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.
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.
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.
Everyone gets to decide what words mean. But anarchism has lots and lots of history of scholarship, debate, and discussion. Kropotkin was writing about this in the 1800s, and we've had well over a century of defining and shaping the definitions.
The parent poster isn't inventing anything or deciding anything. They're just sharing what the common understandings are.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your disagreement here is not the typical understanding. And correcting people is not pushing hierarchy. The parent poster isn't standing over you, they are standing beside you offering to educate you.
You can call anarchism whatever you want, just... if you invent your own notion of the thing don't be surprised when no one understands you.
Edit: I see your post much deeper on, you can ignore me.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
On twitter there are many incredibly hateful, rude, ignorant and ill informed people and you can block them or add community notes. On mastodon or bluesky it's only them and no community notes.
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.
Non technical people have always used centralized platforms starting from geocities, Google, Yahoo, it's cheaper than hiring someone to do it for them.
Are you speaking of public services, like the National Weather Service (also on Facebook, and host their own website), or about politicians and their appointees? Because while the public service arm of the U.S. government still does a ton of critical and often-underappreciated work, the semantic content of U.S. politicians' posts is effectively nil.
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.
One of the most hateful human being control this social network.
There’s tons of decent people in a nazi bar isn’t the test of what makes it a great place to be.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: to elaborate, it’s bullshit that I need to pretend that Nazis have anything to say that’s worth listening to in the name of “polite political discourse”.
It’s an ideology built on hate and violence toward others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Zuckerberg and his minions have changes html and obfuscate it so much, it is impossible to block ads these days. They are worst than google. Imagine google decided every video will require widevine & there is no way to block ads just like twitch.
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.
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.
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.).
Now all that's missing is Chatlib, a self-hosted proxy for ChatGPT which makes it possible to a) query the service without leaving a personally identifiable trace and b) separate out the facts from the dreamt-up fiction. Using Redlib I at least get to see the original posts which makes it easier to separate fact from fiction.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
Other sites require you to make piracy a lifestyle, catching invites and seed ratios and shit. TPB lets me just get that one movie that isn't on any streaming service twice a year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Most nitter instances don't do anything to avoid legal trouble from X. They simply hope that X will not go after them. There are some instances which do put in effort to stay anonymous, and they usually do that with a Cloudflare tunnel to hide their server IP and by not posting any personal details online.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
None of the sites on the codeberg instance list spread malware. If you can link to one that does, I would be shocked. Some of the instances use CAPTCHAs such as DogWAF to prevent scraping, but those are absolutely not malware.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivist_anarchism
No, sorry. Political activists do not get to decide for everyone else what words mean.
Everyone gets to decide what words mean. But anarchism has lots and lots of history of scholarship, debate, and discussion. Kropotkin was writing about this in the 1800s, and we've had well over a century of defining and shaping the definitions.
The parent poster isn't inventing anything or deciding anything. They're just sharing what the common understandings are.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In Orwell's 1984, control of the language was central to control of society. Newspeak and such.
Consider recent quibbles over pronouns.
Given Orwell's strong endorsement of anarchists, it's unlikely he's lampooning anarchists in 1984...
Your disagreement here is not the typical understanding. And correcting people is not pushing hierarchy. The parent poster isn't standing over you, they are standing beside you offering to educate you.
You can call anarchism whatever you want, just... if you invent your own notion of the thing don't be surprised when no one understands you.
Edit: I see your post much deeper on, you can ignore me.
One thing, I meant "Anarchism is questioning authority for authority sake" that's one single 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"
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.
> 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.
> 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.
They're not paying to link. They're paying to summarise, because people read the summary and don't go to the news site.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
You do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"
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.
And the reason that piracy doesn't exist in that case is because the creators have all had to go out of business. ;-)
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.
Name and shame them.
Literally every single UK government entity, town/city council, every public transport company, etc. They all use it sadly.
Any specific examples where twitter was the only way?
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.
Both Anthropic and OpenAI will sometimes make important announcements only on Twitter.
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.
It’s a social network. Less people on it = less ads dollar. You not building the network is making it less valuable and important. It’s something.
> 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.
you need a mental check if you think there are not decent people who use and enjoy X
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.
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.
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.
> 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
We have to move people to mastodon or bluesky. Stop using x Twitter
On twitter there are many incredibly hateful, rude, ignorant and ill informed people and you can block them or add community notes. On mastodon or bluesky it's only them and no community notes.
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.
Non technical people have always used centralized platforms starting from geocities, Google, Yahoo, it's cheaper than hiring someone to do it for them.
Hey I stopped using it and facebook years ago! Couldnt agree more.
The trouble is that many us government figures exclusively post information via x (and to some extent Facebook as well)
Are you speaking of public services, like the National Weather Service (also on Facebook, and host their own website), or about politicians and their appointees? Because while the public service arm of the U.S. government still does a ton of critical and often-underappreciated work, the semantic content of U.S. politicians' posts is effectively nil.
i too was thinking the Star Dink may just welcome nitter anyway
"oh you said 'nitter', yeah that's OK"
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.
One of the most hateful human being control this social network. There’s tons of decent people in a nazi bar isn’t the test of what makes it a great place to be.
A related essay with the same take:
https://publiccomment.blog/p/it-is-past-time-for-you-to-quit...
Why is scrolling broken?
This all already happened, it's called bluesky, and the "decent" (people who agree with you on politics) people had their exodus already
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.
I see that they're not on HN either.
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.
dang and team tread carefully but carry a big stick
Mostly reasonable moderation does it, I’ve seen a noticeable uptick in green accounts posting slop/weird stuff but I just flag them and move on.
HN isn’t perfect but it’s doesn’t have to be to still have value and yeah it does feel a lot like the older web at least more than most things do.
HN remains chill because 99% of political dissent is squashed
BlueSky is so much more toxic than Twitter/X ever was. And I say that as a left-leaning centrist.
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.
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.
Isn't nazi and non-nazi a political opinion difference though?
If you’re being pedantic, sure.
Edit: to elaborate, it’s bullshit that I need to pretend that Nazis have anything to say that’s worth listening to in the name of “polite political discourse”.
It’s an ideology built on hate and violence toward others.
You mean the people who hate Nazis? Yes, they're not on X.
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.
it always seemed like a honeypot for narcissists to me. Some people just can't resist it
Are there any left wing elites?
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.
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.
Instagram is actively hostile to good ui. They constantly go out of their way to break extensions that add a video scrubber.
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.
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.
Zuckerberg and his minions have changes html and obfuscate it so much, it is impossible to block ads these days. They are worst than google. Imagine google decided every video will require widevine & there is no way to block ads just like twitch.
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
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.
1:1 the same thing with Github
Nithub when?
https://codeberg.org/gothub/gothub
I have a side project that proxies GitHub for a simpler UI https://github.com/jmou/cgithub
It's live (best effort) at https://cgithub.jmou.workers.dev/jmou/cgithub
Obviously such a thing would be horrible, but there is sourcehut.
Diffshub is a start
eh anyone going to github knows what they want. At this point it's a flex to be hosted elsewhere
Yeah, the UI is the real and only reason to use Nitter. It's a very similar situation with old reddit.
Since a couple of weeks they force you to login to use old.reddit.
My visits have dropped by about 95%
You can use www.reddit.com (yes, this domain, not old.reddit.com) with the old UI if you set cookie "redesign_optout=true".
Thanks for that tip. Works like a charm.
Use Redlib [1] or one of the other alternative Reddit frontends.
[1] https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
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.
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.
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.).
All those have been ingested by chatgpt, which ironically provides a better user experience.
Now all that's missing is Chatlib, a self-hosted proxy for ChatGPT which makes it possible to a) query the service without leaving a personally identifiable trace and b) separate out the facts from the dreamt-up fiction. Using Redlib I at least get to see the original posts which makes it easier to separate fact from fiction.
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.
Redreader still works on android.
Though, reddit's been infected by you tubers and clankers to the point that it's basically useless.
Reddit infected by Youtubers sounds like pest getting cholera, i.e. Reddit did not need an infection to be a bot-infested cesspit.
Same, it’s been nice if I’m honest, them doing something to old.reddit.com was always going to be the final straw.
Outside this place it was the last of the “social” media’s I used.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
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/
Old reddit redirect extension
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.
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.
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.
>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?
Same with Redlib for Reddit, it's just so much nicer to look at.
I agree. I think the UI is the best part. It seems more responsive to me too.
Seriously. The UX/UI on Twitter has always been a dumpster fire.
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.
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).
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).
All of the WWW was better in 2008. Unironically. We've all been frog-boiled into this current hellscape.
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.
back on when websites were websites. HN of today on my phone reminds me of that.
Smartphones came out in 2008. So your date aligns with the GPs.
... yes. Yes, that was the point.
Ahh sorry. My reading comprehension was obviously failing me then.
Shows the true cost of surveillance capitalism.
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.
> 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?
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.
The X app loads posts much faster than these sites, so I find the app has a better UI.
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.
It can't suck all that much if you're not willing to give it up.
It sounds to me like they did give up on using the builtin UI.
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.
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...
That stopped in 2018. https://www.slashgear.com/library-of-congress-twitter-archiv...
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?
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.
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.
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.
What doesn't work is posting a link to a specific Nitter instance with the expectation that that link will persist.
Which is what HN has been doing for Twitter submissions for approximately two years:
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
Those links are all now dead.
LibRedirect kind of does so, it's not 100% there yet
https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
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
Found this Android app to work quite well. It just lacks working nitter instances right now but you can customize them:
https://github.com/circumspace/linkahest
> It's like chasing the latest TPB.
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?
It's distributing malware, do not use any of the "TPB" sites.
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.
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.
There's just no reason to ever use them when other sites are better.
Other sites require you to make piracy a lifestyle, catching invites and seed ratios and shit. TPB lets me just get that one movie that isn't on any streaming service twice a year.
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.
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.
Soulseek is working fine.
But to be honest I never found TPB (or rarbg etc.) really useful for music.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Probably Spotify
It's also because it's difficult to add your own magnet links.
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.
"It's like chasing the latest TPB."
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
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.
[1] https://github.com/searxng/searxng
[2] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
[3] https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
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.
> 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.
> 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
It's as easy as buying 1 month of seedbox for around 10 bucks.
Buying a seedbox doesn't get you into a private tracker. It's a download client.
mid tier trackers partner with seedbox providers who give them kickbacks for referrals, in exchange for an account
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
Yep it's not easy. Easy was a lie. The best are actually curated public trackers. TPB is not curated.
Sadly, curated public ones are also harder and harder to find (for obvious reasons) :(
Rutracker's a good one.
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...
Well, you need an account to search.
Switching torrent sites every time one gets taken down.
But why wouldn't you?
Did TPB ever change a domain? I've been using the .org domain listed on Wikipedia for as long as I can remember.
I don't think .org is still official. Look for an orange isometric K
It seems to be the "official" one according to Wikipedia though?
a what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_Church_of_Kopimism
Then you are not in a country where it is blocked. (Or you VPN into one.)
I made a small service that will redirect you to a working one:
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
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
"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
For example,
https://killedbygoogle.com/
> When there is no longer a method to read Twitter/X withoot logging in, then one can use a headless browser
There isn't one. Nitter logs in.
What is TPB?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay
https://twitterviewer.net/
That does work, but it misses out on several of nitter's benefits:
- It requires JavaScript - It is not great for privacy, being behind Cloudflare and having numerous trackers - It is not open-source
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.
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.
Please use screenshots and copy the content. Don't link to X.
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
Firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ Chromium Instructions - https://github.com/libredirect/browser_extension
+ 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)
> 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.
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.
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.
I guess X never heard of the Streisand effect...
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.
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.
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
Good faith but still not well thought out. Nobody even knew it was her home until she complained about it.
Is there something like a balancer that redirects me to an instance that is not down?
xxcancel.com (just add an x to xcancel.com) will redirect you to a working instance!
There was a service I discovered that was set as a default in this app: https://github.com/circumspace/linkahest
Unfortunately it also shut down a few days before the nitter takedowns.
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
https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
https://twiiit.com
As promised:
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
I mean, I was just thinking of writing one in a few lines, so there will be one in a few minutes.
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.
Redlib exists - https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
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.
Most nitter instances don't do anything to avoid legal trouble from X. They simply hope that X will not go after them. There are some instances which do put in effort to stay anonymous, and they usually do that with a Cloudflare tunnel to hide their server IP and by not posting any personal details online.
For Reddit you can use Redlib (https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib), I host an instance at https://redlib.miningtcup.me/ and people also like https://safereddit.com/.
You just host it and if you're not big they don't notice you. Nitter is legal btw.
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.
It is consistently no longer working for me on desktop, FWIW.
old.reddit still works anonymously for me. maybe an a/b test?
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.
Dead for me, UK.
possible that they just changed it for mobile.
for personal use you can just host one on your internal network
we do a lil magic and just add another x to xcancel.com => https://xxcancel.com
points to a working nitter instance.
Redirects and has a insane migraine inducing captcha. Why is my Ip sus when it's a UK residential? Gave up after the third attempt
> How to obtain many sessions easily (public instances) The easiest way is to buy them here: https://hstockplus.com/accounts/twitter-x-accounts?sortBy=pr...
> 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?
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.
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
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.
Streisand effect !
Anybody have a favorite with a nicer sounding URL ?
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.
Any user scripts that automatically redirect to a working instance?
Not a user script, but the LibRedirect extension does most of that already
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've got a simple redirect made in the redirector add-on for Firefox and Chrome. X.com -> random nitter instance
https://github.com/libredirect/browser_extension
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.
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.
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.
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.
My xcancel RSS still works fine too!
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.
> 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.
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.
The vote count is just the normal vote count, so I guess only the ordering is different?
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:
Ask HN: who knows about this - "http://News.YCombinator.com/classic"? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1832884
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.
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.
Decade and a half, really. Eternal September was 1993 or 1994, right?
How do you get API approval?
You don't. Nitter impersonates a website or app user.
Publicly suggesting using a shady service to buy masses of accounts instead of just using the damn service. Mental
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.
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.
Stop using Twitter. Get on Mastodon.
Stop using both. Make your own website.
Mastodon is an utter mess. Between that and censorship, we will just stay on X.
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.
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.
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.
What is it about?
Streisand effect.
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
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
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.
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
With or without the original interface, twitter is still a dumpster fire
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
None of the sites on the codeberg instance list spread malware. If you can link to one that does, I would be shocked. Some of the instances use CAPTCHAs such as DogWAF to prevent scraping, but those are absolutely not malware.
No villages were razed. Your argument is invalid.
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.
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!
Experts in my field don't use Xitter, they use arXiv. Experts in my hobby don't use Xitter, they use forums and databases.
> they use forums *and databases*.
Have to say, a message board which can only be accessed via SQL queries does sound a bit niche :-P
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.
Nah, I like my freedom of speech, thanks.
Freedom of speech as long as it fit's in Elmos narrative. It's bit naive to think twitter offers this.
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.
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.
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?
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.
People refuse to let the concept of microblogs as conventional communications platforms die. Why?
In my area, people need something to entertain them while they drive.
Why should it die?
I've been trying to get people on HN to read this for the past two years but I think this is a good place to start for an answer.
https://www.eurozine.com/blogging-the-nihilist-impulse/
What's conventional?
Awesome. Let's all start using this on HN so we end up with a bunch of broken links in a few years
They would become links with only a wrong domain, so I am not very worried about that personally.
It would be cool if libredirect could redirect a broken frontend instance to a working one.
> 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.