst for this. I hate the disgusting, low class UX design where they let you read about 10-15 seconds of a page before locking you out.
Though I think Pinterest takes the cake for being just the ugliest example of this.
Reddit seems to have let this AI demand go to their heads.
I had multiple Reddit accounts, simply because I did not want my more "professional" account linked to the other accounts (some for more controversial opinions, some for more adult talk, etc.) Apparently that's a problem for them. So they banned most of my accounts. If I really was up to no good, I'd have used VPNs, etc. to hide my activities. But I just wanted to segregate my personas. e.g. I like discussing local SF and California politics, and often times take controversial positions. I don't want my activities as a respectable(?) member of the Linux Kernel group to be colored through my activities in these other groups. But now I can't do that.
Oh, and back in the day Reddit (when it wanted to pad its user numbers) didn't care for an email address or a phone number. Now, 15 years later, it suddenly wants to confirm the email address!
And don't even get me started on the moderation at Reddit. Typical example: "Hey! We deleted your comment. If you have any questions about it, email the mods." except ... they deleted the comment and now I don't even know what was wrong with it! :-D
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Old Reddit is now completely unusable without an account. Maybe it's time for me to finally stop using it.
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(as a logged-in user) I just stopped using it the day they banned 3rd party apps and I don't miss it a bit. I visit some communities still, but only on PC with old reddit. Once that is gone, I'm gone as well.
> Reddit is the worst for this. I hate the disgusting, low class UX design where they let you read about 10-15 seconds of a page before locking you out.
When this happens I use uBlock origin to remove that popup and the grey background behind it. Scrolling and loading more comments remains usable (unlike Facebook)
spez is a problem. And if it's not spez, then enlighten me. But they've taken years of built up network effects and absolutely wrecked it. It's so hostile when companies do this. They just ignore their users, straight up. That should be a firable offense. The customer is NOT 'always right', but you can meet them halfway
Fail upwards. That's all they know how to do
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I hope the EU makes it illegal
Unlikely.
The EU is first and foremost a business club. So the majority of EU rules are there to create a common market. If one participant is trying to be dodgy, then oftentimes a rule valid for all market participants is created, to re-establish the common market.
Sometimes it's even the producers that ask the EU to regulate it. E.g. all of those classes for vegetables originated from the producers. As a result, an egg of size "M" from Netherlands has the same size as an egg of the size "M" from France. And both can be sold in e.g. Belgium, since we now have a common market and common attributes. A customer seeing an "M" sized egg in the shelves doesn't need to ponder, he knows what he gets.
If some website needs a login so that you can view contents is completely outside of this. That is actually common, many newspapers and magazines do that. Its entirely to their discretion if they allow free public access, limited access, or paid access. One doesn't need to be Google Search, one can also be Kagi, so to say.
"And the monkey's paw curled a finger"
Yes, more regulations from the EU is what the internet needs /s
It interesting because it suggests Musk doesn't need Twitter to swing anymore elections... He didn't buy it [solely] to make money from it.
It goes against the whole “global town square" declaration.
Only if you're part of the club. If not, fuck off!
I choose to fuck off.
Want to come to the free town square ? Gotta show ID first to the guard at the wall
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Not only requires you to log in, asks you your username once you do log in, which means for me I can't log in because I had a random username and there is no email from them where it is mentioned
Actually between us and X is not logged in but Xcancel itself I believe logs in. So it's not a login issue..
It's builtin adblocker, hehe, internet was full of shit for a while anyway. Books are the new internet.
Hear, hear.
It's possible that the lack of these alternatives will decrease engagement enough that Twitter would loosen these rules. Perhaps not that likely, but it's possible.
I'd say that's practically a given. Everyone that wants to have an account already has one, everyone else will not make an account just because they are bothered into making one.
Nitter and xcancel traffic must be negligible, they're doing this just to pretend they're doing stuff to justify their legal department wages.
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Sites that force you to login to actually use it feel very arrogant.
> when a site requires you to log in before you can read content on it.
Where does this come from? You can see the last few posts of an account [1], and the contents of a single posts, but minimal to no comments [2]. Videos play after dismissing the login popup.
I have no X account, but I read content there all the time without issue.
[1] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack
[2] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2091983940609245467
I received an Amber Alert a few days ago, which linked to a Twitter post containing the details, and the "x" in the "plz login" modal that blocked the entire screen was non-functional. I just sat there pounding on the x, and then a little hand gif popped up and pointed at the login button.
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> https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack
Only 5 posts, and when you click on any of them, you don't see the post, you see a sign up popup
Unless it has changed, the posts are in random order; they aren't the latest, which makes the ones you see basically worthless.
I don't know how it works, but it is very inconsistent.
On mobile right now, I can't scroll past the second post of [1] without getting blocked by an undismissable popup.
If I click on the "read more" button of the first post, I can't scroll down at all before getting that same non-dismissable popup. It makes it hard to read the post itself, because even scrolling a tiny bit (e.g. to get what I'm reading closer to the center of my vision) triggers it.
I've also had other times where I couldn't play a video someone linked to me, but sometimes I can, don't know why.
A few months ago you needed to log in to view any replies, which was critical for some threads.
Not sure how you manage that - twitter, insta, and pinterest all begrudgingly let you see one, maybe two things, then lock down and prevent you from interacting without logging in.
It really gives the sense that you’re not wanted there.
And so I gladly oblige.
This is a surprising change. It works even without JS, although as others have mentioned, without all the content.
6 years ago, pre-Musk, they started forcing the JS-only webapp and everyone absolutely hated it: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/twitter-war...
I wonder if there's a group of developers at X, especially with Musk's cost-saving direction, who are slowly bringing back the static pages.
> a site requires you to log in before you can read content on it.
That's not true for X. You can read content without being signed in.
https://help.x.com/en/safety-and-security/public-and-protect...
Only if it's directly linked to you. Can't go scrolling on someone's profile without getting blocked by a pop-up. Also can't click a post and see replies.
Edit: also can't read a thread because each new post is considered a "reply", so blocked too.
Not in any useful way that makes Twitter better or different than other sources of news.
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Middle powers should heed Cory Doctorow's advice [0] and start offering legal protection in their jurisdictions for precisely this type of projects.
America is a hostile nation, who has sought to align everyone with its interests, under a false pretense of mutual benefit, while instead its tech sector has caused much harm at a global scale. America is now doubling down on value extraction, at an obvious expense to everyone else.
Middle powers should not be granting to America any goodwill whatsoever. There is nothing in it for them anymore, except irresponsible reliance on a bad faith actor.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46509019
>America is a hostile nation, who has sought to align everyone with its interests, under a false pretense of mutual benefit, while instead its tech sector has caused much harm at a global scale. America is now doubling down on value extraction, at an obvious expense to everyone else.
In India, recently, a bill was passed that can permit banks and the government to add charges on UPI transactions. UPI is one of the biggest digital payment systems in the world, and it was free until now. Insider information from multiple news sources suggests that this was done because of pressure from the US.
Sounds bogus, there's free payment services in the US as well, that's nothing special. What makes more sense in the India context is low value of volume per customer where even the minimal operating costs are difficult to cover. I say that from some amount of experience in the micro-finance world, where even money provided at zero actual interest in terms of the loaned money itself still ended up having to have somewhat painful interest rates just to cover true costs in low income countries.
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Most middle powers have robust censorship regimes. As for America being a unique "hostile" phenomena in geopolitics, I believe you are either purveyour or a victim of propaganda.
> its tech sector has caused much harm at a global scale
Like what exactly? Whatever harm US (software) tech has dished out, it has also dished out domestically. What is your nationality and what are your nation's contributions to the rest of the world?
Brazil is trying that and getting a bad look from the USA. Can you imagine a smaller nation doing the same? What would the USA do?
Exactly, what are we going to do? Impose sanctions? Tarriffs? We do that anyways without recourse. Bomb you? We might do that anyways without reasonable impetus. Y'all have no reason to temper your actions for fear of retribution; our President is threatening to rename a lake to Lake America because we "won't be doing business with Ontario anymore". Why? Does it matter? Could anyone have done anything that wasn't just abject groveling? No.
To hell with us. The rest of the world needs to move on from giving a crap what our government thinks of you.
The US is fighting wars with everyone on everything at the same time. They don't have the resources to do anything about it. Every country will develop their own independent payment networks.
China was right to block US tech companies to promote their own, most large and capable countries will do the same over time.
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Doctorow's point is that the USA's trade policy is unilaterally capricious and malevolent toward the best of its allies, so other nations' actions ultimately cannot be said to have any mitigating causal effect. Might as well just go for it. F the DMCA.
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i remember when, after 9/11, the US introduced webcams and fingerprint scanners, at airports to take pictures of incoming travellers and Brazil had a similar lo-fi response, with ink blots and cameras only for Americans. Something like this needs to happen more and everywhere now.
Brazil is close with Russia, and Russia does a lot more harm to the world than the US even under Trump.
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If even a few of the people freaking out here just recreated or rehosted nitter elsewhere out of their reach, we probably wouldn't have this problem. Be the change you wish to see
All due respect, but how would anyone survive, no less find a way to make anything like the average income of any of us on HN, in a world that made not just some 'patents' free but removed property and invention such as the extremities Doctorow's fiction often espouses? America is sorta known for pretense of mutual benefit. We sorta fumbled things after we, to put it bluntly, nuked the Japanese twice. Don't get me wrong, if you read my comments elsewhere you will see how I feel about people/companies claiming swathes of things for themselves too.
Everyone seems to think they either deserve more or they fall for believing people are inherently willing to remunerate fairly for what they use... Def. not my experience, at all... like what if people were all just assuming since your ideas exist, they were for sale or free, or 'offering' things you dont want or arent getting in return...? what if you dont want what they do with it in the first place? what if (heh) you just don't like the end user and you know they will irk you with it?
Doctorow is the furthest from a fair or good example, imho.
> find a way to make anything like the average income of any of us on HN
a) This is not about trying to protect the incomes of people working in Big Tech
b) In his talk Doctorow gives examples of business opportunities that are actually being repressed by the laws against reverse engineering
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Maybe in the past, but who in the present who isn’t already rich is or would have the income hurt by eliminating IP laws? Keep in mind that most indie projects make barely any money, most of those that do are free + ads or Patreon, any software not under expensive DRM is easy to pirate, and AI companies pirate to train LLMs.
> what if you dont want what they do with it in the first place? what if (heh) you just don't like the end user and you know they will irk you with it?
What if you don’t like what somebody does with “your” ideas in their own personal bubble? Why care? Try to ignore them. I’d rather that than have somebody restrict what I can do with whatever ideas they claim are theirs.
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> We sorta fumbled things after we, to put it bluntly, nuked the Japanese twice
What?
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For a very brief window of time, USA did a little bit more good than bad.
Those of us wanting to believe USA was more better than not have struggled to recalibate our beliefs.
The only reason why I needed nitter to access x is due to organizations still using it as their main communication solution to their customers. Even my local council uses it. I would like this to be the final push for people to get off x but I suspect its going g to stay and I guess I don't get to see news from my local council anymore.
I'm totally clueless, but aren't there rules requiring accessibility of public-facing government communications, to the extent that they shouldn't be allowed to use a gated platform when making official statements that are a matter of public interest?
It should be that way.
My tolerance for people posting to X without also posting to an open platform is over.
Public institutions especially.
There's zero excuse, none.
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Someone could certainly make a case in a lawsuit for an ADA violation. I bet if people organized, the city would listen before it got to that point
There are open meeting laws like the Brown Act but I think that only restricts relying on social media for deliberation. Not communication
There is also Lindke v. Freed (2024) which holds that public officials using social media can be sued under the First Amendment violations like blocking users or deleting comments.
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I presume the post is referencing principal councils in England or Wales. They're powerful enough to make life difficult, but small enough to not get a lot of oversight. From what I've heard, it's like a government-backed HOA, and they're notorious for doing whatever they want, while not letting you do what you want.
Newspapers are still often required to be used for certain government publications and they cost money. TwitterX is free. I'm not clear what the controversy here is exactly.
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No, and this policy goes back to publication in for-profit newspapers. Not an issue in the USA in general.
With a disclaimer that there's one zillion governmental entities on the planet overall, so its plausible that one requires no fee and no signup required.
It's not gated. You can read any non-adult post with a direct link. I'm seeing this perspective all over in here. As someone without an X account, I can only assume you all have X accounts to not know this!
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Can't you submit written/oral comments on this? Write letters to your local paper etc. You might need to be That Guy for a few months but sooner or later you're going to connect with other people who feel the same way.
Web enshittification should be disallowed in public offices. It's so easy to create a news entry in Facebook or Twitter/X but they are always walling you from it unless you subscribe. This is unacceptable in public service sector.
...and a mandatory website for every app they tell you to download.
The main competitor in this space is sadly Instagram, which is no better.
I really don't understand any place relying on a third party to publicise news.
(but I'm as fiercely independent as my own skills and ability to learn can manage)
You still have access to local council posts, without logging in. You need to log in to view the follow up discussions(comments) a subtle but important distinction
For example you can view the main post and included links in incognito not logged in, just not the "discussion"
https://x.com/ManCityCouncil/status/2091903421917892994?s=20
That's assuming you have the link to their post. The profile page only shows the last 5 posts (assuming they are showing them in chronological order)
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Final? If anything X seems to be more popular among users.
you're smokin crack, i don't know a single person who uses twitter anymore. literally not one. 5+ years ago? _everyone_ was on twitter.
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You could make an X account.
Is Xitter still doing the "Your account was suspended for reasons, now you gotta dox yourself" dance? (EDIT: Yes, according to debazel's reply) That'd be a reason why "You could make an X account" isn't a reasonable suggestion.
Personally I had an account since 2008 and it got locked for no discernible reason. The website asks me to scan a QR code from my phone to prove I'm a human, and even after grudgingly installing the mobile app to try and complete this verification it just keeps throwing me into a loop.
Not possible, says phone number is invalid.
You mean give them my e-mail and phone number so they can shit that all up too? No thanks.
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Twitter has gone from relatively open to instagram / facebook level of closedness where I can't even share a video with my friends because it asks them to log in. I had to rely on nitter and xcancel for that... Now that no longer works either
I have one niche that I use twitter for. If it wasn't for that - would have deleted my account long time ago. Things like this push me towards that direction, though.
Just go ahead and quit! I had a niche use case for FB, but I decided to quit nevertheless because I didn't want to support the platform anymore. Today I don't miss it a single bit. (I never had a Twitter account in the first place.)
I actually paid for their dumb monthly subscription only so that I could download videos within the app to share with my friends who don't use X. Only after paying did I realize that by "download videos" it means "cache videos locally inside the app for offline playback". It still would not allow me to save the video to my local device. Misleading, tacky, possibly even desparate.
As both Nitter and Xcancel are down and I don't know of any alternatives, I use yt-dlp to download the videos now.
It's glorious. We no longer have to stumble into a blog post split into dozens of tweets.
I know it is Meta-owned and is just as algorithmic, but Threads is a breath of fresh air in terms of access - the website is pratically the same in terms of UX as the app, and it does not require an account to browse at all. Just thought it'd be worth mentioning.
I assume only because Meta have forgotten about it or haven't got around to closing it down yet.
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Actually, the correct solution is Mastodon, which is an open protocol which can not become a walled garden the way Threads (based on Meta’s activity with Instagram and Facebook) will inevitably become a walled garden.
You gotta build the garden before you build the walls.
Someone should be putting AI to the test and make it walk the talk by making a viable alternative to Facebook/Twitter etc :)
It’s a trivial project, it’s babbys first crud app. Getting everyone to use it is the hard part. There are already great alternatives that show this.
Then scaling and paying for it is the hard part.
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this one :thumb-up
There are many already. The code is not why people use those sites. In the case of Meta specifically, it's basically in spite of the user-hostile, garbage code.
The network effect / entrenchment means that any replacement has to be massively better in every dimension to have a chance. Otherwise people just stick to what they know, and then other people stick to it because the other people do. And so on.
I personally think Musk is a garbage-tier human who represents everything wrong with culture wars, and his brain is long blasted into a mush of worthless racist noise and stupidity by drug abuse, so I deleted my X account. Loads of others are too cowardly/selfish to do so.
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https://joinmastodon.org/
https://bsky.app/
https://www.threads.com/
Pick literally any one of those, just seriously, if you're still on that platform, leave.
I'm not sure why Threads makes your cut here, trading one walking negative externality of person in control for another is not really a sell to most folks.
it has Fediverse interop. Skepticism obviously is warranted towards the owners but you can at least interact with an open protocol or consume threads content from a Mastodon instance, say.
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I am already on fediverse. My friends are too. It's where I post my dumb opinions on movies and pictures of my cats. But that is not what I used nitter for. I used nitter to pull posts of organizations and reporters to deliver breaking news in my area to me fast. I did this via the RSS endpoint in nitter. These journalists and organizations only post on twitter that fast. Their websites are updated much slower and often also don't have RSS feeds or APIs for me to scrape. I wish these orgs post on fedi too but they don't. So what am I to do? Nitter was for us people that have already left X.
Have you tried reaching out to them and asking them to duplicate their posts to bluesky?
An interesting new one for Canadians (that's built on AT and interops with bsky) is https://gandersocial.ca/. It uses our national postal service's identity validation, so it dramatically reduces foreign actors and bots, and without handing PII to shady private companies like Persona. They collect no PII either, they just get an "is_a_human" response back from Canada Post.
You can still do read-only things like see threads and follow users as an anonymous user. Just can't post or comment. Only thing I don't like is that it's app-only for now.
The web client just became available, actually! https://gander.social/profile/gander.social/post/17876029732...
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Ah, yes, because I trust a social network founded by a guy that helped build Pornhub
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intersting take, I'm not Canadian but wasn't there some pretty draconian bills that were passed where you could be reported for voicing or sharing your opinions on some things ?
That already seems like a hard barrier for any sort of Canadian social network especially when you require your users to dox themselves and open themselves to all sorts of scrutiny.
The problem with all of this is that it creates a sterilized politically correct environment that won't have the same pull as a public square that upholds freedom of speech like American ones.
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Can us non Canadians sign up somehow ?
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Wasn’t xcancel, sort of by definition, for people who have already left X?
Why would I leave when it's a more engaging and vibrant platform than ever before? As well as still being just as useful, if not more so.
I don't post there anymore but I do still check my DMs once a week, because every now and then someone will find my work through there, and I need people to find my work in order to survive. I unfortunately can't easily trade that in for a platform that no one visits.
They all get to the point where anime contents start flooding in pinning the system at capacity 24/7, scaring the wrong set of people, and then they chicken out and start dying a long death. This situation itself is downstream event of Twitter doing the same, in a sense.
I only use X (via XCancel etc) to read the updates from things like the local train company that they only post on X. They aren't on Bluesky or Mastodon. When I tried Mastodon, I found it too politically extreme, it felt like walking into an angry students' union meeting. It never seemed to catch on in the UK, it surfed a couple of waves of dissatisfaction with X, but people quickly drifted away.
This article has a good explanation of why "you, yes you" should leave:
https://publiccomment.blog/p/it-is-past-time-for-you-to-quit...
All of these are seriously bad copycat alternatives of twitter. And since twitter's foundations are laid on moving bedrock.... the whole thing is a horrible abomination where the tendrils are these "alternatives".
I'll take the bait, what makes Bluesky a bad copycat? It's just old Twitter. I can't for the life of me see what makes it "seriously bad", it has a pretty large userbase, it's seemingly got a decent number of normies to move over from X, it's pleasant enough to use. It's been a success.
Saying this as one of twelve Mastodon users.
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Don't just throw some competitor URLs and tell us to "leave."
What's wrong with X? How are these options better?
You mean besides it being a factory for child pornography?
I don't think any of them are better, I especially do not want to be on bluesky. on X you could still do your own thing and not be tied to the political extremism but its not the case with bluesky, people automatically perceive you to support the founder's political views and it has nowhere the same reach as X which is why I think the negative connotations are stronger on bluesky than X
X is used internationally, especially big in Japan and has lot of adoption among working professionals. Just my two cents and I personally don't really like X much either. Threads also isn't that great either.
Not much detail so far.
> We have received cease and desist letters. Awaiting legal advice at the moment, but for now expect all nitter instances to remain down for the foreseeable future.
[for all those who - like me - first check the comments before clicking on the link]
They should respond with a poop emoji, which is what Musk sends to people he doesn't care about.
Musk can afford to be childish about legal challenges because the outcome doesn't really matter to him.
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Are they expecting legal advice to take a long tine?! It's fairly reasonable to check with a lawyer first, before damaging yourself by complying.
The legal system gets this concept. Otherwise random, unwarranted desist orders from your enemies could break you.
Anyone can send an request.
Weird.
Legal advice costs a lot of money unless you find a lawyer doing it for free, which is rare.
I agree with the spirit of your comment though. More resistance would be a good thing. It’s just unfortunate how it seems to cost like $20k to $100k.
Nitter should put up a request for donations for legal fees. Lots of people are willing.
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Yes and it's not like there hasn't been ton of precedent for scraping recently, including by X themselves, so why would they expect to not be able to win this?
Getting legal advice can absolutely take a long time, and the first thing they'll probably tell most people in this situation is "turn it off for now until we can do more research and collect money from you."
However, C&D's don't really carry any legal weight in the US to my knowledge... but I don't see any harm in complying ahead of time just to be safe. The only "damage" I can see is just by nature of the service being down temporarily.
If there is even a possibility that a court may find the service violating a law, I think the legal advisor would likely say to just leave the service down unless you have many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to fight it... you can most likely avoid the entire lawsuit altogether just by complying with the C&D. And this kind of suit is one that can easily ruin your company or even personal life... so avoiding it seems smart.
> Anyone can send an request.
As for emails, I think BIMI has solved this for some time now, at least for large companies.
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From Nitter matrix group:
basically, it demands that I:
1. Permanently take down nitter.net and the GitHub repository, and delete all "X Data" in both 2. Stop all use of the "Twitter" and "X" marks 3. Cease all access to X data, including copies 4. Delete all X account credentials and session tokens 5. Confirm compliance in writing within three business days
The claims asserted are breach of X's Terms of Service, Developer Agreement and Developer Policy; the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act; and the Lanham Act. It threatens litigation against me personally. X states it has also sent notice to GitHub and to my domain registrar.
So much free speech.
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Why not use those three days (or any time that can still be considered reasonable to respond to this) to contact the EFF before responding by taking down the site?
> 1. Permanently take down nitter.net and the GitHub repository[...]
This is the one that they know they have absolutely no grounds to demand, which is why they started with it. Everything else can be conformed with without even really damaging Nitter (the project.)
> 4. Delete all X account credentials and session tokens
could be trouble for individual servers, but is on legally shaky ground, and servers can simply go down at the first strong challenge and open back up under another name. Nitter the project doesn't need to have any credentials or tokens.
"For the forseeable future" doesn't sound very good. It's a vague phrase, but it usually isn't used to describe something that will change next week or even next month.
"For the time being" would have sounded like less bad wording than "for the forseeable future."
Nitter and Xcancel should just announce that they’re training an LLM. Seems to be a get-out-of-scrape free card these days.
Presumably you also need a billion dollar team of lawyers to use that card...
What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be? Clearly the exodus that happened when Musk took it over didn't kill it but I do seem to see fewer links to it than I used to.
Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
This is only tenuously related but every single Mac app I see advertised on X by verified accounts is malware. I reported one last week to them, they said it's not malware. I appealed it and said the install link is copy and paste obfuscated base64 into your terminal, and they said after review it doesn't break their terms.
So whatever else they do, they take money to knowingly promote malware.
It's not just Mac apps. A Twitter ad is a negative indicator, and makes me less interested in the product.
> the install link is copy and paste obfuscated base64
This doesn't make it malware, as likely as it is that malware would hide itself like that. base64 encoding avoids issues with quoting and escaping in the terminal, and is an easy way to include a bit of binary data that might be needed by a command (or even just written directly to disk somewhere). "Obfuscated base64" is only saying something if you decoded the base64 and still got an obfuscated result. Install-time code execution is more dangerous in the sense that you can't review between installation and program execution; but custom installers come from the same source as the program, so it's the same number of parties to trust.
For that matter, PyPA still maintains bootstrap.pypa.io so that Python users can get current versions of pip by downloading and running a Python script that loads a base85 string, decodes it and writes a wheel file based on that. (It even duplicates some of the standard library `ensurepip` logic.)
If you want a malware report to be taken seriously, in general, you should expect to roll up your sleeves and be able to provide an analysis of concrete malicious behaviour.
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>What is the main use case for X these days?
I use it to follow people who either have ideas I find interesting or do stuff I find interesting, and typically I'm looking for accounts that are small enough that I know they will at least see my replies, and often interact with them. (Something like 3K-15K followers for most of them, I think.)
I also think it's indispensable for real-time commentary and niche commentary on current events: always requires grains of salt but there's just no better place on the Internet for that sort of thing, in part because...
It's the one major social network I'm on where it is easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order. A feed I TRULY control (and, if you follow the right people, insulates you from much of the nonsense on the site).
And every once in awhile, some insane viral nonsense pokes in that makes you say "how could I ever quit this site". There's a certain genre of satirical accounts that is very entertaining as well. Definitely a guilty pleasure component to it all!
>Is it still as popular as it used to be?
A quick search roughly aligns with my perception: it bottomed out a couple of years ago and has gradually recovered, though not to where it was pre-X.
> It's the one major social network I'm on where it is easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order.
Oh weird, I'd rate X as medium-hard for that amongst the microposting sites I look at. Mastodon and Bluesky both default to almost-that, varying mostly in whether you need to jump through hoops to not see reposts.
X was always the one that (a) doesn't default to it, and (b) would keep "forgetting" and pushing you back to the algorithmic feed.
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The problem is that network effects are everything
You are using a relic of what-used-to-be-Twitter. That's what people signed up for. I happen to think what Musk has done - although I'm highly skeptical of him - is not totally insane - Twitter did used to have some pretty notable censorship. But you follow people because that's where the people are. Competition does not spring up overnight, companies know this, and so they're left to gradually (or quickly!) enshittify
"easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order"
Yes, well. That should be the standard. Companies that don't follow that standard should be turned into pariahs
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I haven't left because there are still circles of people I follow that haven't bailed. Once a large enough majority move to Bluesky, I'll start browsing that app more.
On the other hand, I might start posting on Bluesky more because as of a week ago, I'm shadowbanned on X. I know people throw that term around, but nobody on the site can see any of my reply tweets, even me (unless I scroll my account's 'replies' tab); people who've followed me for years are asking why their tweet has a ghost reply.
I don't think X has that much of an incentive to filter out bots while keeping around accounts like me (200 followers, will never pay for Premium). The slightly higher effort bots that glaze tech CEOs will be basically indistinguishable from the real people glazing tech CEOs because they're wannabe founders trying to network/cloutfarm. And that style of dead internet is fine with Elon.
No moral dimension to this whatsoever for you?
> Once a large enough majority move to Bluesky, I'll start browsing that app more
The problem is a network effect. Lot of people rage quit X and then they return to it because they realize the reach isn't there on Bluesky, and whenever that happens it just sends strong signals
I don't really like X either, I feel like the feed algorithm isn't very good and just shows the same thing repeated by multiple accounts.
I'm trying to objectively view the two platforms without the partisan rhetorics. There isn't that many places besides Threads.
I personally like the old php forums which had a real presence.
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That sounds infuriating. I hope you can recover your account.
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> as of a week ago, I'm shadowbanned on X. I know people throw that term around, but nobody on the site can see any of my reply tweets, even me
This is honestly the real value of nitter far beyond anti-Musk shriekers being obsessed with and addicted to X but not wanting to log into X. Nitter seems to simply give you everything - and you can plainly see which tweets are getting huge distribution and which ones nobody is seeing.
It's deplorable, but our president in Mexico recently was asked about some current affairs a d her answer was "ive written about it in X , go see it there" ...
As if X was an official government publishing channel . WTH, they should publish it on they official government pages.
There should be laws that require all government statements to be published on an official government site and be forever archived there no matter where or however else they were published. That way politicians can take advantage of the reach of social media sites while not requiring anyone to use them and also providing a means for those statements to be verified and preserved.
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This right here is the thing that shows how much influence big tech has. Everyone has their anecdotal story about porn, spam, malware or whatever flooding Twitter meanwhile your local city government treats it as an official communications channel.
In a UK context, journalists are on there because politicians are on there... and politicians are on there because journalists are on there. It's politicians that need to pull the plug - if they left en masse the journalists would go where they went, even if they stayed on X too - but nobody has the balls to do it. (Aside from one politician who for all practical purposes seems to do absolutely nothing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyrx1ee2r4o).
A problem for the UK here is things like Rupert Lowe set to be paid as much for divisive posts on X as for being MP - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/aug/24/rupert-lowe...
They could at least use both. I'm pretty annoyed with Andy Burnham. He's had a Bluesky account that has been pretty active... right up until he became a PM. Would it kill him to get a member of his team to repost his tweets to Bluesky?
From what I can tell, most Twitter users outside English speaking countries don't care about who is the CEO at all. Business as usual.
Thats sorta my situation, a scene I'm rather involved in has most the international users there, as such thats where things still live. Every other alternative has failed to gain enough traction for one reason or another.
Its usually either limited features, regional accessibility issues, or platforms like metas' just basically trading one big bad organization for another.
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Depends on the algos. My jp account sees none of that, mostly news, jokes and some random what’s happening in parts of Japan.
NA tuned account has more of what you said.
The algos aren’t language neutral yet.
Yet. Japanese twitter users are a reflection of who they are, etc etc
Doesn’t mean there isn’t toxic stuff though.
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Companies and celebrities are a major use case here. Lots of them (especially ones from non-English speaking countries) still use the site as their primary means of communication. For example, Nintendo doesn't have an official presence on Bluesky, Threads or Mastodon, just Twitter.
There's a decent number of old school companies and creatives who either don't know/care about alternatives, or who tried them and went back to Twitter/X.
I'm surprised people didn't mention this, but I find it to be unbeatable in these two areas:
1. Japanese community 2. Porn (good god, so much porn)
>> What is the main use case for X these days?
More of a political echo chamber than anything else. I mothballed my original account when things were getting spicy which was primarily focused on dev, UI/UX, and InfoSec news. I finally went back and have had some great interactions with people about technical stuff that interests me. Right now, the data center and AI discussions are getting intense along with Omarchy, lol. If you steer clear of the political stuff, you can find some good stuff still.
>> Is it still as popular as it used to be?
Probably not but it still ranks ahead of sites like Reddit. Its like the 13th, 14th most popular platform right now. I log on mainly just to see if I'm missing anything. Other than that, most of the engagement I have is curiosity and just fun stuff like seeing people posting retro games, stuff like that.
>> Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
X is now kind of the social media cul-de-sac . It used to be one of the go to places for breaking tech, popular cultural and political stuff. Now its usually two or three days late to the party on anything worthwhile. So the posts from the CEO probably made the rounds before you finally saw it on X. lol
It’s still fairly popular, but the statistics show that X usage is gradually declining. Elon claims that X is more popular than ever, but the platform doesn’t publicly release its own stats, and publicly available stats say otherwise.
If you like AI and tech, there are some pretty thriving sub-communities. AI stuff, and a lot of tech stuff happens on X first. Claudebot/OpenClaw/Hermes all began on X months before I commonly saw them appear on other platforms.
What public stats say otherwise?
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For one of the big use cases, you can look at the NCMEC's reports-by-ESP numbers.
For example, X has 816K and X AI has 135K reports. Reddit, despite having 200M (36%) more MAU, only has 65K reports. OpenAI, despite having about 8x MAU than X.ai, has 182K reports.
AI research, computer vision/machine learning academic projects and papers, conferences.
> What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be?
No idea comparatively, but an artist friend of mine tried out Bluesky and then complained about how there's way more of a limited reach and engagement there compared to Twitter.
I've made a lot of friends in Japan through shared interest communities that are mostly on twitter. Most are people I've actually met whenever I am in Japan.
Breaking news. If a bomb goes off or a plane goes down people post it to X.
Personally I have zero interest. If it's a big enough deal, it'll get to me somehow. Knowing about it 15s after it happened and then seeing a flood of uninformed speculation would be stressful.
Others do value that, no judgment, but for me it's be a net negative.
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> Breaking news.
Except you now need to create a Xitter account to view posts in chronological order (i.e. breaking news).
No thanks.
They post it other places also in my experience. Twitter doesn't have the monopoly on that it used to.
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I mean, if it is real it's on every wire service there is too, with slightly less hysteria.
I ventured onto Twitter for the first time in maybe a year to check on some breaking news around America/Canada tariffs and trade war.
The comment section was pretty awful; 90% people yelling about Canada's government being a tyranny and/or in bed with Communist China.
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Bluesky Social is more useful for news. I can use custom clients such as https://sill.social/ which just aggregate the links and commentary from my feeds, and catch up on what news is important to the ppl I'm following.
Whenever I check X, it's always just misinformation, and it's impossible to see what people actually say because bluechecks are always the first to show up in the algorithmic ranking. On political commentary: they were dying hard for Graham Platner saying he was the only option, but then Troy Jackson who replaced him did better in the polls.
The biggest social networks can only die slowly. They have too much momentum for the the type of sudden exodus that was possible when the internet had not yet absorbed the entire population.
Unless they're shut down.
G+ comes to mind.
(Several billion profiles, tens of millions active. Shut down 1 Apr 2019. Yes, April Fools' Day.)
If you want alpha on things x is the place to be, aside from some discord servers. I've recently leaned off hn and onto twitter.
There is a lot of Ukraine war reporting on twitter.
Those are all telegram reposts, barely anyone in the former combloc uses twitter.
fwiw a lot of the key accounts for this now also post to both Bluesky and Mastodon
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Its main use for myself was that posts were public by default so lots of government orgs and whatnot posted real time status updates. I never really used it except for occasionally checking those.
Now that more and more are going "walled garden" I don't get it at all
It's mostly a porn site these days
This is one of those situations where describing your algorithmic feed tells us more about you than about Twitter.
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> What is the main use case for X these days?
The same as it ever was. Short-form gossip. News, discussion, jokes.
> What is the main use case for X these days?
There are lots of interesting people/orgs on X from AI/ML circles, as well as Ukraine war OSINT accounts and UA army helpers. I stay on X pretty much for these two topics.
Guess one has to, because there are just too many people on there. I don't like it but what can I do. What I hate the most is that states/countries, prime ministers and kings post on there. And that the emergency services of some countries have that as primary channel. I understand cross posting to the most popular social channels, but primary? That SHOULD be a local channel, not some dystopian shit hole you could be banned from randomly.
I have not used Twitter since 2022 (nuked my account) and I have not missed it even once. You should give it a try.
My feed is mostly people petting rabbits
A lot of interesting people who do interesting things post on X. You can follow them and have interesting feed. You don't get it on FB/Insta or Tiktok.
>>Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
Yeah just a big tech CEOs posting (or an author of a big project, or an engineer working for a top lab), nothing to see here. On to another dancing teenager on TikTok. Let's watch some pranks or a "beauty influencer" on Insta where we are at it instead.
There's lots of US sports content. That's all I use it for.
> What is the main use case for X these days?
twitter/x remains the domain of intelligence agencies worldwide. It is a semi-open (the world first virtual leader, the ayatollah affirms he exists from there ..) psychological operations platform that permits the avatars of "world leaders" to speak to masses and also hosts a parasitical community of grifters ("opinion makers" and "influencers") that feed off of the festering fetid matter served up by the Spook International.
a secondary purpose of the twitter/x is a reverse doomsday clock, based on above. As long as the ghost of this unprofitable "business entity" is kept alive by funny money and funny deals, we can sleep soundly at night knowing there won't be ww3 or any other such extreme negotiating tactics by global elite, since they are all 'playing their role' on twitter currently known as x.
I don't believe the extremism engine of Xitter is reducing the risk of global catastrophe. I think it's accelerating that risk. Certainly it helped elect Trump, and no one can argue that's been good for advancing the cause of peace on earth or avoiding several other causes of mass death.
I see many, many Twitter posts here. I flag every single one. Many of them are AI-related, and not something from a big tech CEO. It seems that many fans of AI don’t have any moral quandaries with using it. I will let you be the judge of whether that says anything about their moral compass in general.
All journalists and politicians are there, including left wing. If you want to know e.g. what the Prime Minister of Pakistan really said instead of some news spin, you have to read his tweets.
It is an elite club, and Musk wants you to pay for it.
I don't know why it is legal for EU politicians to use this walled garden for important messages.
Someone outside of the US jurisdiction (China?) has to keep xcancel.com running.
Linking to X is less useful than it used to be.
IIRC you can’t even read a single post without an account, it is equivalent to posting a link to a private Facebook group or whatever from an outsider point of view.
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It's actively harmful to many people, copy and paste the text if there's no other source
What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be?
Yes, because influential, non-evil people who should know better just will not fucking leave. The vast majority of public-minded ML developers and researchers, including people who compete with xAI, being an obvious example.
And because skilled, knowledgeable people who could create a replacement service just will not do so. At least not without finding new and innovative forehead-slapping ways to fail at it.
Incredibly frustrating that Xitter is still as popular as it is.
> non-evil people
> ML developers and researchers
Brother in Christ, pick one.
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It's become just another doomscroll content mill like the rest. Public figures and well known names have been replaced with random content creators and repost bots.
I rarely use it (you need an account, so I need to add cancel to the url) but last time I had a "guest" account was two years ago and it was pretty much all bots. That being said, some (important) people or companies still use it for announcement but these are usually linked and xcancel works just fine.
I honestly have no idea if there are real people who actually use it daily. Who can read that stuff?
Incredibly unpopular opinion on Hacker News, but X remains the center of many circles, including tech. There is almost nothing posted on Hacker News that I haven't seen on X first, with better commentary.
Examples ?
Actually I retired from twitter before Musk, because twitter started to censor me. But of course once Musk took over, constantly raising his right arm, I knew twitter was dead. Here in Europe nobody wants to see selfish and ruthless right-wing nuts control ecosystems. Billionaires pulling the strings does not work; the USA need to learn this lesson first.
Are you gonna tell us how Twitter started censoring you, or is this a "which opinions, mf-er" goose meme situation?
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Terminally online, infighting and purity testing leftist weirdos who never have and never will achieve anything politically continue to push "nazi bar" rhetoric, but actual people just don't give a shit. Here's some far right nazis for your reference:
https://x.com/vonderleyen https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa https://x.com/liandersson https://x.com/AmnestyEU
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Musk is who you engage with on twitter. You're one of the people who makes his account the most engaged with. I follow tons of stuff on twitter, and have no idea what Musk is doing unless it gets in the mainstream news.
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I made the mistake of searching it yesterday via a proxy while trying to search for local police news (why do our govts use these mechanisms to publish first) and ran into threads calling for ethnic cleansing of south asians from Texas. Not a great read.
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Like all social media, your feed depends partly on who you follow and partly on behavioural cues their algorithms can determine about you (such as who you interact with, sites you visit).
It may be skewed one way or another more than other social networks, but even so, you should be careful saying a social media is a racist bigoted right wing echo chamber because it can sound not like a recital of popular media but more personal experience
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It's a social experiment about [variable] universal basic income
Can you expand on this? I'm not tracking.
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There's people from all walks of life and all corners of the internet on there still, good and bad. Twitter was always a darned mess, the only difference now is you can't just report people and bully them off the site.
Contrast to me trying to open BlueSky, and seeing death threats and other insane things. I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem. Those two factors alone kept me from even trying it out.
What's really weird is there were a ton of claims that disappeared, about how X was full of bots, but X is the opposite of full of bots. Maybe there's one or another, but they're highly under the radar, X has improved their bot problem drastically.
Edit (tweaked some words, and wanted to add):
Then there was Threads, I am not in any way interested in "New Twitter" by Mark Zuckerberg, no thanks.
I really can't deal with BlueSky. I wanted to because I had a lot of good "starter packs" for NeoVim and OCaml development. Nerd stuff is the reason I visit these sites. The problem is, I start following people and it almost always turns into politics. I may even AGREE with the person's politics but I hate reading and talking about it. God forbid I ever disagree.
Funny thing though. I've heard the claims of "CSAM on Twitter" and now "CSAM on BlueSky". I've never had any of that ransomly show up. I do still have 2 or so random follows from clip-art female avatars with no tweets - per week. I've never quite figured out how that scam is supposed to work. I used to block 'em, now I ignore 'em.
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If you look at the replies to basically any big post, you'll see all the blue checkmark bots in there. Usually just copying posts, sometimes doing a weird ai summary of the original post in a way that isn't actually replying to it.
I've got no idea if they're somehow making money off it or what's up
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> I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem.
There really isn't, unless you mean anime content(of both SFW and NSFW alike) by "CSAM". In case you mean by that, then there is, otherwise no. It also appears to be highly locale dependent - some say they see timeline filled to the brim with fetish furry images and male gay nudity dressed with right wing politics, but my timeline is like just Twitter 2014 stuck at 3AM without any of those. I don't use any filters or blocklists, the place seem naturally nice-ish.
> about how X was full of bots
They appear to have largely given up and scaled back efforts to replace existing social graphs by funding African/Middle Eastern/Indian/South Asian content farms under the guise of revenue sharing programs, burning out talents west to east, likely with the conclusion that they're all equally incapable of understanding contents posted on Twitter even without the language barrier, let alone gaining popularity and even with literal algorithmic manipulations. Or they just burned through quite a deep talent pool globally.
That effort started after Twitter was bought, beginning around South Africa or Nigeria. So it's not an improvement, unless you count someone ceasing hostility as an improvement.
Bluesky has a weed problem, but eventually you can tune the algorithm to only show you thirty or forty posts about weed every day.
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I genuinely can't take this comment seriously if you think BlueSky has a CSAM and bullying problem while staying on X.
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> I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem.
I left X permanently because the unfathomable amount of CSAM being generated by Grok, without seeing it myself, sickened me to the point of no return.
I don’t use Bluesky but it seems to me that if this is a real concern to you, then you should have left X as well.
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I did not plan to announce it yet as it is in a very early stage, I was targeting November, but I think it should be mentioned now: I am working on OpenWeb, https://framagit.org/open-web/open-web, a project which allows to access posts (at the moment only tweets but more platforms to be supported later) without any account nor tracking. It *downloads* them instead of proxying, with the goal to make the data public data. Of course, it can't download the full twitter database, so the scope is limited to entities which *have a wikipedia page*. That's the criteria for "is it famous enough", as wikimedia already has good rules about who/what deserves a wikipedia page or not. More on that project soon.
How can that be legal? You’re assuming anyone famous enough to have a Wikipedia page is granting you a license to republish their content? I think the only thing between your project and a cease and desist is lack of popularity. If proxifying gets you into hot water, downloading will be worse.
As I am not a lawyer, I can't confirm if this is legal or not. I do plan to contact legal people to tell me which kind of jurisdiction would allow that. I am still hopeful because: - This is only about public tweets - The project does not add any context or interpretation around them - The project links to the original content - Speeches by public people such as politicians or corporations are usually fine to be spread around. They actually want what they say to be as spread as possible. It would not cross anyone's mind to sue a newspaper because they quoted a tweet of a famous person, saying that there is PI on the content of the tweet.
This project is more an "Internet archive" of the social networks. There is no follow button, no way to comment or interact or anything. It just puts the data in the open. It may still be illegal as much as archive.org is illegal. To be seen.
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Whenever Meta is mentioned on HN, there will be HN users asking why people are still on Facebook or Instagram when we all know Meta hired psychology PHDs to make their products addictive yadda yadda. Usually you will just see people tell each other that they have gotten off Facebook before it became uncool. You hardly see anyone accusing each other of virtue signaling or having any kind of political slant.
But Twitter or X comes up, someone will say they don't use it, and people will start calling out their supposed virtue signaling and making wild speculations about their politics in no time.
Why?
Believe it or not but outside the USA there are over a billion people who use Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp services daily to conduct their daily lives and business. You do not speak for the average Indian or Indonesian and the world does not revolve around America.
Edit: OK, I think I see your question.
Elon is much more explicitly/publicly on one side of US politics than Meta is. That's why people accuse his critics of playing politics (a convenient scapegoat).
For what it's worth people say Facebook helped get trump elected (through use of targeted campaigns using FBs analytics/targeting) the book Carless People covers it a bit, among many other distasteful happenings at meta.
I've never really noticed a difference in the trends for either. For the most part, all of the comments are about how anywhere but HN is complete shit and even HN is not as good as it used to be. There are always a few saying "but that's where everyone is". Inevitably, someone will post a link to something we all hate on constantly, be it one of these kinds of sites or a paywalled news article or whatever, and we're all just supposed to either know the currently working proxy or hope someone has already posted the link in the comments.
One thing I have universally noticed is it doesn't matter what it is or how many sides there are to it, someone always thinks HN is unfair to one side in favor of another. Usually multiple someone at the same time, and usually not even from the opposing side as each other claims.
And I don't know, maybe there is an 80/20 bias or something. I just don't know how I would or wouldn't reliably know that on intuition/things I notice rather than running the numbers on comment data.
Musk and his supporters project a lot. They have some neural condition or notoriety as popularity strategy or something that makes him/them hate everything, and they performatively state that "___ hates Elon"(often verbatim) out of that. It's not exactly organic.
Actual announcement on https://nitter.net/ :
Cease and desist
On 24 August 2026 cease and desist letters have been sent by X Corp. demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project's repository.
nitter.net is offline and development has stopped for the time being. I'm seeking legal advice and won't be commenting further on the specifics for now.
Thank you to everyone who used, hosted, packaged, donated and contributed to Nitter over the past seven years. — zedeus, 25 August 2026
I’ve been writing an HN clone that’s literally a clone. It copies all front page posts and comments. I just wanted to say publicly that dang is awesome. Instead of shutting down the idea, he’s been actively helping the project by answering periodic emails and… well, not shutting it down.
Not sure what to do with it yet. Maybe I could let users have custom filtering rules. But the point is, companies should support community projects like this, not throw around ToS violation claims like they’d hold up in court.
This makes sense for HN as a marketing project for YC.
This doesn't make sense for ad supported platforms where the value is the eyeballs on their site.
To be clear, no ads. I might have a donation link just to cover hosting costs, but I'm not trying to extract money out of this. I have a full time job for that. This is just an art project.
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I don't mean to discourage you, and it's great that you've gotten that support; but I don't understand what purpose this serves. I had understood that Nitter exists exactly because of the forces that would make X leadership tend not to like its existence. HN is already not trying to sell things or make the interface obnoxious for logged-out users, and it makes very responsible use of JavaScript; what is there to filter out?
No discouragement taken :) Thanks for the question.
Some people have asked for a "No AI" version of HN. That's one possibility.
Another possibility is to just stop cloning comments, so that only the articles are mirrored, and then launch the site. There would be few comments, but that might be a feature. I sometimes miss when HN was small.
A third is to AI-generate the comments. That way it's like https://reddit.com/r/subsimulatorgpt2.
Then again HN doesn't have ad revenue to protect, and you can only spend Karma at a limited number of retailers.
Hacker News custom apps don’t threaten the revenue the parent (YC) makes.
Is it available? Would like to peek around, I also made a clone. There are lots of little details about the HN ui that were difficult to get just right.
Oh no way, a fellow HN cloning nerd! Hi!
You’re absolutely right. It’s taken almost daily work from April till now, but I finally have almost everything. Navigation links were particularly tricky. I’d love to see yours too.
Right now it’s running locally on my laptop, but I plan to deploy it to https://news.ycombinator.lol soon. I was gonna make AI generated comments but the API costs are pretty high.
Source is fully available: https://github.com/shawwn/sharc
I started with arc 3.2, which is ancient, and implemented every missing feature one by one until I’ve mostly run out. https://github.com/shawwn/sharc/tree/main/docs/agents/handof... shows a chronological journal of the whole process.
Is yours up somewhere? Would love to compare notes.
EDIT: Here's a side by side screenshot:
HN Simulator: https://i.imgur.com/iZk5ypK.png
HN: https://i.imgur.com/ZocuK0L.png
It's fun to tab back and forth and look at the diffs.
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I also made a clone. I haven't touched it in months. I was going to put it on one of my domains and decided not to until I can sort out moderation and all that. I'm not sure I want to be on the hook for moderating a forum full time.
I would like for things to be so, but these platforms relief on you being on their platform, hooked on their algorithms, delivering them data. They need this in order to make money. HN is not monetized like this, so of course they're more lax. But I don't expect this to be possible for many other social media sites.
On related note I really like serializer.io to read HN (I disable other sites it supports) in chronological order and have it synced across multiple devices under unique URL
Thank you for pointing out https://serializer.io. I hadn't heard of it.
you're infringing HN users' copyright (and possible other rights as well), as they haven't granted you a license to copy, store and republish their content
Some further analysis that argues this is fair use: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49439657
Nobody should have those rights. Copyright has been a disaster for the human race.
they certainly havr given that license
otherwise my browser could not make reproductions and store caches
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Didn't realise everything I posted online was copyrighted by default
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Nitter is a great project, way lighter than using Twitter and gets the job done if you want to check few accounts. I have a list of 30 accounts that I'm checking with Nitter and it's absolutely fantastic for this. Oh well, I guess I'll live without following those accounts.
Nitter permitted perusing of twitter (x-cremente) without being tracked by whoever has the keys to the backdoors to twitter. This is why nitter is being killed - it destroys the surveillance capability provided by twitter/x/musk to interested parties.
You can peruse Twitter with a VPN and see direct-linked post content while signed-out though, even Reddit doesn't let you do that.
I just noticed a couple days ago that when I paste a tweet URL in claude.ai to ask to explain it, sonnet 5 knew to look it up in nitter and xcancel to get the tweet and its context automatically. Shutting down these aggregators allows twitter to drive a harder bargain with Anthropic and OpenAI directly. I wonder whether this was the impetus for the C&D.
There’s still other ways the agents will figure out. They’re playing a whack a mole trying to stop bots but you really can’t have a site that shows a page to wide internet and also lock it down. It does seem they’re moving towards a login required to view anything kinda site. That’ll just kill their search ranking though
I work out of cafes a lot, so I use a commercial VPN often. This means that I am unable to read Reddit. (Not to mention I have to pass two Cloudflare captchas on most other sites.)
If I can't use Xcancel, then I won't be able to read Twitter on the rare occasion I want to.
Strangely, as someone who is online a lot, I seem to be getting gradually cut off from other Internet users. HN is kind of the last survivor for me.
You are replying on HN with an account. Just make an account on X if there's content you want to see.
We got used to something being free and open, doesn't mean this is how it should be.
They collect your passport and facial scan for "security purposes" if they feel like it:
https://help.x.com/en/rules-and-policies/verification-policy
This must be Musk's "free speech absolutism".
Sorry to move the goalposts on you, but the specific feature whose elimination I am lamenting is anonymous, read-only access. HN still supports this. Making an account kind of defeats the purpose.
"The public town square" where you need an account to lurk
It's a feature not a bug ..
Once upon a time I used Twitter's API to scan for tweets that were talking about a particular Wikipedia page. Doing semantic analysis, I did insert the tweets in the right place of the page. I did it as a student, using the free API. Twitter was the open, technically respected network with a great engineering blog. Now it's a political project to elect the extreme-right in Europe.
"The world's town square", where everyone could gather and see what was going on.
And, for more than a decade, it appeared to work pretty well. Governments, media outlets, public-facing services of all kinds came to rely on it as their main way to talk to the public.
But now it's impossible to use without a login, most of that value has been lost.
The best thing to do is to learn from what happened, and not allow a proprietary platform to become so central again.
I always cringed at that framing anyway, for two reasons. First, it was obvious to me that it was a private, centralized, closed-source, piece of software whose owner(s) could always manipulate or take away from people they didn't like. Second, it's genuinely depressing to think that the modern marketplace of ideas was supposed to take place in 180 (or whatever the hell it is now) characters or fewer. Yeah, sure- let's hash out the complexities and nuances of life and society in single-sentence messages. And we wonder why everything has become "polarized" and rage-bait-y. When all you have room to write is "This thing is bad", what the hell else are you supposed to do?
What a stupid platform. I can't believe it's still so popular.
Never had an X account, never will.
Now I'm completely locked out of police reports & municipal updates in my area because it's the only platform they post on.
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I don't understand why they are so dead set on this anti-user short term profit seeking design. During the acquisition wasn't the general sentiment that "I understand this won't be super profitable but I'm doing it on principle"? Trying to chase this boyish fantasy of creating the "everything app" is incompatible with "worlds town square". Those are two different problems with different solutions.
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> The best thing to do is to learn from what happened, and not allow a proprietary platform to become so central again.
In the spirit of that, here's some brainstorming:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
It's amazing how the far left refers to historical center as "far right", and dismisses the views of the majority of the population.
> Once upon a time I used Twitter's API
Once upon a time Twitter used to have RSS/Atom feeds for each account.
* https://www.seroundtable.com/twitter-rss-depreciated-16973.h...
> Now it's a political project to elect the extreme-right in Europe.
You people are completely out of touch with reality. You cannot accept that the reason of why we’re voting for the “far” right is because we experienced a whole decade of uncontrolled immigration policies that permanently reshaped the way of living of previously homogeneous countries.
The free API was closed off well before Twitter ownership changed hands. Even the paid API became untenable for many early users well beforehand.
The writing was on the wall for Twitter well before musk got involved, sadly.
Just Europe?
At the moment.
Already succeeded in the US. Now it’s a project of whether it can be used to maintain power. Right wing populist movements ebb and flow quite readily:
Hopefully I’m correctly sensing the shifting of the winds.
Meta platforms are more responsible for atrocities in other parts of the world, e.g. Myanmar.
Has always been a political project only the politics changed.
API access etc are business issues. Can't mix them up.
As opposed to the Jack Dorsey days of twitter where you would be banned for mildly right wing opinions, even if they were factually correct. That wasn't a political project?
Reminder that the Bluesky firehose is open even for unauthenticated users: https://artifacts.vza.net/emojihose/
> Now it's a political project to elect the extreme-right in Europe.
Certainly the policy of the opposition has nothing to do with the backlash. No definitely not. It's certainly just dumb people being tricked by the bad guys.
If these people could just get properly educated and shielded from the bad ideas surely they'd see the light.
There's a reason the owning class is almost always pushing the same kind of narrative, and the reason is that it's serving them, not people at large.
So you're saying that the current management of Twitter does not favor politically-right messaging? Otherwise, your message is a non-sequitur.
The comment you replied to made no statement about the effectiveness of the project. It's like saying that George Soros is engaged in trying to elect left-wing leadership; nobody denies that.
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Political stuff notwithstanding, I used to be an active X user with a large following, but stopped using it because I couldn't configure a client that reliably allowed me to 1) consume a non-algorithmic feed and 2) disable videos and photos in the feed. It's really quite a bummer to be forced into the engagement maximizing app.
You bring up a lot of good points, so just some general tips for other readers.
> Political stuff notwithstanding
Don't follow people who post about politics and use muting and mute words liberally.
> consume a non-algorithmic feed
New-ish: Following -> Latest. As an aside, the supposed algorithm is on GitHub[1].
> disable videos and photos in the feed
uBlock or Control Panel for Twitter.
1. https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm
same here, my videos and posts would hover close to a million on average. I covered europe mostly where I'm from and the happenings there.
After Nikita took over I found X to be significantly worse. They also realized paying people to repost viral videos wasn't drawing advertisers.
In fact one fo the reasons I think their algorithm is so bad now is because they lack advertisers (conversion on X remains the lowest out of all social media platforms) and have to rely on people paying for X premium who naturally wants to be seen and engage in echo chambers.
The real deal breaker for me is when X did not honor their freedom of speech philosophy and did not offer me protection when a certain European country got involved and became very aggressive that I had to leave.
I dont understand how come there are still people who use the garbage website named X/Twitter.
Especially rich coming from X Corp, with their xAI-Bot web scrapers.
I didn't get much use out of XCancel, because it usually assumed I was a bot and refused to show me the page.
It's web scrapers with anti-scraping filters, all the way down.
I had the same experience with XCancel, but nitter.net worked for me.
Is there any jurisdiction where Nitter instances could be hosted while inconvenient Cease and Desist letters were... let's put it this way, rendered useless?
There's an instance served over TOR, I'm not sure if it's up, but that's a convenient way to render C&D letters useless
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances#tor
If piracy sites are a good indicator of locales that let you hide from American lawyers, then probably Russia
nitter.rdrama.net is still up
From an XML feed when it was Twitter to cease and desist notices, when the „free speech absolutist“ takes over.
Oh, the irony. And so many people still look up to this snake oil salesman
Okay, fine; no more X then.
I need to start preparing for Redlib to meet the same fate, as this god-damned site will be the only other site I care about on the Internet left once that happens.
I was part way through setting up both redlib and bitter on my homelab when this hit. Every app I have used, every plugin, they all get stopped. Was hoping a web proxy would be the final solution.
Also add newpipe/YouTube proxies to the list. I miss the free and open internet
At first I thought Redlib was a pejorative term for how left-leaning Reddit is
Did anyone see the recent X api price changes? A post with a url costs much more than a post without.
They actively penalise anyone leaving the walled garden and also the algorithm punishes such posts
It's insane that their sign-up process now requires a phone number to complete on the web, and even basic features like playing a video in a tweet recently stopped working on x.com without an account. (In the past, searching for tweets, looking at an account's entire timeline, etc., never required logging in at all.)
So where are the alternative instances popping up left and right? I thought the internet would detect a problem and route around it.
It's not insane if you're trying to build a social network without bots and foreign interference.
But Twitter has and embraces that. The bots are all verified. Go on any tweet that mentions crypto or "my friends account got hacked" and dive into the deep well of hidden tweets.
Hiding tweets for users without accounts does absolutely nothing for either of those goals.
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Twitter's removal of messages based on foreign government requests went up massively after the Musk takeover.
Move to the fediverse or die. Twitter has been irrelevant for nearly a decade now.
Objectively untrue, unfortunately.
You can’t move to “the fediverse”, only a specific instance.
Looks like data/account portability is in the works: https://swicg.github.io/activitypub-data-portability/lola
But at ATProto/Bluesky, account portability was a consideration from the start.
Email has federated pretty reliably. Granted, it's nearly impossible to host your own server, because the rest will automatically assume you are only sending spam, but the well-known servers all federate quite nicely. Worst case scenario is that some organizations put a footer on outside messages warning that it's not internal.
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They mean start posting, viewing and interacting in it.
You forgot the /sarcasm
> Twitter has been irrelevant for nearly a decade now.
False.
X was supposed to die by now, its never been more alive.
In fact "Which instance?" is the reason why the fediverse died.
Rumors of the death of the fediverse have been greatly exaggerated. I'm following a vibrant community of nerds, creators, writers, game developers and interesting people on Mastodon right now, and there are numerous other platforms on the fediverse as well, with their own communities. Lots of people have been able to decide on one or more instances for themselves. I don't know why it's such an intractable problem for HN.
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The fediverse is 90% left wing authoritarians who won't hesitate to send death threats if you disagree with Russia's actions in Ukraine, or China's actions re ethnic cleansing and Uyghurs.
I love the idea of the fediverse and tried really hard to make it work, but the community is comprised almost entirely of people who were so extreme that they've been banned from other social media platforms.
This is ultimately X’s problem. Remove the ways to consume its content, remove its relevance.
If at all, people should only fully quote content or post screenshots now.
And twitters gotten increasing aggressive in forcing you to download the app and log in
Irritates me every time there is a hn link to tiwtter
Everyone seems to be these days. Reddit has gotten much more militant over the last month or two
Twitter's been the worst about forcing you to log in.
Before Elon, Twitter would give him some login reminders roughly every 5-10 minutes if you viewed the site while logged out. It was a little annoying, but it wasn't that bad, and you could get rid of the reminder by just clicking the x button.
Now, under Elon, they force you to login to read any replies to posts. Currently, a person's 5 most recent posts can be viewed without an account, but none of the replies can be.
Reddit is now forcing people to login to view old Reddit. IIRC, old Reddit is posts that are from before 2009 or something like that. It's not that important of a loss in the grand scheme of things, but it might be the first step towards making the entire Reddit website login only.
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I've been using XCancel to retrieve posts of an account via RSS, only posting vintage photos from my hometown. It was a small convenience, but I guess that's over. I'll never get what keeps people tethered to it.
Look, we should make a concerted effort—a huge one, I know—to strip away all that is potentially of value in X, and through pulling and separating it from the whole, establishing dignified alternatives to every single one of them.
Here's what X does "well":
- Witness media/citizen journalism.
- Text publishing (narrowed down to short-form and very opinion-based, but still).
- Link sharing (there are TONS of links to great pieces of media; the vast majority of posts containing links to pirated content are never removed).
- Self-promotion (art, video games, software, etc.).
Now, imagine all of these facets turned into dignified, decentralized, and uncensorable platforms or protocols. It might sound like wishful thinking or some kind of utopian aspiration, but I really think we're fighting a battle for Internet freedom RIGHT NOW. What we do in the next two to five years will establish how much of it we'll get to keep in the long term, because there might be no turning back.
> does „well”
> art
Small pushback here: it (and bluesky too) is absolutely atrocious for art, at least as a consumer. Once in a while I stumble upon an artist who only posts their drawings on twitter/bsky, and it’s pretty much impossible to browse their historical works because the „media” tab is just an infinite scroll without any organization; and that’s assuming they don’t also post 10 photos of their cat or other life updates in between their art.
It’s obviously still popular for posting art for many other reasons (I just dislike putting „X”, „art” and „does well” in the same sentence). So IMO the replacements - and lots of these use cases already gave replacements! - struggle simply because of network effects, not their inherent quality.
This is why I wrote "well" in quotation marks and used expressions like "potentially of value". You missed the whole point.
I would literally stop opening twitter links, for me the utility of twitter is not having an account, but sometimes certain projects or governments and businesses use it for announcements. Before Musk put the login only for seeing tweets and comments, I would use regular twitter and when they did that I switched to nitter. (I had an account for some time but it was a complete was of time)
who cares about c&d? just host it outside of us
An anonymous group of devs should host the source on Radicle (over Tor) and the app itself on an onion site. Bonus, it may discourage some scrapers who can’t be bothered with setting up a Tor gateway.
[dead]
If the operators are in the US, they probably don't want to risk it if they were anything less than very careful in not having their personal info attached to any of the data.
I've always found it baffling that more projects by folks that disagree with copyright, access controls, etc aren't hosted in places where the cease and desist won't work.
It's like, you're doing something to annoy a large company with lots of legal resources, and you host everything in the US? Why?
Because the US is the center of the tech world. The default AWS region is in the us. All large tech companies are in the us. If you use any cloud provider the default and cheapest region is in the us and so on. Everything tech is in English and the largest English speaking country is the us.
Apparently meta can still sue foreign individuals in California if you scrape 300k accounts like a Turkish man did
Regardless of the outcome, I’m very thankful for xcancel and all the excellent work they’ve done.
I wish them the best in the legal fight!
Contrast with Bluesky, where the firehoses will give you an archive of everything, every post signed by the original account, for better or worse.
I'm sure this also ends the Safe Harbor protection they've enjoyed, then, if they're going to be in the business of dictating what content can be seen and where.
Remember, corporations may scrap you but you cannot scrap them.
https://xcancel.com is down too.
We get the message alright - everyone move over to alternative platforms. Biggest issue to get local government socials moved to something more open and accessible without an account.
X is really a bad joke with their "Public Town Square".
"Gated Community" is a much better description, but I guess that doesn't sound so cool.
Anyone familiar with the legal reasons Twitter might be able to prevent sites like nitter from working? I believe scraping is legal but I'm sure there are details that make this different
From the letter(s):
> X has documentary evidence that you are scraping X Data, circumventing X’s API access controls and rate limits, accessing X using X accounts and session tokens in violation of X’s rules, and republishing X Data to the public. X’s Terms of Service, Developer Agreement, and Developer Policy strictly forbid such conduct. See https://x.com/en/tos (“[C]rawling or scraping the Services in any form . . . is expressly prohibited.”). By your own description, Nitter “uses Twitter’s unofficial API” and routes all requests through your servers, and requires operators to supply real X accounts to function.
> Your actions constitute a flagrant breach of the contractual and legal obligations you agreed to when accessing the X services. Your actions also violate various state and federal laws, including, but not limited to, the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act (§ 143.001 and § 33.02) and the Lanham Act (15 U.S.C. §§ 1114, 1125).
Ironic that the company calling itself “the public town square” is complaining about someone making their content public.
I wonder how xAI steals its AI training material! Of course no scraping is involved!1!!
They stole the Nitter code too of course without attribution. Does SpaceX really want to go into this?
Ah, TOS violations. I believe those may not hold up in court well from the limited amount I recall in previous cases, but IANAL
Is this comparable to LinkedIn scraping?
That's a lot of unknowns, I doubt this text can actually hold in a court of law
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if i understand correctly, in Meta v. Bright Data, the court ruled that brightdata was allowed to scrape public profiles because the user is unauthenticated. thus I do not believe that precedent is in favor of nitter currently
Possible alternative? https://twitterwebviewer.com/
Whether or not it came to legal notices, these sorts of "use technology to make the other technology less-bad" tactics are always temporary games of cat-and-mouse. Fine in the short term, but not something that offers a full, stable replacement.
Any ideas for a decentralized version of these services? Maybe something tied into the fediverse?
It's that exactly what Mastodon already is?
https://mastodon.social
that is what bsky and other twitter-like platforms purport to be
how well they hold up under stress of bad actors/govts remains to be seen
no i mean a replacement for nitter and xcancel
there's still a lot of info you can only find on twitter
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Bluesky?
Nitter accepts donations at https://liberapay.com/zedeus
Used nitter all the time just to send a clip to friends without making them log in. Losing that pushes me off the platform more than anything else.
The other day in the bay there was an amber alert. it had a bit.ly link which opened up twitter (or i guess x) app. that wouldnt let me see the alert unless i logged in.
It's hardly unique to Twitter but it's so frustrating how much "content" online requires an account. Whenever my friends send me something on Instagram or TikTok or a restaurant puts their menu on Instagram, I'm barraged with a thousand dark patterns forcing me to log in. Even Reddit is doing it now. I do wonder how much of this is to boost engagement versus another "wonderful" side effect from LLMs since they need training data.
The other day someone on here gave me a useful framing. Non-publicly accessible sites are the dark web. If a project told you they were moving all their docs and support to the dark web they would sound crazy, but if they say they're moving it to discord (the same thing) then it's fine.
>the dark web
I prefer the older term "deep web" [1]. It's mentioned in Wikipedia that the terms are used as synonyms now, but I think it's important to differentiate between sites behind login/authentication/etc, and sites that are still openly accessible, albeit over Tor, i2p, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web
> Whenever my friends send me something on Instagram or TikTok
Reply with a screenshot showing that you can’t view the content.
> a restaurant puts their menu on Instagram
Don’t go there. Plenty of other restaurants to choose from. They just lost a customer due to their hostility.
> Don’t go there. Plenty of other restaurants to choose from. They just lost a customer due to their hostility.
This is a wild take to me. Around here pretty much nobody posts their menu online on any website, the technical literacy is just quite poor. If you limited yourself to places that did, you'd only get big fast-food chains.
That customer is the exception because most are signed in all the time
I think we will see the internet closed off more and more as AI usage grows.
Twitter was doing stupid growth hacks, like requiring login to view replies, even before AI scrapers were a concern. (And I suspect many of the scrapers are just using logged-in accounts.)
> before AI scrapers were a concern
didn't the scrapers scrape everything well before concerns were raised. were the concerns raised after the LLMs were released and then people realized what happened? so, forcing logins just closed the barn door after the horses got out.
libredirect is very good for these kinda of things. But the platforms keep trying to make it stop working so is a constant battle of the frontents to build workarounds
It's tracking and data harvesting, always is
There still are alternatives. I don't plan to create an account on X anytime soon. Platformized Internet sucks.
What are they?
https://twitterwebviewer.com/
Bluesky and mastodon
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what I like about xcancel is that it allows me to read but protects me from giving in to the temptation of wasting time by engaging in fruitless discussions. same problem with reddit. funny thing is that my current account just got permanently banned due to ban evasion ... that's fantastic as I can still join and read subs but I cannot post or comment.
Elon was more or less made in environments where the informational flow was free. I'm not sure what he thinks he's doing with all this.
It's likely not him directly, but the big legal teams of lawyers that need things to do.
A still-working Nitter instance here: https://nitter.rdrama.net
World’s richest guy. And this is the hill he wants to fight on.
Ripping off the plaster moment? One can only hope.
This is only a problem because people keep using X. Just stop.
In the grand scheme of things I think that this is good.
Its bad, but in the end nobody really cares that much about what is good or bad.
From a legal perspective, I can guess why you think it's bad. But aside from some legitimate use cases (apparently some towns and cities only issue announcements on X, really?) if you hate the platform itself so much but still feel compelled to check out content there then this may be a great opportunity for freedom and growth.
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If we all move to Bluesky, we break Elon's power over the microblogging ecosystem.
Sure, Bluesky isn't perfect, but at least we can try to make it so.
What are you waiting for?
Companies, celebrities, media, even state agencies all post (only) on Twitter. At least the last one is a shame, but there's a good excuse about reach.
Bluesky's community is more toxic than X has ever been. I'd rather hang out on 4chan.
Bluesky's blocking and muting tools are quite good. You don't actually have to interact with anyone that you don't want to interact with.
That and a default feed that is literally "posts from people I follow, in chronological order" with no concept of the platform inserting promoted or sponsored content in the feed. The worst I might see is someone I follow re-sharing / quoting something I don't want to see, and if that happens I can unfollow that individual, I can mute that post, I can mute the user the post originally came from, or I can block any of the accounts involved.
You can still use: twitterwebviewer.com nitter.kareem.one
old reddit and nitter finished in the span of a month? What an incredible month to be undistracted.
What changed about old reddit?
They force you to login with an account
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PSA: You can follow any Twitter account on Mastodon via `<account>@bird.makeup`.
Did we ever figure out fully decentralized hosting? I.e. nodes so small they cannot sustainably cease and desist?
The fediverse and at protocol come to mind but every fediverse server has unique content
They have archived the nitter repo :( [1]
[1]: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/
... and now it isn't as I'm writing this
... for pushing a commit.
Disregard. Now it's archived again
Folks need to learn to start putting such projects outside of the reach of US. Put it in an "unfriendly" country where the C&D means nothing.
What a shame, I've used the Twitter/X -> RSS quite a lot to follow accounts.
If the courts consider these cease and desist orders authoritatively valid, does that mean all notary services are under threat?
I thought nitter shut down a year or two ago? I've been using xcancel, thinking they've been running on the old codebase...
It did, and then it came back.
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/discussions/1212
Same, nitter never worked for me.
these things have to be operated from Russia or some country that has total independence from US legal system.
A lot of instances are showing rate limited too.
It was only a matter of time before they got in the way of someone committing a crime under the pretense of power.
Explains why the various links were suggesting to use different instances today. Surprised it lasted this long.
This is part of the enshittification of social media: Places which used to be open for anyone to read, logged in or not, have become walled gardens, where you can only read the content if you log in, allowing the social network to use browser fingerprinting to track you, even if you erase all cookies.
Of course, the content on Twitter/X has gone down the toilet. While I am anything but “woke” (you can my posts defending RMS from the “woke mob” a few years ago), having a lot of content showing a random <<person in group Twitter posters don’t like>> committing a crime, and none of the comments letting us know when and where the incident in question happened (and, back when anyone could ask Grok where a given incident happened, it would invariably be something that happened five years ago or eight years ago), but a lot of comments going full Stormfront, saying that’s how all people in <<group they are bigoted against>> act.
Nitter was useful for archiving threads on Twitter/X, since it’s not possible to archive the same threads when they are directly on X. Even though anyone sensible has left Twitter/X, I will miss being able to archive the kind of content (as much as it is garbage) that is on X.
Why are people still using X is the real question? STOP USING THIS THING for hundreds of reasons, including this.
I wish for definitelynotnitter.net, where people just copy paste from accounts they follow and otherwise non-interactive.
Annoying, after disruptions last few years, ended up using extension that manually scrolls through timeline to build a daily digest of tweets, which is all I really need. Keep time spend on bird site to a minimum.
This thing of needing to log in to view public pages needs to die
It's not "security". You know it's not. I feel like Facebook started the whole thing in their desperate attempt to get more users (while simultaneously screwing around with privacy settings on posts). It's incredibly widespread (I refuse to sign up for Instagram)
"Scraping" isn't an argument (LLMs for example) either
The leadership of these companies, are incredibly ethically bankrupt
By making it login only, every potential user is turned into a sellable asset. And you convince the courts that it's a password restricted website so you "breached" authorization or something
I do not know if xcancel is going to survive this :(
As far as I understand, people use XCancel because they do not like X (and Elon) so do not want to give money or traffic to X. But they still want to read and share content posted there.
The added value of XCancel is they are not owned by Elon Musk.
Am I correct here?
Getting around Twitter's blocking of non-logged-in accounts predates Musk's purchase of Twitter. I don't know the specifics of XCancel, but the niche existed beforehand.
Without a nitter instance, I simply won't see posts to X.
This seems predictable, so at least one goal is to reduce the reach of people posting on X.
A dump question, can we use Internet Archive for that?
The open web is dead. The open web remains dead. And we have killed it.
I'm actually much less anti-Musk than the average HN commentator but it should be universally agreed here that a small handful of mega-corp websites dominating the majority of content on the web is a bad thing. Nitter was hardly a solution. Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed, and "free speech" platforms like X are "technically" closed.
IMO we all need to start vibe coding PHP bulletin boards again. 'RETVRN' etc.
If we reflect on the debate from years ago about whether to nationalize Twitter, all the downsides we were warned about have come true. They censor / promote whoever the state wants anyways, the CEOs was literally in the cabinet for a time, but now they also have to enshittify and degrade the experience for the benefit of an also-ran AI lab.
All of the downsides you listed started with Jack Dorsey, and were significantly improved once Musk took over. X/Twitter still has its issues, though.
I’d tell you to check out the “Twitter Files”, but it seems Wikipedia has been completely compromised. And I’m hesitant to recommend you read about it on Grokipedia (you’ll assume there is major bias), but it does seem to be the most accurate retelling of the scandal that I can find online. Here are both though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files https://grokipedia.com/page/Twitter_Files Censorship-wise… Twitter was worse than Reddit at its peak (before being bought).
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Don't reinvent the wheel PHPBB, MyBB and others are still updated.
I hate the closed web purely for disrupting archiving efforts, you can add chat apps like discord, whatsapp, zoom and teams in that list as well. As a lot of communities have moved there.
> Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed
What does the even mean if you can host your own
Hosting your own doesn't really matter if it just means you're on a social network with one user.
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Nothing, fedi is extremely anarchic by design. If you don't like a server you can move to a different one, or start your own. The big Mastodon servers put in a great deal of effort to police what their users can see and interact with (see FediBlock), but it's impossible to shut certain people or groups out of the network entirely. It's a double-edged sword, but it's a net good for the kind of network it was intended to be, which is a hacker's network; it wasn't designed for normies.
Maybe they're referring to defederation? It's quite common on Mastodon as I understand it, due to disagreements on things like moderation between server operators.
What does it even mean, period? MAGA losers are free to establish a community on Bluesky, the only difference between that and Twitter is that Bluesky isn't built to optimize for ragebait and culture war fighting. But they can still socialize among themselves on Bluesky even if no one else wants anything to do with them.
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> IMO we all need to start vibe coding PHP bulletin boards again. 'RETVRN' etc.
The most recent release of phpbb was 2 months ago
And it’s still having critical security vulns after 26 years
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They still work just fine, people need to use them instead of the drugs they get force fed by mega corps.
> "free speech" platforms like X are "technically" closed.
Musk boots off and/or limits distribution of people he disagrees with. I can't fathom how you think that's 'free speech' - it's the opposite.
> Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed
I've heard that - what is your experience? Downvotes and exclusion? Are there more 'open' servers?
> I've heard that - what is your experience? Downvotes and exclusion? Are there more 'open' servers?
Fediverse has plenty of servers which are "free speech" adjacent, which most Mastodon servers close off since its easier for them to police what their users can see than let them do it themselves. The vast majority of them do not run the Mastodon software, and feel far more "wild west" with all the shitposters. But if you want to talk with actual hackers and are into that sort of thing, it's fun times.
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What does a site stealing content has to do with open web?
Someone should make a Twitter competitor.
could we have a moratorium on twitter links here?
Is XCancel separate ? They have a page up as well
XCancel is a different website, but they just put up a notice literally a few minutes ago saying that they're also shutting down until they get legal advice. For the past few hours, xcancel had been marginally functional (constantly giving you an error message if you tried more than 2 or 3 searches at a time), but now the website is down altogether.
Twitterwebviewer is still up, but I always preferred nitter and xcancel. And I wouldn't be surprised if twitterwebviewer also goes offline in the next day or two.
It is a fork of Nitter, they've also shut down due to the C&D[1]
[1]:https://xcancel.com
Good riddance, X is the best news platform.
Sad for the project but unsurprising knowing how much SpaceX (sigh) relies on xAI which it mostly a shelf for a neocloud bootstrapped precisely from Twitter/X as a dataset. I imagine they will legally fight to close as much as possible in order to make it look like a valuable dataset that is exclusive.
xcancel.com still works. Isn't that sus?
xcancel worked even when nitter had problems before. I imagine they're running a fairly custom version of nitter now with their own workarounds.
Edit: I see it's not working either "Instance has been rate limited"
Might help that XCancel hotlinks media (pbs.twimg[.]com), should be a huge bandwidth reduction.
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Right now, I can do about two searches on xcancel before it gives me the "instances have been rate limited" message. Then if I completely close out of my web browser, clear my web history from the last hour, and go back into my web browser, I can do another one or two searches, before xcancel again gives me that message about ""instances have been rate limited".
In theory I can still read the same things I could read before on xcancel by doing an endless cycle of doing one or two searches, then closing out of my web browser and clearing history, and then going back to xcancel and doing another search or two. But certainly that process is very annoying.
Now, I'm not 100% sure if this is related to Musk's cease and desist letter. I've run into this problem or similar technical problems about twice a month before when using XCancel. Usually the technical problem is resolved within 2 or 3 hours and I can use xcancel normally again. So I guess I'll check back in a few hours and see if I can use xcancel normally again.
Edit: Xcancel is working perfectly if you first go to somebody's X profile, and then you turn the x in the url to xcancel. For example, here is Elon Musk's profile on xcancel, where you can still view Elon's tweets, Elon's replies, and the replies that people have made to Elon's tweets.
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/with_replies
XCancel still has a problem right now where I can only make a few searches on the xcancel website itself before it tells me I'm rate limited, and I have to sign out of the browser and sign back in before I can make searches on xcancel again.
However, I occasionally have had this problem on xcancel even before today. And I'd assume that this probably isn't related to the cease and desist letter. If this was due to the cease and desist letter, I'd assume that xcancel would be completely down right now rather than having limited functionality.
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Seems that xcancel.com is down now as well. Maybe they got C&D'd a bit later, or maybe they just took a bit longer to respond to the same notice.
Not anymore. Here's what shows on their page:
> On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel. The service XCancel is stopped until further notice. We are seeking legal advice and won't share more details for now. Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel.
What I don't understand is why people insist on using a service when that service doesn't want them.
I mean, xcancel had bandwidth costs. Even if covered by donations, in what world does it make sense to pay to access twitter instead of moving your business elsewhere?
You'll say the "content creators" are there. Would they stay if they run out of viewers?
So where are the alternatives popping up?
Note that the frequently-used workaround for regwalled Twitter content posted to G+, xcancel.com, is itself a Nitter instance.
HN mods may wish to take notice.
well I guess I won't be reading anything on that hellsite anymore
First Instagram and Facebook, then Reddit, now Twitter. This is the new normal, paywalls and walled gardens everywhere. Not to get started on quickly increasing nation-state censorship and trail blazers such as China with the entirety of their national web locked down already.
We move to the fediverse, hyphanet, etc, and leave the normies in the slop shops. We build a high information quality environment for us which is not easily centralize-able or lockin-able, and eventually the slop shops fall due to the lack of our high quality communications. Enshittification will ensure the slop shops' ultimate failure in their futures.
In the meanwhile for anyone that have android, use QuaX (still requires account)
xcancel.com is also displaying cease and desist now.
So you have to get an X account to get access to "your" own politicians. Similarly, on Truth Social hedge funds are paying $100,000 bribes to Trump for premium access (essentially frontrunning).
This is from the company (X is owned by xAI) that distilled OpenAI against the terms of service.
I appreciate xcancel to see things on HN or elsewhere ...
But really, is anyone still using SHITTER? ... holy fck ...
Just saying but a tor hidden service to access Twitter would be nicer than possibly having your behavior tracked by people who don’t care much about laws(I mean the unofficial ones) and I suppose the liabilities for a third party providing a proxy to that content on the open web for convenience(and or tracking) would be significantly reduced.
As long as people are using X and linking to it this pain will just go on. If you have an account there you will not notice how unusable it is for others. And that's by design.
This means that you need to stop posting links to it anywhere, unless you attach to the link everything you find interesting about it (so the discussion too, if it's interesting).
Doing otherwise should be banned here.
I have a Twitter account and even then I use xcancel and such because Twitter signed me out one time and then i couldn't read replies to tweets without being signed in, and I really hate being nagged to get a shitty app or sign in just to read some stuff.
I donated to xcancel because id rather support that than pay for Twitter blue or whatever.
Let a thousand Nitters bloom.
Xcancel was my only window to X.com which I prefer for our hyperlocal news. With the mainstream media not covering hyperlocal news I am now denied a freedom access to our hyperlocal content. It is a shame that we are denied freedom access to content in this AI slop era.
Sad, if inevitable.
I had twitter since the beginning, it was a very nice place until Musk.
Great news, as twitter becomes less relevant everyday.
That's how each of your cat-and-mouse games end, right?
I mean, even the name already is the perfect symbol of what goes wrong in people's brains, right?
Xcancel should be about cancelling X. Not about adding another pipe to it. ;)
But yeah, people will never become smarter, I guess... Jusz their glasses do.
I wonder why X waited until now to send cease and desist letters. I assumed the issue was resolved somehow - maybe they were unenforceable - long ago.
I'm also surprised they don't already have their response prepared to this inevitable event, though maybe they are just seeking to fine-tune it.
Re: https://nitter.net/
s ot we dott comm
xcancel go it at at another domain?
Like xancel.com
I wonder what bs reason he came up and out of his butt. Such a snowflake he is.
It is absolutely silly how many people here deny the importance of X for at least journalism and politics. Musk isn't the only one on X.
There is a reason these Nitter based gateways exist. If you want to change it, come up with a better alternative.
To the people who say there are only "right wing" figures. Really?
https://x.com/maxblumenthal
https://x.com/richimedhurst
https://x.com/ryangrim
https://x.com/aoc
If you only read Musk and AI boosters, you may get a wrong impression.
Wait until Musk discovers that without these additional services, people will care even less about what happens there.
Perhaps the ability to de-anonymize[1] users and algorithmically influence those remaining is more valuable to him than whatever ARPU is for Twitter, especially with significant elections coming up around thr world.
1. A lot of data vendors key information on phone numbers or email, that's why all rewards program are thirsty for it.
That's it for me. No more twitter.
Elmo really has ruined it.
I don't understand, is people still using it?
Once Elonified and walled, was already a clear bye bye years ago.
why there would be still the need to have an account and post stuff there?
boycott is the answer.
loosing and having few users is the biggest pain, let them drain into the void.
I use Nitter/Xcancel entirely because I don't have an account, and Twitter is now unusable without one. There's still content of some value there. People still link to it and now I can't read what they shared with me.
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To be honest it was quite closed as well before he bought it.
Before AI or whatever reason for being closed again he actually open it back.
Sad to see you getting downvotes for facts. What you stated is exactly what I witnessed myself.
Now I have no more ways to read Twitter... So, good?
In response to this, we should push to directly tax Elon Musk's wealth. :^)
"SpaceX takes down nitter"
I have ignored many cease and desists from powerful entities, for years, with no problems. Call their bluff. They are almost always a baseless fear tactic.
If you guys are really going to stay down otherwise because you are worried, transfer ownership of the Nitter servers to me on paper and I will approve turning them back on and resume operations as usual.
I have zero problem telling Musk to fuck off. In court, if needed.
Twitter is just bots and nazis today, not really worth trying to save
"Elites" of both left and right stay because no matter how much they hate Elon they still need to be in the same country club with other elites. That always takes precedence.
Remember the uniparty.
Or because the masses of normies haven't left it and presenters want eyeballs.
for all of elon's pratting on about crypto and open protocols for x to be a single reader application is insane. Wait the problem is AI scraping??!!? and yet Grok is hoovering the planet... what's good for me isn't good for you.
seems all instances except xcancel.com stopped working
https://status.d420.de
I left Twitter few years ago as active user, it was not really giving me anything in return for contribution, I was still passively reading few accounts I followed through Nitter and used also Nitter redirect for all Twitter links in news articles.
If Musk thinks by shutting down Nitter instances I will return to Twitter he could not be further from truth, it doesn't really provide me anything essential I would not find elsewhere. It's almost as Google thinking I will ever pay for Youtube premium, if adblockers would stop working.
as a former (and the best) mod of the Twitter subreddit and having a well attuned sense for how this will all play out it seems that X will very soon be a defunct service. We've all seen these patterns play out before.
this wikipedia page will be there for that day:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
does any one even use twitter any more? that place is a cesspool.
Reminder that hosting your own won’t last long either if it got popular, as long as you don’t control your domain, you are always under the mercy of being shutdown.
lol I'd say something about X, but man this place fooking loves X and it didn't go well last time. So, "oh nooooo".
I think it's less that "this place" loves X, more that there is a committed segment of folks with flagging privileges that really really like a certain South African business guy.
More accurately, there are people here who don't hate the guy with a burning passion, and find the rhetoric of those who do really, really obnoxious. Especially the persecution complex and the dark hinting.
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Tell your 5 followers on Bluesky about it?
EST, huh? Where is this poster located that they are in an Eastern Standard Time zone?
The US east coast?
No, the East Coast observes EDT until November
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This is sad. The government, in doing so, awards e. g. twitter/Musk a de-facto total control over the communication space. I think ALL protocols need to be made fully open, and everyone should be able to write clients adhering these protocols. Any "cease and desist" also must be instantly made public. Right now there is a rogue government running the USA, run by a corrupt orange clown king. All oligarchs who supported this system need to pay compensation money to the other taxpayers.
X makes a platform available. People choose to post on it knowing full well how it works. X makes money by running ads, charging for subscriptions and tracking users.
To me it sounds reasonable that you can't just take that content and repost it without their or the author of the post explicit permission. It sounds like a fair use case and copying the whole content is not that.
Now there are technical details: "are they really copying or generating on the fly for the user" but I don't think it matters. At the end of the day the content belongs to either X or their users. I think arguments against that are arguments against copyright in general.
If I ever posted something on X my expectations would be that if people want to read it they need to obey X's terms and conditions. I wouldn't be happy if there was a platform copying it somewhere else. If I wanted my post to be public I would post on freely available public website (and then maybe repost or link it from my X's account).
You really are the owner of all the posts who make online. When you post on X, you grant X a license to display your posts, but you still have the copyright to your posts. Same thing if you post on Reddit or Facebook or YCombinator or whatever.
This really is an absurd case, but nitter apparently really wants to err on the side of caution until a judge rules in their favor.
> Same thing if you post on Reddit or Facebook or YCombinator or whatever.
Personally if anyone asked me, I’d happily let them take all comments I’ve ever posted to Reddit or HN and repost all of them on their own site.
In fact, I would like to declare the following right now: All comments I ever have made and ever will make on HN are available to use for anyone and everyone who wants to under the terms of the CC0 license. You can point to this comment if questions about copyright ever come up in relation to wanting to copy my comments from HN and rehost them elsewhere.
It’s just a shame that I am not a particularly famous or interesting person, and my comments are not all that interesting especially if taken out of the threads they are posted in without the surrounding comments from others in those threads.
In order for someone to be able to fully replicate all of the user content from a site such as X or HN or whatever, they would maybe need similar permission from every contributor in every thread if there wasn’t already a permissive license the site itself had gotten its users to agree to let their content be distributed under.
Even if you could somehow get permission from each and every user on a site that you could rehost their comments, it might or might not be doing something wrong to download all of the content from the original site itself unless there’s an ok from the site itself to do so.
Idk, IANAL.
It's fair. But I'm not going to visit Twitter anymore because the website is laggy and glitchy, even with an account.
> You've gotta be kidding me. Unfortunately everyone still uses the Nazi app so this is actually a big problem.
If the commenter truly believes it’s a Nazi app, why are they the slightest bit upset to lose access to any version of it?
It’s astonishingly easy to not use toxic social media platforms.
I can't even read specific public transport updates in my city because they only post those to Twitter, only vague messages on their own website.
Have you thought about complaining to your public transport provider?
That’s a rather poor state of affairs but is surely an issue to take up with our local authorities. Is that their only communication channel? There’s no website, RSS feed or at least mirror feed on an alternative platform?
We should have prevented Twitter/X and other platforms becoming quasi-official communications channels for public institutions.
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You answered your own question.
> Unfortunately everyone still uses the Nazi app
If your local town government for example only posts city updates to twitter, your options are to make a twitter account, use something like nitter, or miss out on updates.
There's that, and the fact that the "town square" for my city ended up being a city citizens page on Facebook. So we've got the city government and the sheriff's office posting updates to X and/or Facebook, and anything coming from the residents can only really be seen on Facebook. I don't want an X or Facebook account. I guess I'm just supposed to remain in the dark if I don't submit to corpos. The merger of corporation and state is very real, and I guess it often arrives unintentionally rather than intentionally.
Is this the case where you are?
If so, that’s appalling.
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I would not say astonishingly as most people are full-on addicted to these platform and addictions are hard to kick, but definitely doable (9 years for me)
I suppose my bemusement comes from the fact that the commenter describes it in the most extreme terms (a nazi app!), and yet cannot kick the habit.
I do not use Twitter but some people who do interesting things somehow still do and only post about them there. It's all so tiring.
When fighting Nazis, it's quite valuable to be able to hear what they're saying and know where they're going.
Sounds like you are their biggest fans to care so much?
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You can want to read something someone else has posted without giving your data to the owner of Twitter.
So, it’s a nazi app that you can’t help but continue to read.
I don’t get it.
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my guess is many people use nitter to do automatic scraping of Twitter for various projects, i.e. they can't believe they "have" to do it because so many people still use Twitter.
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Maybe it's just me, but I think it's time to stop giving any sort of traffic to the CSAM generator website operated by the guy who quotes the Turner Diaries, agrees with antisemitic tweets, and throws Nazi salutes at the inauguration.
If you were using these proxies, just move on. If you still have a Twitter account, well... C'mon, champ. Today's the day. Time to delete your account.
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was still using nitter for the handful of accounts I follow without logging in. can't say I'm surprised — a polite read-only mirror of someone else's product was always going to meet a lawyer before a thank-you note.
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wow absolutely not
Twitter / X was predicted to be dead / destroyed / shut down and completely taken offline.
It turns out that Twitter / X has never been more alive!
What's the point of such a service? It sounds like performative nonsense.
Do you make the same complaint when folks post links to archive.is? If not, why is this different?
Others have explained about not being able to see all content, profiles and such.
I’ll add another reason why I redirect to it: XCancel is/was a lot faster than X and had IMO a much cleaner UI, especially when reading larger conversations or groups of tweets. I don’t browse X much, but I already have an extension installed to redirect certain sites, so adding a redirect was an easy win. I’ll miss it.
Odd. Try to read stuff on twitter without an account/logged out.
It's a kind of enshittification pattern where a site based on user content closes off more and more access over time.
Xcancel and Nitter are/were easier to work with, afaict.
It's mostly useful if you want to link someone to a post on twitter to people who don't have an twitter account.
I use it to make RSS feeds for accounts where I don't want to miss a single post
You need an account to access X. Change the URL to xcancel and you can view these accounts.
It also looks like X requires a Google or Apple account to sign up if you don’t use your phone number. I’m not linking any of that to the X cesspool.
You do not need an account to access specific X posts/tweets. You do need an account to read all replies.
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If you read the comments on the Github issue for Nitter shutting down you'll see that's precisely what it is
You are referring to X/Twitter right?
That is the point. It's a way to get the value of a service you don't like, while signaling to everyone that you're too virtuous to use the service you're getting value out of.
I prefer not to share links that require the people receiving the link to create an account to read the content and it's replies or post to such websites for that matter. That's basic netiquette.
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So that's supposed to be the motive? Frankly I think most users just see it as a path of least resistance to a tweet. You guys really aren't familiar with this Internet thing.