I know it’s hard for some people (for understandable reasons), but at some point we have to ignore the X site completely and make politicians and public services/institutions aware that some people do not have or want access to the site. That is the only way anything might change someday. Maybe I’m just being naive here, but what else can you do?<p>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.
about once a year I try signing up for X after friends tell me I really should be on there for news in certain niches.<p>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).<p>Insta delete, every time.
I don't understand who all these people are who keep saying 'but I need twitter for my local politicians.' Like really? I have not followed any local politicians or authorities twitter and I still get relevant information. Believe it or not, which you might not if all you do is parrot these comments and I have seen this very comment line of thinking parroted for YEARS about twitter, most people do not follow the city hall twitter if they even have a twitter, and they get by fine. I mean people are citing they need to follow their utility. Are you kidding me? Your utility will post a highly localized service outage that might only affect 1 block of a city or less to their world facing twitter feed? And not simply alert customers via their phone on file as they've done for me forever?
> Your utility will post a highly localized service outage that might only affect 1 block of a city or less to their world facing twitter feed? And not simply alert customers via their phone on file as they've done for me forever?<p>It doesn't match your very contrived example specifically, but yes essential services in my major metropolitan area provide more useful and timely information via twitter/X than other sources. People don't or can't register for updates from the city or county, so government organizations have no means of publishing information for public consumption other than social media, and twitter was the de facto standard.<p>Also, many local schools, clubs, etc. used it as their "official" source for updates for years.<p>You are definitely out of the loop if you can't access it, and places are glacially slow to change.
Is it possible to help or encourage our local municipal services to have either an RSS or BlueSky feed? At this point, it's becoming apparent that putting all the information eggs in the twitter basket is/was a bad idea. This is a place where open source standards should shine.
All my local groups are on facebook. It's horrendous. Could do with a browser plugin which only shows posts I want to see, it might even be good enough to send me back to facebook
> at some point we have to ignore the X site completely<p>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 would be totally doable except for a couple of recent changes during the DOGE take-over where federal agencies mandated communication on X as their primary means.<p>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.<p>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.
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Regardless of the legality of the service:<p>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.<p>My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
> My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.<p>That assumes the company's behavior is rooted in ineptitude rather than malice, which is too generous at this point.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49695912">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49695912</a>
I'm not sure what Twitter's specific reasons are, but AFAIK the general trend of login-walling services over the past few years has happened due to a court decision saying that it's legal to scrape publicly available data ( <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn</a> ). If they gate content behind a login wall and put a clause in the EULA forbidding scraping, this lets them use the CFAA to go after anybody who still scrapes the site.
It's ineptitude. Of course it is. Otherwise it would be indefensible.
These browser extensions still work:<p>For Chrome: <a href="https://github.com/tsvb/post-peek" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tsvb/post-peek</a><p>For Firefox: <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dumpster-fire/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dumpster-fire...</a><p>For Safari: <a href="https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox" rel="nofollow">https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox</a>
Twitter itself doesn't even suck too much for me it's the broader context that makes it a no go
I hate when companies do this. Instagram is a black box for me. Whenever someone sends me a link the web app is completely nonfunctional; clicking links just reload the page, it constantly tries opening the app, etc<p>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?<p>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?
The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".<p>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.<p>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.<p>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".
> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".<p>There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still serving ads.<p>> The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free<p>Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable.<p>This vision is ripe for the picking:<p><a href="https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/" rel="nofollow">https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/</a>
>Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable.<p>What rubs me the wrong way about statements like this, is that it is almost always said by people who totally miss that they are advocating for things that are personally profitable for them.<p>A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user. That same end user, who detests the idea of having to spend money, then complains loudly that corporations just want their money. <i>And it is completely lost on them they are playing the exact same game as corporations</i>.<p>The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all. But that overwhelming is not what we see. Instead it is just two entities fighting over money, because they both have the same root motivation to maximize money.
How does one not engage with the corporate product at all?<p>Im typing a comment on a website of a corporation whose goal is to grow companies into corporations, via a computer manufactured by a corporation on a keyboard produced by a corporation, staring at a screen produced by a corporation, while connecting to an internet service offered by a corporation. Never mind that im also employed by a corporation, dressed by a corporation, drive a car manufactured by a corporation that takes fuel from a corporate gas station that is extracted and proccessed by a corporation.<p>What is the alternative exactly
On some level there is local/small businesses. They are less efficient and hence you usually have to pay more for less, but it avoids the a lot of the "power structure" that people have strong distaste for.<p>On a deeper level there is none. Overwhelmingly peoples complaint is that they need to do something to get something, which is just how life is, a shared annoyance that is just a fact of reality.
Advocating for demonetization of a service is not the same as trying to maximize personal profits. Maybe not everything in the world is about money.
No, it's about value.<p>Money is just a convenient abstraction of time and energy. Basically everyone, all the time, is focused on min-maxing their time and energy (optimally is another question, hah). These are both fundamentally scarce things and likewise have intrinsic value to everyone.<p>If you spend time reading an article or watching a YouTube video, it defacto has value to you, and the creator of it spent both time and energy making it. And just like that, there is a market.
Well, to be fair, time is more valuable than money. You can't make more time.
profitable? whats the revenue and whats the expense? give an example of real money somebody makes by seeing a bad meme on twitter through xcancel
I can't write out here how economics works, how things have value, and how humans barter time and energy using abstractions like money.<p>By virtue of people spending time on twitter, twitter has value. If that sentence is non-sensical to you, then now is not the time to for it.
You neglect to consider that these social media websites were giant bait & switches - they were open-access to trick people into going there and making them popular, and only when they got enough network-effect lock-in, did they turn hostile. Morally equivalent to fraud.
I’m personally upset that the modern day companies have decided only extracting profit matters and not building a better product that makes people willing to pay.<p>At least in the digital world almost every piece of software and website I use has been getting objectively worse the past few years. And I don’t mean like, I hate this UI layout so it’s objectively worse. I mean like new Reddit freezing my tab completely ~50% of the time and its notifications page not registering my clicks and instead clicking on the page behind it. Or like Microsoft breaking pasting in fucking Excel and managing to ship that to consumers as another article today showed. Or the fact that activities in Windows that used to be lightning fast like searching or opening an application now take seconds to 10s of seconds.<p>We’ve reached a point where companies are too entrenched in their monopolies and are currently in a mode of just figuring out how to extract as much rent as possible.<p>The only companies I know of still in heavy competition are AI companies but they are doing the tried and true method of heavily subsidizing their business until they kill their competition and I have no doubt that whoever wins will switch over to rent extraction as well.
Read the story of vid.me, YouTube's only ever credible competitor.<p>There is also nebula and curiosity stream, which also illustrate my point. Both solid good services with <1% conversion rates.<p>There is no better service than YouTube while using an ad-blocker, and no amount of "awesome new platform" can break that. Most people's response to "YouTube sucks" is to ad-block on YouTube, not go to a competitor(and pay/view ads). It totally breaks the market and ultimately makes things shitty. That debt must be repaid somewhere.
> A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user.<p>login wall != paywall<p>As for your apples:oranges comparison about maximizing money, which group do you suppose has an unfair advantage these days?<p><i>Modern Capitalism Is Weirder Than You Think: It also no longer works as advertised</i><p><a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-have-upended-how-modern-capitalism-works.html" rel="nofollow">https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h...</a><p>(<a href="https://archive.is/wSmtd" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/wSmtd</a>)
All the evidence in the world that corporations are greedy doesn't detract from the fact the end users are also greedy.<p>It's all greed, all the ways down.<p>I also can't read the article, not going to make an account, and I stand by not backdooring.
What's wrong with that? Capitalism is about <i>everyone</i> being as greedy as possible. If you aren't greedy while your adversary is greedy, you give up everything you have.
The wrong part is fooling yourself that you are above those principles while actively devoting all your energy too them.<p>And I'm not talking food, water, medicine here. I'm talking entertainment and general internet stuff.
If you aren't being maximally greedy in all things, including entertainment and general internet stuff, you aren't doing capitalism right.<p>The current global power imbalance was shaped to a large part by us not being greedy while the rich people were being greedy. It only resulted in them owning all of our stuff. It's probably time we tried to own stuff too.
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Convenient that your "principles" disallow you from seeing critique of said principles.
> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".<p>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.
Then the correct action is to either create a competitor, or point money/ad views at a competitor.<p>But like I said, the internet is largely unwilling to do this. You won't make a competitor that is a charity, and the internet at large won't point dollars and ad-views at a nascent start-up in the space.
None of that has to do with blocking the content behind a login wall. X can still serve ads just fine to non-logged in users. I'm against the site running ads, at all, I'm against mandatory account creation. The internet ran ad supported without mandatory accounts for years.
You can rest assured, 100%, that account walls are also there for money.<p>I'd be tickled if you argue that corporations create friction for any other reason than money.
The login wall provides one more avenue for profit: selling the data of logged-in users. A profile with a history of likes, read-times, etc is more valuable then a pair of eyeballs that are glazed-over and not clicking on an ad...
True, and Britain ruled the waves with wooden warships for a long time. But if they went back to wooden warships they would not rule the waves. The world has changed. Adblock, archive.is, third party mirrors all exist today.
the issue is consistently network effects.<p>large social media companies arent there because theyre good or that there are no competitors, its that switching cost is high.<p>you should be pointing at the government to enforce interoperability standards such that logins and so on are not locked to one place.
> But like I said, the internet is largely unwilling to do this<p>Sorry, what? The internet is unwilling to create twitter clones?<p>Bluesky, mastodon, pleroma, misskey, diaspora, threads, fucking truth social… there is no shortage of twitter alternatives.
None of which has more the 1-2% of twitters MAU.<p>If any of those were highly profitable, they would be able to grow. But more profit for them, means less profit for users, means they are stuck fighting over crumbs from Twitter.
You've moved the goalpost.<p>The internet is happy to create alternatives. Network effects mean it's VERY hard to change the default social network once it's established.<p>I hate using facebook marketplace, but over the past 6-ish years everybody in my city has moved off craigslist to marketplace - so now I use marketplace because otherwise I can't sell my shit. Am I the problem?<p>- also, an aside, but threads has 400 mil monthly active users, or at least facebook says that. so ~70% of twitter's audience. But threads is even more locked down than twitter, so not really a win.
>Am I the problem?<p>Is the person who stays home and doesn't vote the problem?<p>Network effects are strong, but trends can absolutely upend them with disruptions. This is much harder nowadays, because for each user who refuses ads or a subscription, your VC runway needs to be that much longer, or your megacorp parent (meta) needs to sustain you.<p>My core point is that if the internet hates the current status quo, <i>they</i> need to drop their current status quo (free/no ads or bust). We're stuck in a local minimum because people absolutely refuse to even consider the idea of paying (in any form) to move out of it, <i>and they pat themselves on the back for it</i>.
> The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads<p>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.
> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Your comment seems to implicitly assume that X has some ethical claim to the content they're monetizing, when in fact they're trying to monetize _others'_ content.
You want to read what service XYZ offers, but you dont want to do it within the constraints of service XYZ.<p>If you dont want to follow the constraints of service XYZ, you dont have to consume its content.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I suspect that for most people, creating an account is basically a few button clicks (thanks OAuth) and they dont mind creating an account.
Twitter promised an open publishing platform with extensive API access. They're the ones who broke the (social) contract, not us.
Last time I tried creating a Twitter account, I couldn't even complete the sign-up flow before getting automatically banned pending giving them my phone number. After that, I went to like and follow things. My account was then banned again for suspicious activity.
> I suspect that for most people<p>Most people do not use X.<p>X usage is down year over year.<p>The smartest people I know don't post there anymore.
They want to consume XYZ, written by A,B,C and posted on twitter.<p>Do A,B,C agree with the changes to loginwall their content ex-post-facto?
Thanks Elon, now we know that scraping is illegal! Very good to clarify that for future proceedings against the AI thieves.
Everything is both legal and illegal until a lawsuit happens. Then it collapses depending a little bit on the facts and mostly on who has the better lawyers.<p>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).
At the end of the day, as an individual or a team or a company, regardless of the statue and case law, you have to perform the calculus on your monetary and legal resources versus your counterparty.<p>Obviously ungrounded and frivolous cases tend to be easier to defend asymmetrically, but if I was X's legal team, there's no shortage of semi-plauisble claims I could throw at the wall and see what sticks.<p>As an example of this imbalance in action, BrightData is a 'gray area' company that basically does this exact kind of scraping. They have somehow won against Meta Platforms suing them, and even got X's lawsuit against them for scraping -- identical (?) activity to XCancel -- dismissed.<p>According to Wikipedia:<p>> In May 2024, a federal judge dismissed the suit, ruling that Bright Data did not violate X's terms of service or copyright by scraping publicly accessible data.[24] The judge emphasized that such scraping practices are generally legal and that restricting them could lead to information monopolies<p>But does XCancel have the resources of a company like Bright Data, that's funded and used by companies like Deloitte and Moodys?
If the name Bright Data is ringing a bell to anyone, it’s probably because they are a (the?) primary offender running the LG TV “residential proxy” (botnet)
Which, btw, was the least bad thing about those TVs. I support residential proxying as a means to liberate public data that's being held captive by people like Elon.
And the company's previous name was, ominously... Luminati.
Notice it says "terms of service or copyright". If X's lawyers have any intelligence, they'll have a reason why XCancel is not identical to Bright Data. Perhaps this time, instead of claiming it's a copyright violation, they'll claim it's wire fraud because multiple accounts are used.
I wonder if anti-SLAPP laws could be used to shield nitter: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation#Anti-SLAPP_laws_at_state_level" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...</a>
Scraping is legal, but IIRC scraping authenticated contents is not.<p>Isn't Nitter abusing account sign-in for this?
Anyone can make an account, though, and instantly access that content, so Elon doesn't really have any leg to stand on by claiming they're private. It's not the same as Cambridge Analytica scraping stuff you had to have certain privileges to see by tricking the system into granting those privileges.
Elon unfortunately may have a leg to stand on, because it doesn't functionally matter whether "anyone can make an account and see it". I don't believe any legal ruling to date has been fine with that distinction.
But if they ban the nitter operator surely you can't just bypass that ban legally by making a new X account. That there are bans and the operator has to bypass bans by pretending to be a new person I think that this makes it different.<p>It's like a club that checks ids to ban people. I wouldn't call that club open to the general public.
Yes, that's what they went on to point out.
To fix this:<p>1) Nitter offers a deal: download our browser extension, sign up for Twitter, and we'll give you some kind of perk (Amazon credits, whatever).<p>2) Browser extension surfs Twitter on the user's behalf, scraping and sending copies to Nitter.<p>3) We find out how serious the legal system is about prosecuting scraping.
Aurora Store does the same thing to facilitate downloading Play Store apps.
I like this framing, like Schrödinger's cat.
Thin skins over at there at X
I wonder what legal gymnastics are needed for "I can scrape anything off the web ignoring copyright and build a product from this, but you can’t even <i>display</i> what’s on my webpage elsewhere”.<p>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.
Precedent is pretty clear: competitive uses bad, transformative uses good. Xcancel scrapes and then competes directly with X, whereas LLM labs scrape the internet to make an agentic intelligent bot, a transformative use of the scraped content.
> Xcancel scrapes and then competes directly with X, whereas LLM labs scrape the internet to make an agentic intelligent bot, a transformative use of the scraped content.<p>It seems unreasonable to stop there though; the agentic bots are designed and marketed as able to compete with the initially-scraped sources.<p>I'm not convinced that a competitive use at one remove should be treated as not competitive.
I think LLMs providers pretty directly compete with content they scrape like Wikipedia and SO...
Remember the golden rule of the golden rules:<p>Who has the gold makes the rules.
No kidding. I dunno what kind of traffic loss Wikipedia has had but SO is really dead these days<p>If they weren't competing with AI then why is AI killing it?
> weren't competing with AI then why is AI killing it?<p>But it is not the AI who is killing it, users are doing it.
There's a difference between creating a market for something better, so that nobody wants the old thing, and competing _in_ the market for the old thing by copying it directly.
If LLMs only made SO redundant by writing code and solving my technical problems autonomously so I never have to think about it, I would agree. But often I do ask LLMs technical questions, and they answer in great detail. And that part is a very direct SO competitor
If two things are competing, they are in the same market by definition.
And what would be a read-only version of X like XCancel compete against, exactly? Ads impressions? That would be the only possible thing yet they don't add any ads.
It's depriving X of impressions that they could monetise, no? Xcancel doesn't have to make money itself, it just has to impair the rights of the copyright holder. Otherwise piracy would also be legal as long as it were non-profit...
> Otherwise piracy would also be legal as long as it were non-profit...<p>Which is in a few jurisdictions, or at least is not prosecuted if it's for personal use.
Also, according to your definition, the creator of uBlock Origin or any other adblock system should be sued in the same way, because they are depriving $ADS_CORP of their precious impressions.
I don't really buy this.<p>It's like saying "toaster oven/air fryer combos" don't actually compete with toaster ovens or air fryers because they are creating a market for something better<p>Of course they complete.<p>Toaster ovens compete with toasters. Microwaves compete with toaster ovens.<p>Just because it's not the exact same product doesn't mean it's not competing<p>Would I be allowed to steal LG's designs for a microwave and make a "superwave" that does laundry and heats food? Would you claim those products don't compete because the superwave is "something better"?
> Precedent is pretty clear:<p>What cases are you citing when you say this?
Bartz v Anthropic. Though the plaintiffs did get something, it was because of the piracy to the original works (competing against the legal market for the books), not the use of them to train the LLM.
Perhaps <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros._Entertainment_Inc._v._WTV_Systems,_Inc" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros._Entertainment_Inc...</a>.
but xcancel is not putting ads or making a commercial product
How clear is it when I google a recipe and get an AI-generated recipe that's clearly derived from the top three results and then placed above those results? That sounds like it's both transformative (in that the recipe created by the AI may not match any one of the scraped recipes perfectly) and also competitive (in that the AI takes page views away from the pages it got the recipes from)
<i>Transformation</i>.<p>Taking something someone else made and showing it as-is, bypassing their own restrictions: No no.<p>Taking something someone else made, modify it or use parts of it in some bigger thing or completely change it: Fine, if you have money and/or run a company
except a bunch of paywalled stuff did end up in training corpora
Pretty sure it's legal when you do it for your own use (same as browsing a website) but it's illegal to redistribute web scraped results.
Now I want to know, what happens if you redistribute an "AI summary" of the copyright material?
Thats "Billionaire Use" -- its like a "Fair Use" exemption but for billionaires.
scraping content is mostly legal, redistributing content is not.<p>if you started doing the same to, say, instagram content both meta and individual creators would sue you as well.<p>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.
It’s the rehosting of the content not the scraping<p>Edit: not a moral stance
I love how the content belongs to them when someone else reposts it but it belongs to the user if the content is illegal. Such a double standard with these social media and AI companies. Why do we put up with it?
> Why do we put up with it?<p>You let it happen. Once people stop letting it happen, it'll stop. But social media is apparently the new "opium of the masses" so here we are and no one <i>wants</i> to do anything.
Did the users of X consent to XCancel copying their posts to their servers?
Everyone who goes to twitter copies the posts to their computers.
i just screenshotted this comment without your consent
I think users implicitly consent to their public data being public data when they put it in public together with other public data.<p>How I view that public data they decided to make public data, is none of their business.
How do you know data is copied to their servers?<p>> If you serve as a mere conduit for automatic transmission of user communications, there are no other qualifications or obligations you need to meet. If you serve a caching function, in addition to the two requirements above, you must maintain comply with the notice-and-takedown process.<p><a href="https://www.copyright.gov/512/" rel="nofollow">https://www.copyright.gov/512/</a><p><a href="https://internetcases.com/2024/02/12/dmca-subpoena-to-mere-conduit-isp-was-improper/" rel="nofollow">https://internetcases.com/2024/02/12/dmca-subpoena-to-mere-c...</a>
Why can't they distill twitter when AI companies distill everything including twitter? Distilling is copying and redistributing.
Are they distilling?<p>Distilling isn’t copying and redistributing, for the same reason that you reading a story and then writing your own story based on ideas you learned is different from you reading a book, writing all the words down verbatim, and then publishing it as your own.
Because LLM's output is not copyrightable?
No it’s not
That is what all LLMs could do in 2023, verbatim, before they trained it out of them in order to keep up the pretense that there is no plagiarism. Now they all obfuscate the original or refuse to cite.
There's a button on X that allows me to repost someone else's content.
Grok can do that if you give it an HN thread or other websites.
<a href="https://xxcancel.com" rel="nofollow">https://xxcancel.com</a> is up and redirecting to working Nitter instances.
I have been suspended from Ex-Twitter for months for "inauthentic behavior" despite only ever just using the site normally.
I would very much like to have nothing to do with this site anymore, but unfortunately many people and organizations from before Elon took it over still post there and I can't make them all move to another site (and the same site for that matter), so here we are.
Of more concern, the Nitter github repository was permanently archived a couple of days ago.<p><a href="https://github.com/zedeus/nitter" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zedeus/nitter</a>
On that same page:<p><i>UPDATE: Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.</i>
> Following legal advice<p>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.<p>Those people should seek their own legal advice.
> Computer Fraud and Abuse Act<p>Meanwhile it's OK for OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta to hack companies all willy-nilly. Mad world!
In cases like these, companies often try to go after the upstream project, not just operators. The law gives them lots of tools for this: the CFAA has a conspiracy provision; The DMCA has a provision against making software for circumventing copyright; Trademark law might make the name nitter or xcancel illegal; and finally even if the claims are weak the litigation itself is an enormous burden
I imagine it will be hosted in jurisdictions other than the US.
The repo being archived happened after that UPDATE post that you mention. So the project has gone from suspended, to un-suspended, and now it's suspended again (and the repo got archived this time).<p>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].<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/zedeus/nitter" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zedeus/nitter</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/commit/1428b4c2b4246f92a7e5b2673438e5fb39fcc4a3" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/commit/1428b4c2b4246f92a7e5...</a>
Zedeus said "it's hopefully temporary, but it'll remain that way until further notice." in the matrix room
> permanently archived<p>Why do you say it’s permanent? Unarchiving a GitHub repository is reversible, and just as easy as archiving it.
Development still continues by others: <a href="https://codeberg.org/mv12star/shitter" rel="nofollow">https://codeberg.org/mv12star/shitter</a>
This may be a situation where revealing a solution may end up harming it. For those who use iOS and other Apple OSes, I learned of this recently released free Safari extension called Litterbox that allows looking at one post on x.com.<p>[1]: <a href="https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox" rel="nofollow">https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox</a>
With alternatives available:<p>- bluesky
- mastodon<p>Why does anybody (that’s not some right wing, white Christian nationalist nut job) still use twitter?
People really need to just not visit it. You don’t need to browse Twitter to be on top of current events. Anything posted there will be available elsewhere within minutes (and hopefully it will have been vetted somewhat)
Unfortunately not a luxury for all events.<p>Some organizations only post information on Twitter, especially those with limited resources. And if their followers are themselves limited in number, then that information is not disseminated.<p>For example, the Dutch Air Force is currently posting updates on their ongoing airborne exercise exclusively on Twitter: <a href="https://www.defensie.nl/onderwerpen/f/falcon-leap" rel="nofollow">https://www.defensie.nl/onderwerpen/f/falcon-leap</a>
Do you need updates about the Dutch Air Force's ongoing airborne exercise or can you just ignore that exercise? If they <i>weren't</i> posting it on Twitter but were only performing it for a live audience, would you clamor to be part of that audience? Or are you only interested because of the fact it's on Twitter?
Who uses twitter for current events? I’m there for extremely niche hobby related posts.
Yeah as long as the audience is there, people will keep posting on Twitter.
I mean, you clearly don't use Twitter if you think that's how it's used.
Maybe instead of trying to get rid of services that provide a more convenient access to X to non-logged-in users, they should realize that there is a real market behind these services - users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content without the incessant nagging and limitations that X subjects non-logged-in users to?
> users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content<p>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.<p>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.
> signups are often still rejected with no explanation given<p>That's pretty odd. When I google this, there are claims that this is to prevent spam accounts. Obviously, if you choose not to take them at their word, one can read all sorts of odd reasons into it.
HN and Reddit are much more of an echo chamber than X is.
That’s not a market. You are not exchanging anything of value. It’s a public service. One might as well lament that Ferrari doesn’t offer cars to the millions of people who would gladly take one for free.
Reddit says hello
Didn't Reddit ban open access to their APIs and kill third party viewers/apps as well by charging outrageous amounts for continued API access?
And Reddit has also started blocking signed out users in my region.
Excuse my pedantry but "market" implies a possible audience/demographic to _sell_ to. If a user can't be arsed to sign up for Twitter (an action that costs nothing, AFAIK), what makes you think they will pay for read-only access to tweets?<p>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.
Do they not understand you can still serve ads to non-logged-in users? They can still be tracked nearly as effectively with fingerprinting.
> without the incessant nagging and limitations that X subjects non-logged-in users to<p>That is <i>directly</i> 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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification</a>
As if the new owners of twitter give a shit about its sustainability.<p>It is all about capturing the platform to change the conversation around 2024 US presidential election cycle and US politics.<p>It’s effectively become a political propaganda machine owned by billionaires
They clearly realize it and are doing something to stop it. I understand the idea of imagining this as an underserved market they could do something about. Twitter worked that way. X intentionally doesn't want to, and wants to guard its monopoly over the information is controls.<p>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."
I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X at this point when it doesn't serve the public interest or the interest of customers who deserve at least some choice. It's as unreasonable for them as using Instagram or a dating app for something intended for broad reach and accessibility.<p>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.
The reason is simple: they were using Twitter when it was publicly readable and had RSS, and they have no selfish reason to stop. (Selfless reasons don't count, everybody is selfish)
> I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X at this point<p>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?<p>[1] <a href="https://openrss.org/blog/government-updates-belong-in-an-open-feed" rel="nofollow">https://openrss.org/blog/government-updates-belong-in-an-ope...</a>
You go where your people are. I think it’s very reasonable to post updates on Facebook and X.
I extend this to people. I understand old habits and what not, but I'm surprised at the culture on social media. Twitter is literally orthodox white supremacy or however they brand it. Quite odd, but not considering current politics. We've decided to devolve.
> I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X<p>It makes me so mad. The Paris public transportation company (RATP) owns not one but <i>two</i> 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.<p>As far as I'm concerned, my government should issue a blanket ban on public actors using social medias for communication.
If you don’t like X, I don’t understand why anyone would use a service like XCancel, which effectively helps maintain the cultural relevance of X.<p>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.
It's because X is chosen (wrongfully) as the main communications channel of all kinds of important public institutions and people (police departments, city administrations, politicians, etc.).<p>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.
I have no clue what my local government or any such authority could possibly tweet that would be relevant to me. I have not checked their twitter feeds ever and I am none the worse for wear.
Well, I stopped using Shitter first. Then I stopped using xCancel as a conduit for Shitter. Never happier.<p>IF those public institutions want to to connect with all their constituents, then move to a better platform. Not the other way around.
Maybe if people didn't make services like XCancel, the impracticality of X would be more salient.
For me, it's just the easiest fix whenever somebody shares a tweet with me, and it fails to load, or shows me some forced login popup. I just click between x and .com in my URL bar, write "cancel", and it suddenly just works.
Get the Libredirect extension and this will happen automatically (to a server that is actually working).
I used to be you. Now I just dismiss the tweet.<p>Shitter is now irrelevant for me. If you want my engagement or attention or response or to keep up with you, move to a better platform.<p>I used to care enough to keep up with Shitter on xcancel. Now it's just faded into irrelevance. YMMV, particularly over time<p>Shitter isn't the gospel of human experience and creativity and expression. It's just ... Shitter.
It's a standard coordination problem: I don't like X, but some discussion happens there (e.g. plenty of competent mathematicians responding to the Navier-Stokes situation) and I cannot force people to move elsewhere.
Suppose you're on HN and someone posts a link to X. Is the correct reaction<p>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.
You can knowledge it's there, and just not read it. There's lots of links on the internet that I don't click.<p>I'm sure there are people who genuinely need to receive information that's only on that site, but personally I'm enjoying the feeling of the joy of missing out.
at the very least whoever posts the link has presumably accessed it, so we should normalise pasting the full text in here
4. Click the link<p>5. Accept that you won't click on the link
I wish HN would simply ban links to X.
If you think that's remotely viable, you'll be very surprised what most of the YC partners believe and post about on X.
HN is a venture capital fund. That will happen if and only if it becomes profitable to do so.
I don't have an X account, and I only use xcancel when someone sends me a link. The reason it's impossible to completely avoid both of them, at least in my corner of the world is that a lot of public organisms seem to think publishing information online exclusively on Twitter is okay, and if you complain they tend to ignore you (I admit I haven't tried complaining about it on Twitter, which seems to be the only thing that works these days).
Not every org is going to run their own site. I have a similar frustration with companies that post on Facebook or Instagram. I deleted my Facebook account years ago.<p>If they post on Reddit, it gets lost in the sea.
I've stopped using xcancel even for that. If anything is important enough, it will reach me via other channels. Particularly from any contact who give af ... if they don't it's not important.
I want to read stuff from twitter not because I like the twitter culture but because sometimes something happens and the only place you can learn about it is twitter. Like it or not Twitter is still the most relevant platform for tech related information.
Today, for me, the reason was because I wanted to pull up a years-old tweet that had a video of a local road flooding.
Yeah i don't get it, using xcancel is like "that'll show ya" in a weak manner. You are seeing the same tweet.
I never liked Twitter and I don't like X as a medium but they were and still are used by others as a communication channel. To partake of what is communicated without having to sign up and/or subject myself to the barrage of nonsense spewed through X I use a self-hosted Nitter instance. This way I get to follow those X links without needing a (real, active) account. For passive X users Nitter offers a far better - lighter, faster - experience than X itself. This makes Nitter (which is what Xcancel - a misnomer since it doesn't cancel X - is based on) especially useful for those who only use X because others used it to distribute information.
There are places like government agencies, public transit org aisations, and similar organisations, which still use it as adhoc quick notification channel. If I want to see if a train route ist interrupted it's the best source. However using it once in a while (not via app or such) has long loading times and nagging screens for sign in, cookie compliance and so on, which makes the whole thing an annoyance ...<p>Of course the right thing is to lobby those organizations to switch. But that won't help with the immediate situation.
Exactly. If you boycott X, shouldn't you also boycott the people who are on X? But this kind of slacktivism has always been more virtue signaling than anything.
I don’t want to crate account there because I’ll get into endless useless discussions. And you can’t use this website without an account.
It seems intellectually dishonest to blanket-label any principled stance that you disagree with as "virtue signaling".
Not really, unfortunately. If it were just a bunch of bros laughing at fascist memes amongst themselves I would happily boycott everything, but unfortunately a lot of "public" service announcements and discourse also happens on 卐itter. Things like utility companies' and emergency services announcements, city council decisions, public transport notices, official statements by MEPs/local politicians/companies, etc. Not to mention a certain demented orange geriatric who happens to control nukes and posts his daily threats and declarations of war there.<p>These are all things I want to stay informed on, and given the choice would rather read elsewhere. Often I get the same information from secondary sources and manage to avoid that, but even then on controversial things I prefer to check the source directly.
Why should we let one far right billionaire control how we interact with a large portion of the online space? Why shouldn't we try to exfiltrate the data from him instead of just letting him hoard it?<p>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?
> Why should we let one far right billionaire control how we interact<p>We don't. We let six or seven far right billionares do that.<p>> And regarding copyright<p>Copyright of tweets are owned by original authors. Unless you have permission, the copyright infringement which occurs is against the individual, not X.
I don’t use Twitter but assholes continue to reference posts on this cancerous site. That’s why this service exists lil bro
> You can find the content you were looking for on the original website<p>*if you log in to an account<p>A big reason many people use Nitter instances is that X has become very locked down for unauthenticated users.
Web version of Twitter has become unusable now. So much so that I wonder why they still keep it.
For years Twitter stood out among major platforms for having an actually-usable mobile web interface that seemed to be a first-class citizen / wasn’t intentionally degraded to force you into the app, and didn’t even nag you about it. Unsurprising they’ve since ruined it.
The whole point of butchered websites is to direct people to install their more invasive app. It's not like all companies just got bad at making websites somehow. There are conflicting incentives.
So that you can be linked to it and told to make an account.
The reasons it's unusable are precisely the reasons they don't want you using anything else. Direct control over your eyeballs. They decide where the ads go on the page, they decide what comes next in your feed, they track everywhere you look or move the mouse. Anything that circumvents this is a business risk to them.
So media outlets, influencers, etc have something to link to, and a way to promote Twitter by including tweets in their articles.<p>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.
I don't know why but to me the worse bit of it is the giant emoji finger that keeps trying to click the sign up button.
They fired that guy years ago, so no one knows how to decom it without breaking everything
Is it? I've only ever used X on my phone through Brave. But always logged in, though.
What other versions of twitter there are? I use it on both pc and mobile in browser with adblock and the experience is the same as 20 years ago. If anything the "for you" feed has become actually usable in last couple of years.
So they can try to nag you into signing up and installing the app? Which doesn't work in 99.9% of cases, but try telling that to your boss if his name is Elon Musk...
Sadly, the success rate is significantly better than 0.1%. as a broad strategy, it clearly works. I wish it didn't, but there is a reason why all these companies do it.
Free speech absolutist, btw.
What does proxying someone else's content have to do with free speech?
Can someone please explain to me any actual guidelines-based reason for the parent comment to have been flagged and killed (I vouched for it)?
You have to admit, the “free speech” shield-wielding megalomaniac working so hard to keep people from freely accessing info isn’t exactly great optics.
Optics and logic are two different things. The optics seem to be working out well for him, for some reason.
Sure but my point is the Twitter experience is trash and not required like, say, paying an evil ISP or interacting with Google (for 99.9% of people abandoning and fully dodging Google is incredibly difficult). It’s working out for him because people won’t leave (even though engagement and user numbers are still below pre-acquisition numbers). It only has value because of his acquiring it with his other company. Prior its value was tanked. It’s a crap site that isn’t profitable and serves as a mouthpiece for his politics and whims.<p>You can all walk away. You don’t need it.
I'm very much on the side of xcancel and nitter on this one, but I do think it's fair to point out that Twitter is free of monetary charge. It's not free in the sense that you do have to provide some personal information and data to them in exchange for that free account, but it isn't a huge roadblock for most people, however annoying it may be.<p>Now that said, I sure hope Elon will pivot this and make these services unnecessary. I'm not holding my breath though.
The biggest frustration for a lot of people is that their municipalities use Twitter almost exclusively to communicate with their constituents, it _sucks_. I've pleaded and begged my city and county to have some other form of communication, in addition to Twitter/X, to mass distribute information.
right, it's not free, like you said
The phrase "free speech" does not typically mean "free as in beer," rather it means "free as in freedom," so in this case you're conflating the two meanings of "free" in English.<p>The fact that Twitter is login-gated makes it objectively less free as in freedom.
Elon Musk, gratis speech absolutist.
Twitter is heavily login-gated, to the point that I can't see Twitter threads at all unless I have an account. I do not wish to make an account. Services like Nitter/XCancel allow me to read those threads, making that speech more free.
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I would argue that when he is talking about "free speech" he is always referring to the more general, non-US-Constitutional meaning of the phrase; i.e. the freedom to say what you want without being censored. So when a discussion about free speech on Twitter comes up, I assume that's the kind of free speech we're discussing. To bring in the the more narrow, first amendment meaning of the term is just a distraction or diversion.
"Nothing can shut down open source" - Elon Musk, LITERALLY TODAY: <a href="https://nitter.click/elonmusk/status/2099026767357120523" rel="nofollow">https://nitter.click/elonmusk/status/2099026767357120523</a><p>He speaks out both sides of his mouth.
Can you point the way where Free Speech is being countered here?
XCancel service is suspended.<p>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.<p>You can find the content you were looking for on the original website:<p>Continue to X<p>Thank you for your understanding. And the trust you have put into the XCancel project.
Classic “we must show good faith and good will before the judicial system by keeping our stuff offline, until proceedings are complete”<p>“Does the other side need to show any good faith?”<p>“No, in fact the judge is more likely to side either then the more angry and aggressive they are”<p>“….great”
The fact that so many large companies are still on X is so wrong.
Yeah, or local governments, or governments in general, seems strange to me too. But then probably they'd use Facebook/Instagram/Whatever instead of Twitter if Twitter wasn't available, and seemingly it's impossible for them to use something that isn't built like a panopticon that also wants to slurp up as much data from their users as possible.
There should be a law mandating government agencies to not limit their electronic communications to private third party platforms.<p>If they post something on Twitter, or worse, Facebook, they must also provide a copy of the post on their own website. Some kind of online government gazette, if you will.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_gazette" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_gazette</a>
Why?
Why is it “so wrong” to meet your audience where they are?
The same reason is wrong to require a Google or Apple phone to exercise basic civil duties within government services. You are gating the service, or information, behind a 3rd party ToS, a login, and basically stating that you are not allowed to have it until you hand over personal data to such companies.
The comment I replied to said "large companies", not government, and I don't see the equivalence.
Why is it wrong?
Is it wrong to require people to use certain tools? I don’t think so.
It’s the same thing as requiring dress code to go to the tribunal or anything formal.<p>People here overthink so much about this topic.
> Is it wrong to require people to use certain tools?<p>As the state or a representative thereof, yes; that's why public service is either run by itself or contracts to operators who must then abide by requirements (like no discrimination, unconditional access to information, social pricing, or similar provisions depending on your jurisdiction), that they would scrape the very day their activity became free market.<p>In France, even banks, a sector without a public actor in most countries, are legally required to open accounts ("droit au compte"). I don't mean _any_ kind of account, but at least one. On which banks naturally don't make a profit...<p>Google or Apple on the other hand, have no legal duty to let you in, which means in practice that they can lock you out of public services that they gate access to.<p>BTW: overthinking is how society moves forward :)
Because the owner of said tool is a white nationalist
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Just by googling "twitter api" I am able to find an "unofficial API" (scraped, obviously), that gives you access to tweets for around $0.15/1k tweets. Which is expensive if you want to, let's say, train a model, but super cheap for a casual user.<p>A nice UI around such API probably can be one-shotted with modern LLM-coding models and tools.<p>Or, you can go the hard way and vibecode something around buying twitter accounts (just several bucks per each) and proxies.<p>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.
Proposal:<p>Set up a mastodon account that mirrors your (or someone elses) X account.<p>This way people who want can continue using X, and other people can read & refer to their posts without needing to log into X.
What was the Chinese alternative ? At this point I’m just going to use that instead, lawyers won’t be able to take that down.
Makes sense, the legal system is pay to play.<p>Bluesky is here anyway.<p>Hell, you’re arguably on a Twitter alternative right now.
it's going to be a cat and mouse game for as long as X can legally afford to keep it going (i.e. til the heat death of the universe)<p>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.<p>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.
The MOMENT xcancel gets shut down, someone should sue the president for putting official communication on a closed platform.
I wonder if part of the lawsuit required them to link to twitter - it doesn't seem like a very on-brand thing to do.
> You can find the content you were looking for on the original website:<p>> <i>Continue to X</i><p>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!
Why would anyone use any xitter service voluntarily at this point
The service works just fine and it is a decent way to get the latest news.<p>For example, rumors about latest AI developments are available there, but not here on HN.<p>X also works well for media, which on HN you can only see after navigating to an external website.<p>Many comment sections are rough, but usually not worth visiting apart from the top comments anyway.<p>I don't like that Ads are hard to distinguish from regular posts.<p>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.
wtf the guy payed what 40billion for this website?<p>yes, he can enforce whatever ToS he wants .
I wish X would allow browsing threads, which is the only reason I use xcancel.<p>I wouldn't even mind seeing advertisements.<p>I just don't want to have an X account.
Good:<p>Insta requiring login
Facebook requiring login<p>Bad:<p>X requiring login
Are there other instances available? X can't ban them all.<p>I wish legal issues wouldn’t exist for this project and X would stop attacking projects that provide information for free.<p>Privacy is important more than ever as many of us don't want to login into X.
There's plenty of other instances running on nitter, some secret/invite only (and as such more chance to fly under the radar). The code is open source: <a href="https://github.com/zedeus/nitter" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zedeus/nitter</a> albeit X DMCA'd the repo.
> X DMCA'd the repo.<p>No they didn't, or you'd see the text "Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown." and wouldn't have access to the repo at all. Instead you have full access to it, its author having merely archived it out of caution.<p>No reference to nitter in <a href="https://github.com/github/dmca/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/github/dmca/</a>
Seems you're right. They have done this in the past though, so wouldn't exactly be a surprise.<p>Here is what the "free speech" platform have censored previously on GitHub:<p>> X Corp. employs various technical protection measures to control access to its copyrighted works, including those at issue here (API schemas and platform content): e.g., official X Corp. API key/OAuth authentication, rate-limiting mechanisms, proprietary behavioral pattern detection, TLS fingerprint validation, and x-clienttransaction-id checks. The repository referenced above appears specifically designed to circumvent these measures using browser cookies, curl_cffi TLS impersonation, fake headers, request jitter, and reverse-engineered GraphQL queries.<p><a href="https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/b2c88bad7dd771dc7d1842ff81529b86c701f296/2026/03/2026-03-27-x-corp.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/b2c88bad7dd771dc7d1842ff...</a>
<a href="https://status.d402.de/" rel="nofollow">https://status.d402.de/</a> and many other index pages<p>Consider running your own to spread out the HN/Slashdot effect.
When I read this, the Arweave project [1] comes to mind.<p>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?<p>[1] <a href="https://arweave.org/" rel="nofollow">https://arweave.org/</a>
I think XCancel should use their momentum and set up their own social media network, instead of scrapping the domain.
Surprised there are still people who think the issue with "X" is that it is a bad product.<p>It is a bad product, and it is pathological in the way all degraded social media platforms are bad.<p>But it's also worse than those others, in well documented ways; and it's long past time anyone with integrity found alternatives.<p>The failure of the "AI" industry to do so is an indictment and serious red flag.
<a href="https://nitter.click" rel="nofollow">https://nitter.click</a> still works right as rain, and so do many other Nitter instances.
What reason could there be that they can't share details?
Why are people still using X? I mean seriously people, move on and stop using this closed ecosystem that is propaganda around elections.
Man the RSS feeds are busted too now :/
every official government entity needs to get off X<p>every local, state and federal entity<p>nothing published there can be read logged out or archived<p>has to be violating law if not best practices
This to me is a big issue. You have politicians, government entities and other public institutions posting to twitter, but to access we need to log in.<p>There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.<p>This comment also applies to facebook too, which I think is even worse than twitter.
We used to have that, it was called a blog. I used to subscribe to all my local politicians and journalist blogs back in the late 2000s and would recieve everything I needed in my inbox, but now everyone posts on Twitter. That's where we have ActivityPub.
> There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.<p>RSS.
but how to do that without protecting the content from enemy LLM companies scraping?
So are you, dear reader, for intellectual property laws or not. I see a lot of "anti-this" sentiment confused with "anti-AI [data collection]."<p>The consistent view is one regarding IP in general - not reverse engineering your morals based on the case.
I do take your point, that someone against using twitter for training data in AI who then uses a service that might be violating copyright seems hypocritical. But first of all, the people voicing these opinions may not be the same person, despite commenting on the same website.<p>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.
Their browser verification never made it into the same room as my browser anyway...
i just want to unmute the video and full screen it without logging in. i click twitter link and it is muted.
It just feels like every social media site is login-walling public posts. I can't think of a major social media site (reddit, Instagram, FB, Twitter, etc) that doesn't do this to varying degrees. I can only think of minor sites (bluesky, truth social, etc) that allow access.<p>It feels like an end of an era.
Any details about what's going on? Is Nitter/their Github still up?
Has anyone ever succeeded going up against Elon legally?
There are now about 10 different people running them, and you can also run your own. <a href="https://status.d420.de/" rel="nofollow">https://status.d420.de/</a><p>The browser extension "Libredirect" will transparently redirect you to a working one or one of your choice.
So X is down again. Oh well.
As a reminder - get off Twitter and get onto Mastodon (Bluesky is dead to rights). Those of you addicted to what was formerly Twitter need to move on.
Xitter can't make a web UI that's actually usable to save their lives - so they're going after the one platform that does with lawfare.<p>Despicable behavior.
<a href="https://status.d420.de/" rel="nofollow">https://status.d420.de/</a>
Another "victory" for the freedom of information.
Not a popular question here, but what's the difference between xcancel or archive.org, and torrents and other pirate services alike?
(except twitter is user content, yet per their tos xcancel is still piracy)
Torrents can be used to spread information that is in the public domain or licensed freely, just as much as they can be used to spread copyrighted information. Obviously most of what people actually use torrents for is pirating copyrighted media against the wishes of the copyright-holders, but that's not inherent to the protocol.<p>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.
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They don't want to make it irrevelant, it's only readonly so you can't post. Not everyone wants to create a xitter account just to find 1-2 posts
Because removing public content from the internet for profit is wrong and shouldn't be allowed. One man, or one company, should not be in charge of the free speech of half a billion people.
Third party client websites have existed for a long time. It’s just about freedom.
I don't want to log on to his stupid ragebait website. I hate him for entirely different reasons to the usability of a shit website. Problem?
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> It takes away earnings from X users<p>Oh no! How awful! So terrible! People who produce nothing of value might earn slightly less!<p>Moving on to more pressing matters...
Anything that takes money away from narcoleptic, right wing [self]-abusers of the COA^1 is a net good for humanity.<p>^1: Concept of Acronyms
There is no reason for xcancel to exist.<p>Either you cancel X. Meaning: NOT consuming X content.<p>Or you just visit X.com.<p>Right? Right?
> There is no reason for xcancel to exist<p>A bit like your comment.<p>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?
A good idea would be: Make a decision. A trade-off.<p>Either these people are important enough to you, and you don't disfavor the platform soo much. Then visit that platform.<p>Or you dislike the platform so much that you even wonder why these people are there. You definitely don't want to be in contact with the platform. If so, then give up these people.<p>There's no free lunch, right? You also (typically) cannot buy steak, but then somehow not pay the money by showing some fake credit card. That would typically involve crime, right?<p>Make decisions, guys!!! Make decisions!<p>Your cat and mouse games are embarrassing...<p>And that doesn't get better in any way just by downvoting me. ;) ;) ;)
One possible decision is to use a deshittifying front-end, like Nitter.
Are these cat and mouse games (that you are about to lose atm) maybe an indicator that something is wrong with it?<p>Or should things be like that?
It is a half-measure, though.<p>It reduces Twitter's traffic a little. It screws with some of their metrics a little, with the shared accounts having access patterns of several humans all mixed together. It might affect revenue a little.<p>It doesn't do much to address the underlying issue of there being people who you might want to hear from who primarily post their content on a platform owned by a white nationalist. If you want that to get better, you have to something other than continue to use the platform.<p>The platform's user base, including accounts created for XCancel/Nitter purposes, forms the value that causes others to post there. Accessing the platform through a proxy still provides value to the platform in terms of user attention.
Not because this is also my opinion (I have a lot of opinions that people don't share, and I completely don't care, believe me!), but for deeper reasons, I'd love to understand why this is so unpopular, although it's absolutely what every sane person would do in everyday cases.<p>My only explanation would be to imagine all down-voters as chain smokers when they get involved into discussions whether smoking is a good thing.
People don't like to be reminded that they're hanging out at the Nazi Bar.<p>Standing outside and looking through the Nazi Bar's window is still pretty much hanging out at the Nazi Bar. It still brings traffic and attention to their establishment.<p>Sure, it's not buying drinks from the Nazis, and that is an improvement over being inside and giving Nazis your money and engagement directly. But it's still hanging out at the Nazi Bar.
Yes, I like the analogy. Even if you don't agree with "Nazi", it makes the illustration quite obvious:<p>There is a bar that scares you off so much that you wouldn't even go in. So there must be something fundamentally wrong with it. It's not just not your favorite beer, but you absolutely avoid even to <i>enter</i>. There must be a strong reason for that, right?<p>What people are then important enough to watch through the windows? I mean, at first, you just make a fool of yourself. Just imagine the analogy. That's exactly xcancel and friends, right? And then, don't forget: These people explicitly do not share your view in a matter fundamental and important enough for you to not enter the bar.<p>Are they friends? I can't imagine friendships with these differences really need that deep devotion.<p>Are they politicians? Maybe there are enough media around you that already preprocess the conversations at the Nazi bar for you?<p>Wider community (around your job, hobby, ...)? That's probably the most challenging one. But still, wouldn't it be definitely the goal to push them to better places? I know it's not a matter of a day or two, but why couldn't we at least agree on that goal, and then start acting in some way?<p>btw: This is not specific to X or Musk imho. There are other networks out there that aren't in control of such a madman today, but they share a lot of problematic properties.
These people includes pretty much every politician. I personally do have an X account and I do use X, but I completely understand why someone would want to read what their politicians are saying without wanting to create an account anywhere
The hatred and jealousy for Musk is so great in this platform, that the comment section becomes a cesspool of contempt.<p>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.<p>Making an X account would take 2 minutes. But they rather just write a hate comment on HN every opportunity they can.
The hatred and jealousy for Spez is so great in this platform, that the comment section becomes a cesspool of contempt.
They all secretly want to use Reddit 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 Reddit account would take 2 minutes. But they rather just write a hate comment on HN every opportunity they can.
Of course not.<p>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
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IMO, if you hate Elon so much, you shouldn't be visiting his website.<p>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".)<p>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.
I don't want to be tracked by x.com, but still want to be able to read links people send me to tweets. It's pretty reductive to say that people are using it because they "hate Elon so much," or even that they "want to engage with it.'
I don't want to use "X", I want to read updates from orgs and people who, unfortunately, don't post them elsewhere.
I don't visit his website. That's the whole point.
> 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".)<p>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?
My municipality, and many other governmental entities, post official updates to x.com
Is engaging with the site just reading its content, not liking or retweeting? Sometimes I just want to read a tweet thread that was sent to me without ditractions in a straightforward UI.