Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns | Hacker News Reader

Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns

codeberg.org

734 pointsCider9986408 comments

A non-technological way to give negative feedback to Twitter/X is to stop using it, even "just reading an occasional post".

Continuing to read things on it, even through Nitter, is in the interests of Twitter/X and of the people who continue to support Twitter/X by posting there.

Tell the people who use it no. The decent people won't hear them on Twitter/X, and the decent people will wonder what's wrong with them if they persist in supporting that thing.

Tech industry circles nowadays are sometimes tinged with individualist selfish "take whatever you can" thinking, and anarchic or even underhanded methods. Including the thinking "an express no doesn't mean no, if i can find a way to take it from them anyway."

Grassroots collective social action can work, if it isn't constantly undermined by selfish and short-sighted taking.

> Tech industry circles nowadays are sometimes tinged with individualist selfish "take whatever you can" thinking, and anarchic or even underhanded methods. Including the thinking "an express no doesn't mean no, if i can find a way to take it from them anyway"

I agree with that though. It's better to circumvent than to submit and do what you're told.

The same way piracy keeps streaming services somewhat honest, I'm sure that if piracy didn't exist, subscriptions would be even pricier.

The piracy thing is a bit backwards I think. Piracy is a consequence of subscription price so higher prices induce more piracy. The only way piracy doesn’t exist is if all content is free to begin with

And the reason that piracy doesn't exist in that case is because the creators have all had to go out of business. ;-)

Yeah but I don't care about that. I'm not here to make the system work. It's skewed against us consumers anyway.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Consumers are worth less than creators in the cosmic scheme of things. I believe we should be much friendlier to consumers than our laws currently allow, but there should be a balance, and that balance should not privilege consumers above all.

It is a bad thing. And the system is skewed against creators too. It favours exclusively the rent-seeking rich middle man.

Well, I'll drink to that!

There's subscription cost, then there's other factors, like DRM, usability, single source, etc. If you want to find the latest media, you can either hunt for it on one among several subscription services or you can find it on any of the big torrent sites. Once you torrent it, you can watch it on any or every device, without internet, forever.

If first party media companies sold one-off DRM free downloads of movies and TV shows for a reasonable price (not even that cheap, just not requiring bundling with other content you don't want to see), I bet that'd have more of an impact on piracy rates than lowering subscription prices by 10% or whatever.

No.

Music is basically sold like that (Itunes does it for example), and very very few people use it. There are probably some, but I don't personally know any — and I know plenty of music lovers with huge collections.

Normies want to have access to everything at the click of a button, and they don't want to be worrying about disk space, cross device synchronization or organizing files in directories. Streaming is perfect for them, especially in the mobile age (I bet many people had access to more disk space in 2013 than they had in 2021 or have in 2026).

People who would want to be normies but can't afford it (often in E.G. 3rd world countries) use Youtube with ads, Spotify with ads or pirated "free unlocked Spotify" apps on their Android phones. Music geeks want more music than they could possibly afford, so they use ${whatever this week's Deezer grabber is} or just get an account on Redacted. The anti-corporate left / retro people just buy vinyl, CDs or maybe tapes, depending on preference.

Paying to see a movie (versus paying to own a movie) has been a longstanding tradition in the movie industry (cinemas, rentals). If anything, being able to outright own movies was a short blip, and a weird consequence of how media worked at the time, which was annoying to most of the population more than anything else.

With power comes responsibility, and I think responsibility has fallen out of fashion. I think this comes down to the definition of "want", and I talk to my kids about this because I wish we had a different word. Yes, I want to have the piece of cake tonight, but I would also want to not have diabetes in 20 years. People want instant access to the entirety of music produced by humanity for a flat fee, but they also want to be able to access their music even if the industry that provides that service goes away. Curating a collection requires some responsibility and discipline, which is more work than just paying 15 bucks for the service and pressing play. But it also gives you access to that material in 20 years, which the service does not.

What the industry has successfully done is have people learn that for 15 or 20 years they can cave in to their want of convenience. People don't seem to care today that they'll have to pay the price in 15 years, but they will care in 15 years.

Nothing made this more evident than people buying digital movies from Sony, only to find that the rights to access the movie they purchased have been revoked. People are so sick of it in fact that they're now inventing new words like in enshitification to capture the idea that they have been brought in to an ecosystem that they're trapped in and now feel like they can't escape even though it's getting worse. People's love of convenience is the mechanism of their capture by the business.

In fairness once you've seen a movie its value drops with most never getting a second viewing. Them having the ability to take back that awful movie doesn't hurt as much as a song.

You do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"

I have the largest physical media collection of anyone I know. I will buy things I can actually own, but with digital media the studios and labels have ensured purchasing no longer means ownership, and thus digital piracy is not stealing.

> I agree with that though. It's better to circumvent than to submit and do what you're told.

Not always. Sometimes the rules are stupid, and by simply obeying them, their stupidity becomes apparent. The governments that are trying to force Facebook and Google to pay to link to their news stories are a great example. The governments foolishly assumed that the media companies would comply by paying, but instead they chose to comply by leaving. Leaving is a powerful signal.

They're not paying to link. They're paying to summarise, because people read the summary and don't go to the news site.

> Sometimes the rules are stupid, and by simply obeying them, their stupidity becomes apparent.

This probably has to be in a "maliciously compliant" fashion though, as otherwise if you 'sort of' follow them things may actually still function. The point is often to show that things would not work if things were done by the book, so as to encourage the book to be rewritten or thrown out.

We can test this. Piracy used to exist and streaming services were cheap and good. Then piracy didn't exist because of that, and streaming services got expensive and worse. Now piracy exists again.

Piracy existed before,during and after. Things are getting expensive and profits are increasing because growth has slowed and investors want either growth in users or profits.

piracy for many, exists due to the freedoms it provides.

freedom todo format shift, copy, share, preserve, and largely a freedom from surveillance.

noone should be able to see what media u are viewing without ur explicit permission.

everytime u stream or buy, records of ur activity are created, and profiles are shared with brokers.

piracy done right, elimates all capitalism, but especially surveillance capitalism, and top down control over users of media

> Everytime u stream or buy, records of ur activity are created, and profiles are shared with brokers.

Unfortunately this applies even if you pirate. Your own TV you bought with your own money spies on you these days through automatic content recognition.

Well some people have always been pirates, but when Netflix offered a comprehensive catalogue for a decent price very few people still bothered to pirate. That was a big break from the early 2000s when pretty much everyone here in Europe pirated. We had this app called popcorn time which had everything and made it all super easy.

Now everything is split between services and prices constantly go up, you have to pay extra for viewing without ads etc. I see more and more people going back.

This all already happened, it's called bluesky, and the "decent" (people who agree with you on politics) people had their exodus already

To me, the divide Twitter/Bluesky is the divide between terminally only idiots and terminally online simpletons (you decide which is which). Decent people are on neither.

I see that they're not on HN either.

I don't know how HN has remained as chill as it has compared to other social media platforms, but I'm grateful. I can still have deep conversations here without people losing their minds and yelling expletives and death threats. It feels a lot like forums or Reddit back in the 2000s.

dang and team tread carefully but carry a big stick

HN remains chill because 99% of political dissent is squashed

Mostly reasonable moderation does it, I’ve seen a noticeable uptick in green accounts posting slop/weird stuff but I just flag them and move on.

HN isn’t perfect but it’s doesn’t have to be to still have value and yeah it does feel a lot like the older web at least more than most things do.

There are reasonable people who can grasp nuance on both platforms, but you can't deny that twitter/x has become known as a place that allows Nazi politics on it. Just look Elon, the owner..

It's seriously disingenuous to frame the bluesky vs twitter/x as a difference in political opinion.

Isn't nazi and non-nazi a political opinion difference though?

If you’re being pedantic, sure.

Edit: to elaborate, it’s bullshit that I need to pretend that Nazis have anything to say that’s worth listening to in the name of “polite political discourse”.

It’s an ideology built on hate and violence toward others.

You mean the people who hate Nazis? Yes, they're not on X.

BlueSky is so much more toxic than Twitter/X ever was. And I say that as a left-leaning centrist.

Eh, I think you may have just been in a tighter echo chamber on twitter. If you are on bluesky the discover tab is considered a mess and may provide you with things that you aren’t interested in.

i too was thinking the Star Dink may just welcome nitter anyway

"oh you said 'nitter', yeah that's OK"

you need a mental check if you think there are not decent people who use and enjoy X

If THEY would use themselves as excuse for the rest, like you do with them, I wouldn't consider them decent people. There are decent people in the US military and police force, there may be even a stray decent ICE agent. I bet you there's decent people getting sent into the meat grinder by Putin, too. But if any of them were adamant about not wanting to hear about all sorts of fuckery of what they are part of or any overarching context, because they are oh so decent, they're not decent, they're just spineless. It's subjective anyway, and bitching about it never ever helps the verdict.

I've gone through several cycles of religion in my life. In various parts of that spectrum I've wondered why humans invented it. Five decades deep it's becoming more and more evident to me that there is some kind of deeply ingrained need for it in wide swaths of humanity...regardless of what it actually looks like in practice.

I don’t understand what your question has to do with op but I’ll explain it to you.

Religion and language are very similar, both in how they are transmitted and how they shift.

The latter systematizes thought and the former emotions.

Language is encoded by vocal utterances, characters, hand gestures, etc…

Religion by rituals, stories, customs. The purpose of it is to handle the common emotional needs of man. The starting point is the grief that comes from a dead person -> you need a ritual to handle the body and process emotions.

Next you need to handle who has sex with whom as that is another big area of emotional turbulence in man.

Then relationships between parent and child. And so on…

Write it down and get people to follow it, you have a religion. Which will shift and split over time as does language.

It can be completely distinct from the origin of everything though many choose to incorporate deities into their stories to give weight and meaning, this harnesses the inherent respect for father figures people tend to be born with to achieve this.

Twitter is the country club for right and left wing elites. They don't care about viewership, they want to influence each other and chat.

They have thousands of other ways to influence the masses by owning media, other discussion platforms, owning institutions and foundation members and running PR campaigns.

It is better if their actions on Twitter are observed, documented and archived rather than letting them have complete privacy. That is also why journalists of all political leanings are still there.

it always seemed like a honeypot for narcissists to me. Some people just can't resist it

Are there any left wing elites?

i see twitter's takedowns as the same? its claiming ownership over content it only has a license to

nitter is an instance of collective social action - it only works because people who want to post on and use twitter then mirror stuff to nitter

Is that particularly tech industry? Software and media piracy, ad block tools, etc. are all based on this principle.

I don't think it's good to make myself less informed. I have no intention of chatting on Twitter casually or browsing it for fun, but if a major announcement is posted only on Twitter—and I don't know why people keep doing that, but they do—I want to read the original source.

Name and shame them.

Literally every single UK government entity, town/city council, every public transport company, etc. They all use it sadly.

Any specific examples where twitter was the only way?

As an anecdote from the States: During July 4th our city had some poor weather and the best way to check the status of any celebrations going on was their Twitter page.

A good example would be Supertram - the Sheffield tram service. It's only ever provided service disruption notices on twitter. The stations have digital signs which they installed years ago and have always been completely flawed in that they cant actually update them remotely, nor can they say if a tram is running late. They just play a fixed playlist on a loop.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI will sometimes make important announcements only on Twitter.

I haven't used that platform in years and I am still well enough informed. Don't be scared of not knowing everything. The important info will probably reach you. It's not like other platforms don't have people taking about interesting and important things.

I agree with everything you said and abandoned my Twitter account and everything on it years ago for these reasons.

Everything, except for your usage of anarchism to imply chaos or disorder, which is a common misunderstanding. Anarchism, particularly the flavor I subscribe to which is Social Anarchism, is a pursuit of social order, freedom, and prosperity without centralized authorities like Musk.

Thank you for saying this. I totally agree with the OPs comment, but the use of anarchism is off. In fact collectivist anarchism is likely to improve the situation and at least, in theory, produce less predatory entities.

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

I'm fond of the communalism of Murray Bookchin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communalism_(Bookchin)

their ideas of liberatory technology and post-scarcity anarchism are refreshing

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lewis-herber-murray-...

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post...

plus the Kurds & co evolved their own system from the "libertarian municipalism" Bookchin described

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

Thank you for the pointers! These look very interesting.

Anarchism is questioning authority for authority sake. If you put yourself in the place of authority to tell other people what's anarchism you are in for a bad time.

The disagreement is the key value of anarchism. The dialectical pendulum, the exchange of ideas. Disagreeing is expressing anarchism, even if you disagree with the other party's understanding of anarchism.

My explanation is in line with the community maintained Wikipedia articles and their sources based on a long history of anarchist history and writings, and none of it seems to be under any significant dispute.

One does not need to be in a position of authority above others to help ensure discussions are grounded in common definitions of what words mean.

The irony of you pulling credentials to illustrate how right you are about anarchism tells how much you don't understand it even if you understand the definition of the word. Anarchy is negative self-referential, you can't really define it universally without creating a paradox. For instance, even in this case that I might be right in explaining this to you, I'm wrong if I say this is anarchism categorically.

What credentials? I just pointed to supporting evidence I used the word in the way it is most commonly and publicly defined.

Meanwhile you shared your own meaning as correct with no supporting evidence it is a definition commonly shared.

You are free to make up your own special definitions of words that few if any share if you like. You can use the word cat to refer to a dog, for instance. It is not going to help you communicate with the majority of people who speak a mostly shared dialect of written english where words have well documented common knowledge meanings though, but you do you.

Neither making up words nor shoving their definitions in people's faces will help neither of us communicate with anyone else. These types of conversations have to happen in good faith where you assume the other party isn't a moron and conduct a productive conversation, like this one.

The fact you address little to none of my points is an indicative that while you are a very good thesaurus, you don't understand much hermeneutics.

So in good faith I went to dig a bit what's the holdout in our debate here, and it's because I didn't understand two separate uses of anarchism, the one that's epistemological, anarchism as anti-foundationalism, my point, and your point that's political. In political anarchism we don't have this pressure to question every single thing, so when you said Socialist Anarchism I should have gone and read what that is had I known this distinction beforehand.

TLDR, you are right and I'm not necessarily wrong, we were just talking about two different things.

> I should have gone and read what that is

That is the most capacity for growth I have seen demonstrated in a while. You just gave me slightly more hope in humanity.

I just wish I had a less aggressive or snarky style of writing. Maybe then I'd invite people for a discussion and not for exchanging heartbreak, but we are products of our context and certainty is what's currently rewarded, not doubt.

> I just wish I had a less aggressive or snarky style of writing.

You and me both. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard variations of "you are way less of an asshole in person"

Complex asynchronous communication always has a way of forcing the temperature higher than it needs to be because we have more time to wordsmith and the cost of feeling stupid can be multiplied by the size of the perceived audience.

Often the same two people would have had a much better interaction in person where each sees the other as a human being speaking with their own voice and facial expressions.

indeed, the context here is political/organisational rather than epistemological

anarchist organisational practices are real

people have been creating solutions to counter "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" for many decades now

coarsely put, anarchists (and work/housing co-ops, and protest groups) most generally favour consensus-process with proper anti-slow facilitation and role rotation, vs the [usually] majority voting systems and power dichotomies that are the style of communism (see democratic centeralism)

though many places just don't mention this essentially counts as anarchism (or libertarian socialism), cos a) the stigma, b) they just don't need to or know to, c) they do, just behind closed doors

"horizontalism/horizontalidad" has been a good descriptor

https://www.seedsforchange.org.uk/guides

https://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/structure-and-governance

see also sociocracy, and Murray Bookchin

and the whole range of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism plus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_communism in general

libertarian socialism is an oxymoron

Not necessarily I think, because socialism need not be authoritarian, I don't know how, maybe in a thousand years when the society collectively reached higher levels of moral development. But my intuition is that for libertarian socialism to exist, people need to agree and desire to converge to a golden mean ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_mean_(philosophy) ) instead of being incentivised to accumulate as much wealth and power as possible.

> socialism need not be authoritarian

True socialism is the opposite of authoritarianism. Simply put, it's taking care of everyone. Just because the label has been misused doesn't change the goal of those of us who identify as socialists. USA propaganda made it a bad word.

> As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, socialism is the standard left-wing ideology in most countries. [0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

True! But at some point the rubber needs to meet the road and we haven't seen this materialize in practice, so for all intents and purposes, when we talk about realist socialism we need to account for the various forms of authoritarianism that comes in the package, I think

shouldn't we, by the same account, maybe even more, be disparaging of capitalism?

I don't know, I don't care about capitalism, I prefer to reserve my attention for things that could work long term and let it wither and die.

Having said that, I don't subscribe to capitalist propaganda. When I say realist socialism that should refer to the inherent structures of power that need to exist in order to organize large groups of people and how to manage greed and ambition so it doesn't eat society from within. It's important to idealise true socialism, but just as much as the Ubermensch can't materialize, that is also just a compass, a guiding star.

did Pinochet make libertarian capitalism an oxymoron?

In Orwell's 1984, control of the language was central to control of society. Newspeak and such.

Consider recent quibbles over pronouns.

Given Orwell's strong endorsement of anarchists, it's unlikely he's lampooning anarchists in 1984...

You mean quibbles over how my loved-ones live life? It's not difficult. Just be respectful to someone and that's the end of it affecting you.

One thing, I meant "Anarchism is questioning authority for authority sake" that's one single thing.

Your disagreement here is not the typical understanding. And correcting people is not pushing hierarchy. The parent poster isn't standing over you, they are standing beside you offering to educate you.

You can call anarchism whatever you want, just... if you invent your own notion of the thing don't be surprised when no one understands you.

Edit: I see your post much deeper on, you can ignore me.

No, sorry. Political activists do not get to decide for everyone else what words mean.

Everyone gets to decide what words mean. But anarchism has lots and lots of history of scholarship, debate, and discussion. Kropotkin was writing about this in the 1800s, and we've had well over a century of defining and shaping the definitions.

The parent poster isn't inventing anything or deciding anything. They're just sharing what the common understandings are.

If colloquial usage of "anarchy" has a different definition than, an, I'm sorry, irrelevant niche political movement, then you should assume a given speaker meant the colloquial form.

> The parent poster isn't inventing anything or deciding anything.

Stating something authoritatively is, in fact, "deciding" it for others.

> They're just sharing what the common understandings are.

No, it is not at all the common understanding. When I put "anarchy" into a search engine, the first thing I see is "Absence of any form of political authority.", because that is the common understanding. Forming an "-ism" around that is commonly understood to follow the usual patterns.

Perhaps people who apply the label to themselves wish to see things that way, but they are (thankfully) a small minority of people.

I don't give a damn about the justification, because there's clearly no good reason to care, as it clearly serves a dishonest and dangerous political purpose, viz: attempting to delegitimize the state in order to seize power.

The trouble is that many us government figures exclusively post information via x (and to some extent Facebook as well)

Are you speaking of public services, like the National Weather Service (also on Facebook, and host their own website), or about politicians and their appointees? Because while the public service arm of the U.S. government still does a ton of critical and often-underappreciated work, the semantic content of U.S. politicians' posts is effectively nil.

Both. (See for example @dhsgov)

Unfortunately those politicians are the ones who directly affect lives of all of us through their words and actions.

Your defeatist attitude is one of the reasons we are in this mess in the first place. Why should you or anyone else accept this as a status quo?

A related essay with the same take:

https://publiccomment.blog/p/it-is-past-time-for-you-to-quit...

Why is scrolling broken?

What is that with this random hate? There are tons of decent people posting/reading X. I am sure most of them do it because they like the site. Maybe because random detached from reality hate comments like that don't get much engagement.

One of the most hateful human being control this social network. There’s tons of decent people in a nazi bar isn’t the test of what makes it a great place to be.

We have to move people to mastodon or bluesky. Stop using x Twitter

Websites. It's websites. We're not moving from centralised platform A to centralised platform B in an age where people are giving up on centralised platforms altogether.

Non technical people have always used centralized platforms starting from geocities, Google, Yahoo, it's cheaper than hiring someone to do it for them.

On twitter there are many incredibly hateful, rude, ignorant and ill informed people and you can block them or add community notes. On mastodon or bluesky it's only them and no community notes.

No, that's almost as bad.

Locking knowledge into a benignly-ruled centralised blackbox instead of a despicably-ruled centralised blackbox isn't solving the core problem.

well, you can publish and consume ActivityPub from any wordpress instance. You can likewise publish to ATProto, AFAIK.

It's more convenient to use mastodon.social or bsky.app but they're not inherently "centralised blackboxes".

That's bluesky and mastodon working as intended. Easy like a centralized platform for everyone, while staying decentralized for nerds.

I don't know if this works. They have their target audience. A different audience avoiding it doesn't make them shut down. I don't like sportsball, but me not watching a sportsball game doesn't make the league shut down.

It’s a social network. Less people on it = less ads dollar. You not building the network is making it less valuable and important. It’s something.

Hey I stopped using it and facebook years ago! Couldnt agree more.

I can never ever understand the sentiment of - 'If I do/do-not-do XYZ, it won't make a difference since millions of people are still not-doing/doing XYZ in the world'.

It gives same energy as "If I avoid murder, it won't make a difference since murders still happen in the world. If I avoid meat to help climate change, it won't make a difference since millions still eat meat".

The goal is not to get the WORLD to stop. It is to get ME to stop. I will reap its benefits regardless of what happens to others.

But you won't reap the benefits. You'll just be cut out of the conversation that's still happening.

To me, what you advocating for is performative self-flagellation, not a solution to the systemic issue.

The system's still there. You're just pretending it isn't and losing access to its contents. The more correct approach is to exfiltrate the information from the system while starving it of ad revenue.

> You'll just be cut out of the conversation

that's a bad thing ?

> you won't reap the benefits

but that IS my claim - I will reap benefits proportional to my actions (good or bad).

e.g. if global warming causes a flood, my house may be destroyed because I drove cars, but a boat would save me because I was vegetarian.

(the next salvo in this conversation will immediately turn into religious theology, so if that's not your thing, ignore this)

I think the problem is that it’s not black and white, it’s case by case. Some things are just not worth your effort/energy/opportunity cost. Like the difference you’re making by boycotting is so minuscule compared to the enormous downside to you. So you gotta draw your own line in that situation.

I also think the murder thing is different. A lot of these do/dont do xyz things are bad because so many people do/dont. If you were alone in doing/not doing it wouldn’t be an issue by itself. Of course that’s not true for Murder.

People will keep coming with an excuse like there is some crucial information posted exclusively on twitter and their life depends on it, like venue/corporate annoucements and whatever else SMM people are posting there

I feel like I'm living under a rock reading this post. What are the problems with Twitter, why does it need boycotting?

For starts, there's no such thing as Twitter any more, and hasn't been, for years.

Okay but that's not really relevant as the name changing is not a reason to leave/boycott?

There is no problem with X (formerly Twitter). Some people got their panties in a twist because Elon Musk bought it.

I don't want media under control of billionaires like Musk. I mostly stopped using Twitter myself but many important institutions still feel compelled to publish there (sometimes even exclusively), thus I would like other people to also stop using it, so it can perish. Hopefully something better will fill that void. The Fediverse seems promising being a distributed system with no central control.

I wish i could forget the last 6 years as well (to be clear, post COVID nonsense).

> Continuing to read things on it, even through Nitter, is in the interests of Twitter/X

Yet Twitter/X sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Nitter folks, which seems to contradict the idea that they think people reading content via Nitter is in their interest IMHO.

I doubt that works. They would be fine keeping it up indefinitely as their internal Slack. What I think would work better is to just keep using it like nothing happened except a child with skill issue has been ruining it, which require no pretentious, deliberate, or dishonest behavior.

The Twitter HQ had always fought its userbase and culture, not always relentlessly with passion, but never really loved it. The relationship between Twitter, Inc. and its user hivemind was always Clockwork Orange toxic. Though Musk trying to ruin it and getting his brain absolutely deep fried in a massive brain inflammation is his own doing, Musk ending up owning it in the first place, for the large part, is result of its former owners throwing in the towel.

> The decent people won't hear them on Twitter/X, and the decent people will wonder what's wrong with them if they persist in supporting that thing.

Escaping this warped version of morality is precisely what many seek when browsing the site and the reason why many celebrated Musk's purchase.

Also why many say that bluesky is a shithole.

I stopped using it last year but after hearing the news they trained grok on child pornography I deleted my account.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/elon-musks-xai-u...

Could you point to a resource that explains (concisely if possible) why twitter shouldn’t be used unlike other social media platforms?

Is it because it is controlled now by a different branch of the powers that be? (different branch — same tree).

I think it being controlled by that different branch is part of it, but that includes the undesirable attributes of that different branch, and I don't think we need to go into the details of those attributes lol

The not needing an account is obviously not minor, but honestly, the UI is just better, by a lot. I made a twitter account a while ago using one of those throw away email address sites, so I have an account that I don't care about that I can use for twitter....but the experience just sucks. I don't know how any stands it, even if they don't mind needing an account.

Seriously. The UX/UI on Twitter has always been a dumpster fire.

Eh. It was pretty great in 2008, when I used my spotty cell service to tweet road trip updates by texting 40404. O tempora, o mores, etc. etc.

Haven’t had that luxury in Russia. Though being a script kiddie I’ve set up a shortcode just for myself (there were these “paid content SMS as a Service” thingies that forwarded SMS text to an HTTP endpoint you provide).

Didn't have that luxury either, but at one point, "Twilio" was the star and poster-child of startups, with their "Guerilla marketing" and completely fresh and new roles of "developer advocates" so of course everyone and their mother had been to at least one Twilio meetup, or your local meetup with a "developer evangelist" from Twilio. Lots of us built our first SMS-capable service as a "Forward this SMS to this HTTP endpoint", I too did the SMS-to-Tweet thing as the US number didn't accept my SMSes (or wasn't available, or something).

All of the WWW was better in 2008. Unironically. We've all been frog-boiled into this current hellscape.

There was a brief moment when smartphones first came out but the rest of the world's companies weren't taking them seriously yet that was a truly brilliant time and ever since then it's been nothing but downhill.

Smartphones came out in 2008. So your date aligns with the GPs.

... yes. Yes, that was the point.

Ahh sorry. My reading comprehension was obviously failing me then.

back on when websites were websites. HN of today on my phone reminds me of that.

I think it's great. My feed is people posting tech/AI news, scientific publications, videos of rockets and self-driving cars, things made with coding agents etc. It's full of people who do meaningful work as well and you can see who they are. Dark mode, ability to easily copy images, link to posts, see posts of interesting people by going to their profile. On top of that the feed algorithm is open source and actually sane. What else would I want?

It's by far the best designed social media site out there. I know it's a low bar but still.

> On top of that the feed algorithm is open source

Do you genuinely believe what is public is exactly what's deployed? If so, what makes that belief justified?

Why would I doubt it? if you think they are deploying something else then it's quite a claim but it's you who need to show some evidence. It works great anyway. I get a lot of junk I don't want to see on FB/Insta. Reddit is not even worth discussing. X is the only place with where you get a lot of people who work on interesting/important/big stuff and post frequently.

The UI/UX is the main thing. I technically have an X-Twitter account that I rarely use, but loading plain HTML with a bit of JS beats loading a whole SPA experience just to read a post.

1:1 the same thing with Github

Nithub when?

https://codeberg.org/gothub/gothub

Diffshub is a start

Obviously such a thing would be horrible, but there is sourcehut.

    git clone

I have a side project that proxies GitHub for a simpler UI https://github.com/jmou/cgithub

It's live (best effort) at https://cgithub.jmou.workers.dev/jmou/cgithub

eh anyone going to github knows what they want. At this point it's a flex to be hosted elsewhere

Yeah, the UI is the real and only reason to use Nitter. It's a very similar situation with old reddit.

Since a couple of weeks they force you to login to use old.reddit.

My visits have dropped by about 95%

Use Redlib [1] or one of the other alternative Reddit frontends.

[1] https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

At that point though, it's like why. Reddit is, well, trash. It's barely worth visiting without an account, and if you're going to make me jump through hoops to visit, it's time to accept the message of "we don't want you here" and go somewhere else.

The reason to use it is that Reddit does provide the occasional answer to questions like "how to get a Samsung SCX 3400 to run on a Raspberry Pi" (etc.).

All those have been ingested by chatgpt, which ironically provides a better user experience.

Now all that's missing is Chatlib, a self-hosted proxy for ChatGPT which makes it possible to a) query the service without leaving a personally identifiable trace and b) separate out the facts from the dreamt-up fiction. Using Redlib I at least get to see the original posts which makes it easier to separate fact from fiction.

If you're browsing Reddit for its front page, yes, that's trash. But it can be a great source for getting information on narrow, specific topics on well-moderated subreddits filled with enthusiastic and obsessive people eager to share their knowledge. It's been very helpful for me when researching coffee grinders, refrigerators, solar battery backups, headphones, and other such things.

I've been making money from reddit, and for about a decade and a half and at this point, why bother? It's basically drained and what remains is of zero value.

Redreader still works on android.

Though, reddit's been infected by you tubers and clankers to the point that it's basically useless.

Reddit infected by Youtubers sounds like pest getting cholera, i.e. Reddit did not need an infection to be a bot-infested cesspit.

It sure didn't help any. People that get their info from YouTube tend to be morons with zero reading comprehension.

The same is and has been true for Reddit for a long time, the difference lies mostly in the ideological sauce flavouring these places, i.e. Little-endians vs. Big-endians. If you're a Reddit-endian you'll despise the Tube-endians and vice versa.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

works for now. it's no longer just a redirect.

in the week or so it didn't function, I used https://photon-reddit.com/

You can use www.reddit.com (yes, this domain, not old.reddit.com) with the old UI if you set cookie "redesign_optout=true".

Thanks for that tip. Works like a charm.

Old reddit redirect extension

Same, it’s been nice if I’m honest, them doing something to old.reddit.com was always going to be the final straw.

Outside this place it was the last of the “social” media’s I used.

The only reason to use nitter is that for whatever reason twitter allows it access to its api. The UI is terrible and completely irrelevant.

I could use it without an account and know that any comment I clicked into would take me to the thread of posts under it without sponsored ads or posts.

The reason is that every copy of Nitter has a list of account tokens to log in with, and pretends to be a human using those accounts.

>the UI is the real and only reason to use Nitter.

Why is not wanting to share my reading habits with Elon not a real reason?

It can't suck all that much if you're not willing to give it up.

It sounds to me like they did give up on using the builtin UI.

The X app loads posts much faster than these sites, so I find the app has a better UI.

I wonder what data Elon is able to slurp up through the app that he can't get through the website. Seems like a good incentive to keep the site worse.

Shows the true cost of surveillance capitalism.

I remember the days that Bibliogram worked for Instagram. They've given up. A decade ago I could have an RSS feed for what my friends posted, besides the toxic short-form content of IG reels that everyone is now obsessed with post Meta acquisition and their battle to compete with Tiktok.

Instagram is actively hostile to good ui. They constantly go out of their way to break extensions that add a video scrubber.

Last I was on the platform, they eventually added a tab for only chronological posts on the timeline a-la how IG used to work. But they gave no exposure to it, _and_ it completely hid the IG stories of your friends so nobody would want to use it in the first place.

Good UI makes it easier to be selective. social media owners dont want you to be selective, they are selling you to advertisers and influencers after all.

But the view apparently is Zuckerberg bought it when they were 'barely a company'

Yes - and he's utterly ruined it. And we know from his emails it was anti-competitive

Zuckerberg and his minions have changes html and obfuscate it so much, it is impossible to block ads these days. They are worst than google. Imagine google decided every video will require widevine & there is no way to block ads just like twitch.

> Instagram is actively hostile to good ui.

And that idiot, Zuck, thought he was getting a good deal when he poached former head of design, Alan Dye, from Apple. We were relieved to see him go. Our desktop OS is already making small improvements now that he's gone.

Context: the guy doesn't understand fundamentals of UX and has made MacOS worse for years.

[If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design](https://mastodon.social/@heliographe_studio/1158908195095453...)

[Apple has updated the traffic light buttons in macOS 27](https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1vr08s2/apple_has_up...)

I agree. I think the UI is the best part. It seems more responsive to me too.

Same with Redlib for Reddit, it's just so much nicer to look at.

This is no longer possible by the way (making an account on twitter with a throwaway email)

I might cut into my own flesh right now, but the funny thing about that XCancel shutdown is that while the website is down, the RSS feeds still work. Almost like they've just been required to shutdown the visible website and they complied with exactly that.

Isn't Twitter archived by Library of Congress or something similar? Can't remember the exact details, but maybe something (enforced by law even perhaps?) is depending on those feeds with punishment sufficient enough for Elon to actually listen. Or they don't actually realize those are still online, and there is some lone engineer trying their best to never raise any attention to it and we just made their day a lot worse...

That stopped in 2018. https://www.slashgear.com/library-of-congress-twitter-archiv...

Really important for you to mention this. People just love to tell when they know something no one else does. Does "cut into my own flesh" mean that you only think you'll be affected by this becoming common knowledge?

I don't want to lose my feeds and someone might tell XCancel to actually shutdown everything instead of just the website. And not, I've user other Nitter instances before and they either had their RSS feeds disabled or were particularly unstable.

Yeah, but most of these will fall. I used to use one or two of these to scrape my friends' posts because I stopped using Twitter and they'd inevitably all disappear in time. It's like chasing the latest TPB. In the end, I just logged in a headless browser and told an agent to fetch daily.

What is TPB?

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

That's true, but TBP has been going pretty strong for over 2 decades. It can be hard to totally shut something down, if people want it.

Sadly, the music selection has fallen off a cliff, and the rest is in a sharply downward spiral... in one sense this is because the music industry finally settled on a streaming model that most people are willing to rent, and it's also because the new generation has been brainwashed or trained out of storing their own files.

It's also because it's difficult to add your own magnet links.

It's also because torrents are a bad fit for music. The whole protocol is designed for throughput and reliability on big downloads like movies and games, not fast start on 2MB files you don't need to split with today's broadband.

A lot of uploaders still zip everything so you can't download one song out of some album. And the discoverability is shit because DHT doesn't let you ask peers for all their torrents so you need to run a server that index multiple trackers or look things up manually.

The only alternative is Soulseek where it's a direct connection model instead of hash based. That means there are no stable IDs to get a file if the original uploader is down and users can send you anything they want like troll audio or malware.

If we want people to start pirating music again we need to make the UX as good as Spotify. That means no explicit downloads, when you click play the app gets the file from a peer, saves it to a cache then starts playing and seeding automatically. Songs and albums should be content addressed in a global namespace instead of living on trackers, and there should probably be a reputation system. I think something based on iroh blobs for content and atproto for discovery can work.

Soulseek is working fine.

But to be honest I never found TPB (or rarbg etc.) really useful for music.

Soulseek is centralised, and censors searches in compliance with legal requests. If you connect to someone who has censored content, the central server can't stop you grabbing it, but you have to find them another way.

Soulseek is great and reminiscent of the old BBS days. But it feels a lot more fragile than torrenting. 15 years ago, TPB was still a place you could get hard-to-find music. Now you are lucky to find a single person on soulseek with an album you're looking for.

> the new generation has been brainwashed or trained out of storing their own files.

It has very little to do with this and more just about the ubiquitous availability of 5G and always-available streaming.

I stopped caring about data hoarding once I could just access anything I wanted reliably wherever I was.

Streaming is getting worse fast. I basically just pay for curation, and AI slop is creating cracks in that model. Some of the musicians I like are getting crushed by sybil style attacks, where there are 10 new albums in their artist page, but only one is theirs.

Fortunately, sending a screenshot to Claude tells me what to push in a minute or so, but, unfortunately, I can’t just hand it an API endpoint and have it scrub all this crap weekly.

(No idea why the streaming service can’t just do that themselves, of course…)

Of course, for movies, it’s gotten to the point where I just drive to the used DVD store. $1-5 per movie used (including blurays); $20-30 new. I usually walk out with a dozen or so films for $100. This is easier than tpb.

I am not sure what streaming service you are using but it sounds awful. I have not encountered anything like what you describe on Apple Music.

Probably Spotify

no, the ubiquity of 5G is what allowed you to be brainwashed into not storing your own files and using cloud storage or streaming for everything. It's kind of like water, food or electricity. You probably don't own a generator, don't keep lots of water or food stores in case things go down for awhile. You assume things will always work.

Storage is dirt cheap insurance. 5G is a luxury that can go away at any moment, and doesn't exist on large parts of the planet. Even if it does, they can just remove something you "own" from your library.

Wdym "chasing the latest TPB"? Isn't 1337x and others better and offer a complete alternative?

Twitter is different there's many stories that are only there.

Switching torrent sites every time one gets taken down.

But why wouldn't you?

> Isn't 1337x and others better and offer a complete alternative?

The best way is always private trackers. They're easy to get into, easy to keep (if you're a serious and honest person), malware free, high quality content, great community, etc.

> The best way is always private trackers. They're easy to get into

If they were easy to get into, they wouldn't be good

It's as easy as buying 1 month of seedbox for around 10 bucks.

Buying a seedbox doesn't get you into a private tracker. It's a download client.

mid tier trackers partner with seedbox providers who give them kickbacks for referrals, in exchange for an account

So. Easy to get into is: "some unspecified mid-tier trackers may or may not give out accounts to some unspecified seedbox providers".

It's probably easier to lurk in r/trackerinvites (or whatever it's called) hoping to snatch an invite

Yep it's not easy. Easy was a lie. The best are actually curated public trackers. TPB is not curated.

Sadly, curated public ones are also harder and harder to find (for obvious reasons) :(

Rutracker's a good one.

It's amazing how it held up over 20-ish years. You'd think it would only get worse after removing mandatory registration 10 or so years ago. And yet...

Well, you need an account to search.

> It's probably easier to lurk in r/trackerinvites (or whatever it's called) hoping to snatch an invite

I think it's much easier to pay 12 bucks for a month of seedbox that includes an invite to TL, than to hit F5 on /r/OpenSignups for months/years until they open registration.

> I think it's much easier to pay 12 bucks for a month of seedbox that includes an invite to TL

Yes, it's probably easier. My quick search revealed no such seedboxes.

Go to TL, hit the big button in the center that says "sign up promo".

For those wondering, TL is Torrentleech

They're all perfect substitutes. When one is down you can use another. They can't stop us all. I just wish there was a way to automatically redirect to a working instance.

LibRedirect kind of does so, it's not 100% there yet

https://libredirect.manerakai.com/

Love this extension. One stop shop and supports any custom alt front-end you want for any website you want. Usually they have all the major ones and are quick to update with mirrors when something goes down but allowing you to do it yourself is a great fallback

Found this Android app to work quite well. It just lacks working nitter instances right now but you can customize them:

https://github.com/circumspace/linkahest

What doesn't work is posting a link to a specific Nitter instance with the expectation that that link will persist.

Which is what HN has been doing for Twitter submissions for approximately two years:

<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>

Those links are all now dead.

It's inconvenient that the links are dead, but all the information needed to find the referenced information is still stored in the link. You just have to change the domain to a working instance.

Did TPB ever change a domain? I've been using the .org domain listed on Wikipedia for as long as I can remember.

Then you are not in a country where it is blocked. (Or you VPN into one.)

I don't think .org is still official. Look for an orange isometric K

a what?

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

It seems to be the "official" one according to Wikipedia though?

I made a small service that will redirect you to a working one:

https://github.com/skorokithakis/detour, running on https://twit.0r.cx.

Just replace x.com with twit.0r.cx.

Example:

https://twit.0r.cx/Stavros/status/2096184846993314184

    // ==UserScript==
    // @name                   Twitter Alternative
    // @description
    // @match                  *://*.x.com/*
    // @namespace              TwitterRedir
    // @run-at                 document-start
    // ==/UserScript==
    window.location.replace("https://twit.0r.cx" + window.location.pathname + window.location.search);

TIL ublock can do this (and won't have to wait for the initial response from x.com) - see the Tips section on https://twit.0r.cx

Wait, what tips section?

Oh that's a redirect, it's on https://nitter.miningtcup.me/

You'll need to remove a couple of unintended spaces when copy pasting the rule.

The solution is to run your own instance, create a few accounts for it to use and put it behind a reverse proxy with basic auth. Hand out logins to a few people and it will remain useable. If you put your instance out in the open it will sooner or later end up temporarily blocked - I tried this for a few years, same results every time - but smaller instances remain useable.

It isn't hard to run an instance, just park it next to your SearXNG [1], Invidious [2], Redlib [3],PeerTube, ... instances.

[1] https://github.com/searxng/searxng

[2] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

[3] https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

> It's like chasing the latest TPB.

What do you mean? TPB been online and at the exact same URL (give or take some days/weeks around raids) for like two decades, and still has the same URL today. Might not be the same group, but not sure what "chasing" you're referring to?

It's distributing malware, do not use any of the "TPB" sites.

Lol, of course, it has since day 1, and will continue to do so. I don't think anyone use these piracy websites without being aware of the risks here.

It's distributing everything, including things that aren't available any other way, and if you want the good you have to pluck it out of the bad.

Living without the good just to avoid that is maybe one philosophy of life, but certainly not the only valid one.

There's just no reason to ever use them when other sites are better.

Other sites require you to make piracy a lifestyle, catching invites and seed ratios and shit. TPB lets me just get that one movie that isn't on any streaming service twice a year.

No, there are better public sites too, like 1337x

"They will inevitably all disappear in time."

Years ago HN commenters were making the same comment when most Nitter instances were abandoned

Meanwhile nitter.poast.org kept working for years

Then xcancel.com appeared

When there is no longer a method for an internet subscriber to read Twitter/X without the subscriber creating an account on Twitter/X (and "logging in"), then the subscriber can use a headless browser

But that time has not yet come, and no HN commenter has succeeded in predicting when exactly that time will come

The disappearance of "ad blockers" as browser extensions/add-ons may be "inevitable"

Unlike Nitter, we don't see HN commenters trying to downplay their usefulness

Free internet "services" disappear all the time, for a variety of reasons

For example,

https://killedbygoogle.com/

> When there is no longer a method to read Twitter/X withoot logging in, then one can use a headless browser

There isn't one. Nitter logs in.

"Nitter logs in."

Nitter users don't

HN commenters prognosticating about Nitter are wrong yet again:

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/commit/1428b4c2b4246f92a7e5...

"It's like chasing the latest TPB."

1780323401 | The Pirate Bay Remains Resilient, 20 Years After the Raid | https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-remains-resilient-20... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48357154

https://twitterviewer.net/

That does work, but it misses out on several of nitter's benefits:

- It requires JavaScript - It is not great for privacy, being behind Cloudflare and having numerous trackers - It is not open-source

We could stop thinking of them as walled gardens we're trying to get into and start thinking of them as quarantines for the Eternal September population.

> quarantines for the Eternal September population

Hacker News actually has a way to do this quarantine, a version that only counts votes from accounts created before 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/classic. About a decade after Eternal September started, but not bad.

FWiW as an aside, it appears to count votes from December 2008 accounts (as just tested using this 2008-12-26 account).

So that's at least strictly before 2009.

The vote count is just the normal vote count, so I guess only the ordering is different?

It is, isn't it .. serves me right for breezing through that too quickly.

If there's something magical going on, the ordering would be the only real distinction possible.

Apparently the original (still the same?) dates back to the OG PG days:

Ask HN: who knows about this - "http://News.YCombinator.com/classic"? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1832884

  It's what the frontpage would look like if only the votes of users who joined in the first year counted. I made it to check if the site is declining. In practice it's usually just a slower-changing version of the frontpage.

  ~ pg

Cool experiment! It's still possible that the "high quality" users have stopped visiting (and stop voting) as the vibes Septemberized, leaving us with older accounts that act roughly in line with the way September accounts have made it. I'd be interested to know what portion of these older accounts are still voting.

Decade and a half, really. Eternal September was 1993 or 1994, right?

Wow that's very interesting but it only works for the front page (and also only changes the order not the numbers), not for each comment page.

Maybe we should have a setting "count only votes before date yyyy-mm-dd" but this would probably make the site too dynamic (?) and consume a lot of resources.

I guess X never heard of the Streisand effect...

Elon has bought immunity to that. Streisand's flaw was that she gave a shit. Elon has unlocked the kinda reverse-Streisand that Trump has, where their popularity actually feeds on the effect.

The internet peanut gallery will whine about literally everything under the sun. At a certain point I can see why some people would want to harness that energy for their advantage. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em and all that.

Elon Derangement Syndrome is real, like the Trump equivalent.

It's worse. Elon was very well praised by the same people, Trump was never liked.

To be fair, it's possible that he changed, rather than that everyone who now hates him did.

Many people regard Elon as a hero or villain. I regard him as a tragedy: A great entrepreneur who wrecked his sanity due to drugs, genetics, and/or overwork.

If you read his ex-wife's account of their history together, and also the drama of what happened at PayPal etc... he was always kinda .. off.. and full of shit.

Then again, I often think that about myself. But I'm not a trillionaire.

It does sound like losing his first child at 10 weeks really messed him up. It definitely would do that to anybody.

What if insanity is required to be a great entrepreneur?

I guess if that’s how you have to make yourself feel better about the worlds first trillionaire and his success after success, have at it.

I don’t even understand what this comment is trying to imply

It's saying Elon is better than you because he's richer, and as we all know, capitalism is a meritocracy.

He seems like a pretty miserable guy though. Tons of pressure, no real friends, utterly and very visibly failed doge, almost universally despised completely of his own doing.

It's not him who's wrecked. It's just some poor souls who cant't stand how right he is while he expresses that with autistic crudeness.

Musk is the same guy he was 10 years ago, still working his ass off on visionary projects, beating rest of the world on those fronts. And we love him for that!

The thing is, it's difficult to tell what his opinions actually are when he's so committed to trolling and being crude. Even if you sussed them all out and agreed with them, he wouldn't be someone you'd want to emulate, just on the basis that he has a hard time articulating anything consistently. If it's the crudeness that you love, then I guess the opinions themselves take a back seat. But at that point you're just cheering for an agent of chaos, rather than having a consistent set of beliefs of your own.

Nope, I appreciate being unapologetically right. Instead of lying and causing other harms just to satisfy fee-fees.

  > cant't stand how right he is

That's.... convenient. No need to interrogate the stated reasons why someone you admire is not universally and uncritically beloved. I'll just ignore the reasons they themselves repeatedly give and instead assume they actually hate how correct he is about everything. Despite the things he was famously wrong about like COVID cases in 2020 going to 0 in a matter of weeks.

If you have to dig that far, you're not doing very well.

Being truth-seeking means you're willing to be wrong more times than your opponents, which do statements that say nothing instead. He takes an engineering approach to all problems, and yes that sometimes means painful iteration, but at least he has the _chance_ of arriving at truth and right solutions. We owe people that take that brunt this whole world.

Great entrepreneur is a bit of a far fetch. His own friends(?) didn't want him to be CEO of paypal back in the day.

He's just serving the profitable market niche of incompetent CEOs with golden parachutes

It's funny because I think the original Streisand 'effect' was done in good faith. She just didn't want people taking photos of her private home. It's since been used to justify all manner of silencing actions on the part of others

Good faith but still not well thought out. Nobody even knew it was her home until she complained about it.

Is there something like a balancer that redirects me to an instance that is not down?

The LibRedirect browser extensions lets you configure a list and quickly hot between, but it doesn't check whether they are up before redirecting you to one of them iirc

https://libredirect.manerakai.com/

I mean, I was just thinking of writing one in a few lines, so there will be one in a few minutes.

xxcancel.com (just add an x to xcancel.com) will redirect you to a working instance!

As promised:

https://github.com/skorokithakis/detour, running on https://twit.0r.cx.

Just replace x.com with twit.0r.cx.

Example:

https://twit.0r.cx/Stavros/status/2096184846993314184

There was a service I discovered that was set as a default in this app: https://github.com/circumspace/linkahest

Unfortunately it also shut down a few days before the nitter takedowns.

https://twiiit.com

I've already encountered two instances of something I was interested in learning about being linked using Nitter / XCancel, and those links are now quite deceased.

Please link to primary sources. If I need an alternative method of accessing the site, I'll figure it out.

A key design decision was you only need to replace the domain in the URL. So you need only replace it back. It's not like archive.is where I need to also save the original.

Please use screenshots and copy the content. Don't link to X.

oh, that's great. i thought the project is dead.

how would you (EDIT: publicly) host such a nitter instance while avoiding the risk of legal consequences?

since old.reddit (EDIT: on mobile) is closed for visitors without an account it would be great if there was also a neddit project.

Redlib exists - https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

It has a few public instances - https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/ins...

Seems to work decently well, I've seen it being linked to on HN.

for personal use you can just host one on your internal network

Like some other things reddit tells visitors, they're basically lying, or at best, being inconsistent. I've tried old reddit here and there in the past month or so and sometimes it says I need an account for "safety", other times, it doesn't.

It is consistently no longer working for me on desktop, FWIW.

I tried it with a browser that probably still has cookies from an account I deleted 4 months ago, with no problem. Then, tried it with a Private mode window - that one asked for a login.

old.reddit still works anonymously for me. maybe an a/b test?

possible that they just changed it for mobile.

It's regional, in some countries they force logins, in others not. In some countries, r/all isn't available at all on mobile for example, you get redirected regardless of how you try to access it, but seemingly work in other countries.

Dead for me, UK.

You just host it and if you're not big they don't notice you. Nitter is legal btw.

Most nitter instances don't do anything to avoid legal trouble from X. They simply hope that X will not go after them. There are some instances which do put in effort to stay anonymous, and they usually do that with a Cloudflare tunnel to hide their server IP and by not posting any personal details online.

For Reddit you can use Redlib (https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib), I host an instance at https://redlib.miningtcup.me/ and people also like https://safereddit.com/.

Thats the nice thing about alternate frontends like Nitter, if the main instance goes down you can just clone the repo and make your own very easily, or choose from one of the many alternate instances out there.

I highly recommend the extension libredirect, which will redirect you to instances of your choice (or just stick with the defaults). It doesn't just work for Twitter/X, but also Reddit, Tiktok, Youtube, and many others

Firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ Chromium Instructions - https://github.com/libredirect/browser_extension

> you can just clone the repo and make your own very easily

This is not the case for Nitter. It requires real X accounts to run, quite possibly hundreds or thousands for a major public instance. Creating X accounts currently requires phone number verification.

It is possible to create X accounts without a phone number. I run [service].miningtcup.me and it uses 5 accounts, none of which required phone numbers for me to create, and none of which I paid for. You just have to get creative.

It is possible to get phone numbers. And not from shady sites - I mean you can just buy them, from the bodega.

But I agree, not easy.

+ for folks using Kagi Search, you can set up a search engine level redirect (which is what I used to use for redirecting Twitter/X links to Xcancel before the takedown)

> How to obtain many sessions easily (public instances) The easiest way is to buy them here: https://hstockplus.com/accounts/twitter-x-accounts?sortBy=pr...

> This way, you relay the account register process to the seller. These tokens are sold in the format username|password|2fa_code|cookies (including auth token, id and ct0), which makes it very easy and convenient for us to use.

is this legit? this sounds extremely shady. maybe an ad?

I know the guy and it does work, and it's not an ad. Accounts from that website are used on shitter.thepixora.com. The website is extremely sketchy though, he recommends that you don't give it more than a dollar at a time.

oh hey miningtcup! thanks for your very generous reply the other day. not gonna share where but i know you know. buy u a drink if we ever meet

No way to know if that particular site is legit without trying it, but account buying and selling on internet gray markets is very normal and the prices quoted are reasonable.

Yes, you have to give up all your personal data and submit to anal probing to get an account on a sillycon valley service, but a bad actor just has to pay $10 in bitcoin to get a thousand of them.

Any user scripts that automatically redirect to a working instance?

https://github.com/libredirect/browser_extension

I've got a simple redirect made in the redirector add-on for Firefox and Chrome. X.com -> random nitter instance

Not a user script, but the LibRedirect extension does most of that already

https://libredirect.manerakai.com/

I think it doesn't check whether the chosen instance is up before redirecting, but switching to another one if that one is down is a single click.

we do a lil magic and just add another x to xcancel.com => https://xxcancel.com

points to a working nitter instance.

Redirects and has a insane migraine inducing captcha. Why is my Ip sus when it's a UK residential? Gave up after the third attempt

oh, which instance gave you the pain? Will remove it from the load balancer..

https://nitter.miningtcup.me/

Asked me to find three fuzzy blobs in background of grey-noise.

Thank you. Removed this instance as of now.

I don't recall to have had a twitter account.

Because it has been hostile to noscript/basic HTML browsers.

I could use a web API with some token, but it is impossible to create an account and generates such API tokens without a web engine from the whatwg cartel.

There are some extremely sketchy instances with "are you a robot" click dialogs that redirect to exploit URLs.

I would search for other options not listed. I'm not going to name them here because X is lazy and reads HN for scheduling takedown notices.

None of the instances listed have anything like that going on. I believe that all listed instances use either https://www.cloudflare.com/products/turnstile/, https://anubis.techaro.lol/, https://git.miningtcup.me/MiningTcup/dogwaf (made by me), or nothing at all. I recommend against using instances not listed unless you know the host because there are reasons for them to not be listed. I won't elaborate on the reasons for some major instances not being on the list as I want to keep my HN account.

Yes, I entered via nittr.tr, chose one of the instances, got a robot turnstile.

I was on a Windows computer where I didn't care and clicked the turnstile. It was a fake turnstile that redirected to exploit URLs of rough form 1212-12w31762.spammy-url.lol/10919023w71238123ww8128z1287z18178-12w1287wz62178612873ww682183w12.

The browser blocked them. I don't remember which instance it was.

Another instance had a completely broken search feature. Nothing had the quality of the real xcancel.com or nitter.net.

I can assure you that was not an instance on the list.

Do not trust your lying eyes ...

Hope RSS feeds continue working. The only way I can get quality content from twitter is to subscribe to people using xcancel RSS. Even so I need to LLM-filter posts after to get rid of nonsense.

What do we want the web to look like? Lock everything down behind logins, in the name of 'security' when the real goal is nyeh nyeh nyeh you can't see anything, sign up so we get more user metrics

I think today it's not in the name of security but to deal with ridiculous levels of ai scraping.

Sure they also just want everyone to make accounts anyway so it's absolutely a convenient excuse, but it's also real that ais are killing all public sites with constant massive scraping.

There was a thing recently about the kernel gitweb that ais are just clobbering because of the way they stupidly hit every possible valid url, and on a gitweb instance that results in a gobjillion duplicate clones of the entire universe for every tiny commit.

Well, I can say about that that Facebook seems to be the worst about it. They've locked stuff behind logins forever, while also messing with their users privacy settings, while also effectively DDOSing sites with their AI

Google does not, AFAIK, engage in behavior like that (the latter), as much as I don't like a lot of what Google does

We are sadly already beyond the point where sites are locked behind accounts. Today, I'm more concerned about fact that "local" registration is often bundled by SSO from big corporations because it's so supesconvenient.

The future on the eve of age/identity verification doesn't look bright at all. And in years to come, 10 or so, we'll be most likely seeing this corporate-provided SSO as the only way to access sites. They got us trapped already anyway so it's a matter for pushing with law and good marketing.

Will this list automatically update as instances hit rate limits or break for other reasons? Some public instances only have one account to log in with, some have thousands and use residential proxies.

No, not automatically. The list is instances which are reliable, so if an instance is ratelimited any noticeable portion of the time, it won't be up there.

Yeah, nah. The cat and mouse game has begun. X will turn up the heat like Reddit did/is doing. I just created a redirect for (twitter|x).com to 0.0.0.0 and called it a day.

Please I miss nitter so much I wish it would be back up and running it's faster than ever with some updates

Publicly suggesting using a shady service to buy masses of accounts instead of just using the damn service. Mental

The shady service is only for people looking to host nitter, and it's not required. My instance uses accounts that I made myself, for free.

Yes, that is what the guide is for, that is what I was pointing out?

Wouldn't be surprised if some legal pressure wouldn't shut down these kinds of activities which involve furthering profit-gaining from going around platform limits

We should all be using more of those shady services - provided they aren't scams. Those are valuable people providing a valuable service of bypassing enshittification.

I just wish the nitter site would be back up and running and maybe faster than ever with some updates.

Streisand effect !

Anybody have a favorite with a nicer sounding URL ?

My xcancel RSS still works fine too!

Stop using Twitter. Get on Mastodon.

Mastodon is an utter mess. Between that and censorship, we will just stay on X.

As much as I dislike many of the users on X, I really appreciate that it feels like one of the last uncensored social media platforms on the internet. Reddit is handing out permanent AI bans now for any and no reason at all. It's full of people using words like "unalived" now to avoid an automatic ban. The other platforms are no better. If free speech means accepting the speech of people I disagree with, I gladly make that bargain.

X is not, in any way, uncensored when saying the word "cisgender" gets your tweet algorithmically shadowbanned and doing anything Elon doesn't like gets you banned even if you didn't do it on X.

That's hardly the least controversial word to get you shadowbanned, and that isn't to say gender politics is something much controversial. Basically everything get you it.

This. A good platform isn't about just having people you like on and creating an echo chamber through speech controls. Places that are like that feel downright dystopian.

What is it about?

Stop using both. Make your own website.

How do you get API approval?

You don't. Nitter impersonates a website or app user.

Streisand effect.

Streisand effect only works when everybody is against the person being Streisanded. In this case many folks support Twitter and will work with them to get the links taken down

This is a silly fact that doesn't matter, because nobody knows where they are anymore. Even worse, this goofy gloating post ensures that these are about to taken down, too. Nitter can literally be run for a single user, so if a hundred people set it up for their own personal use, I guess that's also more working instances than before the takedown. A real victory if you're dumb.

So for everyone who managed to find another working nitter instance after a long hard search, or in whose friend group one person stood one up so all their friends can use it - fuck you I guess. Somebody wanted to brag on HN about how Musk somehow shot himself in the foot by reducing nitter usage by 99.9% in one day, so now your hoster, and maybe you personally, are getting a legal letter from one of the richest men in the world.

Apparently incorrect. Many comments right on this page have mentioned several automatic redirect services, sites, libraries, extensions and apps, any one of which does it all for you, just automatically redirect to a random working instance.

And there are always many because apparently it's easy to just run one yourself and not even need anyone else's.

It seems there is simply no such problem.

All of the comments on this page serve to expose things that were surviving by flying under the radar. It's delusional to pretend like they're somehow bulletproof when their survival has been due to being infinitesimal in size, and has lasted all of a week.

If some stable service gets put up in Russia, China, Iran, or some other country that will throw up some obstacle to Musk, post it everywhere. Anna's Archive has proven to be tough. This here is bullshit and the people who posted it should be ashamed of themselves for risking a lot of people's safety and access for internet points.

> Many comments right on this page have mentioned several automatic redirect services, sites, libraries, extensions and apps, any one of which does it all for you

Yes, stop mentioning these.

Sites are being mentioned on this page that have already been cut off or shut down. As you watch them go down over the course of the next day or two, maybe reevaluate your priors.

edit: these internet points are imaginary; they turn attention seekers into narcs. Imagine going to the scene where a dozen villages had been razed to the ground and claiming victory because instead of only a dozen villages, there were now several dozen refugee camps where stragglers had fled to. "Streisand Effect" you say, while giving out the GPS coordinates of every refugee camp you're aware of.

One imagines when one puts up a publicly accessible mirror and adds it to the plugin's public mirror list, that they're cool with the public actually, yunno, using it.

Username certainly does check out.

No villages were razed. Your argument is invalid.

Not only refugee camps. Some of the sites on the codeberg list literally spread malware.

People here didn't even look at them but, as you say, just declared victory.

Thanks for some rational thoughts. Unfortunately you are discussing with idiots who barely manage first order thinking.

None of the sites on the codeberg instance list spread malware. If you can link to one that does, I would be shocked. Some of the instances use CAPTCHAs such as DogWAF to prevent scraping, but those are absolutely not malware.

Nitter is legal. It's not even circumventing a DMCA effective technological protection measure.

The only major concern is rate limiting. A large Nitter needs a good supply of accounts and IP addresses. A small one can get by with just one of each. Most of the ones on the page will probably be overloaded soon.

All the instances on the list agreed to be put on it. Their maintainers decided that they were willing to be on it because it's unlikely that they will get a C&D.

With or without the original interface, twitter is still a dumpster fire

Hot take: All those instances keep the service relevant giving it more reach than necessary. Just shut it down. Cancel Twitter and jump on the BlueSkye or Mastodon train.

Nah, I like my freedom of speech, thanks.

Freedom of speech as long as it fit's in Elmos narrative. It's bit naive to think twitter offers this.

Eh, it's a lot less restrictive than Bluesky with its block lists maintained by weirdos. What are some things you aren't allowed to say on Twitter?

I see people talk all the time about how great Bluesky is, yet I never see any great posts there. The discussion is almost always just in relation to Twitter.

Reminds me a bit of when people were pushing for Lemmy.

Can't say cisgender, can't repeat ADS-B data, can't interview people Elon Musk doesn't like, even off platform. Didn't they ban the devs of Nitter, too?

https://fortune.com/2024/09/25/twitter-x-account-suspensions...

If you aren't banned, either Musk agrees with you, or you are small so he hasn't noticed you or doesn't see you as a threat.

You can say cisgender on X, I'm not sure who told you that you can't. There are, quite literally, thousands of people doing so every day.

https://x.com/search?q=cisgender&src=typed_query&f=live

This is a pretty silly point to be arguing about, but I can pretty confidently say you're dead wrong on that.

As far as running flight trackers for celebrities, assuming that's what you mean by "ADS-B data", I think you'll need to use Bluesky for that I'm afraid.

Twitter actually ban and "shadowban" accounts completely at random for every weird reasons. The difference between it and the rest is that it turns blind eyes on most blatant of ban evasions, so much so that its own support sometimes recommending it to users when they were banned. This had been the case since it legitimately was Twitter and there were no injected African spams.

> Twitter actually ban and "shadowban" accounts completely at random for every weird reasons.

Yeah, this kind of thing is on reddit and Facebook too. Very frustrating to be on the receiving end.

> The difference between it and the rest is that it turns blind eyes on most blatant of ban evasions, so much so that its own support sometimes recommending it to users when they were banned

When was this?

People refuse to let the concept of microblogs as conventional communications platforms die. Why?

In my area, people need something to entertain them while they drive.

What's conventional?

Why should it die?

I've been trying to get people on HN to read this for the past two years but I think this is a good place to start for an answer.

https://www.eurozine.com/blogging-the-nihilist-impulse/

Simpler solution:

If you're on Shitter, I'm not interested in your content.

Not even through proxy.

Get on another platform then hit me up if you want some engagement.

Not that we care at all, but for your own good, it'd be best to follow experts in your field/hobby on Twitter. You never know what inspiration might hit you!

Experts in my field don't use Xitter, they use arXiv. Experts in my hobby don't use Xitter, they use forums and databases.

> they use forums *and databases*.

Have to say, a message board which can only be accessed via SQL queries does sound a bit niche :-P

Awesome. Let's all start using this on HN so we end up with a bunch of broken links in a few years

They would become links with only a wrong domain, so I am not very worried about that personally.

It would be cool if libredirect could redirect a broken frontend instance to a working one.

> a bunch of broken links in a few years

Who cares, by that time the originals and their copies would be a lot less worthy of viewing.

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