21 ms·

Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

• refactorAbraxas 22d ago
  It was only a matter of time before they got in the way of someone committing a crime under the pretense of power.
• jocelyner 22d ago
  [dead]
• calmworm 22d ago
  Odd move on Twitter’s part. This will only hasten their demise. It’s like a restaurant that isn’t getting enough customers raising their prices to make more money.
• jeditobe 20d ago
  It’s time to Xcancel Elon!
• HumblyTossed 22d ago
  [flagged]
• Banditoz 22d ago
  A lot of instances are showing rate limited too.
• raphman 22d ago
  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]
  • b112 22d ago
    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.
    • sillysaurusx 22d ago
      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.
      • ForHackernews 22d ago
        This seems like the sort of case the EFF should take up: https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-assistance https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-assistance
        • account42 21d ago
          EFF, ACLU, even the EU legislative should be all over this.
      • ad_hockey 22d ago
        Somebody asked about that on the GitHub thread. You can donate at https://liberapay.com/zedeus https://liberapay.com/zedeus or https://patreon.com/nitter https://patreon.com/nitter. They also take crypto (see Donations section in the project readme)
        • conartist6 21d ago
          (it was me)
    • 22d ago
• spiderfarmer 22d ago
  Let a thousand Nitters bloom.
• bbg2401 22d ago
  > 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.
  • bdangubic 22d ago
    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)
    • bbg2401 22d ago
      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.
  • suddenlybananas 22d ago
    You can want to read something someone else has posted without giving your data to the owner of Twitter.
    • bbg2401 22d ago
      So, it’s a nazi app that you can’t help but continue to read. I don’t get it.
      • suddenlybananas 22d ago
        Well, when heads of state, important ministers, politicians etc post things there, it's an unfortunate reality that you sometimes have to read it to stay in the loop. (I think Nazi app is a bit of an overstatement myself)
        • BizarroLand 22d ago
• NoboruWataya 22d ago
  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.
  • rascul 22d ago
    There's lots of US sports content. That's all I use it for.
  • Leynos 22d ago
    It's mostly a porn site these days
    • loeg 22d ago
      This is one of those situations where describing your algorithmic feed tells us more about you than about Twitter.
      • Markoff 22d ago
        that's my experience with using anonymous search on Nitter instance as well, so hardly anything about me using it without any account
        • pessimizer 22d ago
          But that's got to be what you're searching for. I forget that there's any porn on X, and for a fairly long period I actually thought they had banned it.
          • Markoff 22d ago
            yeah right, if I search for "Prague" I am certainly looking for porn/dick pics, same with pretty much any city you search for this just says you never use search feature
• suddenlybananas 22d ago
  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.
  • duskwuff 22d ago
    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.)
    • dylan604 22d ago
      > 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.
  • micromacrofoot 22d ago
    It's tracking and data harvesting, always is
  • kelvinjps10 22d ago
    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
  • jackb4040 22d ago
    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.
• numpad0 22d ago
  xcancel.com still works. Isn't that sus?
  • dawnerd 22d ago
    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"
    • orange999 22d ago
      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 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.
• tamimio 22d ago
  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.
• teekert 22d ago
  Now I have no more ways to read Twitter... So, good?
• tolerance 22d ago
  In the grand scheme of things I think that this is good.
  • ActorNightly 22d ago
    Its bad, but in the end nobody really cares that much about what is good or bad.
    • tolerance 22d ago
      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.
      • doc_ick 22d ago
        Not op, but my concern was always the town, cities, govt updates only notifying through twitter and no where else. I’d love to have an rss feed directly for reach but they just holed out for Twitter and that’s it.
• utopiah 22d ago
  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.
• kelvinjps10 22d ago
  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)
• erulabs 22d ago
  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.
  • TiredOfLife 22d ago
    What does a site stealing content has to do with open web?
  • _ink_ 22d ago
    They still work just fine, people need to use them instead of the drugs they get force fed by mega corps.
  • alde 22d ago
    > Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed What does the even mean if you can host your own
    • kg 22d ago
      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.
    • gs17 22d ago
      Hosting your own doesn't really matter if it just means you're on a social network with one user.
      • dokyun 22d ago
        Lots of people run single-user instances.
• metalcrow 22d ago
  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
  • zedeus 22d ago
    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 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).
    • hollow-moe 22d ago
      That's a lot of unknowns, I doubt this text can actually hold in a court of law
      • orange999 22d ago
        A similar case Musk filed against an Israeli data scraping firm already got laughed out of court. https://www.reuters.com/legal/musks-x-corp-loses-lawsuit-against-israeli-data-scraping-company-2024-05-10/ 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.
    • metalcrow 22d ago
      Ah, TOS violations. I believe those may not hold up in court well from the limited amount I recall in previous cases, but IANAL
• shevy-java 22d ago
  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.
• solarkraft 22d ago
  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.
• mnls 22d ago
  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.
  • yubblegum 22d ago
    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.
    • DaSHacka 22d ago
      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.
      • metabagel 20d ago
        I am able to search and browse Reddit forums and comments without logging in. Can't do that on Twitter.
• ThouYS 22d ago
  "The public town square" where you need an account to lurk
  • yubblegum 22d ago
    It's a feature not a bug ..
  • metabagel 20d ago
    It's more of a mall. No loitering. No trespassing.
• Artoooooor 22d ago
  Remember, corporations may scrap you but you cannot scrap them.
• g-b-r 22d ago
  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.
• tyjen 22d ago
  Explains why the various links were suggesting to use different instances today. Surprised it lasted this long.
• emsign 22d ago
  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.
• nixosbestos 22d ago
  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".
  • 12_throw_away 22d ago
    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.
    • zahlman 21d ago
      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.
      • kijashdkujdfhas 21d ago
        [flagged]
  • fauchletenerum 22d ago
    Tell your 5 followers on Bluesky about it?
    • deleted 22d ago
      [deleted]
• dredmorbius 22d ago
  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.
• danielovichdk 22d ago
  [flagged]
• sillysaurusx 22d ago
  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.
  • smalltorch 22d ago
    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.
    • sillysaurusx 22d ago
      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 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 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/handoff 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 https://i.imgur.com/iZk5ypK.png HN: https://i.imgur.com/ZocuK0L.png https://i.imgur.com/ZocuK0L.png It's fun to tab back and forth and look at the diffs.
      • datadrivenangel 22d ago
        hackernews clone but all the comments are AI would be kinda funny.
• wrtash 22d ago
  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/maxblumenthal https://x.com/richimedhurst https://x.com/richimedhurst https://x.com/ryangrim https://x.com/ryangrim https://x.com/aoc https://x.com/aoc If you only read Musk and AI boosters, you may get a wrong impression.
• seizethecheese 22d ago
  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.
  • runjake 22d ago
    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 https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm
  • zuzululu 21d ago
    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.
• riffic 22d ago
  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_networking_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
• skybrian 22d ago
  Contrast with Bluesky, where the firehoses will give you an archive of everything, every post signed by the original account, for better or worse.
• tescreal 22d ago
  [flagged]
• bluecalm 22d ago
  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).
  • orange999 22d ago
    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.
    • QuantumNomad_ 22d ago
      > 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.
• Markoff 22d ago
  seems all instances except xcancel.com stopped working https://status.d420.de 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.
• luciana1u 22d ago
  [flagged]
• VCFundedGenYer 22d ago
  Move to the fediverse or die. Twitter has been irrelevant for nearly a decade now.
  • tofuahdude 22d ago
    Objectively untrue, unfortunately.
  • xigoi 22d ago
    You can’t move to “the fediverse”, only a specific instance.
    • notthemessiah 22d ago
      Looks like data/account portability is in the works: https://swicg.github.io/activitypub-data-portability/lola https://swicg.github.io/activitypub-data-portability/lola But at ATProto/Bluesky, account portability was a consideration from the start.
    • dlcarrier 22d ago
      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.
      • xigoi 21d ago
        Federation is much easier when you only need to see messages explicitly sent to you, rather than aggregate content from all over the world.
        • dlcarrier 21d ago
          Usenet handles it fine, and it predates federated email.
    • 22d ago
• paulnpace 22d ago
  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.
• int32_64 22d ago
  old reddit and nitter finished in the span of a month? What an incredible month to be undistracted.
  • delecti 22d ago
    What changed about old reddit?
    • skiddude 22d ago
      They force you to login with an account
      • nunez 22d ago
        I was able to visit old just now...
        • brikwerk 22d ago
          It's not being consistently enforced, yet. Possibly a very slow rollout or an A/B test?
          • ball_of_lint 22d ago
            Yeah, my experience has been that different browsers and wifis (and VPN status) get different results, even within the same day. Definitely happening more frequently today than a few weeks ago though.
        • orange999 22d ago
          Old Reddit is posts from before something like 2009. You now have to login to view Old Reddit. https://old.reddit.com/login/?reason=lor2&dest=https%3A%2F%2Fold.reddit.com%2F https://old.reddit.com/login/?reason=lor2&dest=https%3A%2F%2... It's not that important of a loss in the grand scheme of things. It's probably less than 1% of the posts that have ever been made on the Reddit website, since Reddit was a pretty small and obscure website until 2011 or 2012. But it might be the first step toward making all of Reddit only readable with an account.
• nubinetwork 22d ago
  I thought nitter shut down a year or two ago? I've been using xcancel, thinking they've been running on the old codebase...
  • frollogaston 22d ago
    Same, nitter never worked for me.
  • jwilk 22d ago
    It did, and then it came back. https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/discussions/1212 https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/discussions/1212
• lrvick 22d ago
  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.
• Melatonic 22d ago
  Is XCancel separate ? They have a page up as well
  • orange999 22d ago
    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.
  • skiddude 22d ago
    It is a fork of Nitter, they've also shut down due to the C&D[1] [1]:https://xcancel.com https://xcancel.com
• josefritzishere 22d ago
  Re: https://nitter.net/ https://nitter.net/
• Havoc 22d ago
  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
  • fedpost 22d ago
    Everyone seems to be these days. Reddit has gotten much more militant over the last month or two
    • orange999 22d ago
      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.
      • dan-robertson 22d ago
        I thought old Reddit was about the old UI, not the age of the posts?
      • DaSHacka 22d ago
        > 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. 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).
• bio-s 22d ago
  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.
  • cxr 22d ago
    Have you considered reaching out to users who actually create and own the material published on Twitter to work out a deal whereby xcancel.com would be permitted to publish their posts (regardless of what the cease and desist says)?
    • bio-s 22d ago
      Sorry, I’m not the owner of the website
      • fsuts 21d ago
        Then it may be better to put quotes around it so it looks like a quote. As copying it in plain text makes it look like your post
• 123a124 22d ago
  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.
• HardwareLust 22d ago
  Im surprised they let it run for 2 years. Still not going back to X though.
• nunez 22d ago
  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.
  • Ugvx 22d ago
    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
  • fauchletenerum 22d ago
    At first I thought Redlib was a pejorative term for how left-leaning Reddit is
• skiddude 22d ago
  They have archived the nitter repo :( [1] [1]: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/ https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/
  • exploraz 21d ago
    ... and now it isn't as I'm writing this
    • exploraz 21d ago
      ... for pushing a commit. Disregard. Now it's archived again
• Ugvx 22d ago
  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.
  • dolebirchwood 22d ago
    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?
    • VLM 22d ago
      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.
    • derbOac 22d ago
      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.
      • zahlman 22d ago
        > 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.
        • edoceo 22d ago
          If it's not the case currently, it should be, that public institutions MUST make their public statements widely available. The old POSSE way seems correct. Blocked, or EULA'd or Paywalled on third-party platforms doesn't do that.
• ryandrake 22d ago
  I really don't think this is going to have the effect that X thinks it will have. I've always said that if XCancel and Nitter get taken down, I'm not going to suddenly decide to make an X account--I'm just going to stop reading their content. Same for old.reddit.com. If they kill it, I'm not going to give in and create an account--I'm just going to stop visiting.
  • gdulli 22d ago
    I agree. I think of these alternatives as off-ramps, not replacements. In 2023 I ditched my Reddit and Twitter accounts thinking it would be very difficult. Today, the idea of losing the off-ramps no longer bothers me.
  • ticoombs 22d ago
    They have killed old.reddit now. It forces you (or at least me) to login. Same with regular Reddit. Most threads I get an authwall after the top comment. (Im now entirely on HN and Lemmy)
    • mrtesthah 22d ago
      I use proxy software like redlib and teddit. The browser extension LibRedirect[1] makes these easy to use without conscious thought. They're read-only, but if you were going to post something, you'd have to sign in anyway. 1. https://libredirect.manerakai.com https://libredirect.manerakai.com
  • DoesntMatter22 22d ago
    They aren’t gonna care because they aren’t making any money off of you anyway
    • nozzlegear 22d ago
      If they didn't care, why the Cease and Desist?
    • roosterIllusi0n 21d ago
• deleted 22d ago
  [deleted]
• bromuro 22d ago
  https://xcancel.com https://xcancel.com is down too.
• mococa 22d ago
  I had twitter since the beginning, it was a very nice place until Musk.
• j1elo 22d ago
  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?
  • mvlipwig 22d ago
    If piracy sites are a good indicator of locales that let you hide from American lawyers, then probably Russia
  • tarpitt 22d ago
    nitter.rdrama.net is still up
    • deleted 22d ago
      [deleted]
  • MYEUHD 22d ago
    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 https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances#tor
• urbandw311er 22d ago
  Just so you know – if you are reading this – X is no longer an effective form of publishing as I will not, now or ever, create an account just in order to read something that you have written on there.
  • donmcronald 22d ago
    X is the perfect named because it describes the core interaction after trying to view something on the site. Lmao.
• rvz 22d ago
  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!
• chews 22d ago
  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.
• droptablemain 22d ago
  What's the point of such a service? It sounds like performative nonsense.
  • xvxvx 22d ago
    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.
    • droptablemain 22d ago
      You do not need an account to access specific X posts/tweets. You do need an account to read all replies.
      • pessimizer 22d ago
        You need to be linked to specific tweets to know where they are. You can't just open up a timeline and read more than the last few posts (literally like 5, including any pinned post.)
        • Brybry 22d ago
          I've also found sometimes you get (cached?) versions of profiles with really old posts if you're not logged in. And media often won't play without doing bypass shenanigans (forcing native controls). The main site won't even let you attempt to search but nitter and xcancel search worked great. Twitter is basically unusable on the official site without logging in, even though it may not seem that way after a cursory check.
  • behole 22d ago
    You are referring to X/Twitter right?
  • Petersipoi 22d ago
    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.
• xvxvx 22d ago
  Yeah, it’s connected to Nitter. I had a number of bookmarked X accounts I would check in on via xcancel. I’ll keep them for now but I assume they’re done for. I have zero desire to ever crate an X account. Keep closing doors, Elon, and watch usage drop even more than it already has.
  • Yiin 22d ago
    I don't understand being so emotionally attached to a personality to virtue signal about everything they're connected to. I'm no fan of the guy itself for many reasons, but it's just a service like any other, you either use it or you don't.
    • deleted 22d ago
      [deleted]
    • cbeach 22d ago
      [flagged]
      • muppetman 22d ago
        I think we all laugh because he launched the Cybertruck.
      • sleepybrett 22d ago
        how about he's just a rich asshole who tries to buy his own way and the rest of us are just fed up with rich bullies?
    • stuaxo 22d ago
      Hardly any one is virtue signaling, but people vice signal all the time.
    • deleted 22d ago
      [deleted]
    • frogperson 22d ago
      The us system of government and many of its agencies are under attack by an administration that elon helped secure a win for. Excuse me for getting a little emotional towards a Nazi who supports the concentration camps we have on US soil. I'll make every effort to avoid his products and bad mouth him every single time his name comes up. he is hated.
• big_toast 22d ago
  I don’t get why ai labs and staff didn’t move to Bluesky or something more open. Grok searching across x/twitter is too valuable to ignore or silo. X is effectively a high signal comment layer for the entire internet + quasi internet (arxiv) + real world. Same applies to any data silo I suppose, X just seems more straightforward to beachhead.
  • Hammershaft 22d ago
    I think the signal on X has been deteriorating for years. Many valuable communities that existed purely on Twitter have scattered across the internet after Elon's transformation, often to many disconnected small communities across X, Mastodon instances, BlueSky, and reddit.
  • jraph 22d ago
    > I don’t get why ai labs and staff didn’t move to Bluesky or something more open. Why would they, specifically? There's nothing particularly open about them.
    • big_toast 21d ago
      The labs might not be open. But they would want access to data. More open platforms (the web at large, but bluesky in particular has made open access an explicit goal) tend to provide that, relative to x/threads/facebook/reddit/youtube. Some labs will be able to buy access. Not every platform will offer it. There are many more labs than the big ones.
      • jraph 21d ago
        Good point!
  • roosterIllusi0n 21d ago
    If X is a high signal comment layer, than X must be able to tell real from fake bot posts while not sharing that info with users.
• ButlerianJihad 22d ago
  EST, huh? Where is this poster located that they are in an Eastern Standard Time zone?
  • MBCook 22d ago
    The US east coast?
    • nightpool 22d ago
      No, the East Coast observes EDT until November
      • rsstack 22d ago
        Many humans write EST in the summer.
        • Computer0 22d ago
          I also only use the S variant in human conversation in my time zone.
          • morkalork 22d ago
            I assure you that I am human and never, ever, write EDT in a conversation. My phone even tries to autocorrect it to EST
            • deleted 22d ago
              [deleted]
            • MBCook 22d ago
              This is why I generally try to avoid it and just call it “Eastern“ or “Eastern US“ if talking with someone who might not be in the US. Which is annoying.
          • nightpool 20d ago
• xvxvx 22d ago
  Read-only mode is a great way to entice new users to your platform. If you want to share or comment, you need an account. Blocking ALL access will not have that effect. I went from an active Twitter user to simply having a dozen X accounts bookmarked via xcancel. I can live without them.
  • ButlerianJihad 21d ago
    It is apparent that HN users do not comprehend how useful X is to normal and ordinary people who are not terminally online, and who are not "influencers" and are not "junkies" of social media. X, and Facebook as well, are homes to companies, politicians, news outlets, government organs, and non-profit orgs. Any public service is going to have an X account to pump out announcements and updates about whatever is within their remit. For example, you can follow local law enforcement agencies, local and national weather services, your senators and congresspeople, your health care providers, and much more. You can get urgent updates about traffic construction, accidents, and emergency response in your area. You can receive updates from your respresentatives in government, about their campaigns, about current issues and legislation, about good news and bad news. The network effect here is strong. Even if all ordinary users and individuals decided to pack up, delete their X, and move to BlueSky or Mastodon, the official mouthpieces will stay on X and stay on Facebook. They will be there, and be available to the ordinary individuals. They'll be sending out updates to everyone who follows. That's the utility of X, and it's only become stronger and more robust over the past decade. So it doesn't matter how the techies feel, it doesn't matter if there is no longer a viable "read-only mode" and it doesn't matter if you stay or if you leave, because the "normies" are there, the "normies" have legit accounts, and they're monitoring the accounts that have something to say to them.
• stock_toaster 22d ago
  Especially rich coming from X Corp, with their xAI-Bot web scrapers.
  • dlcarrier 22d ago
    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.
    • jwilk 22d ago
      I had the same experience with XCancel, but nitter.net worked for me.
• afavour 22d ago
  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.
  • koe123 22d ago
    I hope the EU makes it illegal
    • jorisw 22d ago
      Yes, more regulations from the EU is what the internet needs /s
    • PowerElectronix 21d ago
      "And the monkey's paw curled a finger"
    • holgerschurig 21d ago
      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.
      • koe123 20d ago
• zmmmmm 22d ago
  Moves like this are nearly always a precursor to a user hostile change of some kind. I suppose anybody who didn't leave already are likely so rusted on they still won't budge, but people should definitely look for open alternatives at this point.
• negura 22d ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46509019
  • jambalaya8 22d ago
    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.
    • wredcoll 22d ago
      > We sorta fumbled things after we, to put it bluntly, nuked the Japanese twice What?
      • NateEag 22d ago
        I believe OP is saying that the US has not been reliably sane in its public policy since ending WW II via nuclear warfare. 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).
• inatreecrown2 22d ago
  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.
• Funes- 22d ago
  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.
  • adrian17 22d ago
    > 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.
    • Funes- 22d ago
      This is why I wrote "well" in quotation marks and used expressions like "potentially of value". You missed the whole point.
• thataccount 22d ago
  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.
  • userbinator 22d ago
    It's likely not him directly, but the big legal teams of lawyers that need things to do.
• georgemcbay 22d ago
  I guess I'll just never read another tweet again. For the past year or so I've only ever read them (rarely, and only when tipped off about something worth reading from an external source) via xcancel. Would rather just not read anything on twitter ever again than be forced to the actual site.
• altcognito 22d ago
  Wait until Musk discovers that without these additional services, people will care even less about what happens there.
  • overfeed 22d ago
    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.
• avadodin 22d ago
  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.
• S0y 22d ago
  https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ https://bsky.app/ https://bsky.app/ https://www.threads.com/ https://www.threads.com/ Pick literally any one of those, just seriously, if you're still on that platform, leave.
  • numpad0 22d ago
    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.
  • davidw 22d ago
    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-elon-musk-s-x https://publiccomment.blog/p/it-is-past-time-for-you-to-quit...
  • loufe 22d ago
    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.
    • Barrin92 22d ago
      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.
      • pibaker 22d ago
        Aren't many big mastodon instances talking about blocking Threads? 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.
        • 22d ago
• yonran 22d ago
  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.
  • dawnerd 22d ago
    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
• wassup_m8 22d ago
  A still-working Nitter instance here: https://nitter.rdrama.net https://nitter.rdrama.net
• alex1138 22d ago
  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
  • alightsoul 22d ago
    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
• hoshi73 22d ago
  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.)
  • cbeach 22d ago
    It's not insane if you're trying to build a social network without bots and foreign interference.
    • jdiff 22d ago
      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.
      • cbeach 22d ago
        X.com makes it nearly impossible to run bot accounts, with its phone number per account requirement, and the astronomical fees for using its API. 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.
        • numpad0 22d ago
          That's just a lie. Twitter has been overrun by "verified" African-Middle Eastern spambots posting completely nonsensical spams since AFTER it was bought. It's clearly connected to someone higher up than its head of products, considering said head of products was forced to rollback an anti-spam measure at least once.
        • dgellow 22d ago
          Just Google « buy x.com retweets » or similar and you will see a dozen company offering their services. Doesn’t look like a lack of activity on that area
• joshdavham 22d ago
  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!
• vmnb 22d ago
  s ot we dott comm
• abustamam 22d ago
  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.
• pibaker 22d ago
  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?
  • happytoexplain 22d ago
    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).
    • sellmesoap 22d ago
      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.
  • numpad0 22d ago
    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.
  • zamadatix 22d ago
    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.
• segmondy 22d ago
  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.
• mmooss 22d ago
  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.
• rustcleaner 22d ago
  In response to this, we should push to directly tax Elon Musk's wealth. :^)
• Trung0246 22d ago
  In the meanwhile for anyone that have android, use QuaX (still requires account)
• zem 22d ago
  could we have a moratorium on twitter links here?
• huebnerob 22d ago
  Sad, if inevitable.
• w-ll 22d ago
  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.
• senderista 22d ago
  well I guess I won't be reading anything on that hellsite anymore
• trompetenaccoun 22d ago
  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.
  • rustcleaner 22d ago
    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.
• ChrisArchitect 22d ago
  Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49440786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49440786
• tlogan 22d ago
  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?
  • dlcarrier 22d ago
    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.
  • deleted 20d ago
    [deleted]
• strenholme 22d ago
  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.
• informal007 22d ago
  A dump question, can we use Internet Archive for that?
• helpprotactiniu 22d ago
  does any one even use twitter any more? that place is a cesspool.
• DoctorOetker 22d ago
  If the courts consider these cease and desist orders authoritatively valid, does that mean all notary services are under threat?
• kocial 22d ago
  [flagged]
  • jscd 22d ago
    wow absolutely not
• deleted 22d ago
  [deleted]
• gverrilla 22d ago
  Great news, as twitter becomes less relevant everyday.
• tesnorindian 22d ago
  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.
• raver1975 22d ago
  Someone should make a Twitter competitor.
• vmnb 22d ago
  sot we dot comm
• franczesko 22d ago
  There still are alternatives. I don't plan to create an account on X anytime soon. Platformized Internet sucks.
  • jwilk 22d ago
    What are they?
    • alightsoul 22d ago
      Bluesky and mastodon
      • jwilk 22d ago
        I thought we were talking about alternative ways to read Twitter. Alternative microblogging services are not of any help to me, because nobody (that I wanted to read) posts there.
        • alightsoul 21d ago
          Repost their content then.
    • franczesko 21d ago
      https://twitterwebviewer.com/ https://twitterwebviewer.com/
• koe123 22d ago
  Did we ever figure out fully decentralized hosting? I.e. nodes so small they cannot sustainably cease and desist?
  • alightsoul 22d ago
    The fediverse and at protocol come to mind but every fediverse server has unique content
• rtrann 22d ago
  There's always bluesky, great app and vision there.
  • lukeify 21d ago
    And an equally polarising and delusional userbase, like X, just on the other side of the spectrum. No thanks.
    • rtrann 21d ago
      Still though, if I had to pick... I'm sure there's great communities on either really.
• nottorp 22d ago
  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?
• lofaszvanitt 22d ago
  Gabe Newell said it eloquently about gaming piracy that it is a service problem not a money issue. Twitter has a UI/UX issue, and instead of fixing the clusterfuck, they decide to nuke sane alternatives. Maybe they live off of people's pain, and without that they can't function. Interesting times we live in.
  • danielbarla 22d ago
    I agree with Gabe Newell's take, however it absolutely is _also_ a money issue (which Steam went a long way to alleviating with regional pricing). Median PPP ratios for other continents are: Asia ~2.76x, Africa ~2.76x, Europe ~1.58x, etc. Currently new AAA titles debut for 60 to 80 USD. I'm wondering what the piracy situation would look like in the USA, if this was, say 160 to 220 USD; because that is what paying US prices feels like to the median person.
• ElShmusk 22d ago
  I wonder what bs reason he came up and out of his butt. Such a snowflake he is.
• antibarbarus 22d ago
  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.
• Nemo_bis 22d ago
  Nitter accepts donations at https://liberapay.com/zedeus https://liberapay.com/zedeus
• flaburgan 21d ago
  Actual announcement on https://nitter.net/ 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
• flaburgan 21d ago
  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 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.
  • leobg 21d ago
    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.
    • flaburgan 21d ago
      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.
      • thih9 21d ago
        Could X similarly shut down a project like this with a cease and desist?
• aquir 21d ago
  What a shame, I've used the Twitter/X -> RSS quite a lot to follow accounts.
• monneyboi 21d ago
  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?
  • rplnt 21d ago
    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.
  • Gareth321 21d ago
    Bluesky's community is more toxic than X has ever been. I'd rather hang out on 4chan.
    • kijashdkujdfhas 21d ago
      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.
• skeledrew 21d ago
  Shouldn't be using X at all, even via proxy. Should have anticipated this happening eventually :shrugs:.
• encody 21d ago
  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.
  • maipen 21d ago
    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.
    • encody 21d ago
      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.
    • Your_ID_Collect 21d ago
      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 https://help.x.com/en/rules-and-policies/verification-policy This must be Musk's "free speech absolutism".
• maelito 21d ago
  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.
  • ecshafer 21d ago
    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?
  • earth-tattoo 21d ago
    [flagged]
    • deleted 21d ago
      [deleted]
    • dschu 21d ago
      [flagged]
      • enaaem 21d ago
        Slippery slope into gulags.
      • artisinal 21d ago
        I’m curious about the original comment now
        • thrance 21d ago
          You can enable "showdead" in the settings to see the content of such comments. But beware, there's some truly heinous stuff sometimes.
• docheinestages 21d ago
  This is only a problem because people keep using X. Just stop.
• deng 21d ago
  PSA: You can follow any Twitter account on Mastodon via `<account>@bird.makeup`.
• fsuts 21d ago
  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
• dschu 21d ago
  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
• hoverflo 21d ago
  XCancel was usefull, but so be it. I will see less content from X. Probably better this way.
• LightBug1 21d ago
  I appreciate xcancel to see things on HN or elsewhere ... But really, is anyone still using SHITTER? ... holy fck ...
• dsdsavafdv 21d ago
  [flagged]
• expedited123 21d ago
  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.
  • kevin_thibedeau 21d ago
    It's glorious. We no longer have to stumble into a blog post split into dozens of tweets.
  • Razengan 21d ago
    Someone should be putting AI to the test and make it walk the talk by making a viable alternative to Facebook/Twitter etc :)
    • mannycalavera42 21d ago
      this one :thumb-up
    • phoghed 21d ago
      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.
      • flyinghamster 21d ago
        Not just hard, but expensive as well. That's where the net really falls down. It's trivial to reach an audience of millions with text, but when you move to audio the data transfer starts to balloon, and if you're serving video it jumps to a whole new level of insanity. And then you have to think about the cost of the infrastructure, whether you're buying it outright or renting it from the likes of AWS, Google, or Akamai.
    • 21d ago
• lousken 21d ago
  who cares about c&d? just host it outside of us
  • iamnothere 21d ago
    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.
    • 0xd00d00 21d ago
      [dead]
  • duskdozer 21d ago
    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.
  • CM30 21d ago
    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?
    • alightsoul 21d ago
      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.
  • alightsoul 21d ago
    Apparently meta can still sue foreign individuals in California if you scrape 300k accounts like a Turkish man did
• imrehg 21d ago
  Ripping off the plaster moment? One can only hope.
• Laurel1234 21d ago
  [dead]
• delegate 21d ago
  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.
  • arrowsmith 21d ago
    Whatever happened to "Twitter can do what it wants, it's a private platform"?
    • johnnyanmac 21d ago
      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.
      • arrowsmith 21d ago
        So it was never about principles, it was only about who was in charge. Colour me shocked.
    • hamdingers 21d ago
      Have you heard of the Goomba fallacy?
      • arrowsmith 21d ago
• esarbe 21d ago
  That's it for me. No more twitter. Elmo really has ruined it.
  • giov4 21d ago
    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.
    • pxndxx 21d ago
      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.
      • giov4 21d ago
        that's what I believed and did too till now, but would be good to remove the problem completely finally.
  • conradfr 21d ago
    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.
    • electriclove 21d ago
      Sad to see you getting downvotes for facts. What you stated is exactly what I witnessed myself.
• khalic 21d ago
  Any ideas for a decentralized version of these services? Maybe something tied into the fediverse?
  • atomicfiredoll 21d ago
    It's that exactly what Mastodon already is? https://mastodon.social https://mastodon.social
  • the_interloper 21d ago
    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
    • khalic 21d ago
      no i mean a replacement for nitter and xcancel there's still a lot of info you can only find on twitter
      • insomniacity 21d ago
        https://sr.ht/~cloutier/dotmakeup/ https://sr.ht/~cloutier/dotmakeup/
        • khalic 21d ago
          thank you kind stranger
      • alightsoul 21d ago
        Repost it on the fediverse
  • icy 21d ago
    Bluesky?
• pohl 21d ago
  Nitter and Xcancel should just announce that they’re training an LLM. Seems to be a get-out-of-scrape free card these days.
  • londons_explore 21d ago
    Presumably you also need a billion dollar team of lawyers to use that card...
• giamma 21d ago
  https://www.theregister.com/legal/2026/08/26/nitter-no-more-x-sends-in-the-lawyers-to-shut-down-open-source-project/5292548 https://www.theregister.com/legal/2026/08/26/nitter-no-more-...
• giamma 21d ago
  Possible alternative? https://twitterwebviewer.com/ https://twitterwebviewer.com/
  • dagurp 13d ago
    also down
• seydor 21d ago
  "SpaceX takes down nitter"
• pino83 21d ago
  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.
• myko 21d ago
  Twitter is just bots and nazis today, not really worth trying to save
  • Your_ID_Collect 21d ago
    "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.
    • unethical_ban 21d ago
      Or because the masses of normies haven't left it and presenters want eyeballs.
• dzonga 21d ago
  these things have to be operated from Russia or some country that has total independence from US legal system.
• fnoef 21d ago
  I dont understand how come there are still people who use the garbage website named X/Twitter.
• paulnpace 21d ago
  I wish for definitelynotnitter.net, where people just copy paste from accounts they follow and otherwise non-interactive.
• outside1234 21d ago
  Why are people still using X is the real question? STOP USING THIS THING for hundreds of reasons, including this.
• lenerdenator 21d ago
  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.
• eddieroger 21d ago
  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.
• knowaveragejoe 21d ago
  So where are the alternatives popping up?
• raffael_de 21d ago
  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.
• everdrive 21d ago
  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.
• akshay_akula 21d ago
  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.
• silexia 21d ago
  Good riddance, X is the best news platform.
• aillia 21d ago
  You can still use: twitterwebviewer.com nitter.kareem.one
• maxglute 21d ago
  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.
• butz 21d ago
  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.
• nojvek 21d ago
  xcancel go it at at another domain? Like xancel.com
• nojvek 21d ago
  World’s richest guy. And this is the hill he wants to fight on.
• shikck200 20d ago
  Who TF wants to use Twitter? Its the worst echo chamber out there.
  • philipallstar 20d ago
    > Who TF wants to use Twitter? Its the worst echo chamber out there. It's certainly more diverse than Bluesky, if this is an echo chamber-measuring contest.
    • Gareth321 20d ago
      It's crazy to see the same people accusing X of being an echo-chamber suggesting Bluesky without a hint of irony or interospection.
    • tonyhart7 20d ago
      [flagged]
  • alexnewman 20d ago
    And hacker news is a diverse pluralistic utopia
    • VCFundedGenYer 20d ago
      I thought "reddit moments" were bad, I never thought there'd be something worse.
    • spiderfarmer 20d ago
      Whataboutisms do nothing to refute genuine criticisms.
      • mieses 20d ago
        what about throwing stones in glass houses now?
      • phoghed 20d ago
• brachkow 20d ago
  Quick reminder: Somewhere just around three years ago, we were able to access all Twitter data via API And at that exact same time, we could access Reddit without login/app
• himata4113 20d ago
  urgh, there goes my automatic redirect... any alternatives? Although, I don't see how this will hold up in court as they're pretty much an archive-like site hosting UGC.
  • r721 20d ago
    >any alternatives? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49449576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49449576
    • dagurp 13d ago
      down
• matesz 20d ago
  Ex-x account holder here. Even if the world is going to fall and details about this even will be accessible exclusively behind X login wall, I am not setting up the account there again, NO WAY. I wholeheartedly recommend you do the same - remove your account and forget about it. Almost certainly you won't miss it, as I didn't miss it. And there is a big chance you will get a big sight of relief, as I did. If you really must, use https://twitterwebviewer.com/ https://twitterwebviewer.com/ which imo has better interface than Nitter.
  • Banditoz 20d ago
    I disagree. Nitter's big pull was lightweight SSR, this site is not that. Nitter also actually _looks like_ Twitter more than this site!
  • 0xblinq 20d ago
    I do want to remove my account there. But when I was doing it, I got a big warning that anyone could come up and register that handle for themselves. So I instead ended up just deleting every post, my personal details, and left the account alone (not using it anymore). I know they do this intentionally (it's bad intentions all over the place on social networks nowadays, except HN, of course). I'm terrified of somebody else just creating the account with the same handle I used to have, and impersonate me across old friends and contacts. What do you suggest?
    • bean469 20d ago
      You can just inform your friends that you will be deleting your twitter account
      • 0xblinq 20d ago
        That doesn't work. Many people following me on Twitter only know me from Twitter and I don't have other means to reach out. Some others I'm not even interested in talking to them (not friends, just ex co-workers, ex gf, etc).
    • mentalgear 20d ago
• garo-pro 20d ago
  It's quite unfortunate, a lot of people or organisations I am interested in - AI for example - only post on X, and perhaps it's only a matter of time until services like bird.makeup also get taken down. Also, accessibility wise it's sad too, X's web interface is not the best out there and without login you cannot do really much.
  • alpineman 20d ago
    Is it so hard for them to crosspost automatically to all platforms? I always wonder why they don't post elsewhere in this day and age
    • dec0dedab0de 20d ago
      If AI really is democratizing technology, it won’t be long before we get back to everyone having a personal website. I remember blowing everyone’s mind when i wrote a php script to scrape my bands myspace to keep our website up to date with show details. It was like a magic trick. That sort of power is in the hands of the masses now, they just don’t know it yet.
• maelito 20d ago
  Just switch to Bsky.app or mu.social (european version, same global network).
  • embedding-shape 20d ago
    I'm well aware of what bsky.app is, and for others, there is a "Help" link at least, except it's not super clear. But on mu.social, how can I learn about what it actually is? It's missing a "What is mu.social?" link or something. Ironically, they have a "Donate" link/button, but no "About".
    • SSLy 20d ago
      https://hello.mu.social/ https://hello.mu.social/
      • embedding-shape 20d ago
        How do you find that from https://mu.social https://mu.social? Starting to wonder if I'm slightly blind.
        • MadameMinty 20d ago
          Click either "Privacy" or "Terms" on the right, and then go home. Trivial and intuitive. /s
          • embedding-shape 20d ago
            Ah, they've done the "app on root domain, information on sub-domain" move rather than the classic "information on root domain, app on sub-domain", a brave choice indeed :)
  • dist-epoch 20d ago
    How do I follow AI news or discussions on Bsky? It's basically viewed and treated there as worse than nazi propaganda.
• nicole_express 20d ago
  My hope is that this reduces the relevancy of Twitter; a lot of people who consider it a moral reason not use X.com proper end up still using Nitter/Xcancel to keep an eye on discussions, which has helped reduce the reason to leave the site. But in reality I suspect that group isn't actually large enough to have much impact, especially since some will just give in and register on the Everything App.
  • OhMeadhbh 20d ago
    I was a twitter beta tester in 2005 when it was a SMS to intarwebs gateway. IMHO, it stopped being relevant sometime around 2008.
  • ljm 20d ago
    Going cold turkey on Twitter (and Facebook and the like) was amazing, but the problem for a while was that you'd still end up browsing it by proxy because it would all get screenshotted for Reddit. It's been a long time since I've seen them (thank god), but the worst culprits were subs like facepalm, white people twitter, leopards ate my face, and pretty much any left-leaning or liberal sub. They did a fantastic job of platforming the ideologies they stand against simply by screenshotting the most vocal advocates and talking heads and sharing them so commenters could get angry. That shit lived rent free in the subscribers' heads to an unhealthy degree and for everybody who hate-engaged, there were plenty more who saw it as an introduction. One day I'll do for Reddit what I did for the rest of social media but for now it's easy enough to stay off Popular and All and just stick with the smaller subs with a specific subject matter.
• OhMeadhbh 20d ago
  I stopped virtually all social media (except commenting on YouTube videos and telling people they're wrong in HN comments) years ago. No twitter, no mastadon, no bsky, no facebook. I keep hearing myspace is going to re-launch and I would consider getting an account there for the purposes of irony. But... instead of tweeting for an hour a day, I spend that hour reading long form dead tree format texts. I'm not saying this is what you should do, just offering it as an observation that it is an option.
  • mvdwoord 20d ago
    You are so awesome for that.
  • freewilly23 20d ago
    yeah i have been doing the same for a few months now.. deleted all social media accounts and blocked sites like reddit, twitter etc., so i don't get into the trap of 'only quickly checking'. hn is the only social media site i still visit. it's done wonders for my mental.
  • ttoinou 20d ago
    Somebody should relaunch that dead tree format into a new tree format
    • contravariant 20d ago
      No need, it's like emacs, it has a stable cult following that keeps the whole thing going even as alternatives come and go.
  • deleted 20d ago
    [deleted]
  • SaltyBackendGuy 20d ago
    Same. My last vice is Reddit, which I really need to quit.
    • 20d ago
• mnls 20d ago
  You can still selfhost it. You might lose the privacy benefit and you got to have an account to get session token etc but the tracking is way less than using X's app/browser and Nitter is extremely lightweight on resources both at server level and at client.
• Yizahi 20d ago
  Well, I'll just don't read Xitter then (not that I did it anyway). Let that dump bubble and isolate itself, if they wish it so hard.
• neuronsong 20d ago
  Stopped using social media a few years ago (deleted all content and stopped using the accounts). Finally got annoyed enough and wrote my own NopeMod in tampermonkey last year that scans all pages I visit and disables URLs of links I do NOT want to visit. X/twitter/facebook/etc...
• progbits 20d ago
  Proposal: Ban twitter domain for HN submissions. Reasoning: inaccessible to HN users. OP should find another source or mirror.
  • tistoon 20d ago
    [flagged]
    • MisterTea 20d ago
      My cave has running water and gigabit internet you insensitive clod.
• deleted 20d ago
  [deleted]
• ds9vnqosdvnoqsd 18d ago
  [dead]