"If nothing changes, all remaining Nitter instances will go down eventually" | Hacker News Reader

"If nothing changes, all remaining Nitter instances will go down eventually"

nitter.d420.de

503 pointsproctrap359 comments

This is just an instance shutting down, not all of the Nitter instances. Sort of a deceptive title.

The important part is the linked GitHub comment from the primary maintainer (and owner) of the Nitter project. To save readers a click

  Guest accounts have been removed, they weren't just led to believe that. With real accounts getting rate limited immediately and likely banned, I don't see any path forward for Nitter.

Source: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983#issuecomment-191...

The way I interpret this comment is that all public Nitter instances are at risk of becoming inoperable (at their current scale).

> (and owner) of Nitter.

I would say that Nitter as a whole is not owned by anyone, that person is the owner of one of the Nitter instances, in addition to being the primary maintainer of the project as you correctly stated.

I agree with the second part of your comment about all instances being in danger. It is unfortunately a common problem faced by many privacy-respecting frontends (Nitter, Libreddit, Proxigram, Piped etc)

I really meant to say "owner of the Nitter project", but you are nonetheless correct about ownership of Nitter instances. I have edited my post.

It's also factually incorrect to suppose that this person owns the Nitter project, too. There's no CLA so the copyright is held in common by all of the contributors. Free software projects don't have owners, they have maintainers, and the maintainers are a social construction rather than a matter of property law.

But zdeus is the 'owner' of the nitter project on Github. That's their official word for it, even though it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the legal concept of (copyright) ownership.

And then there's 'owner' in the software dev sense, i.e. the one that ultimately decides which direction the project takes, what patches to merge etc. is sometimes referred to as "product owner".

sometimes yes, but not always, no

This seems factually incorrect, but in a nuanced way.

The copyright owner of a code is the one listed as such. In cases of multiple contributors, each owns the copyright to their individual contributions. For projects with shared contributions, it's more accurate to say each necessary part has its own copyright owner, rather than a common ownership.

Free software projects do have copyright owners, which can be entities like non-profits or companies. This ownership is crucial for legal standing in copyright infringement cases, except for public domain code, which isn't copyrighted.

It's wise to have a Contributing.md or similar, stating that contributors affirm their creation is original, free from patent issues, and they agree to license their contribution under the project's terms.

Without such agreements, there's a risk contributors might withdraw their code, claiming it wasn't licensed under the project's terms, potentially leaving gaps in the project.

Simply hosting code on a site with a common license doesn't automatically apply that license to your code unless you explicitly agree to it.

> the maintainers are a social construction rather than a matter of property law.

Property law itself is a social construction of exactly the same kind.

A single person or group owning a FLOSS project is also a typical, almost universal case. There's always the person or team, and the canonical repository, that represents what "Emacs" is, or what "sr.ht" is, etc. In practice, for everything except legal issues, this is the same as legal ownership.

I counted 10 instances recently going down on the status page. There is at least a correlation, probably a cause.

Except half of the instances are rate limited, so unless you know the username or tweet you are looking for, good luck searching for anything.

Oh, does it mostly affect searching?

99% of the time I touch twitter, it's to go to a specific tweet or timeline.

I don't know for sure, I've been watching a couple accounts that have been dormant for a while, but several instances have broken search, so maybe the account pages are cached.

Edit: I just checked an instance and it seems to have tweets from the past minute or two, but if the backend accounts that drive them are getting banned, it's probably gonna tank in the upcoming weeks.

Good to hear. I only follow specific users via nitter (via Feedbro extension)

This is one of the long time running instances shutting down, linking to the primary nitter author saying it's the end for all instances eventually. And providing insights from the status page.

If they don't get new guest accounts, they're all going to shut down withing 30 days. It's just left over accounts and caches giving you the impression everything is fine.

Don't forget the rolling DoS herds of scrapers having no more ways to do stuff on their own, which are now trying to use the remaining instances - killing even more.

I shouldn't have to paste this here, but: "If nothing changes, all remaining instances will go down eventually: Instances rely on guest accounts, which are valid for a certain time and of which you need a ton to run a public instance. The API for this got taken down and it doesn't look like a fluke this time."

It's unfortunate that this mistaken comment is top voted.

"If nothing changes, all remaining instances will go down eventually: Instances rely on guest accounts, which are valid for a certain time and of which you need a ton to run a public instance. The API for this got taken down and it doesn't look like a fluke this time."

nitter.cz and nitter.net are having issues and being rate limited.

The submitted title was "Nitter Is Dead". We changed it to the article title overnight, but I've since changed it to a representative sentence from the text.

If all Nitter instances get shut down, that's another reason for people to stop putting information into the Twitter/X walled-garden.

Nitter has had the effect of a pressure release valve, for the people who object most to Twitter/X.

Without the Nitter compromise, more people will stop linking to Twitter/X threads, indulging people who still post there, etc.

I am quite sure the people who use Nitter or otherwise detest Mysterious Twitter X are a vocal minority of people.

I do not think that people without account are minority.

They just aren't the ones posting on the platform.

I have misunderstood you/OP. In this case you are right. I was commenting from perspective of someone that do not have account but came across the twitter links on sites like HN.

I'm struggling heavily to find the traffic statistic that I read a year or so ago, but it said that point seven to point nine percent of all Twitter traffic came from Nitter. Considering that at the time there were three different third party front ends that is no small amount, I think somewhere around thirty million visits daily.

Comparing traffic, pre sale, of logged in twitter users vs traffic generated by those without accounts would give insight into what percentage of users have to take action to continue to use twitter normally.

I spent a 1-2 minutes googling and could not come up with numbers though.

I know I am part of the percentage of people that used to read twitter without an account, or at least not logged in, and now read twitter a trivial amount.

I use Twitter, and I detest it. It's mostly spam.

This actually came up in a conversation yesterday, funnily enough: I'm mostly using Twitter because I'm curious as to how much worse it's going to get. So far, I've seen them allow NSFW paid-for advertisements, doxxing of well-known figures, daily crypto mention farming spam (with highly suspicious, easily-detectable patterns, spread across ~10 accounts per day), obvious engagement bait to benefit from ad-revenue sharing, fake interaction spam, and plenty more.

As an excerpt, the @support account on Twitter is completely dead, too -- if I remember correctly, the last reply to an issue was around August / June of last year. So clearly they don't have the staffing needed to support... well, the support, and they seem to have issues admitting that.

That becomes even more clear when you look at the spam on the platform: obvious spam patterns are completely ignored, with reports going to the wayside, and crypto / NFT spam being left up to victimize someone who doesn't know what it really is. It's quite grotesque.

Even though a lot of people may use the platform, quite a substantial amount of people also speak out about how much worse Twitter has got since the acquisition -- while I have nothing against Elon Musk, I find it quite amazing how badly the platform seems to be doing ever since he's been at the helm.

None of what you said contests what I said.

I find it quite useful, with the exception of the porn ads.

But I strictly follow python developers, bsd people and retro computing enthusiasts. None post any politics.

I think any social media platform can be good/bad just like people in general, it all depends who you interact with.

> Twitter/X walled-garden

I think the MIME type should be `X-Walled-Garden/Twitter`

Internet media types (previously known as “MIME types”) with “X-” prefixes are now discouraged.

For many in this thread, X is now discouraged as well. /s

I don't understand, how is this sarcasm?

They mean that X the social media platform, formerly known as Twitter, is now discouraged, since Nitter is no longer a viable method for accessing it.

I'm with you that this is disappointing, but folks who use these sorts of tools tend to be a bit naive about the impact of them going away. It's a little silly, to be honest. Best numbers I could come by is X does something like 100B impressions/day and x.com saw 1.2B visits in the month of December. Will some people stop seeing X posts on Nitter? Sure, maybe. Will it matter to X? I doubt it.

Exactly. Even the reddit blackouts etc did nothing really - sure a few people left in a huff and all that jazz, but Reddit is still trucking along happily. The only time I've seen the "eff it, we're leaving!" thing actually work was with Digg v4.

I have seen a considerable degrading of quality on reddit since the blackouts. I use reddit for quality subject discussion in topics ranging from pressure cooking to circuit design but I also use it for general crappy banter and time wasting, and the people who would contribute useful content in the former have decreased in number while the latter have increased making the signal to noise much worse.

It doesn't help that they have started placing content from more obscure subreddits onto people's front pages seemingly randomly, so people wander into places and have no idea what the culture is they are contributing to and add content which is wildly out of place.

To get subject matter discussion which is reasonable I have been wandering back to bespoke forums, which isn't necessarily bad, but they still have a lot of issues. A lot of other content has moved to discord, but I won't get into how I feel about that.

Although, I'm surprised how often I'm seeing the key comments I was searching for deleted. I haven't been keeping stats, but maybe around half the time.

Some Reddit metrics might've hardly noticed the blips, but if they had metrics for early-Reddit qualities, such as for smart (or clever) comments, helpful information, humor, or goodwill... I suspect those would be bad. Where they're not bad might be non-frontpage subs that are still cruising along with their earlier communities. But those communities started in earlier Reddit, and I suspect that today would not have started there.

> metrics for early-Reddit qualities

Those had already tanked before any API changes.

Nah, the blackouts definitely hurt Reddit. Deleted posts are the norm now. This was not the case before the API changes.

Fair point, I have myself noticed a lot more deleted posts. I doubt their bottom line has hurt much though.

Deleted and overwritten posts were a thing for long before the api change.

"A thing" is substantially different from what they claimed, that it's now the norm.

Not in my experience.

yes, but they are every other post you find on google now.

i certainly didn't help; i used shreddit to overwrite then delete my posts.

Tumblr with their NSFW removal change as well.

It's created a reverse eternal September. The masses stay confined to one place. Other places can flourish with the old school smaller community kind of feel and quality. Let twitter live in its current state if it means other places won't be taken over by influencers and other bullshit.

Will the other places resist to VC money or other shenanigans though? That's the question...

There's too many other places. VC can't find every tiny community out there, or even any noteworthy portion of them. Places small enough to still have a coherent sense of community are beneath the notice of VC.

This is nice in theory. I haven't used any twitter alternatives but others seem to report that their content is more or less the same as twitter's.

We're all sharing the same links, articles, jokes, memes, ideas, cat pictures. What differentiates a place is its sense of community, not its content. It's easy to forget that because Twitter long ago stopped being a community.

Speaking for the fediverse only, the experience is what you make of it. Stay on the largest, averagest instance and your experience will be bland; get on an instance with people who share your values, an instance that connects with other instances OK with you, follow accounts posting content you want to see and the experience will be much better.

Mastodon reminds me of 2007 Twitter, and it would be great if it stayed that way.

Don't despair. I've never heard of this Nitter, and I'm living quite a successful life.

I think leftists who are losing their minds over Elon Musk's Twitter are a loud minority. If Nitter goes down, nothing at all will change. Twitter will continue to thrive and people will continue to use it and link to it.

I hate that Twitter is a walled garden but I understand why it is like that today as the well has been poisoned. To be honest I gave it try and it looks like today Mastodon/Bluesky are worse and Twitter better due to the migrations.

i agree.

Redirecting proxy for Nitter instances (alternative)

https://twiiit.com/

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

This is disappointing because often times people link to threads on Twitter but if you’re lucky enough to not get a login wall, the full thread wont be visible without logging in. (Which I’m not going to do)

I really wish people would just stop linking me to twitter (or better yet, stop using it altogether).

If we're lucky this will discourage HNers from linking to Twitter at all.

Especially those stupid blog-like formatted ones.

That's a net positive then

It's a terrible site though and calls to disallow submissions from there (in comments here) were common going back well before Musk took over, so the Twitter dislike originated independently of anyone's views about him.

Dislike is not priority or let say common denominator. Problem is that X/Twitter cannot be viewed without login. This was not the case before.

It used to be widely disliked even before the additional newer problem you mentioned.

In fairness, before Nitter (or even Musk) there was a highly inconsistent guest browsing policy on Twitter. One week you could read entire threads without logging in, the next week every inbound link would redirect to the registration page. Before Nitter I just stopped clicking Twitter links entirely, because I never knew if it would show any content.

At this point, submitting screenshots of a thread you like would unfortunately be more accessible. Shocking that we have to say that about static text content, but here we are in 2024...

Why not make an account if you want to read it?

I refuse to login to twitter for ethical reasons. If someone links me to a tweet I assume it’s because they thought I’d find it interesting. It’s a thoughtful act which deserves a little bit of effort on my part, so I’m willing to change the domain to see it. I’m not willing to login though. It’s a principle thing.

Not the OP but: because I've never wanted to post there and as far as I'm concerned there's no compelling reason I should need one and I'm so offended by Musk and his attempt to force me to get one that I would rather not read it than let him succeed.

1. Don’t want to give Twitter their personal phone number

2. Twitter SMS system can’t deliver to personal number on my network so can’t create account.

3. Banned from Twitter already.

4. Hate Elon.

5. Ethics (various reason)

6. Privacy

7. A lot of work to read a hot take

8. Social media is addictive. The site gives you crack when you log in.

9. Chinese Firewall (and in some occupied lands it may be a crime to use Twitter)

10. Too many logins for shit already.

11. NSFW bot accounts trying to chat you up

12. Uncomfortable agreeing to their terms of service. (e.g. according to their own summary as well of the text, you are not permitted to learn from the experience of using their mobile app, e.g. about app design principles, because it is "solely for the purpose of enabling you to use and enjoy the benefit of the Services.")

Having to make an account to read a website sounds idiotic.

Why should twitter be special in that regard?

It's not so you're essentially promoting the idea that we should have to make an account to read any website, which is idiotic.

Twitter isn't special in that regard. Not having Facebook or Instagram does the same thing or at least you get a very limited view. I think it's all bullshit as those networks exist because of the people are posting as a means to share.

It’s special in its utterly hypocritical espousing of Twitter as some digital “town square” led by “free speech absolutists”.

Many places require an account, many even paid like New York Times but you have all other social media offering limited views to facebook, instagram, tiktok with signing in.

All of those are just as stupid and should not be linked on HN.

I can happily just not read the tweet. There’s no FOMO if the pool of worthwhile posts is getting smaller, not larger

Why make me create an account if I want to read e.g. announcements of government organizations? Many of these publish only to Twitter and don't have an RSS feed.

Twitter can't both be the de-facto successor of RSS and a walled garden enforcing signups for read-only users.

It sucks. I don't want to use twitter but it's where people post. Nitter fulfilled my lurker only use case.

Same.

I just want to run a headless browser that logs into my socials periodically and scrapes the stuff I want from the account I follow and puts it into a less addictive format that provides an upper limit on my possible exposure and engagement. I’m happy to run it locally from my device. Ideally it redirects links to socials I come across too. Where is such a thing?

That sounds like a case of be the change you wish to see. Such a project sounds rather substantial, not only initially but also in upkeep. Might want to be more specific, such as "does this exist for my favorite social network called <insert network here>?"

This was the dream of RSS, but it went against the long-term business interests of the corporations hosting content, so it has since largely faded away

A lot of news sites still support RSS. Could be that not very many regular people understand RSS or want to use it, aside from podcasts.

I started using RSS again recently for this reason. I use it for for facebook, twitter, hackernews, etc. Feedbro extension supports public facebook profiles. Nitter clones like https://farside.link/nitter/elonmusk/rss still work.

That URL redirects me to various instances, some of which are not working.

You're right. I wonder if it works for me because feedbro checks every x minutes and eventually finds a working one to refresh my feed. I wonder if the situation is getting worse and I just haven't noticed yet.

I literally reached this discussion thread via the RSS feed for HN.

It’s out there. Social networking sites with a vested interest in monopolizing your attention don’t use it. So I don’t use them.

Outside of the tech community those see little use. Listings for my local music and arts scenes are on Instagram and Facebook. Underground community events are planned using proprietary group chats.

Free culture and open internet activists lost this battle

We lost the battle, but not the war.

im reminded of an ipad app 10 years ago that did roughly this, creating a magazine like interaction with your twitter, google reader, etc.

Oh yeah, Paper.li, right? https://web.archive.org/web/20120204055823/http://paper.li/

Unfortunately they've shut down at some point, it seems (thus my linking to archive.org instead of their actual domain).

Flipboard

https://www.macrumors.com/2010/07/21/flipboard-a-social-maga...

Oh yeah that's more likely the one, rather than paper.li . Surprising how similar they are! I forgot about Flipboard.

You may want social media to be pipes, not platforms.

Convince the government to forbid the business model in which most of users are not paying customers but a product offered to advertisers. Then, social platforms will not care if you use whatever client you desire.

Big Social shareholders don’t want it, though. Being a double-sided market is addictive, and no one can compete with them if they capture the market by not charging money.

> Convince the government to forbid the business model in which most of users are not paying customers but a product offered to advertisers

I like broadcast TV and radio (especially radio while driving) and think that most Americans would object to their removal.

Just look at the uproar over a few NFL games being unavailable on broadcast TV for a hint as to how well such a ban might go.

> I like broadcast TV and radio (especially radio while driving)

If you suggest to apply the same model to social media (where they don’t get to know about a single thing about the user, strictly one way ads) then I’d be totally for it.

However, I don’t think they’ll find this model profitable enough (advertisers like to target), and because charging users is easier with social media compared to radio broadcasting the barrier to start doing that is lower.

That is, disallowing profiting from PII and only allowing one-way ads in social media, while difficult to enforce will also mean they start charging users anyway. So why not skip that model altogether.

Local broadcast models don’t work on global scale anyway.

It sounded like your proposal would ban the business model of broadcast TV and radio, which I think would be difficult policy for Americans to accept.

New issue is AI. Even sites with no ads will want limits on scraping / apis / composability.

Another future was possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid...

It's too bad the silofication of the 2010s killed it off.

This can be done with little AWS Lambda scripts that periodically scrape (or API) whatever sites you want and e-mail you results. All the credentials to login to whatever sites can be personal/dedicated to your instance (so no real API limits), and the usage will almost certainly fall into the AWS free tier since it's only for you.

The ideal install workflow would be to have a repo of AWS CloudFormation templates to automate the installation of the lambdas for different sites in your account. Anyone can open an AWS account, and using CloudFormation is a few fields, and a button click.

Also, if the scripts are developed properly, they are runnable locally. A sane developer will run them locally during development, and then test deployed before releasing.

In theory, anything is possible with months of developer work. The trouble is, there are billions of people addicted to social media. There aren't many widespread solutions to scrape it. Whenever a scraper becomes even remotely popular, Facebook takes action against it, as accessing posts outside the walled garden is a violation of their terms of service. Currently, I am using a combination of Feedbro and Nitter to scrape all the accounts I want to follow. They currently work with Facebook and have not been blocked.

Yes.

But there is no aggregation - each user runs their own instances. For any site the offers an API, the API would need to have breaking changes to disable this, or block access from AWS.

It's easy to make work for a developer like crowd (very little time to write). It would work for most developers just fine, and could, with more considerable development time, be good for anyone.

Distributed guerilla social media deconstruction.

With an AWS IP and a bot usage pattern they’ll surely ban your account pretty quickly or put you in front of a CAPTCHA. I wish it was as easy as a small script. Without anti-bot techniques, sites would be overflown by scraping bots. Try to scrape a Cloudflare protected site, for example. They’re really good in figuring out if you’re human or a bot. IIRC they even fingerprint your TLS handshake or cypher suite, which ultimately made me give up with headless Chrome and Puppeteer even after proxying through my residential IP, spoofing user-agent and screen size and rate limiting. Unfortunately, there’s no way to distinguish good bots for personal usage from bad bots.

You can generate an RSS feed of any twitter user using RSS Bridge:

https://rss-bridge.org/bridge01/

I tried that earlier.

"Message: Missing configuration option: twitterv2apitoken"

I want the vision that Rabbit is selling, a headless browser that periodically scrolls through my socials and have AI assemble all entries into a readable digest. I would settle for manually scrolling through my timetime to a screen recorder that OCRs all the text and removes the fluff.

This is what I made for myself at https://www.bulletyn.co - regular email digests of content from Reddit, HN, RSS feeds, etc. It's helped me significantly cut down the amount of time I spend on Reddit particularly.

I had been planning to add Twitter before the API changes...alas.

Get different socials, is about your only option at this ppoint.

I wonder if Youtube will ever do the same with Invidious by requiring an account for people to view videos.

Sure, it might seen unthinkable for this to happen in 2024, but give it more 5 or 10 years and I could see this being something acceptable to the eyes of the average user. I don't like the direction the internet is going :\

The point being: archive with yt-dlp while we still can.

Yes, assume every video you watch and like is going to get deleted in a week or month or year, or whatever. We don't know the timeline but it's really not a question of "if", just when.

It's surprising how much gets removed often by creators or youtube.

That too! If I go to my old "Favorites" playlists (or whatever they're called), something like 3/4 of the content is gone! Sad stuff.

The vast majority of content is essentially ephemeral. I don’t tend to go back and rewatch random videos from years ago.

Not just videos. If you find something useful or enjoyable and want to ensure future access you need your own copy.

Oh yeah, I see it as inevitable. I'm blown away that YouTube is still accessible without an account. It's only a matter of time, though, I'd wager. I never thought Twitter would require an account to view its content.

It's not the same site, but it's the same company: one thing that caught my attention lately is those little messages nagging you whenever you access Google without being logged in. And... those sorta passive aggressive behavior always start like this. Like, "Oh, why don't you log in? It's good for you, log in!", and as the time passes that behavior just gets more and more hostile towards the user until you end up reaching twitter/instagram levels.

Oh yeah, that's right! I've noticed those nag modals are filling over 1/3 of my screen! On all kinds of sites! So coercive and manipulative. I can see why some people just browse with JS disabled and just forget about sites that require it.

Thank the EU. Cookie dialogs trained people to mindlessly click ok to make them go away, so they convert like crazy.

People have learned to auto-click OK long before cookie banners. Also, cookie banners are not the fault of the EU, but the malicious compliance of companies.

You can try to guess the reason for such high temperature user boiling, it's not hard.

There is a single TOS and privacy agreement for all Google services. If you “just” log in to Chrome to synchronize history because “it's convenient”, you also allow everything else, including AdSense and other all-across-the-web tracking. By formally becoming a client, you lose most of legal protections against indiscriminate data collection.

Not true in the EU anymore.

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/14202510?hl=en

Why would they want to lose out on the additional ad revenue of not-logged-in users? As long as they manage to generate ad impressions, I don't think they care all that much.

I don't think so, with other sites giving out free video content. If they all did...

> I don't like the direction the internet is going :\

Haven't read "The Internet Con" yet but apparently Cory Doctorow has some ideas what can be done about this direction.

> We can – we must – dismantle the tech platforms. We must to seize the means of computation by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users to leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission. Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and enduring annihilation of the platforms. The Internet Con is the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet. [1]

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/01/bookmaker/

Maybe this is a good moment to reconsider the acceptance of X links on HN. If users without accounts have no way to read the content, why redirect people there en-masse?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39154536

    I use a redirection extension to prepend "https://farside.link/_/" to certain domains.

For example:

    https://twitter.com/nasa

    …becomes:

https://farside.link/_/twitter.com/nasa

    The underscore adds an interstitial redirection page, so you can press Back to try another instance.

The above service redirects to Nitter which still appears to be working.

Nitter currently relies on the mass generation of guest accounts, a weird anonymous form of account that was only supported by old versions of the Twitter app. Creation of them was totally disabled today, so every nitter instance will be dead in under 30 days (when they expire). Scrapers apparently also relied on this, as every public nitter instance was being hammered by scrapers earlier. Instances will probably shut down quite soon unless someone finds another way to create tens of thousands of accounts in an automated fashion for free.

I'm gonna guess that these guest accounts might be the reason 'usage is at an all time high' according to musk, but seems to be falling according to everyone else.

Alternative hypothesis: he is lying about usage.

Yes. Please disallow X/Twitter links and stop forwarding traffic to that cursed user-hostile site.

Websites like Quora, Instagram, TikTok, and now X, work against the idea of an open Web. Content is increasingly concentrated into separated silos. But I understand why it's happening: People who don't have an account can't receive personalized ads.

FB, Linkedin, Pinterest as well. All of these walled gardens are "built on the shoulder of giants", whose work pioneered the open internet.

Further, what isn't silos seems to be content chum whose main purpose is collecting the reader's email address.

Oddly the modern web seems to be driving me offline and back to books.

> FB, Linkedin, Pinterest as well. All of these walled gardens are "built on the shoulder of giants", whose work pioneered the open internet.

Very true. Using the openness when it’s convenient and actively shutting the door behind you, it’s one of the most morally reprehensible things that one can do in a shared ecosystem.

I don’t use TikTok much, but when I see a (web) link to content there it’s always publicly available.

For now.

> But I understand why it's happening

I'm not even mad at them that they want to pay the bills. What I find sad was the method they have used: capture community as big as possible and then sell the community. So many people and orgs fell for that. Now the 'squares' are closed. There is no public internet, just niches.

Yeah it's sad. I hope Musk reverses course for X. At least in showing threads, not necessarily for individual user feeds. Perhaps when the platform is in a better financial position.

The creator of the project left this comment an hour ago:

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1155#issuecomment-19...

(HN removed the deep link to the specific comment from the title)

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1155#issuecomment-19...

"Nitter is dead." on issue "nitter.net certificate expired on 15:08:30 GMT"

Has there been any guides about self-hosting Nitter and using your own personal account, rather than trying to generate a bunch of guest accounts?

I ask because while I no longer use Twitter, I have been using the RSS feature from Nitter to follow a few accounts that aren't available elsewhere. So if there's any way to keep doing that, I'd appreciate it if anyone has a solution. And I really don't want to login to Twitter anymore.

Yeap, the Installion section of the Github Readme.md of Nitter. Docker based.

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter#Installation

They asked about using their personal account. The README does not mention this. And without a personal account, you won't have any luck with self-hosting this, as guest accounts don't work anymore.

Keep in mind that Twitter might ban you for doing that. They really don't like anything that could be considered scraping (unless you pay them a lot of money).

Sadly, important content is sometimes still posted (only) in the form of Twitter threads.

Short of signing up for an account, is there currently a reasonable way of reading those?

wget or curl.

What do you mean by important? If it's something related to public safety (civil defence for instance) then it's a real issue that you as a citizen should fight. For everything else you could just stop engaging and hope that enough others do for the content creators to get the message.

Unfortunately, waiting for them to ‘get the message’ is a losing battle. The main issue i find is that non-tech related folks just don’t care enough about this stuff to move to different platform.

Often people who witness live event report what they witness on twitter. Like the boston massacre or Jan 6th attack had a lot of people reporting important eyewitness post right on social media

A classic example would be a description of the findings about some security bug or breach.

That’s largely on Mastodon; security-Twitter was one of the first communities to migrate.

Yeah, it's unfortunate as it took years for governments/municipalities/orgs etc. to start posting stuff to Twitter and embracing that modern "information pipeline" (as opposed to, at best, a rarely-updated website). Now it's taking years for them to adopt or figure out a self-hosted/self-owned alternative.

Just accept that it's lost. Like tears in the rain, yada yada. Some people don't want permanent chains of information, they prefer sand mandalas that are broken after completion.

After all, it's just a big fake bullshit. There are “fabulous kids clubs” in school. There are “limited membership” snake oil selling and paper medal awarding companies. There are social network services relying on invites and other stuff to make public believe being there is something valuable. It is clear as day that Twitter is at the stage where it has to inflate usage stats by requiring sign-in, and hold user data hostage because it's one of the remaining ways to make some money. If people decide to have a nice chat in a building that is getting demolished without thinking about consequences, it's their choice, after all.

All historic MySpace data was thrown out at some point. Have people killed themselves over that? No, they simply forgot. And you will forget all that, too.

This is not about past content that is lost, this is about future content that is still being posted there.

Including things like info about security incidents that affect me.

At least I think most government authorities have stopped posting life safety information there.

Then login and just sub to those channels? This isn't life/death situation. It's not complicated.

And with that twitter is once again dead to me.. Not even by choice. The layout/UI is utter crap and my computer hates it. I refuse to use it. For a short time i was able to read things.. guess it's back to nothing again. lol

To be fair I was kinda surprised their create thousands of accounts strategy worked at all

What's frustrating about social media closing off public access is that, most of the time, they don't even do it correctly--instead of showing a dialog or a message to sign in to view content, they just straight up show an unclear, ambigous error message. Twitter and Instagram does this AFAIK.

Also a bit OOT but there is also something that I think needed to be said: search engines SHOULD be clear whether a content is accessible without account or not, whether a content is accessible is paywalled or not.

>search engines SHOULD be clear whether a content is accessible without account or not, whether a content is accessible is paywalled or not.

And HN.

Well, very good time we had. It was great experience with nitter,wish it stayed for years to come. Hope to see something like that for mastodon

A good example of the enshittification of Twitter:

Instead of improving their UI / loading times / privacy standards, they just cut all alternatives off.

Just like reddit.

The user needs are treated like a child would - If I can't see them they're not there.

My bet is if they won't find a new niche, administer themselves (much unwoke, such legal battles, wow) instead of adapting to the users' needs. Eventually, a better option comes along and Twitter falls into oblivion.

Maybe they get some political money along the way.

A real shame, I've been using Nitter to check lots of art accounts, but even with https://twiiit.com/ I find myself reloading it multiple times to find an instance that's not rate limited.

Would a self-hosted private instance of Nitter be an option to avoid rate limits, or are Twitter accounts being penalized for using any third-party API client?

You could, but you'd have to make your own personal twitter account. At that point you're using Twitter with extra steps.

yes but those extra steps make the difference. those extra steps are the entire point. The difference between using the blessed client and using a preferred client that previously accessed the platform via an API is those steps!

RSS!

For those who need timely access to information that is only available on Twitter, the account is unavoidable.

The benefit of extra steps is a client under user control, e.g. filtering, RSS, better threading and more.

If timely is the key criterion isn’t sticking a caching layer in the middle the opposite of helping?

Transparent, deterministic, user-controlled caching and filtering > black-box Twitter display algos that change unpredictably.

Are there any services that make daily twitter digests out of lists that doesn't cost arm and leg in terms of API access? I've been running a pretty hacky google sheet script to parse nitter list rss on supported instances, but guess that's going to be DOA in the coming days.

X/Twitter is a gross network. It’s like posting links to 4chan.

Dunno who you followed, but my little corner of twitter is not gross at all. A lot of smart people, doing cool things, and linking to interesting stuff.

AFAIK you can't curate stuff in 4chan by following/muting/blocking, so it's more like reddit or HN than twitter.

I don’t follow anyone on Twitter or even look at it. Content from there just feels slimy. Usually if someone posts a link, it’s something popular or viral, and that means the comments section will be filled with all kinds of crap. Right now I prefer Threads.

It's just like the fediverse, what you see depends on where you hang out around. I can easily find extremely bad corners of the fediverse but again, that's not representative

I wish a map existed. I'd like to see the bad corners.

https://mapstodon.space/@comeetie/109354079049037380

It's weird to say but the "worst" parts (as in, questionably legal content and not just controversial content) in my experience has been in non English speaking instances. But just think of basically any community and they have a mastodon spin off, especially they have been deplatformed somewhere else.

Leave 4chan alone. 4chan compared to Twitter is Heaven

So a place on the Internet that's still fun? It's sad you're so serious that you're grossed out by that.

You might be from the Tumblr side of the tracks, a place of humorless, distributed Orwellian purity testing and virtue signalling where people sublimate their depression and anxiety disorders by trying to police and cancel each other online while pretending they're making the world a better place. That's way less gross than just having a good time. :D

Is there anything preventing a public Nitter instance operator from just creating a few hundred normal user accounts? Phone verification?

Terrible title, can someone please fix that?!

Thanks for fixing!

While browsing website on Android devices, avast is showing a popup of malicious website detected.

Unsurprising that Twitter continues these decisions, just means I interact with it even less

Great, now I will miss patio11, and....

Oh that's the list of all the value I find on Twitter anymore.

Thank for your service comrade.

What a pity. I used their API to bridge my Twitter posts to my Slack instance.

Looks like this is the end

Jim Morrison style or Seth Rogen style?

Sad. Used to browse since it was so nice and easy. Strangely they didn't accept one off donations only monthly. Musk has dismantled left control over Twitter but this is a side effect.

Uninstalled Reddit app it was battery draining plus slow.

HN title got changed for a third time. Hilarious.

Avast is complaining that this website is detected as malicious??

Any alternative?

Not exactly the same thing, but https://threadreaderapp.com/ will allow you to read threads (but not replies) if you come upon a link you can't see.

Edit: I guess that only works if someone has already requested the thread to be unrolled...

The Epoch Clock

On one hand, this is unfortunate since X always directs me to a login page, and Nitter was the only way I could view whatever gets posted nowadays. On the other hand, the cynical side of me is thankful that I have no more desirable means to see the contents of posts on X.

Edit: a similar thing happened with Reddit and Teddit(?). API restrictions effectively killed alternative frontends, so I simply don't look at Reddit posts anymore. I am aware of old.reddit.com, but in the case of Reddit I preferred the alternative frontends not only for no-JS compatibility, but also a (possibly false) sense of privacy

While it is unmaintained now due to the API changes, Libreddit (reddit frontend) is still working for me. Granted, I self-host it, and I'm the only user so I never hit the rate limit, but no issues at all, save for some of the changes reddit has made (namely the new share links)

The repository says at the top in a HUGE FONT that "Libreddit is currently not operational" and the website just shows a oneliner saying Germans are not allowed to read that page. The issue tracker talks of forking and stuff. Doesn't feel too welcoming or functional.

But in actuality it works just fine? Is the message simply wrong when you plug in your own api key and stay in the free tier of reddit's API?

I think that message was to let users know it's basically on it's last legs and could 100% stop at anytime. When the API changes started, most all of the instances ran into rate limits due to the number of requests. But it works just fine until that rate is hit.

Like I mentioned, I've been running my own private instance and I've never hit the rate limit so it's been working fine for me.

And I don't know about any API key. AFAIK, Libreddit uses the publicly available JSON, no need for a key (hence why it's read-only). Since it's still working for me, those JSON endpoints must still be available, just highly rate limited now

Oh, that's cool! Sounds like it should suffice for my usage also, which is extraordinarily light since they shut down reddit-is-fun. I've mostly replaced that with mastodon, not the same concept but serves a similar "let's scroll and see what's new" function.

After doing some analysis (a while ago) on reddit comment/submission rates before and after the boycott and new rate limits, it seems either only a tiny tiny fraction actually left reddit and/or reddit benefited from the negative publicity as much as or more than they lost. Since nothing has changed since then, I suppose there's no point in me staying off the platform anymore, especially if I'm not contributing with OC submissions or comments. Libreddit sounds like a good way to do that, thanks :)

> and the website just shows a oneliner saying Germans are not allowed to read that page.

Curious which website do you mean? The official instance is not online anymore. And I'm not aware of an official libreddit website.

One of the top search results was this page, <https://libreselfhosted.com/project/libreddit/>, which links to <https://libredd.it> as homepage. Domain sounds plausible so I just assumed that's the official one. The project github page has as "website" one of their tickets listed... can't say if that website field once contained something different

Ah yes that was the official instance, but they disabled this one at least half a year ago IIRC.

> Is the message simply wrong when you plug in your own api key and stay in the free tier of reddit's API?

Correct.

Also, I forked it with some OAuth spoofing and have been maintaining it there: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

If they don't want you to use their API just respect their wishes and scrape Reddit. https://github.com/JosephLai241/URS it's the only moral thing we can do.

It's been forked by a maintainer as redlib: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

Thanks for posting, I'll check this out. I knew that maintainer was working on a fork, but I never saw it advertised.

Interesting, I thought they completely disabled the APIs

Yep, it will be easier to cut the X habit off. I'll miss Nitter, but I'll be happier in the long run.

I was a Reddit Apollo user, and it was easier to wean off of Reddit when I had to use their horrible app or their website. Even using old.reddit has been painful.

Interesting because the content I get on X is far, far more valuable than HN + Reddit + Facebook combined.

It’s the only place you can follow subject matter experts and get their real time thoughts.

I think people on HN just don’t know how to use Twitter?

If you want to use it effectively, you have to utilize lists. Curate your own lists or find someone you respect and follow their lists.

If someone is posting things you don’t enjoy then remove them.

Frankly, if X is causing you to be angry/depressed then a big part of that is on you.

> far more valuable than HN + Reddit + Facebook combined

What do you learn from 280 characters at a time?

Mostly I follow artists who post pictures, so the character limit doesn't matter.

The 280 character limit was raised to 4,000 in February of 2023.

Only for people who pay.

> Interesting because the content I get on X is far, far more valuable than HN + Reddit + Facebook combined.

That has been my experience as well. Easily. I learned a ton about LLMs, open source projects, growth hacks, marketing tips, a lot of great from the trenches lessons. Best site on the web.

Yep exactly. I’m also a big formula 1 fan and it’s the only place where I can get insight from engineers who are involved in the day to day of building race cars for ex.

Reddit’s f1 subreddit has really degraded in quality unfortunately (just people posting clickbait articles).

It’s the same for investing, politics, cars, poker and everything else I enjoy.

Why is this reply getting downvoted?

I'm guessing

1) HN readers don't like Elon Musk (I don't like him either) so they don't like Twitter

2) I implied HN readers are doing something wrong (as any other human being, they don't like being told that)

3) I (slightly) insulted the intelligence of HN readers by saying they didn't know how to use Twitter and they really don't like that

I've just gotten downvotes and no one's responded with any actual rebuttals so I don't think what I've posted is wrong.

You are missing the fact that, for many of us who used to enjoy Twitter in exactly the way you described, X no longer fills that need, because the subject matter experts whose real-time thoughts we used to follow have left the platform, and all that remains are people whose real-time thoughts we don't generally want to hear.

That may differ from your experience - your real-time expert community might be different than mine.

But for a lot of us who actually used to enjoy Twitter, what you're describing is no longer to be found there.

> because the subject matter experts whose real-time thoughts we used to follow have left the platform

Do mind naming 10 subject matter experts who've permanently left twitter?

I'm really curious as to which communities used to be vibrant on Twitter and then died after the X switch over.

Yeah, as you stated, my personal experience is that all the communities I follow continue to be active.

Andrej Karpathy - I guess. The tweets i see when i click on it are out of chronological order, maybe there's something new i don't see

Nah Andrej is still active on [Twitter](https://i.imgur.com/KEa6dx4.png)

I'm guessing he's less active now because he's back at OpenAI and not on sabbatical anymore.

Thanks!

Not going to indulge in an 'oh, you like Twitter? Name ten of their albums' kind of question.

My friends left. I left.

The entire discussion is based on subject matter experts. I asked you to name a few and you didn't name a single one.

> My friends left. I left.

Ok? That has no relevance to our discussion.

Nah, you're probably wrong about HN users not knowing how to use Twitter. You're assuming the worst - perhaps assume that people have good reasons for avoiding it and ask what those might be?

I have about 5k followers on Twitter and have posted roughly 10k tweets over the last 16 years of having an account there. I'm pretty familiar with how to use it. I've moved to mastodon - the part of Twitter I used to value is a dumpster fire, many of my colleagues have moved, and I don't want to contribute to monetizing hateful garbage. And that includes preferring not to log in, which means threads don't show up any more. So it was nitter or nothing.

I used to use Twitter and I simply disagree with it being more useful than HN. I suppose it depends on the focus of content you want to learn or read about

For me it's the abysmal SNR no matter where I look, except if it absolutely needs to be real-time. Even considering just the "content" and ignoring the unfathomable interface that we're left with now.

It’s HN. Everyone here has encountered many true believers who, when confronted with a criticism of their favorite tool, responds “well, you are using it wrong. Change your workflow to match mine, which is superior anyway, and then you’ll see.”

It’s tiresome, and I for one have little patience for someone patronizingly suggesting that I'm being stubborn for refusing to allow them to enlighten me.

Is that what you were doing? Maybe not. But you certainly matched my regex, so to speak.

Nearly every subject matter expert I followed has left. Scientists, mathematicians, journalists, authors, comic book people, and so on.

What I now see are people with demented political opinions about women and American politics. It sucks.

i follow about a thousand physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists, try searching keywords like “quantum mechanics” and then “follow all” when recommended. Really no place like twitter for math/science content

> Scientists, mathematicians, journalists, authors, comic book people, and so on.

Intersting, I haven't had a single person leave. People make a big fuss about leaving, but the traffic you get from Twitter is too attractive to leave.

> What I now see are people with demented political opinions about women and American politics. It sucks.

As I said, that's because you're not using lists. It's literally impossible to see posts from accounts you don't like if you're using lists.

As a journalist who has been involved in newsroom analytics at three organizations since Twitter launched, I can assure you that most online news outlets have seen very little to no referral traffic from Twitter in nearly a decade. Journalists love to point to some viral retweet of their story, but most of the time: the number of likes/retweets > actual referrer traffic.

See NPR: https://niemanreports.org/articles/npr-twitter-musk/

I follow subject matter experts on Mastodon/ActivityPub. Scientists, engineers, librarians, mathematicians, doctors, programmers, designers, artists, musicians, retro computing enthusiasts, amateur radio operators, etc. etc.... They've been migrating away from Twitter for a long time, because it has shown us how horribly "millions of people in the same room" works out, especially when a sociopathic algorithm rewards conflict and sensationalism at the expense of thought/consideration and kindness.

Getting more value from tech twitter these days.

I mostly follow L7+ SWEs, creators of popular tech like dynamoDB, and professors in AI/systems/DB/PL. The ones who tried to move to sites like mastodon eventually came back, or are now using twitter much more than these alternatives. There's been more top SWEs and professors especially in AI and systems sharing content there.

Noticed as well that twitter is also more optimistic about tech than HN, especially with subcultures like e/acc, learning/building in public, etc.

> It’s the only place you can follow subject matter experts and get their real time thoughts.

I have no use case for anyone else’s “real time thoughts”. Neither does almost anyone else.

Twitter’s one trick is FOMO for news junkies.

I lurk Reddit for local news without ever logging in. They recently started restricting anonymous users to a limited amount of comments on long threads. That finally motivated me to switch to Firefox plugins that re-layout old.reddit.com to be usable on mobile. Thanks Reddit for the much improved free web experience.

I'm inclined to have the same wishes.

There's a weird world of outrage about twitter ... on twitter by people who keep providing content for twitter. I don't get that.

The further downside being that all the alternatives I've dipped my toes in, the content is pretty much similar to twitter and all the alternatives are offering are various back end type differences, but the same content. So personally I'm not particularly happy with those either.

People are working through their grief, knowing that a utility that is essentially the modern postal service was sold to someone who is essentially the modern Hearst.

But Twitter is/was not a utility, not a “modern post office” not a “town square” (before someone tries to bring up that terrible analogy too) and really doesn’t deserve people’s grief. It’s yet another corporate-owned and controlled messaging app and we are seeing the inevitable result of that control.

> Twitter is/was not a utility

I've found no substitute for getting breaking news on a specific topic (e.g. natural disasters, war, politics, sport). Google News is second best, but the sites it indexes are at the absolute least 20 minutes behind twitter.

Zite was my favourite app from many, many years ago. But it was good at collating daily reading, not for up to the minute/second curation.

For certain topics that are time sensitive, I haven't found anything that comes close to twitter.

Unless you are working as a journalist, or for some other reason you need to respond immediately to world events, you could just abstain.

> you could just abstain.

True for the most part. But occasionally there's good reason to want to know some information sooner rather than later: outbreaks of war, dangerous/breaking events in your localised area, dangerous weather alerts etc.

all of those should have a primary source. Twitter is merely a secondary source.

So to avoid twitter, you can subscribe to the primary source.

At least it used to be this way. But then a few official places that annouce things have turned to use twitter as their primary source.

Twitter was useful when you didn't know the source. Keyword searches brought you everyone talking about a topic, and trending showed you topics people were talking about (and, by extension, the people talking about them). Not everything that might be significant to you is necessarily going to be discussed within your close networks or covered adequately by media-of-record.

If CNN has decided not to cover the protest happening outside your downtown office and you don't want to go up to a rowdy crowd to figure out what's going on, Twitter would (have) be(en) the place to drum up intel (with which to decide if you need to go home early that day or not).

Twitter was great for reporting on court cases. For example, last year the Biden administration essentially made millions of Americans into felons via an obscure ATF rule change. The rule has since been enjoined by at least three federal courts, which anyone who follows @2aupdates would know about because he crawls the PACER feeds. My local newspaper has been following this story, but as recently as last week reported that the rule was still in effect. I submitted a correction and they fixed it.

Twitter was really good for some things. For example, there was a thread yesterday contrasting public data on fertility rates with the latest official data as collected by Twitter users. In short, the UN, Macrotrends and CIA World Factbook are publishing data that is extremely inaccurate. For example, Macrotrends reports that China's TFR was 1.7 in 2023, when the official data says it was 1.09. Accounts like @morebirths and @birthgauge even report estimated fertility based on monthly data so following those accounts is like having a time machine.

I guess it depends on what content you want.

I don't really get into the news enough to want a real time feed. Even if I did, I think I'd look for something more reliable than a collection of posts from Twitter users. It probably even goes deeper than not getting into news for me though, because heck, I don't even watch much TV really.

But I am into sports. And I think the best real time sports feeds out there are the reddit game threads. Now maybe the threads on X are better for some people? I don't know? But reddit game threads are far superior for my purposes. ie - Finding out if everyone else is thinking "What The Actual F--- was that?" Whenever Drew Allar threw the ball in a bowl game for instance.

Similar to you not having found a substitute for news over Twitter, I haven't found a substitute for reddit game threads where these kinds of sanity checks are concerned.

> the sites it indexes are at the absolute least 20 minutes behind twitter

Genuine question: who cares?

There is almost no news where the difference between getting it now, twenty minutes from now, or tonight makes a meaningful differ to your life. Much of the information in the first twenty minutes of an event will be confusing, misleading, and/or wrong.

It was useful for local news.

E.g., when I saw police helicopter that seemed to be doing a low altitude search pattern about 300 m away, and a TV news helicopter hovering higher up in the same area, I wanted to know if this was something I needed to be concerned about.

A quick search on Twitter and I found a recent tweet about gunfire in a store in that area and a shooter on the loose.

it’s not just big news though, twitter was very useful for hyper local news in cities… to the point that if there were helicopters overhead or some loud noise nearby… usually someone posted about it on twitter - this has been irreplaceable for me, I know less about what’s around me now

Trivial, but salient: sale drops for things like electronics or tickets. The only reason I got Pax East passes in 2014 is because I got a Twitter alert. They were gone 10 minutes later. An email alert showed up a half-hour later. I'm sure people have had similar experiences with more significant events.

This is a void that should be filled but is akin to tv or news paper of the past which were as close as you could get to breaking and also privately owned.

The tech is there now for the government and other entities to distribute with open protocols or things like rss, but Twitter never was that

> But Twitter is/was not a utility

The way twitter was used by local governments during emergencies absolutely made it equivalent to one.

Fortunately at least my area has moved away from twitter and towards SMS based notifications for that purpose.

>The way twitter was used by local governments during emergencies absolutely made it equivalent to one.

those governments should be held responsible rather than giving Twitter a free ticket to calling itself a utility.

but they won’t and now it’s gone anyway, just because it shouldn’t have been that way doesn’t mean we didn’t lose anything

While I don't disagree, it requires that both the members of government and the public have a decent technical literacy. I'm not sure how true this is even on HN.

I'd personally love to see the government build a lot of frameworks that can be considered "public goods" and be less reliant on private entities who must generate a profit. I happily pay taxes to serve many networks which operate as natural monopolies, such as roads. I'd also be happy to have that extended to such things as telecommunications. I'd happily pay more taxes if it got rid of my phone bill or internet bill. Though I'd say that personally this is conditioned on them being E2EE and privacy focused, since I consider that information having a higher potential for abuse in a single governmental entity than distributed among corporate powers (even if they still want to abuse it, they can do less and there are competitors).

Yeah, in 2008 when we signed up for it, we didn't realize the implications of that -- now we're learning, between Myspace, FB, and now Twitter. I made a LOT of connections on Twitter, a lot of meaningful interactions, and it absolutely had a large effect on my life. It's without a doubt one of the biggest disappointments to me in modern web/internet tech, that it has gradually been eroded into the trash it is now. Well, as I can say about so many things, "it was good while it lasted".

Not really a utility, but it meant that someone at the parks and rec department with virtually zero computer skills could let everyone know when things were closed due to rain and when they were open again.

> But Twitter is/was not a utility, not a “modern post office” not a “town square”

Yes and no. The thing that makes a social media useful (not necessarily good) is the same thing that makes it hard to leave: userbase. Centralization.

I think it would be weird if people __weren't__ upset. You act as if it is easy to make a collective decision to move platforms. I can't get a collective decision in my friend group for where we should go get food and drinks, and that requires far lower consensus and the stakes/effort needed are much lower. People also frequently complain about places they visit in real life, including restaurants they frequent.

> It’s yet another corporate-owned

Btw, being privately owned doesn't mean it isn't a public space.[0] This should be a bit unsurprising when we look around places and how people organize. People go where other people are, full stop. Doesn't matter if it is public or private property (clear example being malls or cafes). Doesn't matter of online or offline. The major difference is we don't treat online spaces as abstracted versions of offline spaces despite them often being built to serve as that exact thing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privately_owned_public_space

> I don't get that.

It's the same enshittification we're always talking about now. Something you once enjoyed strategically turns to shit once it believes people are too locked in and docile to leave.

I disagree, it's a choice.

> the content is pretty much similar to twitter

I disagree. I find Mastodon to be much more like the Twitter of '08 that we all loved.

It's like watching over the shoulder of a stranger as they go about their day. But you're welcome there! You can say hi and the stranger is happy to have you.

It's real people sharing their weird hobbies. The often-boring minutiae of their daily life. Their feelings and hopes and dreams.

I've made friends. I feel like I know people. I love it.

I have not been to Reddit after they effectively shut down RiF.

Reddit the non-profit frontends are still working (redreader for android is good).

Twitter, instagram etc. there's nothing even this reasonable.

Begs the question what will the future open web forum/discussion place be? Lemmy doesn't seem to have really hit the simplicity to attract users

> API restrictions effectively killed alternative frontends, so I simply don't look at Reddit posts anymore.

They recently did a poll to users, asking which UI you use most. I put old reddit because it is. I cannot understand how in what? 6+ years they developed new reddit and still don't have true feature parity? This tells me they don't have their priorities in line, and they want to IPO to boot.

Personally I think some websites don't really have any need to become publicly traded companies, I rather they become profitable and not controllable by the whims of tech illiterate investors.

I've recently learned that Twitter can actually be quite good for building genuine connections online, but it takes a very conscious effort and a lot of diligence

I'm sure that could be said for Erowid or any number of sites with a discussion forum function.

I was cynical about X like that too, but recently learned some good techniques that make a lot of difference to the overall experience. And then there's really nothing like it, in terms of reach.

Also, it's easy to see bad in everything, and then all we see is bad. But there're good things to find as well, it's just a matter of what we focus on..

What are some of the good techniques you’ve found success with?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy

Thanks, had a laugh!

A lot of the things described here, for example: https://publiclab.co/building-in-public

Well the “experts” among us here, WaPo, and the NYT predicted Twitter would surely collapse after firing their SREs and admin that were crucial to keeping the servers running. Any day now Twitter will collapse and all of us will be saved. Surely

Here's a challenge: find an article from either wapo or nyt which actually predicted a sure collapse. And I mean a collapse as you said rather than issues with operations. (which they had many of since the takeover) I may have missed one if it exists, but I'd bet they didn't publish anything that certain.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/business/media/twitter-us...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/technology/twitter-glitch...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/opinion/elon-musk-twitter...

None of these 3 articles "predict a sure collapse".

One of them reports on what twitter users were saying, one reports on technical problems occurring at that time, and one is an opinion piece titled "Elon Musk Has No Idea What He’s Doing at Twitter" (but which doesn't predict a collapse AFAICT).

Zing.

The first link is reporting about users panicking and one of the few comments from NYT itself is "Though there are no official signs that Twitter is going anywhere,...".

The second documents actual issues and makes no predictions.

Even the third one which is just an opinion piece about how bad of a decision maker Elon is doesn't come close to suggesting a collapse.

Please read the actual articles.

For the “Newspaper of Record” to report such fantastical news stories, as if anecdotal reports and opinions are real news, shows the obsession with the left wing media against Twitter and their hope and vibe about its imminent collapse.

Why write such articles at all? It’s “The NYT never said it would collapse, they just reported numerous articles implying it MIGHT collapse and everyone says it will!” OK!

Knowing what many people believe is itself useful, especially if you annotate it with "there are no signs that this is actually going to happen".

> obsession with the left wing media against Twitter and their hope and vibe about its imminent collapse.

Yet, you can't show me an article that says this. Is this left wing media obsession, or is this what you believe about NYT? Twitter was a hot topic and they reported on what's happening there. It's not like there were many positive things to say since the takeover.

There are similar reports of positive things people said https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/technology/musk-twitter-s... so it's not like only one side is presented.

Sure sure, down the memory hole. No one said Twitter would collapse after firing 7500 people. Everyone assumed it would be fine. All of these articles were simply conjecture, just something to speculate.

When facts are uncomfortable, just rewrite the narrative.

> When facts are uncomfortable, just rewrite the narrative.

The sources you presented failed to substantiate your argument, and instead of looking for different ones or considering you might be mistaken, you've doubled down.

Are you quite sure you are willing to take a hard look at uncomfortable facts and hazard having your mind changed?

Sorry but the 'twitter will die any day now' narrative was utterly pervasive across reddit and endless media sources were cited on a daily basis in the 6-month period that followed the buyout. It was basically the _only_ topic on r/whitepeopletwitter which had 3+ posts hit the frontpage daily.

It isn't something you can gaslight away. Everyone who was there saw it. It happened.

Interestingly enough most of the reddit posts were deleted after 3 days once they'd fallen off the frontpage. It didn't matter, there were always more being made lol. Does make it awfully hard to cite, though. Odd.

I'm not on Reddit so I'll take your word for it, but that isn't the claim being discussed.

You can just use the internet archive if you think some stuff has been deleted or modified.

All the claims I remember of a possible twitter collapse were about users abandoning it, not about some technical issue that would be unsolvable.

It's not fine. It's become a cesspit and virtually every new development over the past year has been to the detriment of its users.

Other than a quote from a political activist, these don't seem that certain about a total collapse or even speculate it

They just had a very high-profile event involving deepfake porn of one of the world's most popular musical artists. They appear to have belatedly responded to this by shutting down all searches of that famous artist's name. This does not suggest an organization that has the capacity to quickly or effectively manage the systems they are running.

Ironically enough, to me what it bothers me the most on twitter is how bad and slow its front-end is. Sure, I'm not a fan of having to use an account, but if twitter at least had a nitter instance, like literally the same front-end, I would have way less problems with that.

twitter and facebook have mostly been garbo for me, what i would like to know is where are the interesting mathematicians and software engineers posting now? or have they had enough too. i suspect that may be the case.

I still use Reddit is Fun (RiF) with no problems. There's a ReVanced version, you provide with your API key and it works like it always had.

Nitter is the only thing that made Twitter/X accessible without a goddamn account. Well, good bye, X.

Thanks, AI.

Just make a Twitter account and install an ad blocked

you won't be able to browse anonymously anymore

And you have to use the incredibly slow official front end. Seriously how much JS do you need to show 280 characters and some links.

Dear customer, your system is too old to run 20 third party browser fingerprinting libraries in parallel with OS window manager and GUI toolkit re-implemented in Javascript. Please use our service on a recent enough device capable of browser fingerprinting.

Good. Join X if you want to see X posts.

Alright. And if you like your walled garden, please stay there and don’t link to it from other sites.

This one still works

nitter.poast.org

I noticed not long ago they started requiring a user-agent string.

Top comment affirms that this is not an announcement as to all instances.

HN title was changed so as not to mislead.

This one still works. That's all I know.

per the linked page, its only a matter of time until all go down

I'm not touching a server owned by kiwifarms.

Care to elaborate for those not familiar with kiwifarms?

No, you can read the Wikipedia article yourself.

Kiwifarms is an absurdly slandered e-gossip forum. poast is a rival community. The poster has no clue who runs what.

Wow, I did not know that. It is just an instance that seems to work better than all the others I tried.

There was a submission about KF a while ago and it summoned an army of impromptu commenters that literally took over the thread, suppressing any negative commentary. Interesting PR strategy.

TBH, I do not use Twitter much at all. It's only when I'm checking something someone submitted to HN. Would be nice if people stopped submitting "tweets". There is rarely anything worth reading in them. Often it's just someone sharing a URL. Why not submit the URL instead.

After reading about the person running HN threatening local government officials maybe none of us should be using any server owned by HN either.

If we use servers owned by Twitter/X does that mean we identify with the political ideologies of whomever owns it servers.

As it happens, there is no need to touch any server owned by KF when using nitter.poast.org. So you should be safe.

Maybe we should revoke Section 230 and require that server owners take legal responsibility for the behaviours of the people who use them. That would spell the end of Twitter/X. Then we would not have to use Nitter instances. Problem solved!

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