I always use xcancel instead of X. I don't have a twitter account and I don't want to sign in. I just occasionally want to read what some people had to say about something. Even this is usually a mistake. It's probably better taken as entertainment.
My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
That assumes the company's behavior is rooted in ineptitude rather than malice, which is too generous at this point.
For Chrome: https://github.com/tsvb/post-peek
For Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dumpster-fire...
For Safari: https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox
If you dont want to follow the constraints of service XYZ, you dont have to consume its content.
The market would dictate that if X content consumers found it too inconvenient to consume from X and that would result in a significant drop in demand, the X content producers would stop producing their content on X.
I dont like many things about X -- random ads, bookmark folders being a paid feature, enshittification of the algorithm if you god forbid linger over some controversial video or content.
But i keep coming back to it because its the best way to follow the minds of brilliant techies. The basic sign up flow that i did years ago was basically a no-op.
I suspect that for most people, creating an account is basically a few button clicks (thanks OAuth) and they dont mind creating an account.
Most people do not use X.
X usage is down year over year.
The smartest people I know don't post there anymore.
Do A,B,C agree with the changes to loginwall their content ex-post-facto?
The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads, or if it does have ads/tracking, that you are trivially capable of blocking them while still totally enjoying the service/product.
xcancel, archive, whatever are all tools almost solely meant to access monetized content without having to contribute to the monetize part. Then those companies are told they "suck" when they don't like it.
Most importantly, the competitors that the internet endlessly cries for to show up to dethrone these giants, see what is going on and say "lol, nope".
There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still serving ads.
> The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free
Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable.
This vision is ripe for the picking:
What rubs me the wrong way about statements like this, is that it is almost always said by people who totally miss that they are advocating for things that are personally profitable for them.
A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user. That same end user, who detests the idea of having to spend money, then complains loudly that corporations just want their money. And it is completely lost on them they are playing the exact same game as corporations.
The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all. But that overwhelming is not what we see. Instead it is just two entities fighting over money, because they both have the same root motivation to maximize money.
Im typing a comment on a website of a corporation whose goal is to grow companies into corporations, via a computer manufactured by a corporation on a keyboard produced by a corporation, staring at a screen produced by a corporation, while connecting to an internet service offered by a corporation. Never mind that im also employed by a corporation, dressed by a corporation, drive a car manufactured by a corporation that takes fuel from a corporate gas station that is extracted and proccessed by a corporation.
What is the alternative exactly
By virtue of people spending time on twitter, twitter has value. If that sentence is non-sensical to you, then now is not the time to for it.
At least in the digital world almost every piece of software and website I use has been getting objectively worse the past few years. And I don’t mean like, I hate this UI layout so it’s objectively worse. I mean like new Reddit freezing my tab completely ~50% of the time and its notifications page not registering my clicks and instead clicking on the page behind it. Or like Microsoft breaking pasting in fucking Excel and managing to ship that to consumers as another article today showed. Or the fact that activities in Windows that used to be lightning fast like searching or opening an application now take seconds to 10s of seconds.
We’ve reached a point where companies are too entrenched in their monopolies and are currently in a mode of just figuring out how to extract as much rent as possible.
The only companies I know of still in heavy competition are AI companies but they are doing the tried and true method of heavily subsidizing their business until they kill their competition and I have no doubt that whoever wins will switch over to rent extraction as well.
There is also nebula and curiosity stream, which also illustrate my point. Both solid good services with <1% conversion rates.
There is no better service than YouTube while using an ad-blocker, and no amount of "awesome new platform" can break that. Most people's response to "YouTube sucks" is to ad-block on YouTube, not go to a competitor(and pay/view ads). It totally breaks the market and ultimately makes things shitty. That debt must be repaid somewhere.
login wall != paywall
As for your apples:oranges comparison about maximizing money, which group do you suppose has an unfair advantage these days?
Modern Capitalism Is Weirder Than You Think: It also no longer works as advertised
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h...
It's all greed, all the ways down.
I also can't read the article, not going to make an account, and I stand by not backdooring.
Or in the case of X, how about just let me browse without creating an account? Likewise with meta/FB, IG, etc. The reality is businesses and other services post here, share status updates, etc. often before their main pages. I'd like to read those, and yet I have no desire to actually post or interact with any of the content, just read it. I should not need an account for that.
But like I said, the internet is largely unwilling to do this. You won't make a competitor that is a charity, and the internet at large won't point dollars and ad-views at a nascent start-up in the space.
large social media companies arent there because theyre good or that there are no competitors, its that switching cost is high.
you should be pointing at the government to enforce interoperability standards such that logins and so on are not locked to one place.
Sorry, what? The internet is unwilling to create twitter clones?
Bluesky, mastodon, pleroma, misskey, diaspora, threads, fucking truth social… there is no shortage of twitter alternatives.
If any of those were highly profitable, they would be able to grow. But more profit for them, means less profit for users, means they are stuck fighting over crumbs from Twitter.
The internet is happy to create alternatives. Network effects mean it's VERY hard to change the default social network once it's established.
I hate using facebook marketplace, but over the past 6-ish years everybody in my city has moved off craigslist to marketplace - so now I use marketplace because otherwise I can't sell my shit. Am I the problem?
I don't think we always need to broaden this out to industry wide levels. We can talk about things specifically. In this case, X/Twitter has put a login wall in front of posts to boost signups. It never used to. That's a meaningful difference that people seek alternatives to.
Luckily, he won that fight, and nowadays nobody thinks of bots when thinking of X, The Everything App.
I suspect Nitter's first round with lawyers pointed out that scraping is legal, but now they have been threatened with something else than scraping - Elon claims something else the way Nitter runs is illegal, such as the use of fake accounts to circumvent an access control device (DMCA 1201).
Obviously ungrounded and frivolous cases tend to be easier to defend asymmetrically, but if I was X's legal team, there's no shortage of semi-plauisble claims I could throw at the wall and see what sticks.
As an example of this imbalance in action, BrightData is a 'gray area' company that basically does this exact kind of scraping. They have somehow won against Meta Platforms suing them, and even got X's lawsuit against them for scraping -- identical (?) activity to XCancel -- dismissed.
According to Wikipedia:
> In May 2024, a federal judge dismissed the suit, ruling that Bright Data did not violate X's terms of service or copyright by scraping publicly accessible data.[24] The judge emphasized that such scraping practices are generally legal and that restricting them could lead to information monopolies
But does XCancel have the resources of a company like Bright Data, that's funded and used by companies like Deloitte and Moodys?
Isn't Nitter abusing account sign-in for this?
It's like a club that checks ids to ban people. I wouldn't call that club open to the general public.
1) Nitter offers a deal: download our browser extension, sign up for Twitter, and we'll give you some kind of perk (Amazon credits, whatever).
2) Browser extension surfs Twitter on the user's behalf, scraping and sending copies to Nitter.
3) We find out how serious the legal system is about prosecuting scraping.
Perhaps that is it in fact. The act of protecting it from scraping means you object. 99% of the blogged contents etc. Big AI helped themselves to was just… there. Public. Not free from copyright but still not paywalled.
It seems unreasonable to stop there though; the agentic bots are designed and marketed as able to compete with the initially-scraped sources.
I'm not convinced that a competitive use at one remove should be treated as not competitive.
After all LLMs don't just code, they also answer questions and give step-by-step instructions. In terms of total userbase those features are used a lot more than writing code
Who has the gold makes the rules.
Do you think the bottom 99% of the country would ever win a legal fight with one of the tech billionaires?
Even if they were 100% in the right, they could just drag out the legal process with endless motions and appeals until the average Joe lacked the funds to continue the fight.
If they weren't competing with AI then why is AI killing it?
But it is not the AI who is killing it, users are doing it.
Which is in a few jurisdictions, or at least is not prosecuted if it's for personal use. Also, according to your definition, the creator of uBlock Origin or any other adblock system should be sued in the same way, because they are depriving $ADS_CORP of their precious impressions.
It's like saying "toaster oven/air fryer combos" don't actually compete with toaster ovens or air fryers because they are creating a market for something better
Of course they complete.
Toaster ovens compete with toasters. Microwaves compete with toaster ovens.
Just because it's not the exact same product doesn't mean it's not competing
Would I be allowed to steal LG's designs for a microwave and make a "superwave" that does laundry and heats food? Would you claim those products don't compete because the superwave is "something better"?
What cases are you citing when you say this?
Is X claiming ownership of the posts people make because pretty much every single social media site doesn't so they have section 230 protection.
I'm not even sure he can use his own account as one of them. The SEC might be pretty friendly to him but I'm not sure that limiting access to a location where material information about Tesla/SpaceX is provided won't become a problem.
But I'm not even sure what damages the accounts are suffering as revenue sharing is going away [1]. With Bartz the damage is a loss of sale. With X the damage is $0 per post to the poster.
There is a newer Original Content Rewards program [2] but it seems to split revenue from X Premium and presumably people that have X Premium are not using XCancel so the damages would be 0.
Recipes can’t be copyrighted
Here’s one discussion about this https://www.nycbar.org/reports/secret-ingredients-how-to-pro...
Taking something someone else made and showing it as-is, bypassing their own restrictions: No no.
Taking something someone else made, modify it or use parts of it in some bigger thing or completely change it: Fine, if you have money and/or run a company
Because that's stupid. These laws are stupid.
It should have nothing to do with storing copies it should have to do with what the models can produce. And it's clear they can produce copyrighted works, they've just been tuned so they don't.
That shouldn't satisfy anyone.
if you started doing the same to, say, instagram content both meta and individual creators would sue you as well.
sites like archive.ph are in a similar bucket btw, and yet nobody's complaining (except websites seeing people evading their paywall). but at the end of the day it's not really fair to apply laws differentially on the basis of whose political ideas we like more.
Edit: not a moral stance
You let it happen. Once people stop letting it happen, it'll stop. But social media is apparently the new "opium of the masses" so here we are and no one wants to do anything.
Nitter is useful for sporadic random access to tweets, but for public feeds like municipal authorities etc. it would be useful if someone scraped the feed and re-hosted the feed from their own server, without being hobbled by rate limits. Is that what you're doing?
So is the distinction that xcancel served the content? But when I run
mtr xcancel.com
Same as when LG said their TVs don't record you and then Hacker News said "how can they detect voice commands if they don't record your voice"... facepalm.
Then the other side also has to bring an excuse for why you were supposed to do it, and if the principal thinks their excuse is better than yours, you get detention.
If you tell the principal "I don't have to do my homework because work means employment and it's illegal to employ a minor" you'll get detention for not doing your homework and extra detention for being a smartass.
The person I was responding to was saying that anytime you viewed copyrighted content with a browser you’d necessarily be committing copyright infringement. I’m not a lawyer but I can imagine that the reasoning there would be slightly different from someone simply viewing a post in a browser as part of the intended use of the site.
Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.
Note this is distinct from broadcast systems like analog television or radio. Packet switching networks only function by copying information and storing multiple copies around the internet, including in your computer's RAM (and disk, if cached).
So a legal definition that says "this kind of copying is copying but that other kind of copying isn't copying" makes no sense at all. Like many other legal definitions--it's all about what has been successfully snuck past a jury at one point or another in the past, without any heed for how things actually work.
You could argue that your MP3 of Enjoy the Silence is actually just a big number, and you can XOR it with 0xFF and it's a completely different big number, and you just happen to XOR it with 0xFF when you want to listen to it. The courts would look past that, and instead determine if you created that "big number" by MP3-encoding the track from a CD you owned (legal), versus obtaining it from some file-sharing network (not legal)
Classic essay about techies not understanding the law: What Colour Are Your Bits? https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
Your response seems to ignore everything in my comment other than the second sentence. I was asking why that detail should matter as far as the law is concerned, and I gave some reasons I don't think that would be good or practical.
If your link is set up to make the image display immediately (that is, you wrap it in image tags, or as in one case, embed Instagram posts) then you may be violating copyright. What's more, in Europe, just a hyperlink to a copyrighted work violates copyright.
Conclusion: copyright is not about copying, it's about access.
How I view that public data they decided to make public data, is none of their business.
> If you serve as a mere conduit for automatic transmission of user communications, there are no other qualifications or obligations you need to meet. If you serve a caching function, in addition to the two requirements above, you must maintain comply with the notice-and-takedown process.
https://www.copyright.gov/512/
https://internetcases.com/2024/02/12/dmca-subpoena-to-mere-c...
Distilling isn’t copying and redistributing, for the same reason that you reading a story and then writing your own story based on ideas you learned is different from you reading a book, writing all the words down verbatim, and then publishing it as your own.
Edit: iPhone autocorrected my OP which meant to say rehosting not reposting
UPDATE: Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.
It's impossible to know what this "legal advice" was, but the software project itself is probably fine. The legal risk is always going to be with the person that hosts it with the intention of facilitating the unauthorized access of Twitter's website. Seems like that could run afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Those people should seek their own legal advice.
Edit: I see I'm being downvoted for just providing facts, so here's some evidence: you can see on the main project page that the repo was archived on 11 Sep[0]. Looking in the commits, the "UPDATE" message was commited on 6 Sep[1].
[0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
[1] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/commit/1428b4c2b4246f92a7e5...
Why do you say it’s permanent? Unarchiving a GitHub repository is reversible, and just as easy as archiving it.
- bluesky - mastodon
Why does anybody (that’s not some right wing, white Christian nationalist nut job) still use twitter?
Some organizations only post information on Twitter, especially those with limited resources. And if their followers are themselves limited in number, then that information is not disseminated.
For example, the Dutch Air Force is currently posting updates on their ongoing airborne exercise exclusively on Twitter: https://www.defensie.nl/onderwerpen/f/falcon-leap
They probably don't want their echo chamber leaking to the wider internet, because external discussion of the content would reveal it for the siloed thought bubble that it is.
Consider X now requires personal information to sign up, and after handing that info over, signups are often still rejected with no explanation given. Yet another tell they're very interested in maintaining that echo chamber.
Speaking only for myself, well, no. If Elon doesn't want non-users to be able to read tweets then that's simply one section of the internet I'm swearing off. I'll get my news from actual news sites and I have plenty of hot takes on my own to last me this life and the next.
That is directly the result of the evil pull of advertising. "Logged in" users are more valuable than "non-logged in" users to advertisers (because logged in ones are identified) and so what you are seeing as "nagging" is Shitter (formerly X, formerly Twitter) desperately trying to increase its ad revenue at your expense. You are watching enshittification right before your eyes.
It is all about capturing the platform to change the conversation around 2024 US presidential election cycle and US politics.
It’s effectively become a political propaganda machine owned by billionaires
It's like paywalls. Some news companies share free news as a sort of loss leader. Others say, "if you aren't going to pay we simply don't want you here."
On a practical level, I’m also wondering what consistent legal standard people want when it comes to things like terms of service and individuals' copyright. It's unworkable to maintain one rule for the awesome people we might like and and another rule for the horrible despots we might not like.
Of course that's a real issue since the whole thing is login gated and inaccessible. But unfortunately it is the reality. So I think something like XCancel is needed.
IF those public institutions want to to connect with all their constituents, then move to a better platform. Not the other way around.
It can happen - nobody would post an Instagram link to HN. But for X it did not happen.
Notice the EU's Digital Markets Act is a liability shield for Nitter instances hosted in the EU.
Shitter is now irrelevant for me. If you want my engagement or attention or response or to keep up with you, move to a better platform.
I used to care enough to keep up with Shitter on xcancel. Now it's just faded into irrelevance. YMMV, particularly over time
Shitter isn't the gospel of human experience and creativity and expression. It's just ... Shitter.
But I still use Wikipedia.
That's what Grok as for.
Apples and Oranges...
That is a red herring. A corporation can act ethically. A charity can act disgracefully.
A government can protect people. A neighbourhood association can bully them.
A billionare can be philanthropic. A group of children can terrorise a community.
1. Pretend it isn't there. 2. Flag it and pretend it isn't there. 3. Flag it and read the content somewhere else in case it's relevant.
I'm sure there are people who genuinely need to receive information that's only on that site, but personally I'm enjoying the feeling of the joy of missing out.
That sounds likes something a clickbait author would write.
5. Accept that you won't click on the link
> right-wing content was shown most prominently, regardless of users' political leaning.
> Left-wing users saw almost the same amount of left-wing and right-wing content, even though they only followed left-wing accounts. But only 14% of the political content sent to our right-leaning users was left-wing.
> The neutral users saw twice as much right-wing content as left-wing content. And barely any of the political content shown to our X users was non-partisan.
> Over half of the political content shown to our new X users came from accounts categorised as extreme. Of the content from extreme authors, 72% of posts came from right-leaning accounts.
All we can actually derive from that article is that X’s new user recommendation system exposed a small number of near-default, low-feedback, synthetic accounts to more content that left-wing “misinformation” researchers classified as “right-wing”.
The current top article on their website argues for punching their political opponents in the streets.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-mus...
And simply criticizing Musk is enough to get a shadow ban
I provided a study that literally won the Royal Statistical Societies' "Statistical Excellence in Journalism" award [0]. You provided unfounded dismissal and conspiracy. The burden of proof is on your side.
[0] https://rss.org.uk/news-publication/news-publications/2026/g...
If they post on Reddit, it gets lost in the sea.
Of course the right thing is to lobby those organizations to switch. But that won't help with the immediate situation.
The author of the comment higher up is describing a person who is boycotting X because they are strongly against its stewardship and moderation but regardless continues to find ways to indulge themselves in the content produced by users of X, for other users of X.
How else should we describe the position held? It's clearly not entirely principled and veers directly into performative action (i.e. virtue signalling).
I admit I'm not nor have been a Twitter/X user so am able to look at the situation without a sense of entitlement or attachment.
Yes. Because we have to participate in a society in which sometimes, that's where the info is. Some towns only post their announcements on Facebook/X!
> How else should we describe the position held? It's clearly not entirely principled and veers directly into performative action (i.e. virtue signalling).
Virtue isn't a binary. I can reduce my externalities, even if I can't eliminate them.
These are all things I want to stay informed on, and given the choice would rather read elsewhere. Often I get the same information from secondary sources and manage to avoid that, but even then on controversial things I prefer to check the source directly.
And regarding copyright, the same company owns an LLM that was no doubt trained through mass copyright infringement. Maybe the legal double standard is on their end?
We don't. We let six or seven far right billionares do that.
> And regarding copyright
Copyright of tweets are owned by original authors. Unless you have permission, the copyright infringement which occurs is against the individual, not X.
*if you log in to an account
A big reason many people use Nitter instances is that X has become very locked down for unauthenticated users.
I don't particularly like Bluesky, but it's publicly readable and has RSS. Any real solution would be protocol or standard instead of yet another closed service, though. For now, I see Nitter and XCancel as a temporary fix until people abandon it for whatever practical, economic, or political reason(s) they may have.
Open RSS wrote about exactly this a couple weeks ago [1]. Bluesky being publicly readable with RSS is an improvement. But government offices should be publishing on their own RSS feeds, and the platforms should be secondary, not the other way around. The amount of policy that gets announced on social media without even a mention on their own website is bizarre. Why isn't posting their content off platform legally required at this point?
[1] https://openrss.org/blog/government-updates-belong-in-an-ope...
It makes me so mad. The Paris public transportation company (RATP) owns not one but two whole apps. Yet, whenever there's an incident they immediately reach for X (on which I can't access their posts), while their apps lag behind.
As far as I'm concerned, my government should issue a blanket ban on public actors using social medias for communication.
If it's public, people can link to it and promote the site. If it's not, then either info there doesn't get free publicity or people just screenshot the tweets instead.
You can all walk away. You don’t need it.
Now that said, I sure hope Elon will pivot this and make these services unnecessary. I'm not holding my breath though.
The fact that Twitter is login-gated makes it objectively less free as in freedom.
It is not the same kind of "free" as in "no cost". Twitter is a paid service. To access Twitter, you have to pay for it. Either by purchasing a subscription or viewing ads.
Think of it as having to buy a newspaper before being able to read it. That doesn't stop the paper's editors from being able to criticize the government.
This is one way to define it, yes, but Musk is a self-described “free speech absolutist” which I would argue means that he feels speech should be maximally free.
> It is not the same kind of "free" as in "no cost".
I have never meant it in that way, and I’m not sure why you thought I did.
> To access Twitter, you have to pay for it. Either by purchasing a subscription or viewing ads.
This is possibly pedantic but this statement as written is false. I can view single tweets just fine, and I don’t see ads.
> Think of it as having to buy a newspaper before being able to read it. That doesn't stop the paper's editors from being able to criticize the government.
That analogy doesn’t really work here, IMO. My only point is that it’s objectively true that speech behind a login wall is less free (as in freedom) than speech not behind a login wall, and so a (non-hypocritical) “free speech absolutist” should always prefer the latter.
Nobody is being censored by the inability of a third party to act as a parallel distribution channel. Nor does freedom of speech have anything to do with entitlement to an audience. No website infringes upon freedom of speech by having a paywall on UGC, as neither the contributors nor readers are worse off than if the site didn't exist.
He speaks out both sides of his mouth.
Unfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings, we are required to suspend this service again until further notice. We can't share more details.
You can find the content you were looking for on the original website:
Continue to X
Thank you for your understanding. And the trust you have put into the XCancel project.
“Does the other side need to show any good faith?”
“No, in fact the judge is more likely to side either then the more angry and aggressive they are”
“….great”
If they post something on Twitter, or worse, Facebook, they must also provide a copy of the post on their own website. Some kind of online government gazette, if you will.
People here overthink so much about this topic.
As the state or a representative thereof, yes; that's why public service is either run by itself or contracts to operators who must then abide by requirements (like no discrimination, unconditional access to information, social pricing, or similar provisions depending on your jurisdiction), that they would scrape the very day their activity became free market.
In France, even banks, a sector without a public actor in most countries, are legally required to open accounts ("droit au compte"). I don't mean _any_ kind of account, but at least one. On which banks naturally don't make a profit...
Google or Apple on the other hand, have no legal duty to let you in, which means in practice that they can lock you out of public services that they gate access to.
BTW: overthinking is how society moves forward :)
A nice UI around such API probably can be one-shotted with modern LLM-coding models and tools.
Or, you can go the hard way and vibecode something around buying twitter accounts (just several bucks per each) and proxies.
What I'm trying to say, that with modern tools it is incredibly easy to bypass the restrictions on reading twitter without an account, even if they manage to take down all the nitter instances, try to make finding nitter source code harder etc.
Insta requiring login Facebook requiring login
Bad:
X requiring login
Set up a mastodon account that mirrors your (or someone elses) X account.
This way people who want can continue using X, and other people can read & refer to their posts without needing to log into X.
> Continue to X
This was hard to swallow for me! Why you are redirecting to X, which is the exact opposite of what you are offering?! Don't get me wrong, I use XCancel and Nitter regularly an I like them, it just hits hard!
regardless, no matter how hard elon turns the screws on their customers, people will continue to use twitter/X because "that's where everyone is" and places like HN will continue to allow these links because "that's where the news is" despite healthier alternatives like the Mastodon network and Bluesky existing.
whatever. i've redirected x to 0.0.0.0 when the first warning shot was fired and called it a day. rocks are looking like a great place to live under right about now anyway.
Bluesky is here anyway.
Hell, you’re arguably on a Twitter alternative right now.
I ditched xcancel for redirectors like https://twit.0r.cx/
or
yes, he can enforce whatever ToS he wants .
For example, rumors about latest AI developments are available there, but not here on HN.
X also works well for media, which on HN you can only see after navigating to an external website.
Many comment sections are rough, but usually not worth visiting apart from the top comments anyway.
I don't like that Ads are hard to distinguish from regular posts.
I believe the main reason for not using X is a political boycott. Many disagree politically, or don't entertain certain delusions about Musk that are popular with progressives.
Social media isn't news. It's entertainment.
What is? TV, Radio, Newspapers, Town square, are all entertainment
There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.
This comment also applies to facebook too, which I think is even worse than twitter.
RSS.
There are millions of accounts for sale, roughly $0.10 per account.
https://hstockplus.com/accounts/twitter-x-accounts?sortBy=pr...
I wouldn't even mind seeing advertisements.
I just don't want to have an X account.
I wish legal issues wouldn’t exist for this project and X would stop attacking projects that provide information for free.
Privacy is important more than ever as many of us don't want to login into X.
No they didn't, or you'd see the text "Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown." and wouldn't have access to the repo at all. Instead you have full access to it, its author having merely archived it out of caution.
No reference to nitter in https://github.com/github/dmca/
Here is what the "free speech" platform have censored previously on GitHub:
> X Corp. employs various technical protection measures to control access to its copyrighted works, including those at issue here (API schemas and platform content): e.g., official X Corp. API key/OAuth authentication, rate-limiting mechanisms, proprietary behavioral pattern detection, TLS fingerprint validation, and x-clienttransaction-id checks. The repository referenced above appears specifically designed to circumvent these measures using browser cookies, curl_cffi TLS impersonation, fake headers, request jitter, and reverse-engineered GraphQL queries.
https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/b2c88bad7dd771dc7d1842ff...
Consider running your own to spread out the HN/Slashdot effect.
Isn't this the exact use case it was built for, preservation of news data in a way that it cannot be tampered with and so that it is kept accessible for everyone forever?
The consistent view is one regarding IP in general - not reverse engineering your morals based on the case.
But more directly addressing your point, I do think you could easily find a consistent moral stance that thinks taking tweets to train AI is worse than republishing those same tweets on a website. An argument can be made that the person writing those tweets wants to be heard, so republishing the tweet is in line with (your best guess of) what they want. Whereas consumption of the tweet for AI training is less likely to be consistent with the wants of the original author.
It feels like an end of an era.
The browser extension "Libredirect" will transparently redirect you to a working one or one of your choice.
Despicable behavior.
Nitter instances by contrast are specific software intended to view information on a specific proprietary social media website in ways the owners of that website don't want them to. It's a question for lawyers if X declaring this to be a type of copyright violation will hold up in court, but X is also actively trying to block Nitter instances from accessing the site at all, which is a technological rather than legal mechanism.
Oh no! How awful! So terrible! People who produce nothing of value might earn slightly less!
Moving on to more pressing matters...
Either you cancel X. Meaning: NOT consuming X content.
Or you just visit X.com.
Right? Right?
A bit like your comment.
It's possible that other people you want to read, are using a platform you don't want to use. Have this perhaps never happened to you, even once?
Either these people are important enough to you, and you don't disfavor the platform soo much. Then visit that platform.
Or you dislike the platform so much that you even wonder why these people are there. You definitely don't want to be in contact with the platform. If so, then give up these people.
There's no free lunch, right? You also (typically) cannot buy steak, but then somehow not pay the money by showing some fake credit card. That would typically involve crime, right?
Make decisions, guys!!! Make decisions!
Your cat and mouse games are embarrassing...
And that doesn't get better in any way just by downvoting me. ;) ;) ;)
Or should things be like that?
It reduces Twitter's traffic a little. It screws with some of their metrics a little, with the shared accounts having access patterns of several humans all mixed together. It might affect revenue a little.
It doesn't do much to address the underlying issue of there being people who you might want to hear from who primarily post their content on a platform owned by a white nationalist. If you want that to get better, you have to something other than continue to use the platform.
The platform's user base, including accounts created for XCancel/Nitter purposes, forms the value that causes others to post there. Accessing the platform through a proxy still provides value to the platform in terms of user attention.
My only explanation would be to imagine all down-voters as chain smokers when they get involved into discussions whether smoking is a good thing.
Standing outside and looking through the Nazi Bar's window is still pretty much hanging out at the Nazi Bar. It still brings traffic and attention to their establishment.
Sure, it's not buying drinks from the Nazis, and that is an improvement over being inside and giving Nazis your money and engagement directly. But it's still hanging out at the Nazi Bar.
They all secretly want to use X because it’s very convenient to consume news and other form of content. But they refuse to make an account because of their pettiness. So they rather use third party websites.
Making an X account would take 2 minutes. But they rather just write a hate comment on HN every opportunity they can.
Xcancel allows HN users and adjacent to swear that they have left Twitter because it has nothing to offer them because its all shit, but still consume Twitter content because every other similar platform really sucks and is boring and has no content
You look very odd and silly if you still want to engage with it and just use a different UI layer (i.e., "XCancel", "Nitter".)
If they want you to have an account to read the post and you want to read the post, create an account, log in, and move on. If you don't want to do that, nobody is forcing you to view a public website. There's alternatives like "Bluesky" out there that might be good for you.
Why? The site still hosts plenty of content worth seeing. Is it really so silly to do it via a better UI, or to not want an account?
xcancel was amazing and I hope they can continue in some way. But since I have no actual need to go to the X site, I choose to completely ignore it, regardless of who posts what there. Most important things will be in the news anyway or you just pick it up from talking to other people.
multiple times now I've signed up with a fake name/handle/email/etc..., sometimes from a VPN, and within 10 minutes a friend usually tells me they see me as a recommendation to follow (they can tell, by the handle).
Insta delete, every time.