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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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

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

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

Those links are all now dead.

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.

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

https://libredirect.manerakai.com/

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

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

https://github.com/circumspace/linkahest

> It's like chasing the latest TPB.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soulseek is working fine.

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

Soulseek is 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Probably Spotify

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.

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

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

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

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

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

"It's like chasing the latest TPB."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> 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

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

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

Rutracker's a good one.

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

Well, you need an account to search.

Switching torrent sites every time one gets taken down.

But why wouldn't you?

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

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

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

a what?

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

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

What is TPB?

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

"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...

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