TwitterWebViewer also no longer in operation, following a request from X Corp | Hacker News Reader

TwitterWebViewer also no longer in operation, following a request from X Corp

twitterwebviewer.com

41 pointsflotzam27 comments

For HN, does that mean we should no longer be using X links, since most can't view them?

Content from X worth sharing is rare anyway.

I'm not any authority here, but I'd say, there's no need for a Reddit-moment to ban it entirely.

Though it wouldn't bother me either.

Directly linked single text posts are still publicly accessible last I checked, but it's a microblogging platform littered with spam.

HN submissions are usually long-form content, so it's rare to see X links anyway.

And comments obey the voting system, so who cares whether people link to X, LinkedIn, Facebook or whatever else.

Banning X in comments would require to ban the others as well, and I think the mods and users can handle by themselves what is relevant in that case.

And in case an X submission is genuinely interesting, it won't be hard to access or infer the content from the comments or other sources.

> HN submissions are usually long-form content, so it's rare to see X links anyway.

There are, at minimum, tens of Twitter links that I see daily which make it to the first couple of pages of the site. A lot of them are AI-related content, which seems to be popular there.

> And in case an X submission is genuinely interesting, it won't be hard to access or infer the content from the comments or other sources.

I don’t want to have to do this. I think we should just disallow Twitter links for posts.

Same category and policy as paywalled news sites.

No, it’s not anymore, since the HN FAQ[0] specifically states:

“It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.“

There don’t appear to be workarounds for Twitter anymore.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Thanks, just looked it up and here is a link for those who want to read it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Sorry, forgot to add the link! Edited my post to add it like I intended.

Yes, and yes.

X usage is declining and somebody is desperate to get some metrics up. https://trends.google.com/explore?q=%2Fm%2F0289n8t&date=toda...

All the AI sheep are still using it, just like the webdev sheep before that.

This was obviously going to happen once Nitter got an immediate C&D.

It just means that it will happen to these alternatives as well and the lawyers have all the money from X Corp to do just that.

These open source projects circumventing X for free, unfortunately have zero chance in fighting these legal takedowns.

Hoping we'll see more resilient development/hosting emerge

Probably the best use case for onion routing and IPFS. Each X URL gets a content addressable IPFS URL, served via an onion site that should be hard to take down.

Browser->Tor Onion site->IPFS as storage system pull through cache->X

Or just a .onion for the frontend and code forge + another server at some clearnet domain proxying it (until taken down and replaced with the new one) would probably work fine. The hidden service can even terminate TLS with a valid cert for the clearnet domain.

True, I suggested IPFS as an hidden content addressable, globally distributed caching proxy and persistent object store. Run it from outside the reach of the US legal framework, like private/shadow libraries/archives (as you could consider it an archive of X, with public access when available).

Another idea I recently had was extending Karakeep (https://github.com/karakeep-app/), which has robust archiving capabilities today, to enable announcing archived URLs via a DHT and serving the archive bundle as a torrent (similar to how the Internet Archive creates a torrent file for each item). With some work, it would be the equivalent of a distributed Wayback Machine, with each instance able to act as both scraper and server. With a browser extension that could query this DHT, you could retrieve an archived version of any URL that has been archived by cherry picking from the swarm (each URL becomes a magnet torrent URL, very similar to IPFS, but with less bootstrapping required imho).

Distributed web adjacent (https://getdweb.net/).

Meanwhlie Grok and other AI bro bots non-consensually scrape everything.

Related discussion and predictions (2 days ago):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49449576

Seemed worth a new post, now that they actually killed it today :(

Is there any frontend still standing?

Nitter itself is still fine, there are like 2 public-ish instances I‘m aware of but I think people should go out and host some in more private communities/run one over Tor or something

I don't know what your definition of "fine" is, but Nitter and XCancel received C&Ds three days ago:

<https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1442>

HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283>

From HN's PoV, the issue is that there aren't well-known workarounds which can be used for X.com / Twitter.com submissions. HN's principle concern is more that any discussion on such posts will largely revolve around the regwall / paywall, which doesn't advance HN's own prime directive: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27901918>

I thought about it from functioning perspective, but yeah, legally it might‘ve been a bit dubious

ChrisArchitect is pretty good at distinguishing between when a discussion is a dupe and when it is related.

Their comment history makes this clear.

I've emailed HN's mods requesting Twitter/X links be site-banned as hard-paywalled, given that Nitter and XCancel had also just received C&Ds (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283>).

I too dislike logging into Twitter/X, but that's not a paywall, the accounts are still free, no?

Is anything really "free"?

Not good enough. Creating an account still leads to the "Your account was suspended for reasons, now you gotta dox yourself" dance. See previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49442907

It can still by bypassed with working nitter instances. Nitter doesn't have to be legal. Archive.today certainly isn't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com