XCancel service is suspended until further notice
xcancel.com
xcancel.com
I always use xcancel instead of X. I don't have a twitter account and I don't want to sign in. I just occasionally want to read what some people had to say about something. Even this is usually a mistake. It's probably better taken as entertainment.
My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
For Chrome: https://github.com/tsvb/post-peek
For Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dumpster-fire...
For Safari: https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox
This add-on violates Mozilla's add-on policies by collecting user data without disclosure, consent or control and executing remote code
Boy this would be nice! X have obviously decided that using the law to take down people fixing its issues is more profitable than fixing them. I'm really curious though, are they right? (Ignoring ethics etc)
I used to glance at Twitter when it was less hostile, now I don't bother since it tries to force you to sign in before viewing content and I don't have an account. But now my interaction is 0, nothing is going to get me to make an account. If other people are like me, X will just continue to lose users without gaining any. Which the limited available data on use suggest is in fact happening.
It's not like one-way communication is a hard problem. Just post that stuff on a website ffs!
The last time I signed up for an Instagram account (2016) it got immediately flagged as a bot account. I think I was supposed to appeal it to have it reinstanted, but why bother if this is how badly they treat users?
Can you imagine going to work as Instagram's web developer, spending your day finding new ways that the app accidentally works and disabling them?
So instagram.com/foo becomes Imginn.com/foo
Hope this helps!
People say repeatedly Instagram was a 'great acquisition' (it was. It destroyed Facebook's competition. Great for them, not for users). That Zuckerberg bought it when it was 'barely a company'. That it's somehow not antitrust (Zuckerberg in emails: "Instagram can hurt us"). People loved Instagram. Not anymore, not for a long time. Stop giving him the benefit of the doubt
You have to disable all ad-blocking (either extensions or Pi-Hole) in order to make it past that "feature".
as for using it without an account, try https://codeberg.org/irelephant/kittygram
What demoralize them the most is to show whoever pays for it doesn't matter.
The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads, or if it does have ads/tracking, that you are trivially capable of blocking them while still totally enjoying the service/product.
xcancel, archive, whatever are all tools almost solely meant to access monetized content without having to contribute to the monetize part. Then those companies are told they "suck" when they don't like it.
Most importantly, the competitors that the internet endlessly cries for to show up to dethrone these giants, see what is going on and say "lol, nope".
There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still serving ads.
> The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free
Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable.
This vision is ripe for the picking:
Or in the case of X, how about just let me browse without creating an account? Likewise with meta/FB, IG, etc. The reality is businesses and other services post here, share status updates, etc. often before their main pages. I'd like to read those, and yet I have no desire to actually post or interact with any of the content, just read it. I should not need an account for that.
I don't think we always need to broaden this out to industry wide levels. We can talk about things specifically. In this case, X/Twitter has put a login wall in front of posts to boost signups. It never used to. That's a meaningful difference that people seek alternatives to.
that's not a realistic expectation for everything but it's completely realistic for text based short form communication given how affordable it is to run. That's why there's ad and tracking free alternatives to twitter already.
the competitors don't say "lol nope" they'd gladly take the users, it's the latter who stay on twitter like lambs running to the slaughter
There was a time where ads were based on the thing you were looking at, and assumptions around your demographics and intentions. It actually worked though returns were lower. (Which makes sense since the psychological warfare was limited to what advertisers thought they knew about the viewer. )
Now, though, if you want to block tracking you're a freeloader, siphoning off resources that other people pay for. And since targeted ads are so (relatively) effective, there is no discussion of separation.
I feel like way too many people forget that there was a great middle ground for the longest time, in the form of Google AdWords. Text only, no animations, flash, iframes serving malware, or any of the other bullshit that had already taken over banner ad networks like Doubleclick at the time. I recall at the time one of the early adblock plugins even had the ability to allowlist AdWords while still blocking the shitware providers with the intent of encouraging the use of "good" ad networks instead of the bad ones.
It's a perfectly sustainable business model, it just requires people who actually care about not being annoying more than they care about maximizing profits, and at some point Google lost those people.
That's pretty much the general problem with our society as a whole, when given the choice between "profitable and sustainable" or "profitable and high quality" versus "more profitable now but will cause problems in a few years" the incentives of capitalism are all in favor of getting all the profits now and getting out before the consequences catch up.
>The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads
Roger.
I guess you had to be there, either that or have above-average powers of observation, but That's. The. Foundation. Of. The. Internet.
And that's how "doesn't suck" has always been defined, except for people who are just trying to make shit up that is quite a bit removed from reality. Now I've accepted ads when I feel like it although lots of times I prefer none, regardless commercial websites have always been less worthwhile than non-commercial, it's not like there's any question. This was settled way before the 1990s were over.
I know perfection can not be achieved and I settle for less as much as anybody, plus "absolutely doesn't suck" may not be reached either but it is not a movable goalpost, more like a brick wall where the closer you get the better. If you are willing and able you might be able to do an outstanding job. Otherwise you're going to end up some distance away on the spectrum of "sucks more than it should."
You were always already paying plenty to your ISP, and last time I checked you still are.
Anything less has always been less than the whole internet you were paying for.
The math is not that hard :\
Facebook? Same.
Xitter? Same.
Youtube? Enshittified beyond measure.
Google? Unusable.
So tell me. Where are these great amazing services supported by ads?
recently with videos I can't change playback speed. so I have to use xCancel.
before I just used to use Tweetdeck. but that went away or went pro.
Make companies give up power? Never going to happen.
That assumes the company's behavior is rooted in ineptitude rather than malice, which is too generous at this point.
A company can make their produce suck, on purpose (out of malice), because it fits their bottom line better (at least, in the short term) vs. a better UX.
OP may simply be asking companies to put their customers ahead of their (short-term) profit.
Reddit is another great example of this, where users have been looking for workarounds to their (increasingly more) hostile login wall since they started pressuring people to use their app years ago.
EDIT in which I clumsily express my weariness at hearing some of the smartest people in the world claim they “didn’t know” because they have arbitrated foolishness against liability
Sometimes the objectives align, but not always. And yes, the world would be a better place if they were better aligned, but we don't live in that world.
I'm sure X's motivation is something along the lines of forcing logins creates more users, or the downside of scraping outweighs the benefits.
What an idealistic nonsense. Companies do anything not for people, but for money. We are not living in a socialist utopia (fortunately!).
Shops, cinemas, B2B consultancies etc generally make money by selling something people want.
(I do get that tech VC doesn't work under this principle and it's not simpld to just change a sectors funding model, but it is worth pointing out that making money does not normally equal making a bad product)
If you dont want to follow the constraints of service XYZ, you dont have to consume its content.
The market would dictate that if X content consumers found it too inconvenient to consume from X and that would result in a significant drop in demand, the X content producers would stop producing their content on X.
I dont like many things about X -- random ads, bookmark folders being a paid feature, enshittification of the algorithm if you god forbid linger over some controversial video or content.
But i keep coming back to it because its the best way to follow the minds of brilliant techies. The basic sign up flow that i did years ago was basically a no-op.
I suspect that for most people, creating an account is basically a few button clicks (thanks OAuth) and they dont mind creating an account.
I am 100% okay with this. I don't want what Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook offer, so I no longer have an account these platforms. But I do have an account with my local electric utility. It's my only option. And if I want to find information about an outage, it's posted on their Facebook page. I'm 0% okay with this.
Do A,B,C agree with the changes to loginwall their content ex-post-facto?
That's the issue though, it's not Twitter's "content" and I'm not trying to "consume" it. I want to be able to read and see what others including public official and primary sources for ongoing events have to say. That they are on twitter is coincidental and generally only because Twitter has captured the "public square". That doesn't make what's posted on there theirs anymore than the postal service owns the letters you send.
Most people do not use X.
X usage is down year over year.
The smartest people I know don't post there anymore.
Not all customers are as particular as I am, therefore a shitty product continues to thrive, and I can go do other things.
I don't particularly like Bluesky, but it's publicly readable and has RSS. Any real solution would be protocol or standard instead of yet another closed service, though. For now, I see Nitter and XCancel as a temporary fix until people abandon it for whatever practical, economic, or political reason(s) they may have.
Open RSS wrote about exactly this a couple weeks ago [1]. Bluesky being publicly readable with RSS is an improvement. But government offices should be publishing on their own RSS feeds, and the platforms should be secondary, not the other way around. The amount of policy that gets announced on social media without even a mention on their own website is bizarre. Why isn't posting their content off platform legally required at this point?
[1] https://openrss.org/blog/government-updates-belong-in-an-ope...
It makes me so mad. The Paris public transportation company (RATP) owns not one but two whole apps. Yet, whenever there's an incident they immediately reach for X (on which I can't access their posts), while their apps lag behind.
As far as I'm concerned, my government should issue a blanket ban on public actors using social medias for communication.
That is your opinion and you are entitled to it, just remember other people have their own and they are entitled to theirs, and no one opinion is 'right'.
If your logic is that some citizens won't be able to read what is posted there, then I assume you similarly object to other social media platforms, newspapers, cable TV stations, etc.
https://github.com/gavinhungry/nitter-bitter
You can self-host it anywhere, and use the aforementioned Redirector [1] extension:
^https://(?:twitter|x)\.com/(.*)
https://nitter.example.tld/$1
UPDATE: Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.
Edit: I see I'm being downvoted for just providing facts, so here's some evidence: you can see on the main project page that the repo was archived on 11 Sep[0]. Looking in the commits, the "UPDATE" message was commited on 6 Sep[1].
[0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
[1] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/commit/1428b4c2b4246f92a7e5...
It's impossible to know what this "legal advice" was, but the software project itself is probably fine. 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.
Why do you say it’s permanent? Unarchiving a GitHub repository is reversible, and just as easy as archiving it.
Also, while we're on the subject, I used to have two factor enabled. After Elon bought the site, they forced me to disable two factor for insane reasons, iirc you needed to pay for a blue checkmark if you wanted two factor. Today for the first time they've started blocking my access to even view the site until I authenticate with a qr code from an android or ios device. The future of the internet is bleak.
This destroys my trust not just in X, but in social media. If bots are this big of a problem, then I guess I can't use them if there is a risk out of nowhere my account is hit. The network effect is real though.
They probably don't want their echo chamber leaking to the wider internet, because external discussion of the content would reveal it for the siloed thought bubble that it is.
Consider X now requires personal information to sign up, and after handing that info over, signups are often still rejected with no explanation given. Yet another tell they're very interested in maintaining that echo chamber.
Speaking only for myself, well, no. If Elon doesn't want non-users to be able to read tweets then that's simply one section of the internet I'm swearing off. I'll get my news from actual news sites and I have plenty of hot takes on my own to last me this life and the next.
One can only assume Bluesky would go the same way were it to gain significant market share. One can even imagine a particular Mastodon instance going that way, were it to be popular enough and run by profit-minded people.
That is directly the result of the evil pull of advertising. "Logged in" users are more valuable than "non-logged in" users to advertisers (because logged in ones are identified) and so what you are seeing as "nagging" is Shitter (formerly X, formerly Twitter) desperately trying to increase its ad revenue at your expense. You are watching enshittification right before your eyes.
It is all about capturing the platform to change the conversation around 2024 US presidential election cycle and US politics.
It’s effectively become a political propaganda machine owned by billionaires
It's like paywalls. Some news companies share free news as a sort of loss leader. Others say, "if you aren't going to pay we simply don't want you here."
- bluesky - mastodon
Why does anybody (that’s not some right wing, white Christian nationalist nut job) still use twitter?
*if you log in to an account
A big reason many people use Nitter instances is that X has become very locked down for unauthenticated users.
He speaks out both sides of his mouth.
If it's public, people can link to it and promote the site. If it's not, then either info there doesn't get free publicity or people just screenshot the tweets instead.
Unfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings, we are required to suspend this service again until further notice. We can't share more details.
You can find the content you were looking for on the original website:
Continue to X
Thank you for your understanding. And the trust you have put into the XCancel project.
“Does the other side need to show any good faith?”
“No, in fact the judge is more likely to side either then the more angry and aggressive they are”
“….great”
There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.
This comment also applies to facebook too, which I think is even worse than twitter.
RSS.
On a practical level, I’m also wondering what consistent legal standard people want when it comes to things like terms of service and individuals' copyright. It's unworkable to maintain one rule for the awesome people we might like and and another rule for the horrible despots we might not like.
Of course that's a real issue since the whole thing is login gated and inaccessible. But unfortunately it is the reality. So I think something like XCancel is needed.
1. Pretend it isn't there. 2. Flag it and pretend it isn't there. 3. Flag it and read the content somewhere else in case it's relevant.
Of course the right thing is to lobby those organizations to switch. But that won't help with the immediate situation.
And regarding copyright, the same company owns an LLM that was no doubt trained through mass copyright infringement. Maybe the legal double standard is on their end?
I was fine with occasionally wading into the shit pile for something I want. It’s fine, the door is open and I don’t live there. Get in get out.
But now they want me have a shit address and shit suit and a shitmail. They want me to say hey its me mr shit can you let me in so can I have some of that delicious shit?
Instead I think I’ll just put on a hazmat suit and steal the few pieces I want from their shit pile and get out.
Boycotting them is pointless. Holding to your principals does nothing but hinder your own usage of the internet and does not help bring about the end of X or whoever else. The 0.5% of X users using xcancel disappearing overnight would have no impact.
These monoliths of Internet consolidation are not worth our consideration. Steal their content, block their ads, get on with your life.
A nice UI around such API probably can be one-shotted with modern LLM-coding models and tools.
Or, you can go the hard way and vibecode something around buying twitter accounts (just several bucks per each) and proxies.
What I'm trying to say, that with modern tools it is incredibly easy to bypass the restrictions on reading twitter without an account, even if they manage to take down all the nitter instances, try to make finding nitter source code harder etc.
Set up a mastodon account that mirrors your (or someone elses) X account.
This way people who want can continue using X, and other people can read & refer to their posts without needing to log into X.
regardless, no matter how hard elon turns the screws on their customers, people will continue to use twitter/X because "that's where everyone is" and places like HN will continue to allow these links because "that's where the news is" despite healthier alternatives like the Mastodon network and Bluesky existing.
whatever. i've redirected x to 0.0.0.0 when the first warning shot was fired and called it a day. rocks are looking like a great place to live under right about now anyway.
I suspect Nitter's first round with lawyers pointed out that scraping is legal, but now they have been threatened with something else than scraping - Elon claims something else the way Nitter runs is illegal, such as the use of fake accounts to circumvent an access control device (DMCA 1201).
Perhaps that is it in fact. The act of protecting it from scraping means you object. 99% of the blogged contents etc. Big AI helped themselves to was just… there. Public. Not free from copyright but still not paywalled.
if you started doing the same to, say, instagram content both meta and individual creators would sue you as well.
sites like archive.ph are in a similar bucket btw, and yet nobody's complaining (except websites seeing people evading their paywall). but at the end of the day it's not really fair to apply laws differentially on the basis of whose political ideas we like more.
Edit: not a moral stance
I ditched xcancel for redirectors like https://twit.0r.cx/
or
It feels like an end of an era.
But at least reddit still has lots of nitter-style mirrors as an alternative.
Bluesky is here anyway.
Hell, you’re arguably on a Twitter alternative right now.
Apparently XCancel is an instance of Nitter. According to Wikipedia, "Nitter is designed to allow access to X without tracking, advertisements, or the need for an account. It only supports browsing, and cannot be used to sign in or interact with the X community."
For example, rumors about latest AI developments are available there, but not here on HN.
X also works well for media, which on HN you can only see after navigating to an external website.
Many comment sections are rough, but usually not worth visiting apart from the top comments anyway.
I don't like that Ads are hard to distinguish from regular posts.
I believe the main reason for not using X is a political boycott. Many disagree politically, or don't entertain certain delusions about Musk that are popular with progressives.
xcancel was amazing and I hope they can continue in some way. But since I have no actual need to go to the X site, I choose to completely ignore it, regardless of who posts what there. Most important things will be in the news anyway or you just pick it up from talking to other people.
If every person wants to leave the platform but X person stays because Y person is there, and Y person stays because Z person is there, and Z person stays because X person is there then it's a feedback loop. Each person wants a better solution or platform, but none end up leaving because of the network effect.
Breaking that dependency involves the individual user but can't be overcome by the individual alone. Over time, the network re-asserts itself and monopolizes the connections.
All the news you want is available elsewhere and often with far less toxic commentary attached.
One of the biggest issues I see is that governments still use X as a primary form of communication with the public. We need to push back on this with lawsuits.
There is absolutely no reason I should have to agree to a private company's TOS to receive communications from the government. It is a violation of my rights that refusal to agree to the X TOS would cut me off from public information.
It's fine if they post to X, but we need to demand laws that the government isn't allowed to have special private clubs where the general public isn't allowed without giving up some amount of their speech rights.
multiple times now I've signed up with a fake name/handle/email/etc..., sometimes from a VPN, and within 10 minutes a friend usually tells me they see me as a recommendation to follow (they can tell, by the handle).
Insta delete, every time.
To ignore the X site completely would mean to ignore the xcancel site aswell otherwise the 'politicians and public services/institutions' will stay aware that even people who don't use x/twitter still read whatever quips they come up with through xcancel, thus mission accomplished. Same for the seemingly increase of twitter/x toilet epiphany threads that somehow count as worthy enough of the first couple pages of HN.
Maybe they have legit reasons for all that, but it's not my problem. It's not worthwhile to me to view stuff on there anymore.
I've been doing that for years. Since just prior to Elon's purchase of it. Nothing of value in my life has been lost.
This is clearly illegal as all comms need to be posted in different accessible places as well as the federal register - but that never stopped anybody in this administration from a bit of grifting to drive users to their own platform.
I’m bummed about this service being taken down. I will now just not be able to see updates from folks in the AI field that choose to post there and I’ll rely on aggregators instead.
We got to get rid of this extremist-esque narrative. X is more unbiased than it has ever been, and Community Notes work better than any other platform's nearest attempts.
Mastodon and others tried to do this but they keep spending all this energy on decentralization which is not the problem to solve. The problem is just to be Twitter but (a) not shit, (b) trustworthy, and (c) prosocial. People want to move, just give them somewhere to go and demonstrate more empathy for them than twitter does (not hard).
Implementing this should not be too hard in the AI era and considering that a lot of people would probably donate engineering effort to a Twitter replacement. Paying for it is of course annoying, especially at scale but maybe that's solvable (ideally with a donation model / raising money from people who want to see it exist instead of taking outside investment, or at least limiting the influence of investors so you don't end up making Twitter again). Running it should be easy, just "try to do a good job" (I volunteer, but I don't even use Twitter so I'd probably not be a good candidate). Getting sued for patent violations or something might be a real problem, but maybe it's circumventable, I dunno.
It often feels like every knew large-scale project is corrupted by the Silicon valley funding model (yes I know I'm on a site that has a lot to d with that), so everyone has lost any trust that a new thing will ever be benevolent... but seriously it is not that hard to start a website, that's what Twitter and Reddit and all them did back in the day. The problem is aligning the site to people's morals enough that everybody hypes you up for free. Which ... I think things have gotten so bad now that one could get a lot of free labor if you even start moving in this direction and seem like a serious contender. Although all the VCs are trying to cash in, all the other 'normal' people really just want to live in a safe and happy world where institutions operate prosocially instead of the opposite, and they'll often do whatever they can to manifest that... if somebody just makes it easy to do.
x requiring an account to even read content from gov officials has to be a massive insane deal breaker for anything gov official.
i hate x, not because of elon but because it is still just twitter where the format breeds the most disgusting human interactions possible. Everyone is performative in every interaction which leads to a net negative. Instragram and meta cannot even claim such a divisive crown although they win on other fronts.
No, bluesky is just yet another twitter with the same fundamental problem because the format is the issue not the politics. At least on bs i can generally read without logging in tho so it wins for me.
RSS is not a read-write medium. You can't realistically carry on a semi-realtime conversation over RSS.
It is a bad product, and it is pathological in the way all degraded social media platforms are bad.
But it's also worse than those others, in well documented ways; and it's long past time anyone with integrity found alternatives.
The failure of the "AI" industry to do so is an indictment and serious red flag.
I wouldn't even mind seeing advertisements.
I just don't want to have an X account.
Isn't this the exact use case it was built for, preservation of news data in a way that it cannot be tampered with and so that it is kept accessible for everyone forever?
Insta requiring login Facebook requiring login
Bad:
X requiring login
The Open Web
Bad:
Insta requiring login Facebook requiring login Xitter requiring login
I wish legal issues wouldn’t exist for this project and X would stop attacking projects that provide information for free.
Privacy is important more than ever as many of us don't want to login into X.
It's been discussed before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49571634 ("Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns")
Consider running your own to spread out the HN/Slashdot effect.
I guess we're seeing Musk-defending-freedom-of-speech in action.
> Continue to X
This was hard to swallow for me! Why you are redirecting to X, which is the exact opposite of what you are offering?! Don't get me wrong, I use XCancel and Nitter regularly an I like them, it just hits hard!
The consistent view is one regarding IP in general - not reverse engineering your morals based on the case.
But more directly addressing your point, I do think you could easily find a consistent moral stance that thinks taking tweets to train AI is worse than republishing those same tweets on a website. An argument can be made that the person writing those tweets wants to be heard, so republishing the tweet is in line with (your best guess of) what they want. Whereas consumption of the tweet for AI training is less likely to be consistent with the wants of the original author.
Nitter instances by contrast are specific software intended to view information on a specific proprietary social media website in ways the owners of that website don't want them to. It's a question for lawyers if X declaring this to be a type of copyright violation will hold up in court, but X is also actively trying to block Nitter instances from accessing the site at all, which is a technological rather than legal mechanism.
every local, state and federal entity
nothing published there can be read logged out or archived
has to be violating law if not best practices
But it is simultaneously the best place to get real time information and after reddit the best place to find human/bot generated content so I do still need access to the data.
Trusting Zuck to fill the gap with Threads is a moron's endeavour and Mastadon is too fragmented we need a centralized good actor to fix this.
Just use the site, people
Now it'll be "Just don't use the site and encourage anyone else to stay away"
Cost me $500 (to a good charity, oh well) and guess what, I was fucking right. I have subby-tendancies but some of you put me to shame. Me personally? I don't like the taste of rubber.
lol, go try to just even sign up for a new X account and let me know how that goes. god damn sycophancy.
yes, he can enforce whatever ToS he wants .
The browser extension "Libredirect" will transparently redirect you to a working one or one of your choice.
I understand that he is a vile POS, but I don't understand people supporting him and using his products.
Despicable behavior.
I seem to be able to post/access pro-Palestinian content there easily, no other platform lets me do that.
It has also been great for my project and find the right community from scratch.
Lulz
Cory Doctorow argues that the antidote to walled platforms is to restore the legal and technical right to adversarial interoperability. Users and developers should have the legal freedom to reverse-engineer APIs, build scrapers, create cross-platform bridges, and deploy third-party readers without facing lawsuits under anti-hacking statutes like the CFAA or DMCA Section 1201.
Either you cancel X. Meaning: NOT consuming X content.
Or you just visit X.com.
Right? Right?
A bit like your comment.
It's possible that other people you want to read, are using a platform you don't want to use. Have this perhaps never happened to you, even once?
They all secretly want to use X because it’s very convenient to consume news and other form of content. But they refuse to make an account because of their pettiness. So they rather use third party websites.
Making an X account would take 2 minutes. But they rather just write a hate comment on HN every opportunity they can.
Xcancel allows HN users and adjacent to swear that they have left Twitter because it has nothing to offer them because its all shit, but still consume Twitter content because every other similar platform really sucks and is boring and has no content
X is the public square. The algorithm is superior to any other social media site out there right now. They are right to charge for the API and right to shut down impostor sites.
What did they say around 2020? If you don't like it - BUILD YOUR OWN.
> They are right to charge for the API
I might just leave that there...
And yes I've on occasion had the same thought with TikTok - it'd be nice to see the vids that people send me, without making an account. But I'll just have to live my life without having seen that one super funny/interesting/enlightening video, or have to ask for a summary :)
I'd like to see the fire department's tweet without having to sign up for X on the spot right now and do a 20 round captcha, followed by a prompt to install the app to verify my age, because suspicious activity was detected.
Of course - ideally - nobody would use this platform for anything important, but given that they do, I'd like open access to it.
The content itself isn't the problem, it's the website.
Other people keep linking me to X posts they want to share.
The website is so bad that it (was) faster to manually change the URL even on my phone than to let the browser try to load the original.
Now I ask people to share screenshots of the posts instead of sending links.
I often run into businesses or events that only publish information on facebook. There was also a time (not sure how prevalent this still is) that people organized parties solely through facebook. I wish them well.
Although overall I agree that we basically dug a very deep and nasty hole for ourselves. xcancel or nitter not working anymore is quite irrelevant imho.
You look very odd and silly if you still want to engage with it and just use a different UI layer (i.e., "XCancel", "Nitter".)
If they want you to have an account to read the post and you want to read the post, create an account, log in, and move on. If you don't want to do that, nobody is forcing you to view a public website. There's alternatives like "Bluesky" out there that might be good for you.
Why? The site still hosts plenty of content worth seeing. Is it really so silly to do it via a better UI, or to not want an account?