Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice | Hacker News Reader

Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

github.com

930 pointszImPatrick410 comments

Few details but glad to see the project will continue. Given how much crucial information is posted exclusively to X, having an alternative frontend is important.

Interesting that they were inspired by Invidious (alternative YouTube frontend). That’s another project that could use some love. Hopefully AI coding tools can do some good and make it easier for these projects to find ways into the walled gardens and work around the counter measures.

Waiting for the day all the social networks allow api access and become usable again. Maybe we can call it “agent first” to help move things along.

"Maybe we can call it “agent first” to help move things along."

"Agent First" API access for social networks. What could possibly go wrong.

And the irony is that we don’t even need APIs for social networks to drown in botspam.

I mean... It'd change nothing for the worse. It's regular users that are getting screwed by lack of API.

If you dont mind, could you share an example of information posted exclusively on twitter which was crucial to you? Just curious;)

A few recent examples: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/currencies/articles/bessen... https://theprint.in/world/us-military-says-it-completed-late... https://www.reuters.com/technology/brad-lightcap-leaving-ope...

It’s still the go-to platform for public figures to broadcast unfortunately, so if you want to verify the original comments you need an alternate frontend or an X account.

Looking at these examples, I can't really see how this information was exclusive to X really:

the currency intervention took place on July 31, during active market hours. It was immediately detected by global trading desks and reported by major news wires like Reuters and Bloomberg as it happened.

When CENTCOM issued the statement regarding the strikes on IRGC targets, the text went live on the official U.S. Central Command Media Portal at the exact same second the automated post hit their X account.

Before anything was posted online, Lightcap sent an official farewell note to the OpenAI team. Once an email is sent to hundreds of tech employees, it was immediately leaked to tech journalists.

It seems, for all three examples, the platform was used merely as a broadcasting service for information that was either already occurring in the public eye or was simultaneously distributed through formal channels.

The competition is between:

- needing to look in several places

- looking in one place

Easy to see why Twitter wins, even when information isn't exclusive, which it often is (I would've suggested video involved in news events, which is often impossible to find elsewhere but easily gathered on Twitter).

I don't know about crucial, but a recent amber alert went out last week. It contained a bit.ly link to the CHP's Twitter page and I couldn't see the information. I clicked on it because the alert was from my town, but light on the details.

Surely a public post on a CHP website would have gotten the job done better.

In this case it seems that linking to the CHP website would likely crash their web servers. Understandable:)

So allowing projects like Nitter and XCancel must also be understandable, in order for recipients to be able to actually read these messages.

100% agreed, auth-walling the broadcasting service which is de-facto used as a public infrastructure by so many parties around the world is just straight an a-hole move, even though it's a private company and they can do whatever they want about it. Who knows maybe at some point in the future they will decide twitter will only be available with a paid subscription.

The local emergency services uses it as a duplicate method because it's mostly more reliable than any service they can afford to offer... and historically a lot of people were using the site, so sharing helps get things noticed.

Paris' subway and local train lines each have a Twitter account, and they are the only reliable source of information regarding outages. Phone apps (at least three official ones with different data sources!) and websites can be outdated. Displays in station too (though less often), have outages of their own, and (rarely) even incorrect updates.

Wow, this is kind of a mess, seems twitter won from usability standpoint here

Except that it doesn't because you need an account to see virtually anything on that N#*i site.

Usability for announcers, I meant. Seems it's easier for them to just post on twitter instead of having to deal with whatever interface their internal systems provide

The funny thing is that one reason that cities, utilities etc. keep posting on Twitter is that it's integrated into their internal systems (or at least to something like Hootsuite that handles multiple social platforms). I'd be very surprised if they're sharing a Twitter password.

Twitter was in a great space for those kind of things. They had a big user base, a simple format and a working API, which was free for those kinds of things. Toolbuilders integrated it. No platform took over as clear successor.

Of course such information should be on the operator's website as primary source ...

Twitter won by pulling the rug!

They changed terms against their captive users and forced policy changes to end open publishing and firehose APIs—which the organization had once championed and enshrined.

It almost seems like we need laws that information about public services have to be available on a public website (as opposed to a third-party website that requires registration).

I personally do not know anyone in real life with a twitter account (although I have one, I have not used it in over 15 years), I wonder how many people just go without this information and are angry that it's (seemingly) not available.

as much as I dislike when people proselytize mastodon, it seems like a very tidy solution to this problem.

As long as the service provider runs an instance in their infrastructure and allows everybody to read.

That said, RSS seems way simpler.

I don't disagree and I'm not a mastodon user but, as far as I know, if you local gov hosted an instance and your state gov did too, you could, essentially, join both and see them together?

RSS aggregation seems like the solution to me but I think we've got to admit defeat on that one because it's been around forever and people don't use it.

Pretty much every podcast in the world and all of their listeners are using RSS. WordPress powers something like 30% of the Web, and most of the operators behind those sites are publishing RSS whether they know it or not.

I thought I was more clear than I was being about rss in the context of the conversation about text based news.

How many people consuming text via rss the same way people consume audio via podcasts?

We're talking about text here. We all know how this sentence ends, "You should start a ..." and it isn't rss feed. Everyone used to have a blog and nobody really cared. Now everyone has a podcast and (more) people do. People don't know what an rss feed is.

> We all know how this sentence ends, "You should start a ..." and it isn't rss feed.

I don't know what this means. I'm guessing the correct answer is supposed to be "podcast"? Even so, weird false dichotomy.

That looking at tweets and listening to podcasts is more popular than reading long-form blog posts via RSS has a lot more to do with people's revealed preference for looking at tweets and listening to podcasts versus reading long-form blogs than it has to do with RSS.

(The actual context was delivery of notices by public services through non-Twitter feeds, anyway. Not blogging.)

> People don't know what an rss feed is.

I don't know why you think this is relevant here. It seems that when you're referring to using "RSS", what you mean is for people to care about RSS—in the way that Gemini, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc. have always been about caring about (and almost exclusively using them to talk about) Gemini, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc. than they ever were actually expected to be used organically and non-self-referentially.

The fact is that people (already/still) use RSS today. It hasn't been defeated. And Twitter could turn into an RSS-based feed reader tomorrow that works basically the same as it works today, and then suddenly everyone would be using RSS but no one would drop out because of it. Because people don't know (read: care) what an RSS feed is.

Yes, you can subscribe from whatever instance you want.

(I'm not a mastodon user either. But I've read the docs.)

You can follow them both from your own mastodon account on a third server.

It's a technically bad solution though, because mastodon is push. The government server has to maintain a list of everyone who's subscribed and make an HTTP request to all of those random domains, and have some timeout and removal policy because sites die all the time. Pull-based, like RSS, is way cleaner.

RSS and IRC need new apps and new means to self host. To do that, there probably has to be new DNS.

We need to stop focusing on the specific protocol when it's not relevant and focus more on the patterns. Wanting RSS, specifically, made sense back when everyone had an RSS reader, the same way it makes sense to have an HTML website today because everyone has a web browser. But since very few people have RSS readers now, there's infinite flexibility in the format you use to provide your feed. The most useful is probably a phone app that vibrates your phone with a notification when your train is delayed. RSS can be provided as an option.

A mastodon account provides an rss feed by default so both solutions coexist without duplicating the work.

> It almost seems like we need laws that information about public services have to be available on a public website

Won't happen in the US/UK because the governments are in Elon's pockets. Won't happen in the EU because they are incapable of getting anything done.

So unless you're in a jurisdiction other than the above three I wouldn't hold your breath about any laws being passed about this.

I think at best you could propose that public information be available without login.

I'm in the UK and tired of basic public services like the railway company posting service updates to X first. I keep a bookmark to the local train company (Northern in my case) on XCancel but while it was down, I was a bit under-informed. The stuff is on their own website, but it seems to appear there after it appears on X, the layout is crap, and there's no way to contact the company other than via X.

A lot of private companies do the same thing - no way to effectively contact them privately, but as soon as you whinge publicly on X they're "on it". Octopus Energy is one of the worst for that.

More or less the same over here in Germany, except with WhatsApp, which is only slightly better than X, but at least you are likely to already have it installed because of all your contacts that refuse to use a more secure messaging app...

At least WhatsApp isn't enshittified yet.

What's their account? I think it would be useful to have a fault-isolated Nitter set up just for such important accounts.

I don't think it's even about being in anyones pocket. They want the publicity. And unless they are all forced to stop using it, everyone has to use it.

Partially true. We can make better front ends just for this information. Imagine traindelays.com or whatever. If it's better than Twitter then people will go there, and then we can get a direct feed from the train company, and then they can abandon Twitter.

> And unless they are all forced to stop using it...

I was talking about the political will to mandate "forcing them to stop using it".

The UK doesn't actually have the economic and political will to put together a national Mastodon or Bluesky instance and mandate that all public agencies use it for their announcements. I'm sure there are three fact-finding committees about it at the moment though.

The problem is that if they did put together those instances the general public wouldn't use them. Most of the public don't want to see a politicians tweets. They share them on Twitter because people will have it put in front of them regardless of desire.

No one cares about a politician's tweets.

The issue being discussed is important notices from Government agencies that affect people's lives immediately, that shouldn't be behind a login wall. Think train service cancellations and such.

There's no way France have no clause in its law everywhere that can be creatively interpreted to be used for that purpose. But that won't get enforced unless there will be a better option than Twitter that average Paris Metro employees understand; they would not be dumb, but they would not care. Average people today can barely grasp the concept of a password.

Surely it shouldn't be to difficult to come up with a sort of plugin-type approach like I've seen in various 'comments' sections on existing websites:

Simply embed the 'update' feed on a page in the existing website and have some kind of admin panel where employees can easily CRUD some updates.

I guess because even this would not be 'free', twitter ends up winning.

Or they already have that, but it's badly designed, bloated, or doesn't have employees assigned to it.

> some kind of admin panel where employees can easily CRUD some updates

In my experience this is usually the crux. That software always rots, and needs whatever (minimal) on-ramping for employees, as well as access management.

If I could wave a wand at those solutions I'd stop fighting the user and let them post to Twitter or wherever, and just have a public facing page pull those posts as updates for consumers outside of whatever walled garden they originate from.

Access management is already a problem - just maybe they haven’t run into it. What happens when the employee who has the twitter password leaves? (This is France so the only way is probably retirement).

A bespoke system with an interface similar to twitter sounds like it’d be a suitable solution. And I bet it can be vibe coded in 5 minutes.

And when it rots, some enterprising employee says: hey, why don't I just make a foobar account and post there? That would work so much better.

X is a public site. Anyone is free to make an account.

I strongly reject that I should be required to create an account in order to read updates about local train service.

You have to give your phone number and are then tracked for what you view.

A more practical consideration for most people, though, is that the app is full of shit. I mean really full of shit. You open the app and it just spews a torrent of shit at your eyeballs until you close it, mixed with the occasional nugget of gold.

Governments should also be worried about sovereignty.

Doesn't their own Île-de-France Mobilités app have reliable information on outages? Surely it's more reliable than their Twitter account?

For me a website is much more accessible than a phone app in many situations.

Ok but can you answer my question about reliability?

I don't have a horse in this race but I would question the idea that a municipal service has a better reliability record than x/twitter.

But who is publishing the outage information to X/Twitter if not the utility itself? I'd be surprised if they do that more timely and reliably on a third-party platform than their own app. That's not the case for any European or US transit authorities I know.

Can any other user of public transport in Paris comment?

The information may be as reliable, but:

1. the service may not be - every small provider has downtime, perhaps proportionally to their size.

2. the tools to update Twitter are well understood, and you can get software that does scheduling of posts across multiple platforms, previews of what posts will look like, etc etc, and said preview works well on the many platforms that people are already using. People doing the updating may prefer to use those tools over what the internal tool gives them.

It's the one I use the most, but in my experience it's lagging behind the Twitter accounts. It's also noisy because it puts last-minute outages at the same level as minor month-long schedule change (which can't be dismissed), so some lines (eg. line R) are almost always displayed as having issues.

Ok thanks for the explanation.

This app is just garbage. Can't even use it if you are rooted.

It's been a while since I've used Twitter, but I thought the tweet ordering was never chronological. Has this changed? You just have to trust that the algorithm will always surface relevant information to the top of the feed?

Irish rail posts about train delays exclusively on Twitter

Good one, and a heavily criticised one it seems;) Shame on Irish rail for doing this!

They don't use Twitter, but my university exclusively uses Facebook for news and relevant announcements like scholarships, days off due to weather, etc. they won't even use their official webpage but for posting the official calendar...

Both FB and WhatsApp have serious lockin with this sort of thing, far more than X does.

WhatsApp is currently not enshittified enough to be a problem, although they do put an entry in my conversation list to talk to their AI.

Last time my city had a water cutoff due to a broken main, the city hall posted on Twitter (and I think Facebook?) where and when to queue for drinking water sooner and much more often than on any other channels, their own website included.

The NYC subway system now writes, on X, "Customer care has moved to the MTA app, chat with us there 24/7. Get service status, arrival times and more all in one place. Visit MTA.info/apps". The web page with similar data is "MTA.info".

There are MTA data feeds, in General Transit Feed Specification format, for program use. Those are for systems that update maps.

The MTA dumped Twitter/X in 2023 because Twitter/X wanted to charge them for using their API, and the MTA refused. [1] The MTA also said that Twitter/X had too much downtime.

When the MTA first got into social media, the person who took the job demanded a desk in the rail control center, so she could see all the displays and immediately hear about problems. If someone mentioned a problem on Twitter, she'd reply immediately. That was the right idea. Few organizations have the guts to put the control room on social media.

[1] https://www.mta.info/press-release/statement-mta-acting-chie...

Any big information fan out is pretty useful for JP twitter. Like yes, we’ll get notifications for flooding / earthquake and etc., but if you want up to date, on the ground videos and etc. it’s pretty useful. Not even talking about the train line scenarios as other commentators mentioned.

There’s a system that is not replicable unless you have majority of the population on the same social media.

I don't know if it is still the case, but when I was writing some Wikipedia articles I discovered the British monarchy seemed to use Twitter exclusively for some purposes.

Regional police and fire here post wildfire updates and accompanying rural road closures on twitter.

Agent First is the name of my startup (https://agentfirst.dev/), which mostly does what you described. :-)

Whats a credit?

In general, a successful web request costs 1 credit: https://doc.agentfirst.dev/endpoints/pricing

>Agent First’s supercluster of real, well-behaved browsers bypasses or solves reCAPTCHA, Cloudflare Turnstile, hCaptcha, & other captchas

Can you share how you prevent spammers from simply using this to do what they usually do, or, if not, how you will stop Cloudflare et al. from marking your browsers as bots and hammering them with captchas? Easy access to the plain web for bots is a pretty tough cat and mouse game and I have been playing it with very short term success at best myself.

The API is default rate-limited, so spamming page requests shouldn’t be possible; not behaving like a bot is the relatively easy part – doing so cost-effectively is harder and what I spend more time optimizing for.

No way API access to current socials, they are all doomed. Bluesky/ATProto developments seems to be the best hope and basis today to rebuild and get back to users what is and always was theirs.

> glad to see the project will continue.

Well ... perhaps without the project people would get fed up with X much faster and move on to something better.

So perhaps these websites only help X to exist.

there is a couple good arguments that alternative front ends open up competition. the first is that since people only see the front end, then augmenting that with additional backends is lower friction. the other is that since network effects are so important (people only go to the busy clubs), that providing a bridge to the existing users and content is kind of mandatory for someone trying to promote an alternative.

If someboy posts something on X...I just assume its a performative act, you dont want to reach an audience and I just ignore. Never creating an account to hear an opinion ....

Aren't most opinions locked behind an account, usually with a pay wall in front? I don't mean new tech, speaking of traditional ones. Politicians or whomever, interview with a journalist locked behind a cable subscription or a newspaper or magasine? Someone sharing their thoughts in their latest book bought at one of 3 places with one of the 2 available transactions companies that link you to the final "content".

I am not on Twitter/X.

Somebody needs to figure out how to move millions of people from one platform to other. Otherwise we will never get better platforms and our current techlords will keep getting richer.

Pay celebrities (and now influencers I guess) like the Twitter early days

This was tried with clubhouse and that kind of failed miserably. I think those days are likely over.

On one hand yeah, but on the other hand clubhouse was pretty cringe

Threads as well

I think adversarial compatibility is the way to go.

Move people over slowly as you add new features the old platform doesn't porvide.

People want to be on platforms where their friends already are. Its a hard problem to solve because how do you get their friends to move onto your platform when they're people too and have the same desire?

Well that's the exact premise of adversarial compatibility. You just scrape the platform their friends are on and cross-post.

There's always the big bad scary word, "decentralization".

But of course, even among HNers, there's amazing cognitive dissonance among "decentralization is hard and takes effort" and "omg, of course the next centralized platform won't be bought by an insecure dictator-wannabe".

I'm not that old, it's played out over and over. I shouldn't even comment here. Decentralization or bust.

I feel your pain, but what about "centralized but under control of a non-profit"? Could Wikipedia/Wikimedia serve as an example of such a model?

Wikipedia has a whole lot of problems, you just don't notice them, because the media isn't interested in shining a spotlight on it like they do with other platforms and the drama that happens there is fairly well hidden, despite being openly accessible for the most part.

People have also been conditioned to mostly trust whatever is on Wikipedia despite years of efforts to hammer it into people that this is not an okay assumption.

It would be better for there to be a bunch of Wikis that are competing with each other evenly. Having only Wikipedia is not a healthy thing.

> It would be better for there to be a bunch of Wikis that are competing with each other evenly. Having only Wikipedia is not a healthy thing.

... I mean, there _are_ (Conservapedia, Ruwiki, Metapedia, etc). It's just that the non-wikipedia generalist ones are so poorly run that no sensible person would ever use them, and usually have a fairly extreme ideological bent (there's a spectrum; Metapedia originally showed up because Conservapedia was insufficiently delusional for some peoples' liking) which requires them to wholesale make shit up (as the old joke goes, reality has a liberal bias). However, if Wikipedia ever goes all evil, I would assume it'll just be forked (there've been a number of prior forks, but except for Ruwiki they've generally died due to lack of interest).

There are, honestly, serious economies of scale here. Unless Wikipedia actually has gone evil, well, no-one actually wants to maintain 66 million articles (No-one, say, wants to maintain 14,000 articles about bridges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Bridges_...). Specialist wikis work, but it'll take something fairly dramatic to break Wikipedia's dominance.

(In an ideal world, I think this _would_ be more decentralised, but it's just very difficult for that to happen in practice. I think much more difficult than social media, which has never really _fully_ centralised in the first place.)

Other Wikis nobody knows or uses aren't really alternatives. Just like Odyssee isn't an alternative to Youtube.

Unfortunately Wikipedia exists within a collective blind spot, so I am not expecting the situation to change. At most people will drop Wikipedia in favor of LLMs, which is even worse.

I really enjoy the "federated platforms are too difficult to use" voices on HN. Quite the hackers these guys!

Not sure about hackers but the lack of search is a killer for anyone normal. Also, threads or rather the lack thereof in Mastodon is not great either.

If no normie can use them, what's the point?

Mass social networks are influencer territory.

You do want the reach —otherwise you'd just make a group on Session with your friends or whatever.

The centralized platforms are a dictatorship of sorts but they make the often insufficient effort to include groups that hate each other.

If a Mastodon instance can become that centralized platform, I'll be the first to sign up.

I would like decentralization (mostly for resilience in case of natural and human made disasters if anything), but for the control I am not sure it is better. Someone has to make a choice of what is shown. Someone has to moderate things. And I am not even sure who is the best to do that - am I capable to decide a good balance between in-bubble and out-of-bubble content; or decide about the difference between hate-speech and free-speech ? Who can I trust to do that? Would a communist/libertarian/etc. be better than an insecure wannabe dictator?

You're not going to get many volunteers to move from a free-speech platform to a censored one. Everyone who wants the censorship is already on BlueSky or Mastodon. Part of sharing a society with people is being okay with their being able to say things you don't like.

There are instances full of actual Nazis on Mastodon - that we can choose to refuse to interact with those instances (yes, I've blocked a nazi instance on my instance) does not prevent them from talking amongst themselves or to people who want to talk to them.

Censorship is not refusing to listen to people we find abusive. People are not entitled to force me to listen.

A federated platform is far more resistant to censorship than X is.

How is it not censorship if you are making the decision for not only yourself, but others, too? It sounds like saying bleeping swear words on TV isn't censorship because you just don't want to hear bad language.

People are choosing to be on instances which block certain things. That's their choice. I want to be able to have a conversation without filling it with racist screaming. Choosing to be in places that don't allow that is my choice.

If I refuse Nazis access to my house and other people chose to visit my house knowing I won't let Nazis in, I'm not censoring Nazis as I have no influence on their freedom of speech - they remain entirely free to speak elsewhere, to people who are willing to listen. I have no power to stop them from speaking, just to offer those who don't want to listen somewhere where they won't have to.

Nobody is forced to join a Mastodon instance that censors Nazis - there are many that don't, or you can run your own.

I never used either Twitter or Mastodon and don't quite understand what people use these platforms for. But I hear folks saying they are there because other people they know are there.

How would it work on Mastodon if you want to communicate with two people that happen to have each others instances blocked? Is it like having to use both Twitter and BlueSky or does it solve the problem more elegantly?

If that matters to you, you pick an instance that rarely blocks, and then you can talk to both of them seamlessly.

Occasionally some people are affected because they've picked a major-ish but somewhat block-happy instance, in which case they can either move their account (the experience for a move on Mastodon isn't great but it does work) or create a second one if it really matters to them.

Usually people will find out pretty early on if they're on an instance whose policies they agree with or not, so even if the account migration is jankier than it should be, it's rarely a major problem (in that instance - if instances shut down it's more problematic)

You’re an absolute helmet if you actually believe what you wrote.

We're talking about the "free-speech platform" that bans words like "cis" and "cisgender"?

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/14/on-elons-whim-x-now-treats...

The platform that randomly banned journalists for using Substack?

https://newrepublic.com/post/179067/twitter-files-matt-taibb...

The same platform that banned left-wing journalists because they were criticizing Musk?

https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-journalists-f...

I don't know, it sounds like there's some very good reasons to move away from a centralized platform where the owner can randomly decide he doesn't like you and ban you.

I don't know what all that's about, but the day-to-day experience is that you can find a wide range of opinions on X and a much narrower range on alternatives. I don't think a lot of people who aren't already on these alternatives are in favor of restricting the range of expressed opinions.

they came with verifiable sources and you come with your own "day-to-day experience", quite myopic

"I don't know what all those sources that describe specific instances of Twitter restricting free speech are about, but my vibes tell me that the other platforms restrict free speech."

I find it hilarious that folks still consider Musk to be pro free speech.

He has shown time and again that the underlying philosophy is “free speech for me, but not for thee”…

…or more specifically “don’t tell me (and people who agree with me) what we can or can’t say”, while actively censoring opposition.

He does this without believing he is abandoning a “free speech absolutist” stance.

Blind hypocrisy? Unrestrained privilege? Both? Something else? Not sure.

This is true. Why would anyone not establishment liberal go to BlueSky? I'm playing with Nostr but these decentralized social media platforms are a no go for 90% of people. Now I'm wondering why we're talking about Twitter or political social media in general in 2026. That's long over with. Move on.

The "free speech" on X made it so that I had to self-censor, though. Any post about wanting cycle infrastructure in my city was met with death threats and abuse from right wing bluecheckmarked lunatics. Is that really what free speech is about?

We have better platforms, most people are just too passive to switch. The masses should stay where they are so as not to invade and pollute the newer and better communities with the same problems that inevitably come with high scale.

I suppose if we could standardize on some kind of federation protocol and have locally-stored (and synced between devices) identities we could use for accounts everywhere, that would solve a lot of problems, but I don't see it happening.

And in the context of twitter-style platforms, federation to me has always seemed like a "which wind would you like to piss into?" situation where you have no idea what servers/people can even see what you're posting, especially when many (even large) servers not only share centralized error-prone block/ban lists but also keep defederating from each other.

What you're describing exists: Its called AT-Protocol and runs Bluesky. See more: https://overreacted.io/open-social/

Having a protocol is not enough. You need also to be in a position to mandate that all the social media company over a certain size adopt it

Yes but on the scale of traditional social media sites' account populations, AT users are currently a rounding error. And sites aren't required to provide federation.

Yes - that is indeed a problem.

The billionaires make using their products quite simple. It was easy to sign up for twitter back when it was still usable. Even before Elon took over, it basically died.

What are incentives for the average person? Their logic seems straightforward: they want to be where their friends are at. And all they want to do there is cycle through their base emotions at a whim's pace.

Whatever politics or technologies that make alternative platforms "better" to some people doesn't matter to most. The idea that new platforms should even have the "millions" (read: the masses) in mind comes across as being antithetical to the trend toward decentralized tech.

> What are incentives for the average person? Their logic seems straightforward: they want to be where their friends are at

This is some sort of absolute, fundamental difference between the early web and now, at least how I experienced it as a teen in the late 90s in Hungary. Back then I made a site, because you wanted to make something of my own, in my style, as I wanted. There was nobody else online from my friends, and I made new friends online. I actually found my age people on ICQ, within the same subculture.

This "oh my friends are there" approach is what destroys everything. More precisely the people who can't decide for themselves.

Then do you think that the average person's disinterest in moving to different platforms is a bad thing? How does this affect the ideal version of the web it seems like you're advocating for?

Those users indeed don't matter. The problem is the cool kids are on Twitter & co as well these days. Because that's where they have the most reach. Almost everyone on social media cares about reach, there isn't much of a point to posting things that no one reads.

The old web was a very different place, it wasn't as centralized and there were significantly fewer people around. There were specific forums that you'd go to for specific topics. Say you were interested in West African dances - there was usually the one forum where all the West African dance nerds hung out. At most a couple of different ones. And they were very small communities. If there were issues with the admins or moderation users could and did do mass walk-outs and create a new place.

That's kind of the same thing though - the people you wanted to interact with were there. They just were a different cohort than what you might find on something like Instagram today.

There wasn't anyone there.

I made a site, I put it out there, because as a 14 year old, it was fantastic I could make completely mine and nobody else's at all. That was the drive.

> Back then I made a site, because you wanted to make something of my own, in my style, as I wanted

You were the minority. Most people don't know or want to make anything of their own, and they don't have style. They just follow others, and whatever others follow, hence the internet (and the world) now.

What would an average person lose if everybody used more open platforms?

What is the average person losing now on closed platforms?

Think about why they should care about your answer and if there's any proof that it bothers them to the degree that they may view your alternative platforms as actual solutions.

All you need is to mandate real-time API access for users... Unfortunately even the EU doesn't seem prepared to do that though.

That’s why I think atproto is cool. It’s the only thing I’m aware of that provides for actually forking a public social network.

atproto is very promising here, being able to separate personal data from social platforms will make it far easier for people to mass migrate to other services. Unfortunately this selling point is more focused towards tech savvy people but with personal data and privacy becoming more of a concern to the average user online, and social platforms which are working towards keeping bots away its possible.

atrpoto is great technology but disappointing communities

most people in bluesky moved to bluesky driven by hate and fear instead of love and curiosity

i notice they talk bad a lot about other people's posts in other platforms

Echo chamber strikes again, because I see none of that, just love for knowledge, history, and science.

Try posting anything even mildly positive about AI on Bluesky and you’ll experience instant hate.

Well that's just what getting out of the AI echo chamber feels like.

Try saying anything positive about AI at the grocery store and you'll have the same experience.

I don't see that at all personally. Maybe 10% of the posts I see are political/drama, and almost none of them are insulting posts from other platforms.

> most people in bluesky moved to bluesky driven by hate and fear instead of love and curiosity

My personal experience has been a lot more balanced. But, I don't want to say that there is no hate and fear on ATProto...

The platform is the people, not the tech.

Likely the most astute observation in all 150+ comments.

The network is the people, the platform is the tech. Which do you need?

If you're engaging in discussions you need the network. If you're reading municipal weather warnings you don't really, it's just a data source that can be copied anywhere.

Probably where twitter is going honestly. Not unlike MySpace pivot to music and Facebook being used exclusively for Messenger

Anyone remember back in the day when every platform had RSS feeds, and you could aggregate your Facebook and Twitter on sites like FriendFeed? “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”

I was so sad when they’re acquired by the FB. It was a great platform

For a while after the acquisition you could syndicate your external blog's RSS feed into your Facebook profile. Didn't take long for that to get the axe.

Google and Facebook fucked up the internet.

The internet we had in the 90's and early 00's was amazing. Everything felt free, indie, hackable, composable, ingestible. You didn't worry about platforms because most platforms exposed their data via friendly APIs (remember when Reddit and Twitter had an API and that they encouraged people to actually use them?)

RSS everywhere, websites with honest to god Bittorrent links. Software you could download and own without a subscription. Forums, Geocities, personal websites, IRC (no Discord ads, server caps, rules against scripting), RPG Maker 2000.

Google and Facebook and Twitter fucked us. The 2010's - 2020's were cellphone incrementalism and walled garden overgrowth.

Hell, even Flash was awesome pre-Adobe. It was buggy, full of zero day vulns, and was inefficient for mobile, but children as young as 8 could build games and animations -- and they were! We got left with a pile of "standards" CSS, Javascript transpilers, competing standards, nodegrunts, and library churn and it was never the same.

Thankfully, I'm starting to feel that AI models are going to let us tear down the walls. We can easily spin up indie experiments again in our spare hours after work and do a lot of neat stuff. It feels like the late 90's / early 00's again.

I think the biggest mistake Google made was developing AI, which seem to be the seeds of big tech's undoing. We can totally overrun them now.

AI = actually a threat to big tech, not a moat. They're going to kill themselves with their own product.

We'll probably build distributed protocols that can finally get the product and UX love that compel people to start using them.

And it feels so awesome to just build things I love - games on the weekend, custom audio players, file organizers, SRS software. I'm loving software again for the first time in a long time. Robotics...

And YouTube encouraged people not to use their real name.

That Google failed to turn Google Reader into a giant open blogging social network and instead created G+ is something we will still be wondering after Google itself has stopped existing.

There are a lot of possible futures for Google. Here are a couple that I see:

1. Google de-ossifies and starts shipping. They have all the AI talent and infra necessary to "own" AI and get people and industry using its models and products. They don't have the same costs that OpenAI and Anthropic do and have a much healthier income stream. They can productively put Gemini in front of more people and embed deep into people's lives. Google leapfrogs Apple, Amazon, Meta, and its other peers because of its incumbent advantages in AI, data, and distribution.

2. Google bleeds out all Google Search ad revenue. People switch away from Chrome to browser agents that have adblock and remove ads. Gemini languishes. Once unassailable Android comes under attack from vibe coded upstarts that no longer require a trillion dollars to compete. Google still sells a lot of enterprise B2B infra (cloud, workspace) and YouTube continues to thrive. Everything else about Google becomes IBM while YouTube becomes Comcast. Still a giant, but a shell of its former self.

I'm sure there are other possible futures as well, but these are the two I see for Google.

I keep oscillating between predictions #1 and #2. Right now I'm feeling #2.

They'll start server side rendering sites onto a canvas. I suspect that's what Stadia will be reborn as.

Good. Images consume even fewer tokens than text.

Institutional misincentives at Google. People are promoted for launching a product, and they're promoted away from the product they launched, and nobody wants to maintain it since you don't get promoted for maintaining a product someone else launched.

I had to 'vouch' this comment. It was [dead]. Why? Who sits here lurking this site flagging every single thing they disagree with?

It was [dead] but not [flagged] [dead], which means it was killed by automatic filter. We can only speculate on what that filter might be.

I've seen several strangely dead comments today, perhaps the automated filter has been updated and has some gremlins?

Probably anti-ban evasion signal (user was previously banned, created a new account, gets shadowbanned on spot)

I agree that shadowbans are an underhanded measure that doesn't belong in a site like HN. I always vouch [dead] comments made in good faith

We stopped having APIs because of Cambridge Analytica.

They were already heavily limited and essentially useless by then, definitely not enough access to sync your profile to another network.

While I remain anxious about the dystopian future AI may ultimately deliver to us, this has been a clear silver lining in my eyes.

I have an old Wyze Scale that restricts advanced features behind a proprietary mega-app, forcing users to swipe past their other services. I've now been able to reverse engineer their Bluetooth protocol which can be used with tools like OpenScale.

In an older world, this would have been a prolonged endeavor for juice that ultimately isn't worth the squeeze. Now it can now takes place in an afternoon.

I really want them both atomised. Not sold for parts. Not reconstituted into smaller monopolies. Not state owned. Just like, delete both businesses and push their physical assets into a dry lakebed and blow them up.

And then remove all copyright law and patents pertaining to software. So the subsequent players are forced to play nice with everyone.

> Google and Facebook fucked up the internet.

I'd say advertising has fucked up the Internet. Everything they (and plenty of others) have done has been to collect and sell personal data to advertising brokers.

Facebook and Google are probably two of the biggest players when it comes to how online advertising has been shaped.

> I'd say advertising has fucked up the Internet

Nothing wrong with honest advertising per se..... back in the day we bought computer magazines mainly for the adverts.

Rather, the problem is the SV AdTech industry which seeks to track me, invade my privacy at every opportunity and is busy sniffing my knickers trying to work out if I'm pregnant so they can sell me more shite.

One observes the FUD those employed by AdTEch are spreading on here about the GDPR; a bunch of people whose very salaries are dependent on abusing our privacy.

The problem was that the Internet allowed for the "innovation" of tracking users to send specific ads to them. And it wasn't made promptly illegal. That's all it took

And advertising eventually fucked up google (the company)

Only through regulations mandating interoperability and enforced at national level. This is social problem, not technological one. So technology won't solve it

We could mandate that any platform beyond a certain (huge) size must provide open interoperability APIs.

Less radically, we can demand that any entity that takes any public money (and of course public entities themselves) avoid communicating solely through closed platforms.

It's insane that the primary public communication channel for e.g. certain UK government institutions and the Norwegian police, was Twitter at one point!

This is the correct approach. If these American companies want to operate in our countries, and maintain their positions as our primary information channels, then they need to obey laws.

We need open APIs, transparent algorithms, and above all, accountability.

This is more or less the approach that the EU is taking with the DMA. As with most EU regulatory projects, it proceeds, ah, _slowly_ (Twitter isn't yet subject to it, for instance, apparently largely because historically it didn't have a high enough market cap, though the new entity where it's been tacked onto a rocket launch company and a racist LLM presumably now qualifies...)

Migration in Mastodon works quite well. You're still confined to the one ActivityPub platform but you can easily move to a new server with a new community and different policies.

In the early days of social media it was a standard that you could get your lists of friends, etc out and then use them to bootstrap your social network on new social media. All the big players like Twitter and Facebook took advantage of that and then locked down their own platforms to make it hard for you to move your social network out of them.

In the early days of the internet it was a standard that people had different accounts on different sites and there wasn't any federation. We're doing it right now - my hacker news account doesn't work on mastodon or on reddit.

Perhaps part of the reason we don't do that any more is that signup is so high friction? It used to be just username, password, confirm password, captcha, submit. But now it's username, password, confirm password, email, phone number, captcha, submit, go to phone, open email app, wait for slow loading, refresh, wait for slow refresh, click email, see long link, click link, "this must be opened on the device you signed up with", back, retype 100 random characters on the computer with perfect accuracy, "email verified", next step, go to phone, open SMS app, wait for slow loading, no new SMS, back to computer, "send code again (wait 60 seconds)", wait 60 seconds, click it, go to phone, finally get a 6-digit code, back to computer, type it in, submit.

Signing up for things is a massive chore now. Because they want so much personal identification data, that they don't actually need for the function because they never send an email or an SMS.

And if you're signing up on the same device you're checking your email and SMS on, it's straight up impossible because every time you switch to the email app, it unloads the browser app and forgets its state so the verification is invalid. You have to keep trying 6-7 times and hope maybe one time you'll do it quick enough that the browser will stay resident in memory.

I actually have at least two phone apps that are social-adjacent that do signup secretly in the background. You just install the app, and it generates a random identifier and uses that as your account ID. Nothing is visible to the user. In the settings is an import/export option for device migration. If you want signups, this is how to get them.

The first step is to actually make a better platform.

The problem with all the decentralized alternatives is that they sacrifice usability for decentralization and then almost nobody cares about decentralization so for most people it's only downsides.

A common pattern I see is to build a competitor to a platform people are outraged at and then completely fumble the step of acquiring the hate site's userbase by gating your new one behind an invite only system for months.

in the current climate the definition of "better" might not be one you like

the "better" that will win will be what's more engaging and addictive

What is Digg or Myspace

Adversarial interoperability works well for this. Facebook did it in its early days — it let you connect your account on then-popular competing social media website (MySpace, probably, I don't remember for sure) and would import your social graph and crosspost on your behalf.

The average person, on either end of political or cultural spectrum, or anywhere on anything for that matter, is fine with wherever they are. Also, the last thing they want is an overtly opinionated and often increasingly hostile population on alternative platforms and apps, sometimes actually moderated by, spearheaded by, benevolent admin overlords. They are less worried about migrating their data, or preserve it, than the hn crowd, criting cron jobs and backup and migration scripts, whenever the need comes. That’s why they won’t migrate, they will just start using the next service and then the next and next. Until then they are not interested and it shows. Serves right for the economic and governance models we as a collective society chose — it applied in everything, there’s no picking. Not that this is how it should be or should not be, but this is how it is.

>Somebody needs to figure out how to move millions of people from one platform to other

it's been solved, ban the platform. This is a collective action problem. Even if every single user on platform X wants to move to platform Y, as long as they can't coordinate the movement individual cost exceeds the benefit they'd all get.

So the most straight forward way is to get rid of the platform , and everyone will move out of necessity.

I think something that could help is moving together rather than one-by-one. We could have a website where you can register as "ready to move from X to Y when N other people are", when the goal is reached everybody gets a notice it's time to move.

"Move," like these platforms are places... I think that were going to have to kick that mental habit before we have social protocols that are not susceptible to walledgardenification. Technology aside, the notion of a way of communicating being a place is fundamentally susceptible to bad behavior on the part of whoever controls that place.

We need social media which are actually media. Speech, dance, watercolor... these are media and nobody has had to abandon them because of a poorly behaving owner.

Twitter, whatever it is, is not a medium, nor is it a place.

Problems that need to be solved - 1. Distribution - corps own the browsers 2. Platforms - corps own these as well 3. Cost - hosting, moderation, etc.

You may very well be building a whole new intraweb

Agreed. Let's get to it.

I once consulted a lawyer when a large company contacted me.

His response was - they've got a team of lawyers on payroll whose job it is to make you run out of money...

It would be unfortunate for xAI, which abused the TOS of OpenAI for distilling via user accounts, to get a ruling that forbids scraping via user accounts.

The entire business model of the AI industry, who resell and launder the scraped data, would collapse.

Nitter just makes it visible to a human and has anti-scraper measures necessitated by the thieves like xAI.

Additionally, a GoFundMe would reach astronomical proportions given how unpopular Musk is.

Latter is probably a factor, because merely being right doesn't mean you won't run out of money while defending yourself from lawyers

While true, parent comment's first point (that the plaintiff would be unwilling to make the winning argument) would have an impact on their ability to spend the defendent to death. Judges do notice when you don't have an actual argument.

Serious comment: I wonder how this dynamic will change when AI has some real legal chops. One could spin up agents that could sift through all the BS discovery docs and correspondence they send to waste time and money. The agents could presumably even file the necessary paperwork on your behalf. Obviously not a lawyer, just food for thought.

AI is good at volume, bad at accuracy and nuance. Of all the tasks to go through with a fine-toothed comb (ie, manually) legal is one.

And yet all the lawyers are dripping in AI. I got a near final doc from one the other day with a bunch of perplexity bullshit in it. How is this real life…

Just as many junior devs are serving slop PRs. Unfortunately, you can only take a horse to water.

Genuine question - isn't legal stuff one of the things AI should in theory be very good at? Legalese is like code, in that every word is very strictly defined and there to do a specific job in the text. I feel like that's one of the things AI would be good at writing and interpreting.

It's far from trivial to set up anything more formalised than a loose taxonomy. People have been trying for a few decades now. AI will help automate this formalisation with graphs etc but it's not good enough yet for you to give a judge 13m LOC of mathlic proving your client isn't guilty.

Unserious comment: The big company will spin up swarms of agents whose job is to overwhelm your AI agents with legal requests / correspondence, still with the goal of making you run out of money (but now via AI spend).

Plot twist they'll be running Claude Bible or GPT-Galaxy with max reasoning on, against my dumb local Qwen-0.8b and they'll run out of money before I do.

Currently their attorneys cost much more than yours. That doesn't appear to be sufficient.

First: it's a joke.

Second: the US justice system is also a joke. I could fight Google in justice and win in my country (France) and in pretty much any other developed country because a working system doesn't let big actor DoS smaller player out of justice. You obviously can't fix a corrupt syatem with technology.

Perhaps Brandolini’s Law might apply here.

> The big company will spin up swarms of agents whose job is to overwhelm your AI agents […]

This may be a plot point in a William Gibson novel.

but clearly there is diminishing returns on spend here right? Assuming that tokens will get cheap enough then once we both spend 10,000$ no one's is getting more advantage because both LLMs exhaust all effective paths hitting high rates of diminishing returns making further attack investments mostly void.

The legal process isn’t a free for all. There’s only so much bullshit they can throw at you before the judge finds them in contempt.

> The agents could presumably even file the necessary paperwork on your behalf.

Someone's name needs to be at the bottom of the paperwork, and those court filing costs would also add up.

It seems like youtube-dl/yt-dlp survived. t

different things: this is an online service, not downloadable software.

Not going to work in EU.

Do we know where the main author(s) of Nitter is based? Jurisdiction matters a whole lot.

Probably the first time I've read a headline of some kind where good news followed something like "Due to legal advice". I hope the best for any service using Nitter, because the split between X and Bluesky is becoming another red vs. blue making life difficult for everyone else.

It's a split between user expirences that do and don't optimize for rage and culture wars and engagement bait. If there's also a de facto red vs. blue split, it's due to which community gravitates to which model of what a social network should be.

Look I wanted to like bsky but the fact is that their userbase has been doing as much rage and culture wars and engagement bait as any other. I mean look at what just happened the other day with the paint.net guy

It seems the paint.net situation was more about anti-AI folks vs a pro AI dev. Not very red or blue coded, nor engagement bait, as far as I can tell. I suppose it is something of a culture war. Albeit without the CEO's thumb on the scales.

Maybe there could be a joining path: an ActivityPub joining ATProto and Nitter/X or something so no need to miss out on anything by being on "the other".

Eh, honestly, "entity gets nasty legal letter, entity stops doing thing, entity resumes doing thing after its own lawyers say, 'yeah, nah'" is a fairly common pattern.

It is sad that Twitter is basically a private closed gate monopoly that people beg to use instead of developing alternatives like RSS

Social media is addictive. RSS is not. Social media is profitable so worth marketing. RSS is not.

It's the ability to reply, I think. Like this one. Makes you feel like you're doing something even though you're just shouting into a black hole where some other people are also shouting and you might even hear each other sometimes.

There was a time when Twitter supported RSS, it lived at @your-username/rss

Then they stopped it, because "eNgaGeMEnT" or w/e

Selfhosting friction has to be close to zero for that to work. And Termux is already way too much.

what is termux ?

Way too much, obviously. It’s an Android app that exposes the underlying Android OS cli, and bolts on a Linux user space. Unsure why it’s relevant to this discussion

Termux lets you run on your phone things you'd normally need a Linux (apple) pc or a vps.

Maybe selfhost on an old phone? Just guessing what the OP meant.

Yeah I keep yelling at Mum “Stop logging onto Twitter and develop and enhance RSS” but lately she’s stopped speaking to me.

macOS mail application used to receive RSS news feeds. It couldn't be simpler for your mom than that. She wouldn't even need to log onto twitter

Reading between the lines it appears that the only argument twitter had is that they could not enforce content moderation due to the archival nature of nitter. Pretty cool to see that archival sites cannot get C&D'd that easily!

Correct me if I am wrong, but I'm pretty sure they could get away with this because nitter is not an archival software, but rather a frontend or alternative twitter proxy.

It's effectively archival since their cache is forever afaik.

When I got my first cease and desist my lawyer basically asked me if this is a hill you are willing to die on (i.e. spend enormous amounts of time and money on). I with them luck. I suspect a Go Fund Me announcement coming soon.

You're thinking of pre-LLM times. Nowadays GPT-6 can probably advise them better than all the worlds law firms combined. And probably win too, considering the incompetence (and tech illiteracy) of human lawyers.

Have citations of case law that doesn't exist been addressed? It seemed like that kind of outcome being punished might make people less likely to try relying on LLM output for legal situations without an expert human performing a review.

You presume opposing counsel isn't using GPT-6 and other, legal-specific models trained on data ChatGPT will never gain access to. Hint: they are.

Regardless of advice quality, legal proceedings aren't free-to-play, and the adversary in question here has bottomless pockets.

Such speculation is just fear mongering and that is exactly what the daft bullies want.

It's not speculation, it's simple fact. Both Lexis and Westlaw already have LLM integration that smokes the frontier models in this regard.

The best legal professionals, just like the best software engineers, have wholly embraced LLM assistance.

"Gee, we bill $700/hr but just can't figure out how to put a prompt into a chat interface." Please.

No they don't, and no they haven't.

LLMs have been making so many mistakes that the big firms have slowed or even paused their LLM spend. And that was before CA passed a law relating legal AI use.

It's kinda-crazy the degree to which legal data--which you need for a fair trial under the law--is locked up by monopolistic brokers.

FFS, we're already at the edge of having to pay to know what the laws even are. [0]

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/pro-codes-act-wolf-she...

What's even crazier is that those brokers typically won't sell to members of the general public; there exists basically no reasonable ability to obtain most case law in most states.

Indeed the Pro Codes Act is still being pushed hard to this day.

Here's an article from this Congress: https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewleahey/2025/06/26/pro-cod...

Imagine having to buy a subscription to the laws you must follow or potentially be imprisoned for violating.

Advice? Maybe ballpark quality if you can avoid hallucinations. The legal connections that will help net you a win, certainly not.

A problem right now is that GPT-6 is just a chatbot, and wouldn't be able to file any counterclaims (which involve human lawyers and billable hours) when fElon decides to wage a battle of attrition in the courtrooms.

Optimistically assuming you can do a lot of stuff well with GPT-6 in the legal space, its still going to be a lot of money - 1. Various court fees may still be thousands 2. You still will likely need to have at least _some_ legal representation. Not as much as before, but still thousands of dollars worth 3. You need to pray that your non-legal brain can catch any issues, both strategic & tactical, that GPT-6 produces because X's lawyers will be happy to pounce.

It would be cheaper to run it like a pirate site.

https://annas-archive.gd for reference.

Anna's Archive has huge data stores behind it, Nitter doesn't and is easy to replicate. You, yes you, can and should set one up right now. They can't get all of us. If you post it to #nitter:matrix.org it might even get included on the public instance lists.

Glad they were able to get legal help and are back. It’s frustrating to me how it’s so hard to access so many websites nowadays without being logged in. Ridiculous that so much of the web nowadays is just a handful of websites almost all of which seem to have so many restrictions.

One of the reasons Twitter became foundational was because it was so accessible and open…

Cool to see such a notable Nim based project continue! It's unfortunate that X tries to block Nitter so often, but zedeus always seems to find a path around technical or now legal issues.

The code looks surprisingly easy to hack on: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/src/nitter.nim

Nitter's author has suggested at least once that due to problems with Nim, a rewrite in Go is in the works:

"The long-term plan is to rewrite the source code in Go, as I'm no longer interested in using Nim. This isn't a small task, but building more features with the current state of things is painful. Before doing that I'll fix some feature parity issues, and work on some conveniences for instance operators. Stay tuned."

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/discussions/1212

Honestly seems like a good move. It also isn't likely to be very difficult with the help of LLMs.

Curious as an outsider: what sorts of problems are there in the Nim world, and why would things improve by switching to Go?

Basically lack of polish. Nim's compiler just keeps evolving around unfinished and unpolished ideas never reaching a momentum.

It's a research project of its BDFL and he is alienating the most senior developers and contributors to Nim's ecosystems (ie Zedeus).

More stable, commonly supported platform I presume. You don't want to be on a snowflake platform for a long running project, it only causes endless problems.

Go has Google behind it. It's a much more established language with far more mature packages and a much bigger ecosystem. If you're using Nim then you're relying on few libraries/tools written by hobbyists who don't have time to ensure they work well, or even more likely you're having to write these yourself.

But the bigger problem is the culture of the Nim community and its leadership. I made a hard decision to stop spending my free time contributing to it a few years ago now and I'm glad I did.

Interesting, well too bad. Personally I find Nim more useful and productive than ever with LLMs.

Nitter uses Jester which seems dead for sure, but doing static binaries is easy. Personally I just forked Mummy to continue as MummyNG since I prefer threaded servers so things like JSON parsing doesn’t cause latency issues.

Though that being written over a year ago it’s either not a high priority or harder than it seems. I’ll be curious to see which. LLMs make it easier than ever for others to contribute or to fix up deps.

Genuinely curious what is keeping you using Nim. Is it just sunk cost fallacy at this point?

LLMs actually make the case for Nim worse IMO. The language is more expressive than Go and more productive for human coders, but in the age of LLMs this doesn’t matter as much.

And yes, I can confirm that Jester is dead. Surprised Nitter is still using it.

So X(.ai) can scrape the entire web, but nobody can scrape X. Makes sense.

Of course. xAI can also run gas generators to power its data centers and pump toxins into the air around local communities. Grok can generate non-consensual nude images of women (and CSAM). Their owner can make nazi salutes and demolish agencies millions depend on. Rules, laws and ethics are for poor people.

And DOGE can get everyone's personal data but nobody can see crash data from his cars or full reports from government agencies about crashes, or where he's flying in his jet, or where he buys and owns properties...

It's getting to the point where his private security are harassing people for walking down the street in their own neighborhood that runs alongside one of his "compounds."

Everyone does what's best for their own interests. We should not sit down and obey Elon's interests - we should support our own by running more Nitters.

> Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue.

The word "project" doesn't make a clear distinction between the repo and the instances. Nitter is on good ground with respect to the repo. The instances will be much harder to defend. From that one sentence it isn't clear if this is what the legal advice says or not.

Nitter changed their design such that it now requires an X account to scrape through. This was to stay functional after X removed guest accounts. This exposes them to a legal attack through the terms of service that must be accepted for the account, and to technical attack by blocking the scraping accounts.

The major instances are coming back online.

Twitter has a history of tracking down leakers by watermarks.

https://theintercept.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-leaks-twitter/

Nitter might want to make sure that their scrapes are bit-identical to other accounts to defeat this.

Threat model a bit different, they can just request xcancel.com/unique-string and check what IP or account requested unique-string IMO

currently working instances: https://codeberg.org/mv12star/shitter/wiki/Instances

Maybe we should define and spec what is an Open Platform, say RSS, Mastodon, grandma cookies recipe in a txt in an Apache, etc. Then paint a beautiful "open platform" logo and start making some collective noises, some pinky flower good-guy psiops. If reply is it alrady exists, it ain't rather working. Currently civil life is being shaped for the algos and the money, that is ok in business terms, we civilians are not coaxed to post or follow Twitter or Facebook as in an Orwellian bad dream. We rather opt-in, yet the politic process is not more illustrated despite all factual discussions at a chat distance of resolution, rational debate is penalized for being boring and much we are offered is as gamified as the Aliexpress user experience. Let's convince ourselves first that the parallel non-profit internet is a grand place to find the full spectrum of human rant in all its glory and gore. Hail the guy in his basement that made and documented a COTS parts scanning tunnel microscope. That is open platform content. Heck, remember webrings? Megacorps are not the problem, it is us being lazy even as spectators.

People don't gravitate to open or closed platforms, or platforms at all. They gravitate to something else. I think it's the ability to reply to a global conversation and feel like you're doing something, like I am right now.

Door 1: try to take down sites offering a lite version that people prefer over x.com.

Door 2: improve x.com to be better than third-party sites.

Which is, Elon?

Door 3: turn off API.

Nitter doesn't use the Application Programming Interface. It uses Adversarial Platform Interoperability, instead.

To be fair, I don't think X could ever satisfy many of the users seeking Nitter services simply by definition.

I never bothered with nitter until elon made the site unusable for people not signed in. If he undid the changes and then sold the company I’d probably a bother to update the url the next time my nitter redirects stopped working.

Making services better isn't the goal of the company, I'm sure they could make it better in a month if they wanted to but they'd lose money (which is what's important).

How much does he even care about the details of X these days?

I suspect the original C&Ds were just their legal team wanting to "do something" upon hearing about Nitter somehow, and not Elon personally commanding them.

...and I noticed that X did bring back a (quite) limited JS-free "lite version" recently, so maybe they are changing for the better.

It'll be very funny if everything associated with Twitter branding would survive and the other one just didn't

Elon abandoned that trademark, it's up for grabs according to the law, even though a court didn't think so.

That means not even the court cares what Elon says anymore.

Not what that means, at least not on a general basis.

Keep in mind that trademarks are registered independently in different jurisdictions, so IP offices and courts are likely to not align in different countries on that point.

Related, Xcancel.com redirector extension for Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xcancelcom-redirect...

Nice!

Is there sth like this but for old reddit

Or use Libredirect, which supports 20+ different sites and free choice of instance.

It seems like it would be a trivial statistical exercise to find all the nitter instance X accounts and just ban them, it's actually embarrassing they got lawyers involved instead of just doing that if they didn't want nitter to function.

x accounts with blank reputation cost $0.01 each on the grey web

So it's legal to systematically clone a website and host it as an alternative service?

Seems quite different from google cache or archive.is, (one is offline), and the othere is too unreliable and full of holes to configure as a real and credible threat.

Keep in mind that those front-ends are, in general, much more friendly towards noscript/basic HTML browsers than the official front-ends broke a few year ago. (well, nitter was at the time)

Don't think the 'whatwg cartel' will let some web not require their web engines.

Expect shadowpaid hackers to ruin their infrastructure. Don't be a fool, expect the worst (more so when the whatwg cartel is involved).

And if you, yeah you! If you are running an "AI scrapper", have the decency to preserve those front-ends (or get the code and run it yourself).

They are more noscript friendly ... except for the mandatory bot check. Sad that this is what the Internet has become.

Real BOTs are more and more using whatwg cartel web engines, namely this has an end. If not all, namely the end was already reached. The ones not using them are more likely to be shadowpaid hackers by the whatwg cartel to ruin anything noscript/basic HTML (or they could be beyond idiotic hackers, unlikely).

Not to mention, many "maths challenges" out there are nothing more than a 'wait loop' in the end. Namely, you could replace them with a HTTP hard refresh timer with human scale wait times in order to get the same pertinent result. Those are actually even worse because they are pleasing the whatwg cartel since those are made to work only in their web engines.

The least they could do is to standardize those 'maths challenges' and make them HTTP header friendly.

Human scale wait timers aren't a big issue for bots. More parallel requests. Or more websites being scraped in parallel, if the website doesn't allow multiple timers going at once.

Whereas number crunching actually ties up some CPU time.

Ofc a timer will be set per connection and has to be only one part of a whole global and probably fine-grained connection policy !

Their only purpose compared to such timer, is, in their current state to create a hard dependency on exactly the web engines of the whatwg cartel and do exclude low end hardware (this does create a barrier of entry for new hardware or small hardware).

At least, they could have had the decency to design some "HTTP" specs to de-couple those maths challenges from those abominations which are the web engines of the whatwg cartel (maybe that's the case).

Yep, I could bet that a lot of BOTs are now based on those abominations (and probably using neural nets). You also have click farms with real humans.

There is so much wrong there... well Big Tech...

I'm running one and bots are trying to abuse it to poll or scrape twitter

Then if those BOTS are using whatwg web engines, what are your options?

Not to mention, they could be click farms with real humans behind, then what can you do?

Anyone else wondering what the "legal advice" is?

> YOLO

I'll be surprised if there was actually any legal advice at all. And if there was it was probably pertaining only to the legality of the software project itself, not actually hosting and running an instance with the explicit goal of facilitating the unauthorized access of Twitter's website.

duplicate of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589003

Sorry, didn‘t see it in the search before I submitted it

Actually i think you submitted a minute or so first.

I should have checked the timestamps, my bad.

How can you check timestamps that precisely?

Hover over the English time. There is a title that has the exact timestamp.

Thanks

Redirector is a great browser extension (Firefox and Chrome) to easily automatically redirect x.com links to one of these alternatives, BTW.

The software project itself is probably fine, but the legal risk is always going to be with the person that hosts it with the intention of facilitating the unauthorized access of Twitter's website. Seems like that could run afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Those people should seek their own legal advice.

The project maintainer, Zedeus, runs the most or second-most popular instance, and I assume his lawyers decided that was okay.

Host the infra in countries unfriendly to the US and its legal framework apparatus. Continually package the archive as torrents for distribution globally.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49567595

X already knows who the maintainer is and could easily go after him.

They will have to prove he’s operating it, and someone else can orchestrate. Anna’s Archive, Z Lib, Archive.today, Tor exit node patterns.

Put a tip jar out, let’s get archiving. “You can just do things.”

Except this is settled case law. LinkedIn tried and lost against scrapers.

I think that this is different because Nitter uses real X accounts for scraping, rather than publicly available data.

Explain to me why that matters at all in an ethical sense. Especially given the scraping / pirating that's gone on by all of these companies in the last number of years.

When have ethics ever mattered in law?

Who cares this is a subthread about legal advice.

That is still a form of publicly available.

That was a case of scraping explicitly public data that was already available to the general public without any extra effort.

Which is exactly what Twitter is?

no twitter requires a login

Which anyone can make

Yeah, I think I will stick with redirectors to working instance anyway, seems like safer option than stick with one specific instance.

https://twit.0r.cx

https://xxcancel.com

Glad you like xxcancel.com (I am the dev!). I just added xcancel.com back to the instances list. Can't wait to also add nitter.net back to it soon.

Do you have any suggestions for xxcancel.com?

Some government bodies and officials post "official" public communications on x/facebook which may not be mirrored or oreserved anywhere else in same format.

There has to be a reasonable way to preserve these comms for public benefit.

Presumably there’s a future where your ai agent posts all your videos / pictures / comments on every platform you have so we get around the idea of X, for example, being the only one to receive posts?

Looking at their crypto addresses, they are sitting on many thousands of dollars that haven't moved in a very long time. What's the point of donating if they aren't going to use the funds?

I wonder if instead of an alternative frontend, coordinated scrappers was investigated as the solution, the benefit being partial access still available when the defense step up.

Let's hope X doesn't pressure GitHub to take the repo down.

It's actually sad to see how deeply do we depend on monopolies.

Thankfully github is but one in an unlimited sea of choice between both hosted and self-hosted git forges all across the world.

Other solutions might not have the exact same functionality, but in this context of mere availability... it really doesn't matter.

Why do people feel the need to go to X so strongly? What am I missing? I don't use nitter or X

Network effects are really powerful.

Same reason at least one person in your company has a windows machine with a copy of excel, even though its a locked in platform which is paid and opaque: its what everyone else uses.

That doesn't really explain why people went there, only why they stay. I remember back in 2006 when Twitter was new and I still couldn't figure out why anyone wanted to use it. So I never did, to this day.

i signed up because everyone was there… therefore i also likely reinforced that feeling in others too.

Because unfortunately people still post things on X that I find relevant, even if I don't use the platform much, and pragmatism wins over pure principles.

Links mostly. To organization or government agencies or whatever official that shares updates only in one place. (Which is bad)

Sometimes it's hard to avoid.

One small service provider I use updates its X/Facebook status much faster than its official status page during outages. There can be a gap of a few hours.

A surprising number of official bodies use it (and only it) for realtime updates. e.g. for a very long time the only way to get the latest updates on the NYC subway was to follow their account on there.

More broadly, it’s a platform where prominent people say noteworthy things. I don’t think it’s surprising people want to read it.

Because important information or information I care about is at times exclusively posted on Twitter, like news from my local municipality. I am not a Twitter/X user, so having Nitter as an option is important to me.

Nitter doesn't let you post to X. It only lets you read when someone else posted something on X and then it hits a place like Hacker News. It's an adversarial interoperability tool.

because sometimes someone links something written there and people want to read it, it's not that complicated

Because the alternative we were promised (bsky) is much, much worse than X, albeit at the other end of the political spectrum.

Wait, so this was all a Streisand Effect shenanigan to increase the reach of "X"?

It looks like graf and his legal team at poast really came through

I feel like setting up the social media is a solved problem. And while getting users is hard, if you hook up to the fediverse, you can piggy back off other Platforms. I think the harder problem is making it profitable

> if you hook up to the fediverse

No this is the hard problem. HN people live in a bubble. Anything else than signup with oauth and then having access to everyone and its too hard and 99% of people will click away.

I think the friction is higher than that. With few exceptions I basically won't use any new service that requires me to create an account. I do all my online shopping on sites that offer guest checkout. Zero chance I'm creating any new social accounts at this point.

Again, this is HN bubble stuff. The vast majority of people do not mind oauth or account.

You using the word oauth means you're in the same bubble. People want signup with Google or Apple or even better, username/password signup or zero signup

Anybody still think Elon Musk is a great guy who wants nothing but the best for humanity?

I mostly wonder how far he'll fall, but to say I'm disappointed would be a gross understatement. What surprises me is that people keep working for him.

Thank goodness! I only use XCancel for tweets

Good for X to be somewhat up again, I guess

Total defeat of Elon "I have too much money" Musk.

Now we need an alternative that works well and is de-centralized from the get go.

isn't nitter decentralized?

> Now we need an alternative that works well and is de-centralized from the get go.

It's called Nostr. I post on it every day.

Who?

Nostr is like a decentralized message queue/key-value store with cryptographic identities. It has been funded by Jack Dorsey. Its most common usages are a decentralized Twitter clone, a tailscale clone without any registration needed called NostrVPN, and diVine, a revival of the classic Vine service. But there's also very interesting stuff like this, a completely decentralized git that uses public relays and cryptographic identities to control ownership.

It's called a website

X.com is far superior to the original Twitter and far better than any other social media sites.

How is it superior when viewing w/o an account is impossible? From my POV this was the moment X/Twitter completely rejected its stated mission of being a town square.

Create a free account, easy.

Why do people feel the need to go to X so strongly? What am I missing? I don't use nitter or X

Because despite the fact that they're both free and cost nothing to use, a lot of government agencies, companies, and press refuse to use or crosspost to Mastodon or Bluesky.

Literally the only cost is setting up an IFTTT workflow or a script, or having an AI agent do it for you, etc.

People will complain, in the same sentence, that bsky/mastodon will dilute their follower count and interactions, and "nobody uses it."

Well it's true, these clones were attempts to cash in on the left wing Elon manufactured hate, nitter and xcancel are similar.

I'm so here for an age where some of this IP protectionism felony anti-circumvention nonsense gets absolutely bulldozed. Please please please.

It's entirely unacceptable, is suicidal corporatism to riff off the bad man, to have humanity's "public" messaging system be off limits to researchers, academics, observers. To trust a network at their word that they and they alone have a right to defend and protect us from propaganda, from malicious & shadow influence. This is not an ok basis that our information driven civilization can rest on.

I look forward to getting out of this trap. https://bsky.app/profile/jauntywunderkind.bsky.social/post/3...

ok, what's the legal advice ?

Now if only we can get a working one for Instagram

What you mean you don't like Zuckerberg's endless log in to see any page ever hyper aggressive popups

This is great news!

Lawsuits and cease and desists should never exist for software. I've just seen 10 more instances go live, you can't just go and sue everyone in the world.

It makes no sense to do this to an OSS community project just trying to provide information for free.

I hope as a society we stop censoring projects by using shallow and evil tactics like this.

helps a lot

I find it hilarious that the world's richest man, who:

- refuses to speak to the press and lies about having a PR department, but still expects the press to cover everything his companies do

- is ignoring environmental regulations wholesale and literally poisoning tens to hundreds of thousands of people with very high NOx emissions, for which there is a great deal of high quality evidence showing causes significant health issues

- knew his giant rocket test would send debris miles, which caused extensive damage to wildlife near the launchpad and substantial private property damage...but he wanted to launch on 4/20

- runs a car company which was caught speeding up the odometers on cars nearing their end of warranty, purposefully either erases logs from its cars involved in crashes or lies to investigators and in court about whether logs exist/are retrievable, and has blamed its customers for car windows randomly shattering, drive units being destroyed by water ingress due to faulty seals (literally telling people they drove in too heavy a rainstorm)...not to mention currently have a significant problem with their suspensions failing, something that is wildly dangerous and just generally does not happen...not to mention being top per vehicle in deaths, fires, crashes...

- felt entitled to get his hands on nearly every kind of personal data the government has

- produces AI tools that have been repeatedly found to have some of the worst safety limitations on deepfake porn, and also sexual imagery involving minors

- set records for the largest number of complaints at numerous federal regulators and at one point his companies combined were under investigation by ~30 different federal regulatory agencies

- literally paid people to vote for his preferred candidate, because....see prior point

...throws such a major wobbly over nearly anyone doing anything he doesn't like "to" him.

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