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neilv 11 hours ago [-]
A non-technological way to give negative feedback to Twitter/X is to stop using it, even "just reading an occasional post".
Continuing to read things on it, even through Nitter, is in the interests of Twitter/X and of the people who continue to support Twitter/X by posting there.
Tell the people who use it no. The decent people won't hear them on Twitter/X, and the decent people will wonder what's wrong with them if they persist in supporting that thing.
Tech industry circles nowadays are sometimes tinged with individualist selfish "take whatever you can" thinking, and anarchic or even underhanded methods. Including the thinking "an express no doesn't mean no, if i can find a way to take it from them anyway."
Grassroots collective social action can work, if it isn't constantly undermined by selfish and short-sighted taking.
lrvick 6 hours ago [-]
I agree with everything you said and abandoned my Twitter account and everything on it years ago for these reasons.
Everything, except for your usage of anarchism to imply chaos or disorder, which is a common misunderstanding. Anarchism, particularly the flavor I subscribe to which is Social Anarchism, is a pursuit of social order, freedom, and prosperity without centralized authorities like Musk.
gchamonlive 4 hours ago [-]
Anarchism is questioning authority for authority sake. If you put yourself in the place of authority to tell other people what's anarchism you are in for a bad time.
The disagreement is the key value of anarchism. The dialectical pendulum, the exchange of ideas. Disagreeing is expressing anarchism, even if you disagree with the other party's understanding of anarchism.
lrvick 3 hours ago [-]
My explanation is in line with the community maintained Wikipedia articles and their sources based on a long history of anarchist history and writings, and none of it seems to be under any significant dispute.
One does not need to be in a position of authority above others to help ensure discussions are grounded in common definitions of what words mean.
gchamonlive 2 hours ago [-]
The irony of you pulling credentials to illustrate how right you are about anarchism tells how much you don't understand it even if you understand the definition of the word. Anarchy is negative self-referential, you can't really define it universally without creating a paradox. For instance, even in this case that I might be right in explaining this to you, I'm wrong if I say this is anarchism categorically.
lrvick 2 hours ago [-]
What credentials? I just pointed to supporting evidence I used the word in the way it is most commonly and publicly defined.
Meanwhile you shared your own meaning as correct with no supporting evidence it is a definition commonly shared.
You are free to make up your own special definitions of words that few if any share if you like. You can use the word cat to refer to a dog, for instance. It is not going to help you communicate with the majority of people who speak a mostly shared dialect of written english where words have well documented common knowledge meanings though, but you do you.
gchamonlive 2 hours ago [-]
So in good faith I went to dig a bit what's the holdout in our debate here, and it's because I didn't understand two separate uses of anarchism, the one that's epistemological, anarchism as anti-foundationalism, my point, and your point that's political. In political anarchism we don't have this pressure to question every single thing, so when you said Socialist Anarchism I should have gone and read what that is had I known this distinction beforehand.
TLDR, you are right and I'm not necessarily wrong, we were just talking about two different things.
gchamonlive 2 hours ago [-]
Neither making up words nor shoving their definitions in people's faces will help neither of us communicate with anyone else. These types of conversations have to happen in good faith where you assume the other party isn't a moron and conduct a productive conversation, like this one.
The fact you address little to none of my points is an indicative that while you are a very good thesaurus, you don't understand much hermeneutics.
gchamonlive 1 hours ago [-]
One thing, I meant "Anarchism is questioning authority for authority sake" that's one single thing.
slowin 6 hours ago [-]
Thank you for saying this. I totally agree with the OPs comment, but the use of anarchism is off. In fact collectivist anarchism is likely to improve the situation and at least, in theory, produce less predatory entities.
No, sorry. Political activists do not get to decide for everyone else what words mean.
mitxela 3 hours ago [-]
I don't know if this works. They have their target audience. A different audience avoiding it doesn't make them shut down. I don't like sportsball, but me not watching a sportsball game doesn't make the league shut down.
wolvoleo 11 hours ago [-]
> Tech industry circles nowadays are sometimes tinged with individualist selfish "take whatever you can" thinking, and anarchic or even underhanded methods. Including the thinking "an express no doesn't mean no, if i can find a way to take it from them anyway"
I agree with that though. It's better to circumvent than to submit and do what you're told.
The same way piracy keeps streaming services somewhat honest, I'm sure that if piracy didn't exist, subscriptions would be even pricier.
rpdillon 9 hours ago [-]
> I agree with that though. It's better to circumvent than to submit and do what you're told.
Not always. Sometimes the rules are stupid, and by simply obeying them, their stupidity becomes apparent. The governments that are trying to force Facebook and Google to pay to link to their news stories are a great example. The governments foolishly assumed that the media companies would comply by paying, but instead they chose to comply by leaving. Leaving is a powerful signal.
throw0101a 5 hours ago [-]
> Sometimes the rules are stupid, and by simply obeying them, their stupidity becomes apparent.
This probably has to be in a "maliciously compliant" fashion though, as otherwise if you 'sort of' follow them things may actually still function. The point is often to show that things would not work if things were done by the book, so as to encourage the book to be rewritten or thrown out.
apefulsin 6 hours ago [-]
They're not paying to link. They're paying to summarise, because people read the summary and don't go to the news site.
apefulsin 6 hours ago [-]
We can test this. Piracy used to exist and streaming services were cheap and good. Then piracy didn't exist because of that, and streaming services got expensive and worse. Now piracy exists again.
ipaddr 5 hours ago [-]
Piracy existed before,during and after. Things are getting expensive and profits are increasing because growth has slowed and investors want either growth in users or profits.
br0ceph 3 hours ago [-]
piracy for many, exists due to the freedoms it provides.
freedom todo format shift, copy, share, preserve, and largely a freedom from surveillance.
noone should be able to see what media u are viewing without ur explicit permission.
everytime u stream or buy, records of ur activity are created, and profiles are shared with brokers.
piracy done right, elimates all capitalism, but especially surveillance capitalism, and top down control over users of media
cindyllm 3 hours ago [-]
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5 hours ago [-]
bayesnet 10 hours ago [-]
The piracy thing is a bit backwards I think. Piracy is a consequence of subscription price so higher prices induce more piracy. The only way piracy doesn’t exist is if all content is free to begin with
aftbit 9 hours ago [-]
There's subscription cost, then there's other factors, like DRM, usability, single source, etc. If you want to find the latest media, you can either hunt for it on one among several subscription services or you can find it on any of the big torrent sites. Once you torrent it, you can watch it on any or every device, without internet, forever.
If first party media companies sold one-off DRM free downloads of movies and TV shows for a reasonable price (not even that cheap, just not requiring bundling with other content you don't want to see), I bet that'd have more of an impact on piracy rates than lowering subscription prices by 10% or whatever.
miki123211 7 hours ago [-]
No.
Music is basically sold like that (Itunes does it for example), and very very few people use it. There are probably some, but I don't personally know any — and I know plenty of music lovers with huge collections.
Normies want to have access to everything at the click of a button, and they don't want to be worrying about disk space, cross device synchronization or organizing files in directories. Streaming is perfect for them, especially in the mobile age (I bet many people had access to more disk space in 2013 than they had in 2021 or have in 2026).
People who would want to be normies but can't afford it (often in E.G. 3rd world countries) use Youtube with ads, Spotify with ads or pirated "free unlocked Spotify" apps on their Android phones. Music geeks want more music than they could possibly afford, so they use ${whatever this week's Deezer grabber is} or just get an account on Redacted. The anti-corporate left / retro people just buy vinyl, CDs or maybe tapes, depending on preference.
Paying to see a movie (versus paying to own a movie) has been a longstanding tradition in the movie industry (cinemas, rentals). If anything, being able to outright own movies was a short blip, and a weird consequence of how media worked at the time, which was annoying to most of the population more than anything else.
rpdillon 6 hours ago [-]
With power comes responsibility, and I think responsibility has fallen out of fashion. I think this comes down to the definition of "want", and I talk to my kids about this because I wish we had a different word. Yes, I want to have the piece of cake tonight, but I would also want to not have diabetes in 20 years. People want instant access to the entirety of music produced by humanity for a flat fee, but they also want to be able to access their music even if the industry that provides that service goes away. Curating a collection requires some responsibility and discipline, which is more work than just paying 15 bucks for the service and pressing play. But it also gives you access to that material in 20 years, which the service does not.
What the industry has successfully done is have people learn that for 15 or 20 years they can cave in to their want of convenience. People don't seem to care today that they'll have to pay the price in 15 years, but they will care in 15 years.
Nothing made this more evident than people buying digital movies from Sony, only to find that the rights to access the movie they purchased have been revoked. People are so sick of it in fact that they're now inventing new words like in enshitification to capture the idea that they have been brought in to an ecosystem that they're trapped in and now feel like they can't escape even though it's getting worse. People's love of convenience is the mechanism of their capture by the business.
ipaddr 5 hours ago [-]
In fairness once you've seen a movie its value drops with most never getting a second viewing. Them having the ability to take back that awful movie doesn't hurt as much as a song.
apefulsin 4 hours ago [-]
You do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"
lrvick 3 hours ago [-]
I have the largest physical media collection of anyone I know. I will buy things I can actually own, but with digital media the studios and labels have ensured purchasing no longer means ownership, and thus digital piracy is not stealing.
phlakaton 9 hours ago [-]
And the reason that piracy doesn't exist in that case is because the creators have all had to go out of business. ;-)
Wowfunhappy 6 hours ago [-]
I don't think it's good to make myself less informed. I have no intention of chatting on Twitter casually or browsing it for fun, but if a major announcement is posted only on Twitter—and I don't know why people keep doing that, but they do—I want to read the original source.
4 hours ago [-]
randunel 6 hours ago [-]
Name and shame them.
esskay 6 hours ago [-]
Literally every single UK government entity, town/city council, every public transport company, etc. They all use it sadly.
kwarcode 3 hours ago [-]
Any specific examples where twitter was the only way?
doublepg23 2 hours ago [-]
As an anecdote from the States: During July 4th our city had some poor weather and the best way to check the status of any celebrations going on was their Twitter page.
alightsoul 4 hours ago [-]
We have to move people to mastodon or bluesky. Stop using x Twitter
mitxela 1 hours ago [-]
Websites. It's websites. We're not moving from centralised platform A to centralised platform B in an age where people are giving up on centralised platforms altogether.
8note 7 hours ago [-]
> Tech industry circles nowadays are sometimes tinged with individualist selfish "take whatever you can" thinking, and anarchic or even underhanded methods. Including the thinking "an express no doesn't mean no, if i can find a way to take it from them anyway."
i see twitter's takedowns as the same? its claiming ownership over content it only has a license to
nitter is an instance of collective social action - it only works because people who want to post on and use twitter then mirror stuff to nitter
arjie 7 hours ago [-]
> Tech industry circles nowadays are sometimes tinged with individualist selfish "take whatever you can" thinking, and anarchic or even underhanded methods. Including the thinking "an express no doesn't mean no, if i can find a way to take it from them anyway."
Is that particularly tech industry? Software and media piracy, ad block tools, etc. are all based on this principle.
beanjuiceII 9 hours ago [-]
you need a mental check if you think there are not decent people who use and enjoy X
jcims 7 hours ago [-]
I've gone through several cycles of religion in my life. In various parts of that spectrum I've wondered why humans invented it. Five decades deep it's becoming more and more evident to me that there is some kind of deeply ingrained need for it in wide swaths of humanity...regardless of what it actually looks like in practice.
codersfocus 5 minutes ago [-]
I don’t understand what your question has to do with op but I’ll explain it to you.
Religion and language are very similar, both in how they are transmitted and how they shift.
The latter systematizes thought and the former emotions.
Language is encoded by vocal utterances, characters, hand gestures, etc…
Religion by rituals, stories, customs. The purpose of it is to handle the common emotional needs of man. The starting point is the grief that comes from a dead person -> you need a ritual to handle the body and process emotions.
Next you need to handle who has sex with whom as that is another big area of emotional turbulence in man.
Then relationships between parent and child. And so on…
Write it down and get people to follow it, you have a religion. Which will shift and split over time as does language.
It can be completely distinct from the origin of everything though many choose to incorporate deities into their stories to give weight and meaning, this harnesses the inherent respect for father figures people tend to be born with to achieve this.
customguy 9 hours ago [-]
If THEY would use themselves as excuse for the rest, like you do with them, I wouldn't consider them decent people. There are decent people in the US military and police force, there may be even a stray decent ICE agent. I bet you there's decent people getting sent into the meat grinder by Putin, too. But if any of them were adamant about not wanting to hear about all sorts of fuckery of what they are part of or any overarching context, because they are oh so decent, they're not decent, they're just spineless. It's subjective anyway, and bitching about it never ever helps the verdict.
ipython 6 hours ago [-]
The trouble is that many us government figures exclusively post information via x (and to some extent Facebook as well)
6 hours ago [-]
mrobot 10 hours ago [-]
i too was thinking the Star Dink may just welcome nitter anyway
evan_ 7 hours ago [-]
"oh you said 'nitter', yeah that's OK"
bluecalm 5 hours ago [-]
What is that with this random hate? There are tons of decent people posting/reading X. I am sure most of them do it because they like the site.
Maybe because random detached from reality hate comments like that don't get much engagement.
This all already happened, it's called bluesky, and the "decent" (people who agree with you on politics) people had their exodus already
orwin 10 hours ago [-]
To me, the divide Twitter/Bluesky is the divide between terminally only idiots and terminally online simpletons (you decide which is which). Decent people are on neither.
dminik 10 hours ago [-]
I see that they're not on HN either.
Gareth321 8 hours ago [-]
I don't know how HN has remained as chill as it has compared to other social media platforms, but I'm grateful. I can still have deep conversations here without people losing their minds and yelling expletives and death threats. It feels a lot like forums or Reddit back in the 2000s.
Zetaphor 8 hours ago [-]
dang and team tread carefully but carry a big stick
tekla 3 hours ago [-]
HN remains chill because 99% of political dissent is squashed
megagpt3 3 hours ago [-]
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efdee 6 hours ago [-]
BlueSky is so much more toxic than Twitter/X ever was. And I say that as a left-leaning centrist.
twobitshifter 6 hours ago [-]
Eh, I think you may have just been in a tighter echo chamber on twitter. If you are on bluesky the discover tab is considered a mess and may provide you with things that you aren’t interested in.
josh_p 10 hours ago [-]
There are reasonable people who can grasp nuance on both platforms, but you can't deny that twitter/x has become known as a place that allows Nazi politics on it. Just look Elon, the owner..
It's seriously disingenuous to frame the bluesky vs twitter/x as a difference in political opinion.
mitxela 1 hours ago [-]
Isn't nazi and non-nazi a political opinion difference though?
bitwize 10 hours ago [-]
You mean the people who hate Nazis? Yes, they're not on X.
yde_java 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
someothherguyy 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
wpietri 8 hours ago [-]
I was one of Twitter's first 500 users. Later, I worked at Twitter on anti-abuse. I was a big fan. But I quit using it after Musk's takeover because I didn't want to be supporting somebody who's awful in a half-dozen ways that have only become more obvious. [1] And X reflects that.
I'm not the OP, but anybody honestly wanting to know why people think good humans should not use Twitter does not have far to look.
Elon Musk is racist to the type of people who would require me to sign a statement supporting their systematically racist hiring quota if I want to do some physics research.
simplify 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
snailmailman 7 hours ago [-]
The article uses "posting about race" in the headline, but makes it pretty clear in the content that he is pushing racist white supremacist ideas.
jamal-kumar 5 hours ago [-]
Which is kind of ironic. I remember realizing that they called it nitter for specifically horrible reasons after finding the online git web panel with the source code which was called "gitler" (hitler in russian for anyone who speaks it). Can't find it now but 4 or 5 years ago it's hard to forget. It even had some kind of nazi anime theme.
4-5 years ago is also about when Kanye West started to go insane, posted the raelian swastika/star of david hybrid on twitter and elon said something like "this is not love" and banned him, which to me explains the motivations for nitter coming up in the first place
apefulsin 4 hours ago [-]
It's Twitter written in Nim. Ni- + -itter.
proxyscore 5 hours ago [-]
He did the Hitler salute twice infront of all the USA.
Still confused?
choochooo 5 hours ago [-]
“Everyone always wants to go back in time so they can kill Hitler. But I’d be afraid if they sent me back in time I’d get just caught under the spell of his beautiful fucking eyes. Knowing me I might even join the party!” -Norm
lern_too_spel 9 hours ago [-]
Those are certainly some words to describe people who share on sites that require readers to log in when there are many alternatives that don't.
9 hours ago [-]
asnf-qwpz 8 hours ago [-]
Twitter is the country club for right and left wing elites. They don't care about viewership, they want to influence each other and chat.
They have thousands of other ways to influence the masses by owning media, other discussion platforms, owning institutions and foundation members and running PR campaigns.
It is better if their actions on Twitter are observed, documented and archived rather than letting them have complete privacy. That is also why journalists of all political leanings are still there.
pvab3 8 hours ago [-]
it always seemed like a honeypot for narcissists to me. Some people just can't resist it
apefulsin 6 hours ago [-]
Are there any left wing elites?
cindyllm 6 hours ago [-]
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MostlyStable 21 hours ago [-]
The not needing an account is obviously not minor, but honestly, the UI is just better, by a lot. I made a twitter account a while ago using one of those throw away email address sites, so I have an account that I don't care about that I can use for twitter....but the experience just sucks. I don't know how any stands it, even if they don't mind needing an account.
prophesi 12 hours ago [-]
I remember the days that Bibliogram worked for Instagram. They've given up. A decade ago I could have an RSS feed for what my friends posted, besides the toxic short-form content of IG reels that everyone is now obsessed with post Meta acquisition and their battle to compete with Tiktok.
ComputerGuru 12 hours ago [-]
Instagram is actively hostile to good ui. They constantly go out of their way to break extensions that add a video scrubber.
prophesi 11 hours ago [-]
Last I was on the platform, they eventually added a tab for only chronological posts on the timeline a-la how IG used to work. But they gave no exposure to it, _and_ it completely hid the IG stories of your friends so nobody would want to use it in the first place.
rasz 9 hours ago [-]
Good UI makes it easier to be selective. social media owners dont want you to be selective, they are selling you to advertisers and influencers after all.
alex1138 2 hours ago [-]
But the view apparently is Zuckerberg bought it when they were 'barely a company'
Yes - and he's utterly ruined it. And we know from his emails it was anti-competitive
ronsor 18 hours ago [-]
The UI/UX is the main thing. I technically have an X-Twitter account that I rarely use, but loading plain HTML with a bit of JS beats loading a whole SPA experience just to read a post.
At that point though, it's like why. Reddit is, well, trash. It's barely worth visiting without an account, and if you're going to make me jump through hoops to visit, it's time to accept the message of "we don't want you here" and go somewhere else.
dolebirchwood 7 hours ago [-]
If you're browsing Reddit for its front page, yes, that's trash. But it can be a great source for getting information on narrow, specific topics on well-moderated subreddits filled with enthusiastic and obsessive people eager to share their knowledge. It's been very helpful for me when researching coffee grinders, refrigerators, solar battery backups, headphones, and other such things.
Leonard_of_Q 11 hours ago [-]
The reason to use it is that Reddit does provide the occasional answer to questions like "how to get a Samsung SCX 3400 to run on a Raspberry Pi" (etc.).
apefulsin 4 hours ago [-]
All those have been ingested by chatgpt, which ironically provides a better user experience.
nosioptar 5 hours ago [-]
Redreader still works on android.
Though, reddit's been infected by you tubers and clankers to the point that it's basically useless.
throwaway27448 13 hours ago [-]
I've been making money from reddit, and for about a decade and a half and at this point, why bother? It's basically drained and what remains is of zero value.
The only reason to use nitter is that for whatever reason twitter allows it access to its api. The UI is terrible and completely irrelevant.
prophesi 12 hours ago [-]
I could use it without an account and know that any comment I clicked into would take me to the thread of posts under it without sponsored ads or posts.
apefulsin 6 hours ago [-]
The reason is that every copy of Nitter has a list of account tokens to log in with, and pretends to be a human using those accounts.
sillyfluke 12 hours ago [-]
>the UI is the real and only reason to use Nitter.
Why is not wanting to share my reading habits with Elon not a real reason?
Saris 10 hours ago [-]
Same with Redlib for Reddit, it's just so much nicer to look at.
cebert 11 hours ago [-]
I agree. I think the UI is the best part. It seems more responsive to me too.
throooooo 20 hours ago [-]
Seriously. The UX/UI on Twitter has always been a dumpster fire.
ksenzee 19 hours ago [-]
Eh. It was pretty great in 2008, when I used my spotty cell service to tweet road trip updates by texting 40404. O tempora, o mores, etc. etc.
notpushkin 17 hours ago [-]
Haven’t had that luxury in Russia. Though being a script kiddie I’ve set up a shortcode just for myself (there were these “paid content SMS as a Service” thingies that forwarded SMS text to an HTTP endpoint you provide).
embedding-shape 13 hours ago [-]
Didn't have that luxury either, but at one point, "Twilio" was the star and poster-child of startups, with their "Guerilla marketing" and completely fresh and new roles of "developer advocates" so of course everyone and their mother had been to at least one Twilio meetup, or your local meetup with a "developer evangelist" from Twilio. Lots of us built our first SMS-capable service as a "Forward this SMS to this HTTP endpoint", I too did the SMS-to-Tweet thing as the US number didn't accept my SMSes (or wasn't available, or something).
encom 14 hours ago [-]
All of the WWW was better in 2008. Unironically. We've all been frog-boiled into this current hellscape.
moron4hire 13 hours ago [-]
There was a brief moment when smartphones first came out but the rest of the world's companies weren't taking them seriously yet that was a truly brilliant time and ever since then it's been nothing but downhill.
whateveracct 10 hours ago [-]
back on when websites were websites. HN of today on my phone reminds me of that.
hnlmorg 11 hours ago [-]
Smartphones came out in 2008. So your date aligns with the GPs.
moron4hire 10 hours ago [-]
... yes. Yes, that was the point.
hnlmorg 6 hours ago [-]
Ahh sorry. My reading comprehension was obviously failing me then.
btreecat 17 hours ago [-]
It can't suck all that much if you're not willing to give it up.
Dylan16807 16 hours ago [-]
It sounds to me like they did give up on using the builtin UI.
ichad99 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
utopiah 15 hours ago [-]
Shows the true cost of surveillance capitalism.
bluecalm 18 hours ago [-]
I think it's great. My feed is people posting tech/AI news, scientific publications, videos of rockets and self-driving cars, things made with coding agents etc. It's full of people who do meaningful work as well and you can see who they are.
Dark mode, ability to easily copy images, link to posts, see posts of interesting people by going to their profile. On top of that the feed algorithm is open source and actually sane. What else would I want?
It's by far the best designed social media site out there. I know it's a low bar but still.
embedding-shape 13 hours ago [-]
> On top of that the feed algorithm is open source
Do you genuinely believe what is public is exactly what's deployed? If so, what makes that belief justified?
bluecalm 5 hours ago [-]
Why would I doubt it? if you think they are deploying something else then it's quite a claim but it's you who need to show some evidence.
It works great anyway. I get a lot of junk I don't want to see on FB/Insta. Reddit is not even worth discussing. X is the only place with where you get a lot of people who work on interesting/important/big stuff and post frequently.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jasonvorhe 14 hours ago [-]
I'm a nostr user first and X is lurk only but I seldomly see anything by or about Musk and so does everyone else I speak to who actually uses it.
I suspect this has become more of a meme by Mastodon/Bluesky users than anything real.
Hammershaft 14 hours ago [-]
I understand you can still tailor a good experience, but if you create a fresh X account the density of Elon Musk posts is genuinely absurd. There's no way he isn't putting his thumb on the algorithm to boost his reach.
Also the density of pure hate & ragebait by mask-off fascist accounts! It shocks me how much of that I saw unprompted right away after making a new account recently.
apefulsin 4 hours ago [-]
Their "open source algorithm" (Which is actually a random code dump that does not constitute the algorithm) contains enough evidence that Elon posts are massively boosted, though no smoking gun. It also classifies politics as democrat or republican and then acts to maintain echo chambers.
epiccoleman 12 hours ago [-]
I don't really use X but I'm in a chat where I'll often follow links, and man do I see a lot of racist stuff in replies. It's gross.
grosswait 14 hours ago [-]
No different than an uncurated Reddit profile. You’ll get bombarded with garbage until effort is placed into the curation.
epiccoleman 12 hours ago [-]
I made a new reddit account for a side project a few months ago and I couldn't believe how terrible reddit is when you don't have 10 years of subreddit curation. The default experience is to be dumped into what basically amounts to "Facebook boomer slop" mixed with a ton of hustle / small business / get rich quick content.
It's an unpleasant experience. My main Reddit account doesn't "solve reddit" by any means - I often find myself thinking "man this site sucks, I should stop coming here," but the difference between that curated account and a fresh one is night and day.
jasonvorhe 13 hours ago [-]
Weird, we must have very different definitions of "fascists".
Hammershaft 7 hours ago [-]
I'm not talking about conservatives.
I mean I went from fresh account to unprompted groypers posting hitler hype edits and white nationalists posting happy merchant memes about the great replacement.
This is uniquely an X thing. It wasn't like this when I used twitter, and it isn't like that on any other socials I know.
TitaRusell 14 hours ago [-]
The Dutch PM for some reason uses X (or his PR agents do). There is always a lot of impotent homophobic rage coming from the retweets. It is all very sad.
But that's the US first amendment for you.
coldpie 13 hours ago [-]
The US first amendment has nothing to do with what a private company chooses to host on their platform. That content is there because the users and owners of the platform want it to be there.
mitxela 1 hours ago [-]
In countries without the first amendment, private companies are required to block nazi content when they see it and ban nazis when they see them.
ceejayoz 11 hours ago [-]
> The US first amendment has nothing to do with what a private company chooses to host on their platform.
The First Amendment (largely) prevents the government from choosing what a private company hosts on their platform for them.
A version of X hosted in Germany would look quite different.
11 hours ago [-]
lloydatkinson 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
teiferer 18 hours ago [-]
I can concur though. I have a rarely used account and I get Elon on top of the feed all the time. Even as mobile notifications. I don't click on them and scroll past, but they keep coming.
bsoqk 16 hours ago [-]
Have you tried blocking him? It’s always seemed an effective strategy to me when I want to stop seeing someone online.
16 hours ago [-]
charcircuit 16 hours ago [-]
The X app loads posts much faster than these sites, so I find the app has a better UI.
Zambyte 11 hours ago [-]
I wonder what data Elon is able to slurp up through the app that he can't get through the website. Seems like a good incentive to keep the site worse.
15 hours ago [-]
pronik 14 hours ago [-]
I might cut into my own flesh right now, but the funny thing about that XCancel shutdown is that while the website is down, the RSS feeds still work. Almost like they've just been required to shutdown the visible website and they complied with exactly that.
embedding-shape 13 hours ago [-]
Isn't Twitter archived by Library of Congress or something similar? Can't remember the exact details, but maybe something (enforced by law even perhaps?) is depending on those feeds with punishment sufficient enough for Elon to actually listen. Or they don't actually realize those are still online, and there is some lone engineer trying their best to never raise any attention to it and we just made their day a lot worse...
Really important for you to mention this. People just love to tell when they know something no one else does. Does "cut into my own flesh" mean that you only think you'll be affected by this becoming common knowledge?
pronik 10 hours ago [-]
I don't want to lose my feeds and someone might tell XCancel to actually shutdown everything instead of just the website. And not, I've user other Nitter instances before and they either had their RSS feeds disabled or were particularly unstable.
pessimizer 8 hours ago [-]
It's not just you would lose your feed. It's not just "your own flesh." You're exposing a very risky behavior by people who have already been served legal papers by one of the most powerful people on Earth. Your own loss is trivial.
It's also unwise behavior by xcancel. Either do it or don't do it. Half doing it will result in just as much liability as doing it, and they've already decided that doing it was too dangerous. They've made a mental error by somehow categorizing this as less to give themselves permission to do this, likely due to some sort of emotional need to be defiant.
I hope I'm wrong about the emotional need. I think they're located in Germany so maybe some lawyer found some loophole and this is a prelude to coming all the way back up (Europe hates Musk), maybe somebody simply forgot to shut down the RSS proxies because they were still running the instance personally and for friends, or maybe some asshole who had access snuck in and turned it back on.
But that's on them. My problem with your post is that you seem to think that you're risking yourself rather than snitching on others.
pronik 8 hours ago [-]
I agree on my personal worries being least important ones in the greater sense of things. But they are important to me and like you said, it's completely on xcancel to keep things on, either deliberately or by accident. Figuring out which part of XCancel they really shut down is trivial and it's certainly nothing secret that I evilly exposed.
arjie 20 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but most of these will fall. I used to use one or two of these to scrape my friends' posts because I stopped using Twitter and they'd inevitably all disappear in time. It's like chasing the latest TPB. In the end, I just logged in a headless browser and told an agent to fetch daily.
someonebaggy 19 hours ago [-]
They're all perfect substitutes. When one is down you can use another. They can't stop us all. I just wish there was a way to automatically redirect to a working instance.
netniuq 16 hours ago [-]
LibRedirect kind of does so, it's not 100% there yet
Love this extension. One stop shop and supports any custom alt front-end you want for any website you want. Usually they have all the major ones and are quick to update with mirrors when something goes down but allowing you to do it yourself is a great fallback
jasonvorhe 13 hours ago [-]
Found this Android app to work quite well. It just lacks working nitter instances right now but you can customize them:
What do you mean? TPB been online and at the exact same URL (give or take some days/weeks around raids) for like two decades, and still has the same URL today. Might not be the same group, but not sure what "chasing" you're referring to?
ahoka 12 hours ago [-]
It's distributing malware, do not use any of the "TPB" sites.
embedding-shape 12 hours ago [-]
Lol, of course, it has since day 1, and will continue to do so. I don't think anyone use these piracy websites without being aware of the risks here.
Brian_K_White 11 hours ago [-]
It's distributing everything, including things that aren't available any other way, and if you want the good you have to pluck it out of the bad.
Living without the good just to avoid that is maybe one philosophy of life, but certainly not the only valid one.
apefulsin 4 hours ago [-]
There's just no reason to ever use them when other sites are better.
That's true, but TBP has been going pretty strong for over 2 decades. It can be hard to totally shut something down, if people want it.
noduerme 19 hours ago [-]
Sadly, the music selection has fallen off a cliff, and the rest is in a sharply downward spiral... in one sense this is because the music industry finally settled on a streaming model that most people are willing to rent, and it's also because the new generation has been brainwashed or trained out of storing their own files.
conradfr 15 hours ago [-]
Soulseek is working fine.
But to be honest I never found TPB (or rarbg etc.) really useful for music.
apefulsin 4 hours ago [-]
Soulseek is centralised, and censors searches in compliance with legal requests. If you connect to someone who has censored content, the central server can't stop you grabbing it, but you have to find them another way.
petcat 11 hours ago [-]
> the new generation has been brainwashed or trained out of storing their own files.
It has very little to do with this and more just about the ubiquitous availability of 5G and always-available streaming.
I stopped caring about data hoarding once I could just access anything I wanted reliably wherever I was.
hedora 11 hours ago [-]
Streaming is getting worse fast. I basically just pay for curation, and AI slop is creating cracks in that model. Some of the musicians I like are getting crushed by sybil style attacks, where there are 10 new albums in their artist page, but only one is theirs.
Fortunately, sending a screenshot to Claude tells me what to push in a minute or so, but, unfortunately, I can’t just hand it an API endpoint and have it scrub all this crap weekly.
(No idea why the streaming service can’t just do that themselves, of course…)
Of course, for movies, it’s gotten to the point where I just drive to the used DVD store. $1-5 per movie used (including blurays); $20-30 new. I usually walk out with a dozen or so films for $100. This is easier than tpb.
jamwil 10 hours ago [-]
I am not sure what streaming service you are using but it sounds awful. I have not encountered anything like what you describe on Apple Music.
apefulsin 4 hours ago [-]
Probably Spotify
tosti 17 hours ago [-]
It's also because it's difficult to add your own magnet links.
tancop 17 hours ago [-]
It's also because torrents are a bad fit for music. The whole protocol is designed for throughput and reliability on big downloads like movies and games, not fast start on 2MB files you don't need to split with today's broadband.
A lot of uploaders still zip everything so you can't download one song out of some album. And the discoverability is shit because DHT doesn't let you ask peers for all their torrents so you need to run a server that index multiple trackers or look things up manually.
The only alternative is Soulseek where it's a direct connection model instead of hash based. That means there are no stable IDs to get a file if the original uploader is down and users can send you anything they want like troll audio or malware.
If we want people to start pirating music again we need to make the UX as good as Spotify. That means no explicit downloads, when you click play the app gets the file from a peer, saves it to a cache then starts playing and seeding automatically. Songs and albums should be content addressed in a global namespace instead of living on trackers, and there should probably be a reputation system. I think something based on iroh blobs for content and atproto for discovery can work.
15 hours ago [-]
Leonard_of_Q 14 hours ago [-]
The solution is to run your own instance, create a few accounts for it to use and put it behind a reverse proxy with basic auth. Hand out logins to a few people and it will remain useable. If you put your instance out in the open it will sooner or later end up temporarily blocked - I tried this for a few years, same results every time - but smaller instances remain useable.
It isn't hard to run an instance, just park it next to your SearXNG [1], Invidious [2], Redlib [3],PeerTube, ... instances.
Wdym "chasing the latest TPB"? Isn't 1337x and others better and offer a complete alternative?
Twitter is different there's many stories that are only there.
papyrus9244 17 hours ago [-]
> Isn't 1337x and others better and offer a complete alternative?
The best way is always private trackers. They're easy to get into, easy to keep (if you're a serious and honest person), malware free, high quality content, great community, etc.
troupo 17 hours ago [-]
> The best way is always private trackers. They're easy to get into
If they were easy to get into, they wouldn't be good
papyrus9244 17 hours ago [-]
It's as easy as buying 1 month of seedbox for around 10 bucks.
16 hours ago [-]
troupo 17 hours ago [-]
Buying a seedbox doesn't get you into a private tracker. It's a download client.
mitxela 16 hours ago [-]
mid tier trackers partner with seedbox providers who give them kickbacks for referrals, in exchange for an account
troupo 16 hours ago [-]
So. Easy to get into is: "some unspecified mid-tier trackers may or may not give out accounts to some unspecified seedbox providers".
It's probably easier to lurk in r/trackerinvites (or whatever it's called) hoping to snatch an invite
mitxela 16 hours ago [-]
Yep it's not easy. Easy was a lie. The best are actually curated public trackers. TPB is not curated.
troupo 16 hours ago [-]
Sadly, curated public ones are also harder and harder to find (for obvious reasons) :(
Gander5739 14 hours ago [-]
Rutracker's a good one.
troupo 7 hours ago [-]
It's amazing how it held up over 20-ish years. You'd think it would only get worse after removing mandatory registration 10 or so years ago. And yet...
Gander5739 6 hours ago [-]
Well, you need an account to search.
someonebaggy 19 hours ago [-]
Switching torrent sites every time one gets taken down.
But why wouldn't you?
yoavm 18 hours ago [-]
Did TPB ever change a domain? I've been using the .org domain listed on Wikipedia for as long as I can remember.
tosti 17 hours ago [-]
I don't think .org is still official. Look for an orange isometric K
yoavm 11 hours ago [-]
It seems to be the "official" one according to Wikipedia though?
TIL ublock can do this (and won't have to wait for the initial response from x.com) - see the Tips section on https://twit.0r.cx
ichad99 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
1vuio0pswjnm7 4 hours ago [-]
"They will inevitably all disappear in time."
Years ago HN commenters were making the same comment when most Nitter instances were abandoned
Meanwhile nitter.poast.org kept working for years
Then xcancel.com appeared
When there is no longer a method for an internet subscriber to read Twitter/X without the subscriber creating an account on Twitter/X (and "logging in"), then the subscriber can use a headless browser
But that time has not yet come, and no HN commenter has succeeded in predicting when exactly that time will come
The disappearance of "ad blockers" as browser extensions/add-ons may be "inevitable"
Unlike Nitter, we don't see HN commenters trying to downplay their usefulness
Free internet "services" disappear all the time, for a variety of reasons
Thats the nice thing about alternate frontends like Nitter, if the main instance goes down you can just clone the repo and make your own very easily, or choose from one of the many alternate instances out there.
I highly recommend the extension libredirect, which will redirect you to instances of your choice (or just stick with the defaults). It doesn't just work for Twitter/X, but also Reddit, Tiktok, Youtube, and many others
+ for folks using Kagi Search, you can set up a search engine level redirect (which is what I used to use for redirecting Twitter/X links to Xcancel before the takedown)
MallocVoidstar 4 hours ago [-]
> you can just clone the repo and make your own very easily
This is not the case for Nitter. It requires real X accounts to run, quite possibly hundreds or thousands for a major public instance. Creating X accounts currently requires phone number verification.
miningtcup 4 hours ago [-]
It is possible to create X accounts without a phone number. I run [service].miningtcup.me and it uses 5 accounts, none of which required phone numbers for me to create, and none of which I paid for. You just have to get creative.
apefulsin 4 hours ago [-]
It is possible to get phone numbers. And not from shady sites - I mean you can just buy them, from the bodega.
But I agree, not easy.
4 hours ago [-]
Venn1 11 hours ago [-]
I've already encountered two instances of something I was interested in learning about being linked using Nitter / XCancel, and those links are now quite deceased.
Please link to primary sources. If I need an alternative method of accessing the site, I'll figure it out.
akkartik 11 hours ago [-]
A key design decision was you only need to replace the domain in the URL. So you need only replace it back. It's not like archive.is where I need to also save the original.
klntsky 18 hours ago [-]
Is there something like a balancer that redirects me to an instance that is not down?
DavCreator 15 hours ago [-]
xxcancel.com (just add an x to xcancel.com) will redirect you to a working instance!
Unfortunately it also shut down a few days before the nitter takedowns.
netniuq 16 hours ago [-]
The LibRedirect browser extensions lets you configure a list and quickly hot between, but it doesn't check whether they are up before redirecting you to one of them iirc
I mean, I was just thinking of writing one in a few lines, so there will be one in a few minutes.
corvad 22 hours ago [-]
I guess X never heard of the Streisand effect...
noduerme 19 hours ago [-]
Elon has bought immunity to that. Streisand's flaw was that she gave a shit. Elon has unlocked the kinda reverse-Streisand that Trump has, where their popularity actually feeds on the effect.
0xDEAFBEAD 15 hours ago [-]
The internet peanut gallery will whine about literally everything under the sun. At a certain point I can see why some people would want to harness that energy for their advantage. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em and all that.
encom 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
slig 13 hours ago [-]
It's worse. Elon was very well praised by the same people, Trump was never liked.
noduerme 13 hours ago [-]
To be fair, it's possible that he changed, rather than that everyone who now hates him did.
0xDEAFBEAD 12 hours ago [-]
Many people regard Elon as a hero or villain. I regard him as a tragedy: A great entrepreneur who wrecked his sanity due to drugs, genetics, and/or overwork.
throw-the-towel 9 hours ago [-]
What if insanity is required to be a great entrepreneur?
figmert 5 hours ago [-]
Great entrepreneur is a bit of a far fetch. His own friends(?) didn't want him to be CEO of paypal back in the day.
apefulsin 4 hours ago [-]
He's just serving the profitable market niche of incompetent CEOs with golden parachutes
cmrdporcupine 11 hours ago [-]
If you read his ex-wife's account of their history together, and also the drama of what happened at PayPal etc... he was always kinda .. off.. and full of shit.
Then again, I often think that about myself. But I'm not a trillionaire.
It does sound like losing his first child at 10 weeks really messed him up. It definitely would do that to anybody.
maxlin 5 hours ago [-]
It's not him who's wrecked. It's just some poor souls who cant't stand how right he is while he expresses that with autistic crudeness.
Musk is the same guy he was 10 years ago, still working his ass off on visionary projects, beating rest of the world on those fronts. And we love him for that!
Vaslo 8 hours ago [-]
I guess if that’s how you have to make yourself feel better about the worlds first trillionaire and his success after success, have at it.
phoghed 7 hours ago [-]
I don’t even understand what this comment is trying to imply
mitxela 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
alex1138 2 hours ago [-]
It's funny because I think the original Streisand 'effect' was done in good faith. She just didn't want people taking photos of her private home. It's since been used to justify all manner of silencing actions on the part of others
raffael_de 17 hours ago [-]
oh, that's great. i thought the project is dead.
how would you (EDIT: publicly) host such a nitter instance while avoiding the risk of legal consequences?
since old.reddit (EDIT: on mobile) is closed for visitors without an account it would be great if there was also a neddit project.
Seems to work decently well, I've seen it being linked to on HN.
mitxela 16 hours ago [-]
You just host it and if you're not big they don't notice you. Nitter is legal btw.
code_duck 16 hours ago [-]
Like some other things reddit tells visitors, they're basically lying, or at best, being inconsistent. I've tried old reddit here and there in the past month or so and sometimes it says I need an account for "safety", other times, it doesn't.
zahlman 24 minutes ago [-]
It is consistently no longer working for me on desktop, FWIW.
phrotoma 16 hours ago [-]
old.reddit still works anonymously for me. maybe an a/b test?
embedding-shape 13 hours ago [-]
It's regional, in some countries they force logins, in others not. In some countries, r/all isn't available at all on mobile for example, you get redirected regardless of how you try to access it, but seemingly work in other countries.
doublerabbit 6 hours ago [-]
Dead for me, UK.
raffael_de 16 hours ago [-]
possible that they just changed it for mobile.
wanderingpixel 17 hours ago [-]
for personal use you can just host one on your internal network
14 hours ago [-]
VCFundedGenYer 9 hours ago [-]
Stop using Twitter. Get on Mastodon.
xigoi 7 hours ago [-]
Stop using both. Make your own website.
Vaslo 8 hours ago [-]
Mastodon is an utter mess. Between that and censorship, we will just stay on X.
Gareth321 7 hours ago [-]
As much as I dislike many of the users on X, I really appreciate that it feels like one of the last uncensored social media platforms on the internet. Reddit is handing out permanent AI bans now for any and no reason at all. It's full of people using words like "unalived" now to avoid an automatic ban. The other platforms are no better. If free speech means accepting the speech of people I disagree with, I gladly make that bargain.
mitxela 6 hours ago [-]
X is not, in any way, uncensored when saying the word "cisgender" gets your tweet algorithmically shadowbanned and doing anything Elon doesn't like gets you banned even if you didn't do it on X.
maxlin 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mitxela 1 hours ago [-]
If "you can only agree with the platform owner" is not a lack of freedom of speech then what is?
maxlin 5 hours ago [-]
This. A good platform isn't about just having people you like on and creating an echo chamber through speech controls. Places that are like that feel downright dystopian.
apefulsin 4 hours ago [-]
What is it about?
zahlman 22 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
fuldeka 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
nunez 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah, nah. The cat and mouse game has begun. X will turn up the heat like Reddit did/is doing. I just created a redirect for (twitter|x).com to 0.0.0.0 and called it a day.
> This way, you relay the account register process to the seller. These tokens are sold in the format username|password|2fa_code|cookies (including auth token, id and ct0), which makes it very easy and convenient for us to use.
is this legit? this sounds extremely shady. maybe an ad?
miningtcup 19 hours ago [-]
I know the guy and it does work, and it's not an ad. Accounts from that website are used on shitter.thepixora.com. The website is extremely sketchy though, he recommends that you don't give it more than a dollar at a time.
swyx 4 hours ago [-]
oh hey miningtcup! thanks for your very generous reply the other day. not gonna share where but i know you know. buy u a drink if we ever meet
mitxela 16 hours ago [-]
No way to know if that particular site is legit without trying it, but account buying and selling on internet gray markets is very normal and the prices quoted are reasonable.
Yes, you have to give up all your personal data and submit to anal probing to get an account on a sillycon valley service, but a bad actor just has to pay $10 in bitcoin to get a thousand of them.
agnosticmantis 22 hours ago [-]
Any user scripts that automatically redirect to a working instance?
netniuq 16 hours ago [-]
Not a user script, but the LibRedirect extension does most of that already
Will this list automatically update as instances hit rate limits or break for other reasons? Some public instances only have one account to log in with, some have thousands and use residential proxies.
miningtcup 4 hours ago [-]
No, not automatically. The list is instances which are reliable, so if an instance is ratelimited any noticeable portion of the time, it won't be up there.
a3qhg 11 hours ago [-]
There are some extremely sketchy instances with "are you a robot" click dialogs that redirect to exploit URLs.
I would search for other options not listed. I'm not going to name them here because X is lazy and reads HN for scheduling takedown notices.
miningtcup 4 hours ago [-]
None of the instances listed have anything like that going on. I believe that all listed instances use either https://www.cloudflare.com/products/turnstile/, https://anubis.techaro.lol/, https://git.miningtcup.me/MiningTcup/dogwaf (made by me), or nothing at all. I recommend against using instances not listed unless you know the host because there are reasons for them to not be listed. I won't elaborate on the reasons for some major instances not being on the list as I want to keep my HN account.
add-sub-mul-div 22 hours ago [-]
We could stop thinking of them as walled gardens we're trying to get into and start thinking of them as quarantines for the Eternal September population.
delichon 22 hours ago [-]
> quarantines for the Eternal September population
Hacker News actually has a way to do this quarantine, a version that only counts votes from accounts created before 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/classic. About a decade after Eternal September started, but not bad.
defrost 22 hours ago [-]
FWiW as an aside, it appears to count votes from December 2008 accounts (as just tested using this 2008-12-26 account).
So that's at least strictly before 2009.
mitxela 19 hours ago [-]
The vote count is just the normal vote count, so I guess only the ordering is different?
defrost 18 hours ago [-]
It is, isn't it .. serves me right for breezing through that too quickly.
If there's something magical going on, the ordering would be the only real distinction possible.
Apparently the original (still the same?) dates back to the OG PG days:
It's what the frontpage would look like if only the votes of users who joined in the first year counted. I made it to check if the site is declining. In practice it's usually just a slower-changing version of the frontpage.
~ pg
DangitBobby 11 hours ago [-]
Cool experiment! It's still possible that the "high quality" users have stopped visiting (and stop voting) as the vibes Septemberized, leaving us with older accounts that act roughly in line with the way September accounts have made it. I'd be interested to know what portion of these older accounts are still voting.
bananaflag 20 hours ago [-]
Wow that's very interesting but it only works for the front page (and also only changes the order not the numbers), not for each comment page.
Maybe we should have a setting "count only votes before date yyyy-mm-dd" but this would probably make the site too dynamic (?) and consume a lot of resources.
randallsquared 21 hours ago [-]
Decade and a half, really. Eternal September was 1993 or 1994, right?
aaron695 15 hours ago [-]
[dead]
maxlin 5 hours ago [-]
Publicly suggesting using a shady service to buy masses of accounts instead of just using the damn service. Mental
miningtcup 4 hours ago [-]
The shady service is only for people looking to host nitter, and it's not required. My instance uses accounts that I made myself, for free.
apefulsin 4 hours ago [-]
We should all be using more of those shady services - provided they aren't scams. Those are valuable people providing a valuable service of bypassing enshittification.
throwaway27448 13 hours ago [-]
How do you get API approval?
mitxela 58 minutes ago [-]
You don't. Nitter impersonates a website or app user.
Abimelex 14 hours ago [-]
Hot take: All those instances keep the service relevant giving it more reach than necessary. Just shut it down. Cancel Twitter and jump on the BlueSkye or Mastodon train.
jasonvorhe 13 hours ago [-]
Nah, I like my freedom of speech, thanks.
Abimelex 11 hours ago [-]
Freedom of speech as long as it fit's in Elmos narrative. It's bit naive to think twitter offers this.
joenot443 10 hours ago [-]
Eh, it's a lot less restrictive than Bluesky with its block lists maintained by weirdos. What are some things you aren't allowed to say on Twitter?
I see people talk all the time about how great Bluesky is, yet I never see any great posts there. The discussion is almost always just in relation to Twitter.
Reminds me a bit of when people were pushing for Lemmy.
numpad0 35 minutes ago [-]
Twitter actually ban and "shadowban" accounts completely at random for every weird reasons. The difference between it and the rest is that it turns blind eyes on most blatant of ban evasions, so much so that its own support sometimes recommending it to users when they were banned. This had been the case since it legitimately was Twitter and there were no injected African spams.
mitxela 2 hours ago [-]
Can't say cisgender, can't repeat ADS-B data, can't interview people Elon Musk doesn't like, even off platform. Didn't they ban the devs of Nitter, too?
If you aren't banned, either Musk agrees with you, or you are small so he hasn't noticed you or doesn't see you as a threat.
shevy-java 14 hours ago [-]
Streisand effect.
Vaslo 8 hours ago [-]
Streisand effect only works when everybody is against the person being Streisanded. In this case many folks support Twitter and will work with them to get the links taken down
19 hours ago [-]
alex1138 19 hours ago [-]
What do we want the web to look like? Lock everything down behind logins, in the name of 'security' when the real goal is nyeh nyeh nyeh you can't see anything, sign up so we get more user metrics
Brian_K_White 10 hours ago [-]
I think today it's not in the name of security but to deal with ridiculous levels of ai scraping.
Sure they also just want everyone to make accounts anyway so it's absolutely a convenient excuse, but it's also real that ais are killing all public sites with constant massive scraping.
There was a thing recently about the kernel gitweb that ais are just clobbering because of the way they stupidly hit every possible valid url, and on a gitweb instance that results in a gobjillion duplicate clones of the entire universe for every tiny commit.
alex1138 2 hours ago [-]
Well, I can say about that that Facebook seems to be the worst about it. They've locked stuff behind logins forever, while also messing with their users privacy settings, while also effectively DDOSing sites with their AI
Google does not, AFAIK, engage in behavior like that (the latter), as much as I don't like a lot of what Google does
LightBug1 11 hours ago [-]
Simpler solution:
If you're on Shitter, I'm not interested in your content.
Not even through proxy.
Get on another platform then hit me up if you want some engagement.
suplexer 6 hours ago [-]
Not that we care at all, but for your own good, it'd be best to follow experts in your field/hobby on Twitter. You never know what inspiration might hit you!
urbnspacecowboy 5 hours ago [-]
Experts in my field don't use Xitter, they use arXiv. Experts in my hobby don't use Xitter, they use forums and databases.
kamma4434 19 hours ago [-]
With or without the original interface, twitter is still a dumpster fire
23 hours ago [-]
pessimizer 11 hours ago [-]
This is a silly fact that doesn't matter, because nobody knows where they are anymore. Even worse, this goofy gloating post ensures that these are about to taken down, too. Nitter can literally be run for a single user, so if a hundred people set it up for their own personal use, I guess that's also more working instances than before the takedown. A real victory if you're dumb.
So for everyone who managed to find another working nitter instance after a long hard search, or in whose friend group one person stood one up so all their friends can use it - fuck you I guess. Somebody wanted to brag on HN about how Musk somehow shot himself in the foot by reducing nitter usage by 99.9% in one day, so now your hoster, and maybe you personally, are getting a legal letter from one of the richest men in the world.
miningtcup 4 hours ago [-]
All the instances on the list agreed to be put on it. Their maintainers decided that they were willing to be on it because it's unlikely that they will get a C&D.
Brian_K_White 11 hours ago [-]
Apparently incorrect. Many comments right on this page have mentioned several automatic redirect services, sites, libraries, extensions and apps, any one of which does it all for you, just automatically redirect to a random working instance.
And there are always many because apparently it's easy to just run one yourself and not even need anyone else's.
It seems there is simply no such problem.
pessimizer 8 hours ago [-]
All of the comments on this page serve to expose things that were surviving by flying under the radar. It's delusional to pretend like they're somehow bulletproof when their survival has been due to being infinitesimal in size, and has lasted all of a week.
If some stable service gets put up in Russia, China, Iran, or some other country that will throw up some obstacle to Musk, post it everywhere. Anna's Archive has proven to be tough. This here is bullshit and the people who posted it should be ashamed of themselves for risking a lot of people's safety and access for internet points.
> Many comments right on this page have mentioned several automatic redirect services, sites, libraries, extensions and apps, any one of which does it all for you
Yes, stop mentioning these.
Sites are being mentioned on this page that have already been cut off or shut down. As you watch them go down over the course of the next day or two, maybe reevaluate your priors.
edit: these internet points are imaginary; they turn attention seekers into narcs. Imagine going to the scene where a dozen villages had been razed to the ground and claiming victory because instead of only a dozen villages, there were now several dozen refugee camps where stragglers had fled to. "Streisand Effect" you say, while giving out the GPS coordinates of every refugee camp you're aware of.
mitxela 4 hours ago [-]
Nitter is legal. It's not even circumventing a DMCA effective technological protection measure.
The only major concern is rate limiting. A large Nitter needs a good supply of accounts and IP addresses. A small one can get by with just one of each. Most of the ones on the page will probably be overloaded soon.
chuckadams 7 hours ago [-]
One imagines when one puts up a publicly accessible mirror and adds it to the plugin's public mirror list, that they're cool with the public actually, yunno, using it.
Username certainly does check out.
12jaaGh 7 hours ago [-]
Not only refugee camps. Some of the sites on the codeberg list literally spread malware.
People here didn't even look at them but, as you say, just declared victory.
Thanks for some rational thoughts. Unfortunately you are discussing with idiots who barely manage first order thinking.
Brian_K_White 7 hours ago [-]
No villages were razed. Your argument is invalid.
poudelr 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sparrowidle 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
saintwalker 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Petersipoi 23 hours ago [-]
Awesome. Let's all start using this on HN so we end up with a bunch of broken links in a few years
dadoum 22 hours ago [-]
They would become links with only a wrong domain, so I am not very worried about that personally.
mitxela 19 hours ago [-]
It would be cool if libredirect could redirect a broken frontend instance to a working one.
bigbadfeline 21 hours ago [-]
> a bunch of broken links in a few years
Who cares, by that time the originals and their copies would be a lot less worthy of viewing.
tolerance 8 hours ago [-]
People refuse to let the concept of microblogs as conventional communications platforms die. Why?
zahlman 19 minutes ago [-]
Why should it die?
nosioptar 5 hours ago [-]
In my area, people need something to entertain them while they drive.
Continuing to read things on it, even through Nitter, is in the interests of Twitter/X and of the people who continue to support Twitter/X by posting there.
Tell the people who use it no. The decent people won't hear them on Twitter/X, and the decent people will wonder what's wrong with them if they persist in supporting that thing.
Tech industry circles nowadays are sometimes tinged with individualist selfish "take whatever you can" thinking, and anarchic or even underhanded methods. Including the thinking "an express no doesn't mean no, if i can find a way to take it from them anyway."
Grassroots collective social action can work, if it isn't constantly undermined by selfish and short-sighted taking.
Everything, except for your usage of anarchism to imply chaos or disorder, which is a common misunderstanding. Anarchism, particularly the flavor I subscribe to which is Social Anarchism, is a pursuit of social order, freedom, and prosperity without centralized authorities like Musk.
The disagreement is the key value of anarchism. The dialectical pendulum, the exchange of ideas. Disagreeing is expressing anarchism, even if you disagree with the other party's understanding of anarchism.
One does not need to be in a position of authority above others to help ensure discussions are grounded in common definitions of what words mean.
Meanwhile you shared your own meaning as correct with no supporting evidence it is a definition commonly shared.
You are free to make up your own special definitions of words that few if any share if you like. You can use the word cat to refer to a dog, for instance. It is not going to help you communicate with the majority of people who speak a mostly shared dialect of written english where words have well documented common knowledge meanings though, but you do you.
TLDR, you are right and I'm not necessarily wrong, we were just talking about two different things.
The fact you address little to none of my points is an indicative that while you are a very good thesaurus, you don't understand much hermeneutics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivist_anarchism
I agree with that though. It's better to circumvent than to submit and do what you're told.
The same way piracy keeps streaming services somewhat honest, I'm sure that if piracy didn't exist, subscriptions would be even pricier.
Not always. Sometimes the rules are stupid, and by simply obeying them, their stupidity becomes apparent. The governments that are trying to force Facebook and Google to pay to link to their news stories are a great example. The governments foolishly assumed that the media companies would comply by paying, but instead they chose to comply by leaving. Leaving is a powerful signal.
This probably has to be in a "maliciously compliant" fashion though, as otherwise if you 'sort of' follow them things may actually still function. The point is often to show that things would not work if things were done by the book, so as to encourage the book to be rewritten or thrown out.
freedom todo format shift, copy, share, preserve, and largely a freedom from surveillance.
noone should be able to see what media u are viewing without ur explicit permission.
everytime u stream or buy, records of ur activity are created, and profiles are shared with brokers.
piracy done right, elimates all capitalism, but especially surveillance capitalism, and top down control over users of media
If first party media companies sold one-off DRM free downloads of movies and TV shows for a reasonable price (not even that cheap, just not requiring bundling with other content you don't want to see), I bet that'd have more of an impact on piracy rates than lowering subscription prices by 10% or whatever.
Music is basically sold like that (Itunes does it for example), and very very few people use it. There are probably some, but I don't personally know any — and I know plenty of music lovers with huge collections.
Normies want to have access to everything at the click of a button, and they don't want to be worrying about disk space, cross device synchronization or organizing files in directories. Streaming is perfect for them, especially in the mobile age (I bet many people had access to more disk space in 2013 than they had in 2021 or have in 2026).
People who would want to be normies but can't afford it (often in E.G. 3rd world countries) use Youtube with ads, Spotify with ads or pirated "free unlocked Spotify" apps on their Android phones. Music geeks want more music than they could possibly afford, so they use ${whatever this week's Deezer grabber is} or just get an account on Redacted. The anti-corporate left / retro people just buy vinyl, CDs or maybe tapes, depending on preference.
Paying to see a movie (versus paying to own a movie) has been a longstanding tradition in the movie industry (cinemas, rentals). If anything, being able to outright own movies was a short blip, and a weird consequence of how media worked at the time, which was annoying to most of the population more than anything else.
What the industry has successfully done is have people learn that for 15 or 20 years they can cave in to their want of convenience. People don't seem to care today that they'll have to pay the price in 15 years, but they will care in 15 years.
Nothing made this more evident than people buying digital movies from Sony, only to find that the rights to access the movie they purchased have been revoked. People are so sick of it in fact that they're now inventing new words like in enshitification to capture the idea that they have been brought in to an ecosystem that they're trapped in and now feel like they can't escape even though it's getting worse. People's love of convenience is the mechanism of their capture by the business.
i see twitter's takedowns as the same? its claiming ownership over content it only has a license to
nitter is an instance of collective social action - it only works because people who want to post on and use twitter then mirror stuff to nitter
Is that particularly tech industry? Software and media piracy, ad block tools, etc. are all based on this principle.
Religion and language are very similar, both in how they are transmitted and how they shift.
The latter systematizes thought and the former emotions.
Language is encoded by vocal utterances, characters, hand gestures, etc…
Religion by rituals, stories, customs. The purpose of it is to handle the common emotional needs of man. The starting point is the grief that comes from a dead person -> you need a ritual to handle the body and process emotions.
Next you need to handle who has sex with whom as that is another big area of emotional turbulence in man.
Then relationships between parent and child. And so on…
Write it down and get people to follow it, you have a religion. Which will shift and split over time as does language.
It can be completely distinct from the origin of everything though many choose to incorporate deities into their stories to give weight and meaning, this harnesses the inherent respect for father figures people tend to be born with to achieve this.
https://publiccomment.blog/p/it-is-past-time-for-you-to-quit...
It's seriously disingenuous to frame the bluesky vs twitter/x as a difference in political opinion.
I'm not the OP, but anybody honestly wanting to know why people think good humans should not use Twitter does not have far to look.
1. E.g., https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/04/24/musk-on... or his Economist interview.
4-5 years ago is also about when Kanye West started to go insane, posted the raelian swastika/star of david hybrid on twitter and elon said something like "this is not love" and banned him, which to me explains the motivations for nitter coming up in the first place
Still confused?
They have thousands of other ways to influence the masses by owning media, other discussion platforms, owning institutions and foundation members and running PR campaigns.
It is better if their actions on Twitter are observed, documented and archived rather than letting them have complete privacy. That is also why journalists of all political leanings are still there.
Yes - and he's utterly ruined it. And we know from his emails it was anti-competitive
It's live (best effort) at https://cgithub.jmou.workers.dev/jmou/cgithub
My visits have dropped by about 95%
[1] https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
Though, reddit's been infected by you tubers and clankers to the point that it's basically useless.
works for now. it's no longer just a redirect.
in the week or so it didn't function, I used https://photon-reddit.com/
Why is not wanting to share my reading habits with Elon not a real reason?
It's by far the best designed social media site out there. I know it's a low bar but still.
Do you genuinely believe what is public is exactly what's deployed? If so, what makes that belief justified?
I suspect this has become more of a meme by Mastodon/Bluesky users than anything real.
Also the density of pure hate & ragebait by mask-off fascist accounts! It shocks me how much of that I saw unprompted right away after making a new account recently.
It's an unpleasant experience. My main Reddit account doesn't "solve reddit" by any means - I often find myself thinking "man this site sucks, I should stop coming here," but the difference between that curated account and a fresh one is night and day.
I mean I went from fresh account to unprompted groypers posting hitler hype edits and white nationalists posting happy merchant memes about the great replacement.
This is uniquely an X thing. It wasn't like this when I used twitter, and it isn't like that on any other socials I know.
But that's the US first amendment for you.
The First Amendment (largely) prevents the government from choosing what a private company hosts on their platform for them.
A version of X hosted in Germany would look quite different.
It's also unwise behavior by xcancel. Either do it or don't do it. Half doing it will result in just as much liability as doing it, and they've already decided that doing it was too dangerous. They've made a mental error by somehow categorizing this as less to give themselves permission to do this, likely due to some sort of emotional need to be defiant.
I hope I'm wrong about the emotional need. I think they're located in Germany so maybe some lawyer found some loophole and this is a prelude to coming all the way back up (Europe hates Musk), maybe somebody simply forgot to shut down the RSS proxies because they were still running the instance personally and for friends, or maybe some asshole who had access snuck in and turned it back on.
But that's on them. My problem with your post is that you seem to think that you're risking yourself rather than snitching on others.
https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
https://github.com/circumspace/linkahest
What do you mean? TPB been online and at the exact same URL (give or take some days/weeks around raids) for like two decades, and still has the same URL today. Might not be the same group, but not sure what "chasing" you're referring to?
Living without the good just to avoid that is maybe one philosophy of life, but certainly not the only valid one.
1780323401 | The Pirate Bay Remains Resilient, 20 Years After the Raid | https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-remains-resilient-20... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48357154
But to be honest I never found TPB (or rarbg etc.) really useful for music.
It has very little to do with this and more just about the ubiquitous availability of 5G and always-available streaming.
I stopped caring about data hoarding once I could just access anything I wanted reliably wherever I was.
Fortunately, sending a screenshot to Claude tells me what to push in a minute or so, but, unfortunately, I can’t just hand it an API endpoint and have it scrub all this crap weekly.
(No idea why the streaming service can’t just do that themselves, of course…)
Of course, for movies, it’s gotten to the point where I just drive to the used DVD store. $1-5 per movie used (including blurays); $20-30 new. I usually walk out with a dozen or so films for $100. This is easier than tpb.
A lot of uploaders still zip everything so you can't download one song out of some album. And the discoverability is shit because DHT doesn't let you ask peers for all their torrents so you need to run a server that index multiple trackers or look things up manually.
The only alternative is Soulseek where it's a direct connection model instead of hash based. That means there are no stable IDs to get a file if the original uploader is down and users can send you anything they want like troll audio or malware.
If we want people to start pirating music again we need to make the UX as good as Spotify. That means no explicit downloads, when you click play the app gets the file from a peer, saves it to a cache then starts playing and seeding automatically. Songs and albums should be content addressed in a global namespace instead of living on trackers, and there should probably be a reputation system. I think something based on iroh blobs for content and atproto for discovery can work.
It isn't hard to run an instance, just park it next to your SearXNG [1], Invidious [2], Redlib [3],PeerTube, ... instances.
[1] https://github.com/searxng/searxng
[2] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
[3] https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
Twitter is different there's many stories that are only there.
The best way is always private trackers. They're easy to get into, easy to keep (if you're a serious and honest person), malware free, high quality content, great community, etc.
If they were easy to get into, they wouldn't be good
It's probably easier to lurk in r/trackerinvites (or whatever it's called) hoping to snatch an invite
But why wouldn't you?
https://github.com/skorokithakis/detour, running on https://twit.0r.cx.
Just replace x.com with twit.0r.cx.
Example:
https://twit.0r.cx/Stavros/status/2096184846993314184
Years ago HN commenters were making the same comment when most Nitter instances were abandoned
Meanwhile nitter.poast.org kept working for years
Then xcancel.com appeared
When there is no longer a method for an internet subscriber to read Twitter/X without the subscriber creating an account on Twitter/X (and "logging in"), then the subscriber can use a headless browser
But that time has not yet come, and no HN commenter has succeeded in predicting when exactly that time will come
The disappearance of "ad blockers" as browser extensions/add-ons may be "inevitable"
Unlike Nitter, we don't see HN commenters trying to downplay their usefulness
Free internet "services" disappear all the time, for a variety of reasons
For example,
https://killedbygoogle.com/
There isn't one. Nitter logs in.
I highly recommend the extension libredirect, which will redirect you to instances of your choice (or just stick with the defaults). It doesn't just work for Twitter/X, but also Reddit, Tiktok, Youtube, and many others
Firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ Chromium Instructions - https://github.com/libredirect/browser_extension
This is not the case for Nitter. It requires real X accounts to run, quite possibly hundreds or thousands for a major public instance. Creating X accounts currently requires phone number verification.
But I agree, not easy.
Please link to primary sources. If I need an alternative method of accessing the site, I'll figure it out.
Unfortunately it also shut down a few days before the nitter takedowns.
https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
https://github.com/skorokithakis/detour, running on https://twit.0r.cx.
Just replace x.com with twit.0r.cx.
Example:
https://twit.0r.cx/Stavros/status/2096184846993314184
Then again, I often think that about myself. But I'm not a trillionaire.
It does sound like losing his first child at 10 weeks really messed him up. It definitely would do that to anybody.
Musk is the same guy he was 10 years ago, still working his ass off on visionary projects, beating rest of the world on those fronts. And we love him for that!
how would you (EDIT: publicly) host such a nitter instance while avoiding the risk of legal consequences?
since old.reddit (EDIT: on mobile) is closed for visitors without an account it would be great if there was also a neddit project.
It has a few public instances - https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/ins...
Seems to work decently well, I've seen it being linked to on HN.
points to a working nitter instance.
> This way, you relay the account register process to the seller. These tokens are sold in the format username|password|2fa_code|cookies (including auth token, id and ct0), which makes it very easy and convenient for us to use.
is this legit? this sounds extremely shady. maybe an ad?
Yes, you have to give up all your personal data and submit to anal probing to get an account on a sillycon valley service, but a bad actor just has to pay $10 in bitcoin to get a thousand of them.
https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
I think it doesn't check whether the chosen instance is up before redirecting, but switching to another one if that one is down is a single click.
I would search for other options not listed. I'm not going to name them here because X is lazy and reads HN for scheduling takedown notices.
Hacker News actually has a way to do this quarantine, a version that only counts votes from accounts created before 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/classic. About a decade after Eternal September started, but not bad.
So that's at least strictly before 2009.
If there's something magical going on, the ordering would be the only real distinction possible.
Apparently the original (still the same?) dates back to the OG PG days:
Ask HN: who knows about this - "http://News.YCombinator.com/classic"? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1832884
Maybe we should have a setting "count only votes before date yyyy-mm-dd" but this would probably make the site too dynamic (?) and consume a lot of resources.
I see people talk all the time about how great Bluesky is, yet I never see any great posts there. The discussion is almost always just in relation to Twitter.
Reminds me a bit of when people were pushing for Lemmy.
https://fortune.com/2024/09/25/twitter-x-account-suspensions...
If you aren't banned, either Musk agrees with you, or you are small so he hasn't noticed you or doesn't see you as a threat.
Sure they also just want everyone to make accounts anyway so it's absolutely a convenient excuse, but it's also real that ais are killing all public sites with constant massive scraping.
There was a thing recently about the kernel gitweb that ais are just clobbering because of the way they stupidly hit every possible valid url, and on a gitweb instance that results in a gobjillion duplicate clones of the entire universe for every tiny commit.
Google does not, AFAIK, engage in behavior like that (the latter), as much as I don't like a lot of what Google does
If you're on Shitter, I'm not interested in your content.
Not even through proxy.
Get on another platform then hit me up if you want some engagement.
So for everyone who managed to find another working nitter instance after a long hard search, or in whose friend group one person stood one up so all their friends can use it - fuck you I guess. Somebody wanted to brag on HN about how Musk somehow shot himself in the foot by reducing nitter usage by 99.9% in one day, so now your hoster, and maybe you personally, are getting a legal letter from one of the richest men in the world.
And there are always many because apparently it's easy to just run one yourself and not even need anyone else's.
It seems there is simply no such problem.
If some stable service gets put up in Russia, China, Iran, or some other country that will throw up some obstacle to Musk, post it everywhere. Anna's Archive has proven to be tough. This here is bullshit and the people who posted it should be ashamed of themselves for risking a lot of people's safety and access for internet points.
> Many comments right on this page have mentioned several automatic redirect services, sites, libraries, extensions and apps, any one of which does it all for you
Yes, stop mentioning these.
Sites are being mentioned on this page that have already been cut off or shut down. As you watch them go down over the course of the next day or two, maybe reevaluate your priors.
edit: these internet points are imaginary; they turn attention seekers into narcs. Imagine going to the scene where a dozen villages had been razed to the ground and claiming victory because instead of only a dozen villages, there were now several dozen refugee camps where stragglers had fled to. "Streisand Effect" you say, while giving out the GPS coordinates of every refugee camp you're aware of.
The only major concern is rate limiting. A large Nitter needs a good supply of accounts and IP addresses. A small one can get by with just one of each. Most of the ones on the page will probably be overloaded soon.
Username certainly does check out.
People here didn't even look at them but, as you say, just declared victory.
Thanks for some rational thoughts. Unfortunately you are discussing with idiots who barely manage first order thinking.
Who cares, by that time the originals and their copies would be a lot less worthy of viewing.