Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
47% Positive
Analyzed from 20741 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#twitter#don#more#nitter#reddit#post#account#still#https#content
Discussion Sentiment
Analyzed from 20741 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
Discussion (921 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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?
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.
It's not only social media anymore, many mainstream websites have started doing it.
For example on IMDB, you used to be able to read the comments, now they locked them behind a signup box.. it's only a matter of time until they lock the whole site down.
I wish we had the old internet, with simple html forms, texts and pictures.
The peek was really Web 2.0 design, it introduced just enough styles and interactivity to get rid of TABLES but no more than that.
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.
They already AI shadowbanned me and nuke all of my accounts for participating in historical discussions that mentioned violent upheaval of power, thats why I can't login. I appreciate them helping me ween off using the site completely.
Thank you reddit, never thought I'd quit you. And I'm missing nothing but the exact same conversations over and over again.
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.
I learned that the LinkedIn meta of photos of posts is because their algorithm de-ranks anything with a link, so for farming you should post a picture of text then follow up with a link to a blog post a day later as a comment reply to the post to double-dip the activity.
And, eurgh, so many bad incentives to just make everything worse.
If you earnestly just post a link to a blog, it weights you don't because they don't want people leaving their feed.
And actual text people spend less time hovering than photos of text, so again, down the ranking your post goes.
I don't spend much time on other social media but if Imgur is all just photos of text that won't be an accident, but it'll be what sites optimise for.
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.
I don't believe it.
With the shuttering of nitter if this is what twitter wants then the least they could do is let you create an account. You need apple or google for that. It seems like they shut the front door some time ago and now drew the curtains so people couldn't peer in.
They managed to make it enticing enough for me just to see one person's posts to enter my email but said "fuck off and get the app". I'll have to make do with the 5 posts they show without login
So fuck that. Bye Reddit. I'll miss some of the communities.
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).
I dare say something similar also exists for Firefox
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mirrorimage/mglldpk...
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!
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.
And the manbaby in charge will absolutely go after you.
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.
Also, blocking scraping is very rich (and expectedly hypocritical) for an AI company, which SpaceX is now.
And of course, Google is an AI company, too.
You won't miss much.
Though I think Pinterest takes the cake for being just the ugliest example of this.
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
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/204535759-I...
Maybe it’s time to just download it and Wikipedia, then point an LLM / vectordb at it.
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)
Fail upwards. That's all they know how to do
Existing Reddit users aren’t affected by this regi wall UX because they’re already logged in. And as much as I hate the UX too… Reddit user numbers have grown a ton in the last few years. It’s difficult to make the argument that these changes are a failure.
Reddit users are not customers. The advertisers and AI labs are the customers because they're the ones paying. The users are the cattle in the pen being sold to the advertisers and the monkeys at the typewriters whose output gets sold as AI training data.
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.
Only if you're part of the club. If not, fuck off!
I choose to fuck off.
Nitter and xcancel traffic must be negligible, they're doing this just to pretend they're doing stuff to justify their legal department wages.
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
Not the giant X in the middle.
Horrible UI choices.....
I don't understand why I'm being downvoted. Am I seeing something different than everyone else? I just tried with private browser, multiple browsers, multiple devices, and they're all the same: I click any twitter post link I can find, and I see the post, no login screen. I'm not using adblock or and javascript is turned on.
Only 5 posts, and when you click on any of them, you don't see the post, you see a sign up popup
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.
It really gives the sense that you’re not wanted there.
And so I gladly oblige.
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.
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...
Edit: also can't read a thread because each new post is considered a "reply", so blocked too.
But that's beside the point. I was pointing out that X does allow non-logged in users view posts.
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
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.
To hell with us. The rest of the world needs to move on from giving a crap what our government thinks of you.
China was right to block US tech companies to promote their own, most large and capable countries will do the same over time.
Invading a country, pretending it's not a war of aggression, letting your own soldiers die, and killing many innocent people with no authority from your democratic houses... USA would not do that!!! /s
Trump stood to avoid prison, he's used the stock markets to steal from his own people. It looks like the wars against Venezuela, and against Iran were/are solely to enrich himself. Honestly, Putin looks more moral here (a phrase I thought I'd never even contemplate) unless he was also in a club of prolific paedophiles?
I guess Putin has perverted a super power into an oligarchic dictatorship...
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.
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
I can't help but wonder how much stronger the core of the EU economy would be with actual robust management of their trade relationship with China. The US too but I think the EU is suffering a bit more in real time.
No doubt it makes Doctorow the star of certain types of intellectual circles but the theories have never made a people or country actually well off and never will. But, things don't have to work in the real world to be popular, or even to become policy.
> 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.
Those of us wanting to believe USA was more better than not have struggled to recalibate our beliefs.
What?
I don't know if I agree with the claim overall, but I certainly think nuking civilian populations was an execrable choice (even if the official targets were technically military ones).
My tolerance for people posting to X without also posting to an open platform is over.
Public institutions especially.
There's zero excuse, none.
How about the general lack of awareness of "open platforms", or of any given one of your objections to X?
Most people are not in the HN bubble.
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.
And yet if someone did care, there's a decent chance if they asked the right person in the right way they'd be like "Oh, Mastodon? Okay, sounds neat, oh you know what it's just another checkbox in the software we use to cross-post everything! I'll just check the box!"
But nah, lets not do the easy thing, lets look up legal precedent and ponder the ADA.
I miss the days when we had an RFC, people got together, came up with a solution, and we ended up with decentralized NNTP or something. Everything is someone's little kingdom now.
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.
Seems pretty obvious, not every citizen has access to twitter, there's no legitimate chain of trust and there's endless potential for corruption and manipulation.
In pretty much every developed country sans the US apparently governments, even local ones, tend to be obligated to publish information through their own channels because 1. they own them so you know communication is authentic, 2. they can't ban or restrict you from accessing it, they know how that information is made available, there's no financial conflict of interest.
It's completely possible for Twitter, given that the government has no insight into its technical operations, exert influence on who sees what and how. That alone is insane for public, government communication. If the government isn't sovereign in respect to its communications infrastructure your government is run by tech oligarchs
If I have a link to a local emergency department twitter handle, I can view all of their recent posts, right?
(but I'm as fiercely independent as my own skills and ability to learn can manage)
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
Showing everything is not viable under those competing goals. So they have settled on:
Show the post when someone has a direct link, but require login to see the discussion Show a limited number of recent posts on a profile, and require login for more
Raising that limit from 6 to 10 would not solve the real complaint: “I cannot see communication from my city.”
They already identify government official accounts. One simple option is to extend the visible timeline for those accounts only—six months or a year of posts—while still keeping discussions behind a login.
https://bsky.app/
https://www.threads.com/
Pick literally any one of those, just seriously, if you're still on that platform, leave.
Threads' activity pub gimmick is just a nice to have. It's the salad of the Big Mac. If you're going to eat it anyway, sure, glad it is there, but it doesn't make it deserve a spot in any serious discussion about healthy food alternatives.
As in, if you use threads and are in Europe, you have no option to enable mastodon to read threads replies.
It has been completely abandoned AFAIK. As expected, the good ol' classic EEE attempt, but it just didn't work due to decentralized architecture and just lack of actual capability from Meta.
I don't like the mastodon culture but tbh I can't fault them for this move. Imagine if every post on r/all suddenly shows up on HN.
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.
[1]: https://gandersocial.ca/faq/
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.
Not a thing. You can't post hate speech or threats of violence.
> 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.
Also not a thing. I was pretty clear all they get is a is_a_human".
> 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.
Also not a thing. American platforms practice widespread self-censorship and have no protection under the law except from the state.
https://publiccomment.blog/p/it-is-past-time-for-you-to-quit...
Saying this as one of twelve Mastodon users.
What's wrong with X? How are these options better?
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.
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.
> 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]
The legal system gets this concept. Otherwise random, unwarranted desist orders from your enemies could break you.
Anyone can send an request.
Weird.
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.
They also take crypto (see Donations section in the project readme)
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.
Normally I would agree, but Nitter has been an adversarial integration from the start. I would expect them to have anticipated this attack.
> 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.
Which is significant damage. By complying too eagerly you give those notices power that they would not otherwise have.
> 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.
If you're of that mindset why create Nitter in the first place. And they are pretty much guaranteed public (including financial support) for any lawsuit if they ask for it since Nitter is something a lot of people want to exist.
> And this kind of suit is one that can easily ruin your company or even personal life... so avoiding it seems smart.
It's ultimately not that smart when you're in the "business" of creating Nitter because it just tells the bullies that all that's needed is a nicely formatted letter and you'll fold.
And the legal system "gets that". Reasonable compliance isn't "Oh, someone sent me a C&D. I should destroy my entire business on the off change it makes sense to do so. I'll just raze everything to the ground, hoping that it's better than just... having everything razed to the ground through a suit."
Just.. no. The legal system knows that due diligence is not simply complying, but instead taking time to validate the claim, see if it makes sense, and so on. After all, if the matter were truly urgent, an injunction could easily be obtained.
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.
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 time being" would have sounded like less bad wording than "for the forseeable future."
Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
So whatever else they do, they take money to knowingly promote malware.
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 reported them all the Cloudflare and Cloudflare took them down. One moved away from Cloudflare, and Twitter kept them up.
I reported another to NiceNIC and they asked for: 1. Verifiable malicious download file or sample hash 2. Screenshot or screen recording with the full URL visible 3. Evidence of malicious scripts, obfuscated code, or download chain 4. HTTP response, redirect chain, headers, or packet capture data 5. Third-party security verdict tied to the specific URL or file
I just ignored them. I don't work for them and if they want to host illegal content then it's not my business decision.
This one in particular had the download in base64, piping into Javascript and running a binary as a fake Apple Updater script.
But I am sick of this attitude that it's my responsibility for a malware report to be taken seriously. If they introduce malware bounties then ok, but otherwise I'm doing them a favour by reporting it and if they want to continue to host it after reasonable being made aware of its existence, they should be legally responsible.
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.
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.
"major" was doing a bit of work for me. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit were more in mind when I said that.
>would keep "forgetting" and pushing you back
This hasn't happened to me in awhile. Dunno if it was a transient thing, an app thing, or something that has been reversed.
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
Can we stop this bullshit? It has away more censorship now. And its censorship before Musk was already biased toward conservatives, punishing left more severely. Must made it massively worst.
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.
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.
In another view days I'll try filing a support ticket, maybe claiming something like "I was mass-reported by DSA leftists for my right-wing views"; things along those lines have gotten some peoples' permanent suspensions lifted.
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.
As if X was an official government publishing channel . WTH, they should publish it on they official government pages.
Its usually either limited features, regional accessibility issues, or platforms like metas' just basically trading one big bad organization for another.
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.
NA tuned account has more of what you said.
Yet. Japanese twitter users are a reflection of who they are, etc etc
Doesn’t mean there isn’t toxic stuff though.
Like last week my feed was all about Chiba flooding. Very relevant.
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
1. Japanese community 2. Porn (good god, so much porn)
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.
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.
Others do value that, no judgment, but for me it's be a net negative.
Since then I've had a look on XCancel when there have been major events once or twice and yeah, most of the flurry of real time updates turn out to be misinformed or just plain wrong later anyway... I don't miss it.
The comment section was pretty awful; 90% people yelling about Canada's government being a tyranny and/or in bed with Communist China.
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.
G+ comes to mind.
(Several billion profiles, tens of millions active. Shut down 1 Apr 2019. Yes, April Fools' Day.)
Now that more and more are going "walled garden" I don't get it at all
This is not one of "those situations".
The same as it ever was. Short-form gossip. News, discussion, jokes.
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.
>>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.
You can see the last few posts of an account [1], and the contents of a single posts, but minimal or no comments [2]. Videos play after dismissing the login popup.
[1] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack
[2] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2091983940609245467
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.
> ML developers and researchers
Brother in Christ, pick one.
There's just a lot of money in drinking the AGI LLM VC WN koolaid. Not everyone has drank that koolaid.
I honestly have no idea if there are real people who actually use it daily. Who can read that stuff?
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.
Once enough 'big' accounts block you for any arbitrary reason they like, your account is heavily downweighted enough to send your replies, posts, and everything into yet another class of shadowban that isn't a shadowban.
I've never interacted with the ilks of people like a16z and yet their Twitter block definitely causes a heavier algo downrank impact just 'being' there.
https://x.com/vonderleyen https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa https://x.com/liandersson https://x.com/AmnestyEU
They are literally getting money (not making) without producing anything and that aligns with Elon's world view of a jobless civilization driven by AI and robots.
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.
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.
Worse yet, people get so blinded that they lose the plot entirely... I asked someone about the accounting of a Palestinian fund raiser they were promoting.
They got very defensive so I looked into it, and it was a scam. I pointed this out to the poster to let them know, and they wrote a snide response which got their followers to brigade me.
Fedi is a lot better if you want nerd stuff specifically, running instances attracts a lot of hackers who're geared toward it. The big instances are pretty much the same shlock you get on Twitter/Bluesky but there's a lot of cool people in the margins (tip: look for instances that aren't running Mastodon).
I've got no idea if they're somehow making money off it or what's up
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 don't get any CSAM, alt-right, nazism, weed, ragebaits, unwanted gay contents. Simply none of those. But I don't normally set the language to English, and I suspect that might have to do with not getting those stuffs.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/11/blueskys-active-user-base-...
- June 2025: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/x-accounts-peddle-chi...
- Jan 2026: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/02/musk-grok-ai-bot-safeguard-s...
- Mar 2026: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/17/x-csam-ch...
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.
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
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?
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).
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.
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 doesn't make sense for ad supported platforms where the value is the eyeballs on their site.
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.
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.
https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/
It's not your content, and you're cheating us all!
There's also going to be an opt-out feature: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49439657
otherwise my browser could not make reproductions and store caches
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.
In the spirit of that, here's some brainstorming:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
Once upon a time Twitter used to have RSS/Atom feeds for each account.
* https://www.seroundtable.com/twitter-rss-depreciated-16973.h...
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.
We got used to something being free and open, doesn't mean this is how it should be.
https://help.x.com/en/rules-and-policies/verification-policy
This must be Musk's "free speech absolutism".
Oh, the irony. And so many people still look up to this snake oil salesman
They actively penalise anyone leaving the walled garden and also the algorithm punishes such posts
> 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
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.
It's web scrapers with anti-scraping filters, all the way down.
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances#tor
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.
Also add newpipe/YouTube proxies to the list. I miss the free and open internet
Hiding tweets for users without accounts does absolutely nothing for either of those goals.
Twitter, by comparison, was trivially easy to run bots on. I ran many automated Twitter accounts (for legit purposes). I had to shut them all down when Musk bought Twitter.
But at ATProto/Bluesky, account portability was a consideration from the start.
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.
False.
X was supposed to die by now, its never been more alive.
In fact "Which instance?" is the reason why the fediverse died.
My mastodon feed is really busy with way higher quality posts than I had back in the twitter days. Less spam too.
Irritates me every time there is a hn link to tiwtter
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.
They're A/B testing that already. Mobiles more well known but the desktop version was unusable without logging in for the last couple weeks.
It would have taken like 30 seconds for you to verify that this isn't correct. "Old reddit" is old.reddit.com, and is the old/original UI of the site. It has nothing to do with actual post age. If you visit any thread on Reddit, and replace the "www.reddit.com" with "old.reddit.com", you get the old reddit UI.
This UI is seen by many as much better than the current atrocious UI with the god-ugly ""snoos"", ads, "similar posts", and other cruft most of us don't want. They now require a login to use the debloated UI, as well as attempting to view any comments/threads over a VPN (even on new reddit).
At least Twitter lets you see the original post, even over a VPN (only hiding replies while logged-out), Reddit hits you with an obnoxious "woah there pardner! slow ur heckin horses down!" snoo image preventing you from seeing anything of the thread.
It annoys me to no end, as so many technical questions and support threads are now gated behind this restriction.
Twitter meanwhile, has little of value other than ragebait anyway.
Oh, and you could only save a Reddit thread with the old reddit link on the Wayback Machine. The regular www reddit links have JS required to fetch the contents of the thread, so every thread got saved as an empty page.
It's been that way for over like 3-4 years at this point, unless they've fixed it now that they've kneecapped old reddit (assuming it wasn't intentional in the first place).
If at all, people should only fully quote content or post screenshots now.
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.
> 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.
I wish them the best in the legal fight!
"Gated Community" is a much better description, but I guess that doesn't sound so cool.
> 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).
They stole the Nitter code too of course without attribution. Does SpaceX really want to go into this?
https://www.reuters.com/legal/musks-x-corp-loses-lawsuit-aga...
But I guess the nitter owner doesn't want to take any chances until he actually gets a court ruling in his favor.
Alternative microblogging services are not of any help to me, because nobody (that I wanted to read) posts there.
Sure, Bluesky isn't perfect, but at least we can try to make it so.
What are you waiting for?
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
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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/
Disregard. Now it's archived again
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/discussions/1212
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.
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
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?
This seems predictable, so at least one goal is to reduce the reach of people posting on X.
But really, is anyone still using SHITTER? ... holy fck ...
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?
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.
[1]:https://xcancel.com
Edit: I see it's not working either "Instance has 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.
Some sites throw annoying captchas your way though.
Although now I should say that this was the truth yesterday, but now twitter seems to be actively killing the credentials that nitter instances are using, and they're returning rate limit messages permanently. My guess is that this is a function of how many credentials/tokens a nitter instance was cycling through to get content x the amount of traffic that nitter instance gets. They probably just set the rate-limiting bans longer for everybody (or steadily increase them on each offense), instead of trying to find the specific offending credentials.
edit: xcancel officially gone, so none of this matters.
> 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.
HN mods may wish to take notice.
I donated to xcancel because id rather support that than pay for Twitter blue or whatever.
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.
What does the even mean if you can host your own
normal people dont understand how they can join specific communities or instances or whatever it is on the specific platform, they want something like "twitter" and then thats where they are, they dont want "some weird twitter instance thats not the main one"
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).
At a certain point it's just words; what makes those meaningful? Musk bans and limits distribution for people he dislikes or who criticize him, intentionally directs hate mobs, promotes hate and disinformation, ...
The most recent release of phpbb was 2 months ago
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?
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.
Doing otherwise should be banned here.
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.
It turns out that Twitter / X has never been more alive!
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.
1. A lot of data vendors key information on phone numbers or email, that's why all rewards program are thirsty for it.
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.
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.
this wikipedia page will be there for that day:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
We should have prevented Twitter/X and other platforms becoming quasi-official communications channels for public institutions.
> 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.
If so, that’s appalling.
Twitter used to be an easy and free way to distribute updates publicly. That has changed, but the inertia is still there and there isn't a good low friction alternative.
I don’t get it.
- some important non nazi information exists only on this app
- the nazi app is being harmed by nitter
Seems like using nitter would align with their worldview. Curious how you’ve failed to make this connection?
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.
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.
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.