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kemotep 2 days ago [-]
I used Twitter for over 10 years without an account then suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted and no longer an option. Reddit is now this way too.
But I find it ridiculous that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable without being logged in (and in some cases requiring an app instead of the site). Even Bluesky has this problem!
Sometimes this information is really important! And I even if I did have an account I may not have access to log in on every device (or even want to).
It’s absurd that social media can become this like critical communications platform for severe weather alerts or business hours or anything but the sites hosting it are completely hostile to allowing you to see it.
Sites like this are a bandaid on a gangrenous foot. Thanks for allowing me to see links from twitter but it isn’t a sustainable solution clearly.
ghusto 1 days ago [-]
Here in the Netherlands, WhatsApp has the defacto communication tool. Everyone is expected to have it installed, not just by friends but also municipals and companies. Same level as having an e-mail address.
It's a missed opportunity for the digital soverignty the EU says it so badly needs. The code for a government backed WhatsApp competitor is there, in multiple instances even. Launch a WhatsApp clone and put all governement communication through it so everyone has to have it installed, and you have an instant EU-wide userbase. From there, people will naturally start to use it between themselves.
veeti 1 days ago [-]
Eurocrats could never in a million years make it happen. For starters, every country would insist on having its own ChatsApp, with roll out taking years. Then, to satisfy strict security and compliance regulations it would be restricted to devices passing Google & Apple hardware attestation checks. And once everyone is finally forced to be on board, any confidentiality guarantees can go out the window to catch pedos and terrorists.
Mastodon instances would be a drop-in replacement, no? Federated instances and as a bonus, it solves the biggest problem of new users not knowing which server to join. Just join your local government's if you don't know of another.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
You speak as if these are simple operations, and technically they are but socially they are not.
yitchelle 23 hours ago [-]
So true. Even within a country, different states would argue for their own version of it. (Looking at you, Bavaria)
account42 22 hours ago [-]
The EU should rather embrace open standards rather than building a closed competitor here. We already have XMPP and Matrix, all that's required is for public institutions to use them.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
For what purpose? All this discussion about open alternatives to closed systems always leaves out what the purpose is. For broadcasting public information that is not time critical, I think they should use HTTP and HTML.
wldcordeiro 1 days ago [-]
Reminds me of what Brasil did with Pix which of course the outside payment processors have been trying to undo.
Vinnl 22 hours ago [-]
It is ubiquitous, but as a Dutchie who's never had WhatsApp, it is not quite at the level of an email address yet, luckily.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
There is a carrier neutral WhatsApp, called SMS.
pjc50 22 hours ago [-]
Whatsapp etc. only took off because SMS is so limited, and the mobile companies are so profit-focused they can't make a decent competitor.
(how is whatsapp paid for again?)
inigyou 17 hours ago [-]
It's not all about profit as European SMS is now free. It is however about decentralisation stifling feature development - a trap we run into again and again, from email to IRC to SMS to Fediverse/ATProto.
WhatsApp is one company so if they want to enable sending images they can just do it, and they don't have to coordinate with anyone else. MMS was a failure because you couldn't be sure if your recipient would actually get it, or if your carrier would actually let you send it.
Parodper 19 hours ago [-]
SMS made you pay by character. RCS is the current free alternative.
Markoff 15 hours ago [-]
so instead using Meta product you suggest using Google product, great alternative for Europe independence
it's like when they wanna get rid of Visa/MC by switching to EU apps, which will require Google/Apple verification, what an improvement...
Parodper 59 minutes ago [-]
RCS is an international standard. Google only adds their client (and running the service if your mobile provider doesn't).
Don't know what EU apps are you talking about, but yes, mobile apps need Google services. Web interfaces don't.
dghughes 19 hours ago [-]
Cell towers failed in my region after a hurricane. SMS is pointless in that situation.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
So can internet.
gonzalohm 18 hours ago [-]
Not neutral if you are Apple. That's their battlefield
nujabe 1 days ago [-]
Not even remotely close.
prmoustache 1 days ago [-]
For natural disaster emergency annoucememt it is more reliable than whatsapp.
gsich 1 days ago [-]
Cell Broadcast yes, SMS no.
KellyCriterion 23 hours ago [-]
Isnt the one just "mass usage" of the other?
Like Cell Broadcast just duplicates the SMS on carrier level?
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
Cell broadcast, depending on the emergency level set by the sender, also makes your phone vibrate until you read the message, and may also cause it to play a loud siren noise. Which is the sort of thing you want in a real emergency.
inexcf 22 hours ago [-]
Nah, Cell Broadcast has a lot less overhead since it does not have to do any routing or delivery confirmation and such. The load does not scale based on recipients which makes it far more reliable during an emergency.
account42 23 hours ago [-]
Why, because it can't be monetized by Facebook?
arijun 22 hours ago [-]
Because it doesn't do the job well. It's difficult to send any media, group chats are a pain, international messages often incur fees, it doesn't work on wifi-only, and so on.
olmo23 21 hours ago [-]
Whatsapp is used by a lot of "neighbourhood watch" groups, so you'd need an IRC-like channel to replace it.
vincnetas 22 hours ago [-]
Yes, no, try to have group chat with SMS, and tell me how that went...
KPGv2 20 hours ago [-]
RTS is the SMS replacement and is quite old. And as evidence it works, I direct your attention to the ubiquitous iMessage, which only "couldn't" interop with Android because Apple was trying the vendor lock-in approach and actively enshittifying its own users' experience and blaming it on Android users.
saintfire 10 hours ago [-]
Assuming you mean RCS, to which Google built a proprietary E2EE extension, remains the only client with no API to build off of and if I recall requires play attestation.
Hardly a complete solution, it devolved into a Google power grab, in my opinion.
For once I half agree with apple when they say its less secure, as apple-to-google comms are not E2EE like they are for google-to-google. While that is fixable with a hack its still a hack, not part of the protocol.
inigyou 17 hours ago [-]
Which it also had to do because SMS doesn't have half its features, like encryption and sending images.
Grisu_FTP 19 hours ago [-]
Do you mean RCS or are these 2 seperate things?
baxtr 1 days ago [-]
I think my main communication is probably the last tool that I want to be government backed tbh.
valleyer 1 days ago [-]
Even if it's communication/announcements from the government?
I too am constantly frustrated that official communications from governments happen on Twitter or Facebook.
thevinter 1 days ago [-]
Communications/announcements from the government can easily be posted on the government's website or, if really needed, sent as an SMS
iamnothere 1 days ago [-]
My local government still lets you sign up for email notifications about services and local alerts. It’s great!
vasco 1 days ago [-]
Too expensive, bad idea.
thevinter 23 hours ago [-]
SMS are virtually free for every carrier. The prices for the customers exist to partially offset the fixed costs of the infrastructure (which already exists).
account42 23 hours ago [-]
Here unlimited free SMS for customers has been the norm for most plans.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
What do you mean? They'll just pass a law saying carriers have to deliver them for free
pjc50 22 hours ago [-]
This is how you get the Andy Burnham "don't use disposable BBQs" announcement sent via the emergency system.
r_lee 1 days ago [-]
are those your "main communication" tools?
account42 23 hours ago [-]
I agree that I don't trust governments today to provide the necessary confidentiality guarantees but remember that both physical mail and the phone network are government backed - in the sense that they set the rules even if they are operated by private entities in some countries.
pjc50 22 hours ago [-]
I think the lessons of 2026 must be:
- the dangers of fascism are very real
- technological choices won't save you from the snatch squads, although grassroots use of tech by communities can help
- fascism is extensively promoted by some corporations and their owners
- a non-captured government that is willing to push back is much better than relying on corporations
- anything headquartered in America is potentially subject to arbitrary sanctions against non-US users
- just because we don't like the solution doesn't mean the problem isn't real (see age verification debate)
abc123abc123 20 hours ago [-]
Fascinating! Where I live, fascism is not the threat, it is rampant socialism. It is spreading like cancer and destroying lives and economies.
angoragoats 19 hours ago [-]
Where do you live? Because I’m guessing you’re wrong.
pjc50 19 hours ago [-]
Probably he lives on Twitter.
vincnetas 22 hours ago [-]
what country are you from that you trust US corps more than your own government?
bluebarbet 20 hours ago [-]
That bar is low. Less than 8% of the world population lives in a full democracy (Economist Democracy Index).
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
US corporations aren't full democracies either
1 days ago [-]
dataengineer56 18 hours ago [-]
> It's a missed opportunity for the digital soverignty the EU says it so badly needs. The code for a government backed WhatsApp competitor is there, in multiple instances even. Launch a WhatsApp clone and put all governement communication through it so everyone has to have it installed, and you have an instant EU-wide userbase. From there, people will naturally start to use it between themselves.
I think you have completely misjudged how much the majority of people would not want to use an EU-controlled chat app.
toomuchtodo 1 days ago [-]
Do you think if government accounts were on Signal, people would install it?
azangru 1 days ago [-]
Signal requires a mobile phone for an account; so it's not entirely web-friendly. Plus, can you read what's posted to signal without an account?
Hard to keep up with lots of sites. At least provide a common interface, like an atom feed.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
Are you supposed to keep up with lots of sites? Which ones would you want to keep up with?
inglor_cz 23 hours ago [-]
The problem is that an EU-mandated digital communicating tool would look like the Minitel.
Anyone remembering the French minitel?
pjc50 22 hours ago [-]
I think it was quite good for the 1980s, it just got stuck there.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
That's the fate of all government-backed systems as well as all decentralised systems. The former can't evolve because of extreme bureaucracy and the latter can't evolve because of incompatibility trauma and fragmentation.
But in either case we do have the ability to make a new system every 10 years.
inglor_cz 21 hours ago [-]
Touché. Getting stuck with an obsolete service/protocol for decades is a nightmare, even if it is just ye olde user inertia. If it is mandated by law or pushed by the government, it becomes nearly impossible to update.
In this, I trust the government way less than either the open source movement or the actual Silicon Valley. Both of the latter are much better at iterating of their designs when a new idea comes along.
alex1138 1 days ago [-]
Which is one of the many many reasons Zuckerberg needs to be investigated the hell out of for every single thing he does
I grant you 2014 is 12 years ago now and you could plausibly argue it was their doing to grow network effects but I'm pretty sure WA had that infrastructure already in place - Acton, Koum et al already did the ground work to get carriers to... whatever it is
Zuckerberg stole it like he steals everything
inemesitaffia 21 hours ago [-]
People insisted then that paying tens of Instagram for WhatsApp was too much.
alex1138 16 hours ago [-]
I have no idea. The point is they took competition out back, and shot it
Whether that's 'too much' depends on your view of it
I'm tired of people calling them 'savvy acquisitions'. Not when Zuck's on record as saying 'Instagram can hurt us'
a_imho 2 days ago [-]
Increasingly access is hidden behind mobile apps too, which in turn requires succumbing to app stores and handing over the keys to 2 giant US companies. For slopware and social media, fine. Some would even argue it is a blessing in disguise. However on the government level it is totally unacceptable. E.g. why should anyone and especially non US citizens accept the Google/Apple TOS in order to file their taxes, access their health recds or schedule a gov appointment?
CTDOCodebases 1 days ago [-]
It's all by design to. People call for social media regulation without realizing that it is by no coincidence these companies have been able to grow so large. The security state has been outsourced to private industry.
GPerson 2 days ago [-]
My phone can’t even open most of the apps since it’s so old. Reddit does not load (this actually helped me a lot).
alyeska2 2 days ago [-]
Even worse, it's hard or impossible to even have an account with any shred of privacy.
I've tried to create pseudoanonymous accounts on both Bluesky and Twitter and then had them be instantly banned before I ever used them. Not even doing anything real privacy like TOR or a VPN, just trying to create an account without revealing my personal phone number.
Ironically, their attempts to crack down on bots means real people like me can't access the sites, while the scammers, propagandists and shills will put in the work to register accounts.
filoleg 2 days ago [-]
Just to clarify, what do you mean by "without revealing my personal phone number"?
Did you use a voip number (e.g., Google Voice/Twilio/etc.) instead? Or somehow no number at all? Or a secondary (real) phone number, and Twitter somehow determined it wasn't your primary personal phone number?
Not pushing back against what you said, just trying to understand what factually happened.
omoikane 2 days ago [-]
Bluesky didn't require phone numbers back when it was invite only, and then there was a period of time after they allowed everyone to create accounts where users need a phone number to verify. That requirement might have been replaced by a captcha according to:
But I didn't try to create an account recently, maybe they went back to requiring phone numbers.
deltoidmaximus 2 days ago [-]
Lots of services demand your phone number after the fact now, hoping to use the sunk cost fallacy to extort it out of you when you're in a hurry.
Walmart recently deleted my phone number from my account for vague reasons but most likely because another account had the same number. That other account is my wife and the number is our VoIP line. I have no desire to interact with walmart through my cell phone so I didn't give it to them. So I used a google voice number, which is not my number, to get back in. Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company and autopopulated the field. Jokes on me!
aucisson_masque 1 days ago [-]
> Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company
Holy moly, don't you have any law at all to protect people's privacy ?
fcarraldo 1 days ago [-]
in the US? no.
cassepipe 1 days ago [-]
But I don't think that's the case for Bluesky
hparadiz 1 days ago [-]
It's because of spam. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Ironically AI could fix this when trivial spam detection inference becomes cheap enough to throw away on every upload.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
AI would classify anything disagreeing with the government as spam. For example right now it would classify anything opposing Israel as spam.
hparadiz 23 hours ago [-]
Are you sure that's not just people getting fed up with you and hitting the mute button? I just mute those people.
inigyou 17 hours ago [-]
That trains the AI
account42 22 hours ago [-]
Yes and most importantly when the black box flags something as spam there will be no appeal.
alyeska2 2 days ago [-]
It's been years since I tried making a Twitter account, I believe at the time it sometimes required a phone number to sign up but other times it was optional (some A/B test).
I think Bluesky didn't require a phone number to sign up, just an email. Maybe I'm misremembering though and it forced a phone number so I had to provide a fake one or a voip one.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Right now X requires either a phone number, or email + phone hardware ID.
Melatonic 1 days ago [-]
Can you use Google voice still without providing another phone number ?
deltoidmaximus 2 days ago [-]
I wouldn't even care if they blocked my anonymous account from posting or really interacting besides reading things. But of course, preventing bot actions isn't actually why I need an account so they aren't going to let you do that.
cassepipe 1 days ago [-]
I don't remember giving my phone to bluesky
alexfortin 1 days ago [-]
I didn't
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
You might try attacking the problem from the other direction. If your country allows buying a SIM card without KYC, then do that.
giancarlostoro 2 days ago [-]
> Reddit is now this way too.
Which is why OpenAI formed a partnership with reddit, in exchange for access to OpenAI's models, OpenAI gets access to reddit's data, and access to reddits live feed.
The reason X and Reddit started forcing accounts is to prevent or add barrier for web scraping, and forcing companies to pay for access to the data.
ModernMech 2 days ago [-]
Notably this was called a “temporary emergency measure” by Elon Musk — yet another promise he couldn’t keep
“Temporary emergency” should always be considered skeptically - especially when it comes to government. They almost always stay permanent.
2 days ago [-]
ibejoeb 2 days ago [-]
I'm fine with the criticism, but what's the solution? And what makes this a uniquely Elon problem when the rest of the social media industry does the same? There was backlash when the models learned computer programming from open source repositories, so I wonder if the same applies to casual speech.
kelvinjps10 1 days ago [-]
Because it worked without an account before Elon came to Twitter and changed it?
Pedro_Ribeiro 1 days ago [-]
Would've happened either way. Data is more valuable and also trivial to scrape now.
account42 22 hours ago [-]
Which is the root of the problem - that we have allowed companies to claim ownership over and sell their user's data.
aboardRat4 1 days ago [-]
Usenet worked without any antispam, until the first spammer appeared.
rplnt 2 days ago [-]
Similarly, society decided at some point that linkedin, a completely private and constantly hacked social network, is a must-have when looking for work (not any work, but for a lot of jobs it applies). Just give them all your private data and we'll have a look.
y-c-o-m-b 2 days ago [-]
Makes one miss the days when Craigslist or Monster (and its clones) were legitimately the best places to find employment.
I've always loathed LinkedIn due to their poor security and their data mining practices, starting from day 1. I haven't used LinkedIn in over 10 years and only used it briefly to connect with old colleagues. I never had a problem getting work without it. Due to AI, scammers, and infiltration by countries like North Korea, LinkedIn seems to be the only other source outside of "networking" to get hired these days though, unfortunately.
At this point nothing would make me happier than to see Meta, X, LinkedIn, and their friends collapse. They are a cancer and only amplify the enshittification of everything.
mk89 21 hours ago [-]
I think stackoverflow jobs was better than all the alternatives we ever had or have now (which are ridiculous).
If there is one thing I miss on the internet is indeed stackoverlow jobs. Crazy that it didn't work out.
LinkedIn is the Facebook of people who don't want to be on Facebook but want to post Facebook kind of stuff.
anotherpaul 2 days ago [-]
totally agree, businesses that only have Facebook or Instagram are basically hidden from me. I can not see their opening hours, nor the menue, if it is a restaurant. I understand why the businesses use facebook, its easy, but its also a bit sad.
arjie 2 days ago [-]
The governments go where the people are. If they post on their own sites it’s the equivalent of “on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’”.
But government information should definitely be first source on their site with federation elsewhere.
phforms 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, "first source" is the key here. The information should be available openly and independently of any 3rd-party platform.
In a broader sense, I believe that every person who publishes on the internet should have a standard way to keep their profile data (accounts, posts, etc.) in a secure, user-owned vault that is independent of any company or institution and platforms should have to pull data from that place (in a restricted, user-controlled way) instead of from their own servers. Platforms should be exchangeable, profiles should be entirely user-owned. But of course, this is just a dream and hard to realise technically and economically (incentive-wise) with our current systems. Decentralised protocols are a step in this direction, but unfortunately still too technical/complicated for most people to really "own" or host their data themselves.
arjie 1 days ago [-]
ATProto attempted to do this with their PDS based structure but it isn’t fully decentralized yet. The vision is similar to what you describe though.
pfraze 1 days ago [-]
Thats entirely how atproto works now!
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Except for the part where bluesky maintains a central registry and also the part where the protocol is really complicated with its authenticity stuff.
> As the next step of maturing governance of the PLC identity system, Bluesky Social PBC is supporting the creation of an independent organization to operate the directory.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
someone related to bluesky maintains a central registry*
If the US government sanctions you, your PLC will get deleted. Only the US government will have this power.
pfraze 14 hours ago [-]
PLC's board composition and country of residence are designed to shield from that. At best it will only ever be as effective at this as ICANN, which is roughly our target.
andrepd 2 days ago [-]
The problem is not governments or people posting there. The problem is platforms/utilities not being treated as such.
dghughes 19 hours ago [-]
My 81 year-old mother has never owned a computer. So yes it's not good to have critical government services only on apps or websites that require log in or subscriptions. Although to her it doesn't matter since she has no clue of these sites.
We went through a hurricane in 2022 and that was an eye opener too. Most "land lines" are no longer a line to anywhere it's just a phone connected to the Internet. Anyone with that type phone had no service after 24 hours without power. My 85 uncle still (even now) had an actual land line and it worked no issues.
After the hurricane no citizen had any way to communicate. Cell towers failed when generators ran out of fuel. No fuel because gas stations couldn't pump gas without power.
My dad passed away just a year earlier he had been on an oxygen generator that needed power 24/7. I don't think he would have survived. I'm not sure if I could even have reached 911.
For awareness radio is the best solution but even emergency services radio stations are being decommissioned here in Canada in favour of Internet services.
dmd 19 hours ago [-]
Re the "land lines", I think the answer to that is not "keep 100+ year old copper infrastructure running" but "make our modern infrastructure as reliable as Ma Bell made it 100 years ago".
Of course, neither will happen, so there's that.
pessimizer 19 hours ago [-]
> "make our modern infrastructure as reliable as Ma Bell made it 100 years ago"
Sadly, I don't think that makes sense. Switches have a lot more to do a lot faster when it comes to the internet as compared to a phone. 100 years ago, calls were completed by a person physically moving one or more wires from one plug to another.
Better to have an emergency system that will always work - and maybe the only way to keep an emergency system maintained is to use it during non-emergencies. Hard phone lines and radio.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
They also have better, more ubiquitous technology. Is an off-the-shelf managed Ethernet switch on a UPS really less reliable per user than a 5ESS? I don't know, but surely only marginally because both are pretty close to 100%, and the main cause of failures is human errors on both systems.
The actual problem people have with VoIP landlines is that they require power at the customer end. A traditional analog POTS line supplies power from the central office so it doesn't need any from the customer, unless they want to use a cordless phone, which takes more power than the central office provides. A fiber VoIP line requires power at both ends no matter what.
Note the original phones actually didn't have "central battery" as they call it. Instead each phone had its own battery, designed for about 6 months of usage, and every 6 months the phone company sent a wagon around to replace everyone's phone batteries.
It's frustrating, but we need to accept that we are not the kind of user that these platforms want. I stopped using Reddit for the same reason, and I accepted that I'm not the best user for them. For my luck, Reddit is not used as the main communication channel for government agencies
account42 22 hours ago [-]
We actually don't need to accept that. When they become big enough for network effects to become inescapable they need to be treated as utilities more than random private companies.
tuesdaynight 18 hours ago [-]
Are you saying that they should be regulated or controlled by the government in some ways?
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
They already are. For example they're not allowed to kill people or publish child porn
tuesdaynight 13 hours ago [-]
Okay, so I imagine they must agree that age verification is good as well
cassepipe 1 days ago [-]
> Even Bluesky has this problem!
Bluesky is totally accessible for me without an account. What do you see ?
kemotep 1 days ago [-]
Plenty of people restrict their account to require that you too have an account to see their posts. A link to Bluesky often feels like roulette on whether I can see a post or not.
It isn’t as egregious as other sites but it’s still restrictive.
expedited123 1 days ago [-]
I don't understand why they have this option. Why would anyone toggle this on?
culi 1 days ago [-]
Maybe to minimize bots scraping your info.
account42 22 hours ago [-]
If bluesky ever becomes popular boots will just scrape the firehose directly.
culi 12 hours ago [-]
I mean it's 3x the size of HN by monthly active users
JuniperMesos 21 hours ago [-]
I would support a law requiring official government messages to be promulgated only via channels that do not require an account to view. It's not the most important thing to spend political capital on, but it would have the positive effect of directly interfering with government officials publishing their messages on proprietary login-only social media because it's the most expedient thing to do or it's the only thing they know how to do.
kitd 21 hours ago [-]
Isn't that just "the World Wide Web"?
The reason these sites require login is because they also want to control the resulting conversations, whether for moderation (generous) or selling your data (more likely).
Announcements/political campaigning doesn't require feedback in the same way so no reason for them to use X, FB or anything else.
Seeing the state of most conversations on X or FB, I'm quite happy with limiting the general public's ability to broadcast to the world.
wackget 1 days ago [-]
I wholeheartedly agree on every point. I've felt this way for years. It's scandalous.
Many companies also rely on socials as their only effective means of customer service. If you have a problem or want to provide feedback but you don't use social media then you are SOL.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Or you sue them and (if they did something wrong) they're SOL.
But you won't. And they know you won't. Not even small claims.
account42 22 hours ago [-]
...because the overhead of even small claims is bigger than what you can possibly recover in most regular disputes. There needs to be something like a class action for small claims - government regulators where you can submit complaints with evidence to and if enough people complain about a company the government has to look into it.
inigyou 17 hours ago [-]
Isn't small claims designed for, well, small claims and therefore low overhead? That's why you can't bring a lawyer. Which is super annoying for a company, because a company has no physical embodiment and has to send a lawyer or other representative just by virtue of being a company.
A workaround that will surely be patched in the next site update.
Melatonic 1 days ago [-]
That's why we really need some kind of non profit or maybe two "social media" sites made with the public good in mind. One could be officially government sanctioned and funded (sort of like Voice of America but internal to the US more so) and have a strict organisation verification policy for local police / government and other quasi public entities (say like transportation systems and energy companies - etc)
Exactly, we don't need any more closed silos when there are open options that governments can adopt.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
So HTTP and IP
pjc50 22 hours ago [-]
I think if you think that technologies which were around for decades before social media took off are equivalent to social media, then it's actually on you for missing what the difference is.
See HN classics of "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame" and "you can replicate dropbox with webdav"; at some point you have to stop thinking that it's everyone else who is wrong and work out what they want which you're missing, which is convenience.
inigyou 17 hours ago [-]
Yeah but you have to think about what that convenience actually is. You can't just say "twitter is convenient". Visiting someone's website is actually much easier than visiting their Twitter, so what happened?
pjc50 10 hours ago [-]
Scrolling Twitter is a lot easier than visiting a thousand websites, and it auto suggests new content. In its case, the power of suggestion is used for bad, but it's important.
Also, replies and retweets.
tmp10423288442 2 days ago [-]
Should governments not have posted announcements in newspapers back when they were widely read, even though they require paying to read them?
aboardRat4 24 hours ago [-]
Newspapers never required logging in to buy a copy.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
You had to pay for a copy though and that's worse
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
Newspapers were regulated.
jm4 2 days ago [-]
The Reddit thing is disappointing. I stopped being a user a long time ago, but their links often show up in search results. I started noticing I couldn't see the page without logging in. I ended up blocking Reddit in my search results. It's not worth it.
cpt_sobel 23 hours ago [-]
At least for now Reddit doesn't require neither phone number nor email address (I think)
jm4 18 hours ago [-]
I just don't want to be logged in. I used to be an active user. It sucks up too much time and there's a lot of toxicity. I finally got off when they blocked third party apps. Their official app is horrible and the website has enough annoyances that I don't want to use it. I was content to click on the occasional search result though. Now that they finally took that away I'm done.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
It requires email now. It used to not. And if you don't want to be shadowbanned you also need phone, and if you want to view NSFW you need government ID.
Seattle3503 23 hours ago [-]
In practice you wont be able to comment if you don't provide email. Though, you will be able to view.
andunie 19 hours ago [-]
The solution is clearly one that isn't controlled by any company:
Nostr.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
Nostr people are like the Voat people the first time Reddit fucked up.
nomilk 2 days ago [-]
From Musk in Dec 2022 (right after purchasing Twitter):
> we should not be prohibiting read-only scroll
Seems Musk agreed Twitter shouldn't require an account just to view the site. Wonder why the change of mind.
I learned from experience at least a decade ago that you should not take anything he says seriously or as an assertion of fact. Countless examples[0] prove that this is the case.
Agreed for sure. I think part of the problem is that at least for a while, he was good at selling the lie that he was an intelligent engineer, which caused a lot of people (especially tech-savvy ones) to trust him more than the average random public figure. Unfortunately it seems like some people never realized he was a fraud and still view him this way.
nomilk 2 days ago [-]
Musk is aggressively optimistic on what can be achieved and by when, but rational on product decisions.
Musk stating that read-only scroll should be allowed seems very sensible (I think we all agree on that). But he (or someone he delegated to) clearly changed their mind. Intrigued to know why. Occam's razor would probably suggest that allowing scrapers to host twitter posts elsewhere costs them ad revenue, so they make it difficult.
assagr 2 days ago [-]
He thinks Twitter data is valuable for AI training. He also blocks archive.org.
Grok 4.0, before it deteriorated, had a phase when it was good at writing tweets. The feature was used by Musk sycophants but it becomes boring soon.
Since Grok is closed now too and Cursor is pivoting to octocnt (GitHub clone), nobody knows where things are heading.
numpad0 1 days ago [-]
I think buying Twitter for data was a blunder big as expecting self driving to be solved by 2015 or whenever it originally was.
It is only clear with hindsight, but now everyone knows that tweets are literally detrimental for LLM style AI for whatever reason. Personally I think it's because tweets are responses without CoT or prompts, or could be also because all its meat is in the shape incompatible with en-US culture, even when it's in English, though all that matters is it's actively useless.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
He didn't buy twitter for data, he bought it to shut down criticism of himself and it worked
pessimizer 18 hours ago [-]
He bought twitter because he was forced to. He got it at twice any valuation (based on fake usage stats) and at least 4x what it was worth. Criticism of him was not "shut down" either off or on twitter.
Why did he ban the maker of this twitter unblocker thing and the maker of elonjet?
nomilk 1 days ago [-]
Maybe for training, but how about look up? I often use claude voice and grok voice (both on iOS) and reasonably frequently claude simply cannot find any info about a breaking topic, whereas grok always can.
numpad0 1 days ago [-]
I wonder if "no one says no" culture is practically the same thing as instructing LLMs to always hallucinate.
You know, LLM hallucination is a phenomenon where the AI would generate syntactically bulletproof chunks of text that are not grounded in reality. Lots of efforts by frontier LLM labs had been made in past few years to solve this by enabling AIs to refute premises in the prompt.
Ordinary people still need to be instructed to google stuffs. They don't go to a niche de facto non-American social media to be disappointed by its notoriously bad search to then conclude its notoriously dumb AI can be abused as a makeshift search tool. People are simply unable.
Twitter has been doing so much things backwards lately. That's reminiscent of how hallucination hurts whatever you do with AIs.
aboardRat4 24 hours ago [-]
Hallucination is not something specific to LLM by any means.
Remember when you were a kid, your teacher probably told you "At an exam, leave no question unanswered, even if you don't know what to write. Nobody is penalised for wrong answers, but even total gibberish might sometimes add a half-point to your score".
numpad0 11 hours ago [-]
That's what I'm saying. Musk corp guys seem ungrounded and hallucinating a ton like early GPTs.
angoragoats 12 hours ago [-]
Yes, but LLMs are hallucination machines by design. What I mean by this is that everything the LLM generates is a hallucination, untethered from truth or reality, since the data is generated purely based on statistics around what word is most likely to come next. This type of algorithm can never model "truth" or "fact."
To the extent that an LLM generates something factual or realistic, it's doing so either accidentally, or because of the various band-aids that the grandparent post describes which will never fully solve the problem.
2 days ago [-]
angoragoats 2 days ago [-]
> Musk is aggressively optimistic on what can be achieved and by when
That’s putting it quite charitably, IMO.
> but rational on product decisions
Hard disagree. You only need to look to his entire tenure at DOGE for literally hundreds (thousands?) of counterexamples.
Or, if you don’t count that work as “product decisions,” there are other highly questionable product decisions that he is responsible for: the rear doors on the Model X; the lack of instruments/gauges of any kind in front of the driver on the Model 3 and Y; the lack of proper safety sensors/protection for the hood of the Cybertruck, leading to mangled fingers; that stupid yoke steering wheel; and the entirety of Neuralink (just to name a handful).
100percentjake 2 days ago [-]
I am certifiably not a fan of Musk but the yoke in the cybertruck when combined with the drive by wire steering is an absolute engineering masterpiece and a masterclass in systems calibration. The yoke itself has a relatively narrow range of motion of .94 turns lock-to-lock and at slow parking lot speeds that means you can do a 3 point turn, park, parallel park, navigate around, without making large movements of the steering input and you never have to (because you physically cannot) go hand-over-hand. Then at highway speeds the steering ratio is vastly different and the vehicle feels solid as a rock. It's absolutely effortless.
Now, on the flipside, the yoke also exists in the Tesla Model S Plaid, which has a traditional manual rack. In here it is the worst god-damned thing to ever curse a vehicle. The width is roughly the diameter of a school bus steering wheel and going hand over hand with it is annoying at best and the whole experience feels like utter garbage.
angoragoats 2 days ago [-]
> Now, on the flipside, the yoke also exists in the Tesla Model S Plaid, which has a traditional manual rack. In here it is the worst god-damned thing to ever curse a vehicle.
Yes, as I said, bad product decisions.
account42 22 hours ago [-]
Likely the realization what AI companies (themselves included) are willing to pay for that data.
nkozyra 20 hours ago [-]
> get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable
The US House of Representatives posts their live hearings exclusively on YouTube. This is information that should be ungated and freely available, yet is a pain to acquire or archive because YouTube absolutely does not want you getting to the raw video.
I don't understand how this is legal, honestly.
1 days ago [-]
maxehmookau 22 hours ago [-]
I agree. I run a small community organisation and we've come off all social media and created a single website. You want information about us? That's where it is - the website.
Nobody should be relying on any social media company to share information widely, and citizens shouldn't be required to sign up for Facebook, X, or anything, to get that information.
23 hours ago [-]
mxschll 2 days ago [-]
In the EU, EU-Alert exists. They can push alarms to any phone with that system.
jasonfarnon 1 days ago [-]
They have Amber Alert here and the other day I noticed it linked to twitter for more information...which I couldn't actually but for a split-second when a pop-up loaded. This is silly. Perhaps govt can reach more people by posting a message to twitter vs their website. But if you're sending a link out, there is no excuse not to link to your website or any number of other open, stable hosts.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Amber alerts accomplish nothing, with or without twitter links
account42 22 hours ago [-]
Which is appropriate only for the extremest of extreme situations like an imminent open war our natural catastrophe.
eudamoniac 1 days ago [-]
I'm sympathetic, as I also don't have an account, but honestly I don't think requiring a free account that takes 10 seconds to make and needs no personal info constitutes "completely hostile to allowing you to see it."
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Twitter requires your phone number to sign up
maxlin 1 days ago [-]
Blame boundless AI scraping. X would like very much to be more open.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
You don't think he has the resources to sue the scrapers?
maxlin 14 hours ago [-]
That's a false premise - scraping itself isn't illegal, and reasonable also it should not be. But having most of the traffic be scrapers that don't behave well and brute force constantly refetch pages unnecessarily and unintelligently is the issue.
So it's just bad behavior requiring reduction of the openness. Like with any open things when people can't behave anymore :(
tharmas 2 days ago [-]
And you have to have a phone number to login to these sites (Authenticate). Even On-line Banking, you need a phone number to log in. And in my country Mobile contracts are hideously expensive.
Its all part of the plan: the Digital Control Grid.
Just wait till the Genius Act kicks in with Stable Coins. Programmable money is coming.
fuzzfactor 2 days ago [-]
>suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted
To some decision-makers their idea of "disruption" is limited to enshittification more than anything else.
Exoristos 2 days ago [-]
Disruption was never an unblemished positive for society.
uygiugiu 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Thanks, new account that only posts to support Musk
charcircuit 1 days ago [-]
>are completely hostile to allowing you to see it.
You say like this like it doesn't literally take like 10 seconds to make an account to see it.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
It doesn't. Have you actually tried? Recently?
charcircuit 21 hours ago [-]
A couple years ago was the last time.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
Try it again today.
baggy_trough 1 days ago [-]
Create an account then? Not sure why that's an issue.
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1 days ago [-]
You can't make new accounts on twitter. You can only use existing apple or google accounts.
baggy_trough 1 days ago [-]
I think you can, if you install their app.
aboardRat4 24 hours ago [-]
I don't have a smartphone.
baggy_trough 17 hours ago [-]
Then use one of the other options. It's not really that difficult.
andrewmutz 2 days ago [-]
Anyone know the specifics of how this works under the hood? I assumed the people over at Twitter/X would aggressively block systems like this from working. Are they doing something creative to get around that?
dawnerd 23 hours ago [-]
Burner accounts are dirt, dirt cheap. I have several hundred I rotate out. I’m afraid to mention the library I’m using in case it’s not in their cross hairs, but it makes scraping trivial. At least at the scale I’m scraping I don’t even need a proxy. My residential up is enough to keep the blocks away.
Only had a handful of accounts banned.
swyx 1 days ago [-]
sad that i come here for technical information and yours is the first lonely comment asking about how this works
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
On most of these sites you can just copy the requests the browser makes. There's a walls and ladders game going on, but all the easy to implement walls aren't very high so most sites don't bother building the tallest one possible.
You can start by making a burner account and viewing some pages in a browser and watching the developer network tab. Either you'll see some dynamic JSON request that fetches the main page content, or it'll be in the initial page request. In either case you can copy that request and parse it. If it's in the initial page then it's in HTML so parse it with BeautifulSoup or similar. A minority of sites are using TLS fingerprinting, so try curl-impersonate if plain curl doesn't work.
At least in Firefox I suggest right click "copy as cURL [command]" and then delete parts of the command to see what's actually needed to get the data, or copy the whole exact thing if you're worried about getting fingerprinted based on the parts you deleted.
There's certainly some kind of auth cookie or token. How long does it last? Maybe 15 minutes, an hour, a day, forever? If it's not forever there's a way to refresh it so look through the network requests again, or maybe the network requests when you log in.
If you get rate limited it's probably by IP address and you can try a few things. Rebooting your router to change IP? If you have IPv6 you can change your address arbitrarily within a /64 and if the site is really dumb it will consider that a new IP, but most know about that. If your ISP gives you a /48 or /56 you can change subnet. You can try running on cloudflare workers or Amazon lambda, which have big IP pools that continually churn. Some sites that use cloudflare may exempt all of cloudflare from rate limiting and you may greatly benefit from running on a cloudflare worker. You can try a mobile connection that may use CGNAT, forcing the site to choose between unblocking you or blocking your carrier. If all else fails, residential proxy access is either very cheap or very expensive to buy, depending on how much data you need to move.
In the end you just need to try it and see.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
No, and nitter the software still works too. Apparently the only barrier he could create was a cease and desist letter.
What is the uid parameter for? It looks to me it's ignored.
f0e4c2f7 1 days ago [-]
Having the same issue. I think they might have turned it off. Was looking forward to using this.
1 days ago [-]
1vuio0pswjnm7 1 days ago [-]
uid optional
Narretz 19 hours ago [-]
Gonna be interesting for how long it stays available like this. It's a scraper's dream.
jwilk 2 days ago [-]
The latter URL looks wrong.
SoKamil 2 days ago [-]
It would be nice if URL schema was compatibile with X. In case of Nitter, I could’ve just replaced x.com with xcancel.com with a web extension and URL still works.
Melatonic 1 days ago [-]
Was doing something similar. But couldn't this still be done with just a slightly more advanced replacement ?
john_strinlai 2 days ago [-]
it's brave to look at other companies receiving cease and desist notices and treat it as a market opening
Looks fine, they don't care about the notices i guess
SXX 2 days ago [-]
.com domain zone is managed by Verysign US company. They will just C&D them.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
It's a step up. Texas took down a Dutch porn site that way, but it was a Texas court order, not a random company sending C&D.
2 days ago [-]
pibaker 1 days ago [-]
"Check our Wikipedia page for our latest domain. Next stop the Central African Republic!"
2 days ago [-]
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
C&D has zero legal weight. They're just relying on developers being conflict-averse. At my local hacker space, at least five members are in some kinds of protracted legal battles (five different ones)
I guess my brain has been cooked by internet libertarianism but what's the basis of a C&D for proxying a website?
Is the legal basis just copyright of the contents?
xmprt 2 days ago [-]
Bigger "guns" diplomacy. They don't need any legal basis for a C&D. Just depends on whether you have enough money to fight it in court.
john_strinlai 2 days ago [-]
i dont know the legal basis used, or the validity. i just know that i wouldnt want to have to spend the time or money fighting twitter over it
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
You don't have to fight a C&D, you can ignore it. But they may sue you and you have to fight that. But they can also sue you without a C&D or even after you comply with one. The C&D itself has no effect, but it's the equivalent of a gangster pointing at his own eyeballs and then yours, "I'm watching you."
john_strinlai 14 hours ago [-]
you've replied here several times, i understand your position on C&Ds.
a C&D is reasonably understood as an intent to sue if you continue whatever they want you to cease.
my comment can be read as "i just know that i wouldnt want to have to spend the time or money fighting twitter over it (where "it" = ignoring their C&D and being sued)"
cindyllm 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
paxys 2 days ago [-]
Well yeah the copyright violation is pretty clear cut here.
itintheory 2 days ago [-]
My understanding is that copyright of what's posted is retained by the poster. The Nitter C&D was around a ToS violation for scraping.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Violating ToS is legal, but so is sending a C&D for anything you like
celsoazevedo 2 days ago [-]
Politics aside, Twitter/X has become a bad place to share information on and to link to. It's a bad option from a technical point of view.
We can't read a multi-part tweet (or follow-ups from the author) or check the latest updates from an official account without an account, which requires a mobile phone number and sometimes extra verifications. A digital "town square" can't require an account and a phone number to read what's said there.
Same with Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Linkdin, etc.
seahorseemoji 2 days ago [-]
I wish I understood why the majority of the AI discussions happen on Twitter/X.
nlitened 1 days ago [-]
Network effect. Most people worth discussing with are already there, so more people join the discussion there, and so on.
chii 24 hours ago [-]
but it's a really shallow form of discussion, as most tweets are the equivalent of short-form videos of tiktoks.
nlitened 24 hours ago [-]
I think Pareto principle applies here: most discussions will be shallow, only occasionally diving deep — and Twitter acknowledges that reality, and builds around it.
hparadiz 23 hours ago [-]
The real problem is that places like HN and Reddit allow downvotes / reports to drown people out. Someone on Twitter will post on their page. They control it. It can be slop. It can be low quality. It can be their random thoughts but all that is irrelevant while you slowly build up your audience and the stuff you wanna work on. This generally takes time and is something that grows organically. Meanwhile on HN I will regularly see posts "flagged" where the account didn't actually say anything bad or against the rules. It just goes against the group think and it doesn't even take that much. It can be 1 or 2 people flagging your post and then suddenly it's hidden. This simply does not happen on Twitter.
So eventually people stop posting. I stopped posting on Reddit entirely for example even though I had dozens of very highly upvoted technical posts mainly because I would regularly see highly inaccurate information get upvoted while the real accurate information is downvoted.
HN has the same problem with Elon Musk overall and SpaceX / Twitter.
On Twitter there is a highly active community of space enthusiasts. Absolutely none of them would post slop like "Elon is not an engineer" but on HN that is what passes for discourse.
I mean at least they tell on themselves but I would prefer a technical forum have actually smart people in it. Not just larpers.
I just can't take this discourse seriously.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
Substack is about posting on your page. Twitter is about posting on other people's pages in the reply section.
esseph 13 hours ago [-]
> On Twitter there is a highly active community of space enthusiasts. Absolutely none of them would post slop like "Elon is not an engineer"
You live in an algo bubble!
TONS of intelligent people with backgrounds in space, defense and technology say it all the time on Twitter.
hparadiz 12 hours ago [-]
And all of them are wrong.
ChrisRR 22 hours ago [-]
I don't think anything on twitter can really be called a discussion. The UI is designed for shouting into the void, anything else is an afterthought
itomato 1 days ago [-]
Tells me how valuable they actually are.
17 hours ago [-]
redox99 1 days ago [-]
Because obviously everyone who participates in a discussion has an account, so they don't feel this annoyance other than maybe when sharing a link to someone else.
jesse_dot_id 1 days ago [-]
A lot of crypto bro grifter crossover in AI.
anigbrowl 1 days ago [-]
Read Social and Economic Networks by Michael O Jackson.
moomoo11 1 days ago [-]
why not?
anigbrowl 1 days ago [-]
Don't be obtuse. the reasons why not were spelled out in the GP.
moomoo11 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
preg_match 1 days ago [-]
Inertia. Twitter has basically no value, it's just a bad app and bad website. It was never actually "good" for information communication, but it was tolerable.
When it comes down to 99% of these "why are people using sucky thing?" questions, the answer is inertia. Never confuse popularity for quality, they're completely orthogonal.
frabia 20 hours ago [-]
I recently tried the X API to fetch the latest tweets about a given topic, and I spent ~1$ in one go just to retrieve them and some additional info about the users. This is ridiculously expensive.
So I can only be happy that such service exists (though if there was a better support for an API would be 10x better)
Hmm, on the one hand Elon begs for new users with animated ads on the x.com front page, on the other hand one of his (likely) alt accounts claims that "Every $1 [of advertising on X] spent delivered an average return of $5.42":
I am kind of addicted to studying propaganda and reading about baseball stadiums on the moon to drive up the SpaceX stock price. For this I need the Twitter gateways.
newsomix9xl 2 days ago [-]
I ignored Twitter before Musk bought it and oddly I still have no problem ignoring it.
It doesn't even have good cat pictures.
baggachipz 2 days ago [-]
I built dailycat.app and it has good cat pictures!
abraham 2 days ago [-]
Yay for daily cat apps! I run daily.cat
drop_star 2 days ago [-]
you guys are doing the important work. Keep it up!
RIMR 2 days ago [-]
Literally every time I decide to stop ignoring X, I log in and am greeted with overt racism and religious hatred. Always a good reminder to just ignore that cesspit.
I guess other people have more tolerance than I do for the constant stream of hatred that floats to the top of the algorithm like scum over there.
newsomix9xl 2 days ago [-]
Totes. I searched for cat pics and within a few results I was being given racially charged fights.
qwertox 18 hours ago [-]
Would there be a way to turn a user's account into an RSS feed? i mean the accounts of other users, not the own, personalized feed.
futhey 1 days ago [-]
Not sure how this is even possible but the trending box for Taiwan just shows the Thailand trending searches in a different order... And worldwide trending searches are predominantly... in Greek?
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
That's probably where the accounts they use are from.
oriettaxx 2 days ago [-]
https://www.autistici.org offer great services with very strong effort to protect privacy, for more then 20 years, now... and all is done by volunteers.
Very proud of their work, and kudos for affecting how the world is handling information and their will to do good
unethical_ban 1 days ago [-]
Now designated a terror organization by the current US administration.
uygiugiu 19 hours ago [-]
Antifa terrorists use autistici as their IT department
oriettaxx 1 days ago [-]
yes, I've answered in the wrong post, sorry
121kahG 2 days ago [-]
The site is very fast even though it should be overloaded now. Registered in Hong Kong (good), handled by Cloudflare and claims to be in California:
Repo is fake, only a README and a LICENSE. I guess we'll take what we can get now.
gruez 1 days ago [-]
>handled by Cloudflare and claims to be in California
Where? are you just pulling cloudflare's ip info?
jacobgorm 1 days ago [-]
I've been on Mastodon for a few years, and though it has less drama than Twitter/X, it does seem to have reached critical mass of users and does cover most of my needs for random gossip. I am surprised that that nobody has mentioned it here.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Because it's not a real platform, it's a series of tiny microplatforms
daedrdev 2 days ago [-]
Listen I know this comment is off topic, flag this if you want but I think it’s an important discussion
Speaking of twitter, are there any posts here about the ycombinator discourse?
Given a high level member of ycombinator blocked the chairman of the FTC after an argument over immigration, I foresee issues in the future.
MiscCompFacts 2 days ago [-]
Is there a link to this argument?
iAMkenough 2 days ago [-]
I don’t think it’s an issue. Their site, their rules.
johannes1234321 2 days ago [-]
And compared to Twitter or others discussed here no government agency or similar uses Hacker News as their primary channel for news updates. However Twitter, Instagram and auch are used for such official purpose from different agencies worldwide. Thus access for the respective citizens is relevant.
alexthedigger 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
ee334y5rthsrth 23 hours ago [-]
My account has been suspended. The administrators determined that I used hate speech against a plant called Canadian goldenrod.
ewwefwef 22 hours ago [-]
probably trouble with translation to other language
trompetenaccoun 1 days ago [-]
The X account of the person running this has been suspended.
Doing it and making money from it was always going to end in a ban.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
It's legal though. See SerpAPI for precedent. Google was really bummed about losing that one.
It's also legal for X to pressure you in many ways to stop doing a legal thing, to take technical measures to prevent you from doing it, and to ban your account on X.
seebeegeebee 2 days ago [-]
We need this for Linkdin too!
add-sub-mul-div 2 days ago [-]
Sometimes a walled garden can be a good thing, if it functions as a quarantine.
tantalor 2 days ago [-]
More like a tall fence around a superfund site.
uygiugiu 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
pfraze 1 days ago [-]
New account, 4 comments, one includes “Musk’s takeover of Twitter was a net win for free speech”
JuniperMesos 21 hours ago [-]
Musk's takeover of Twitter was in fact a net win for free speech, in large part because it encouraged large numbers of people to actually abandon the platform and post on somewhat-more-censorship-resistent platforms instead, which those people would not have done if the previous management of Twitter had continued to operate it.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
Not enough though. Whats 20% times +10 free speech points, plus 80% times -50?
seebeegeebee 1 days ago [-]
Oh, is this supposed to be a liberal echo-chamber?
Are you mad other users have their own opinions?
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
New account, -2 karma, mostly posts about how evil immigrants are
1 days ago [-]
fuzzfactor 1 days ago [-]
Bless his heart, babies don't know any better.
seebeegeebee 1 days ago [-]
Yes, burn the witch!!!
How dare someone disagree with our MSM opinions!
fuzzfactor 17 hours ago [-]
That's quite an MSM opinion you've got there.
I would say don't burn anything, especially not an innocent neophyte without an ounce of maturity who doesn't know right from wrong yet.
I'm certainly not going to downvote them either, and surely not silently, that would be kind of chickenshit. Plus it's like their opinion, man.
OTOH who needs a "witch hunt" when it's self-described.
When you think about it lots of people around here don't even need to hunt for that missing sock any more ;)
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
You should downvote nonsense comments. That's how moderation works here.
Jtarii 2 days ago [-]
The search is somehow faster than twitter's own search.
bsimpson 1 days ago [-]
Are there any Instagram equivalents that don't suck?
People love to virtue signal by linking to Twitter proxies, but Instagram is still a walled garden that all sorts of useful information (event details, restaurant menus, etc.) is locked inside. I occasionally have luck with whatever the top Google results are, but they're all encrusted with dodgy ads.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
It's impossible to build a foobar equivalent unless it's literally foobar, because the value of foobar isn't the software, but the fact that other people post stuff there. There's no point having a restaurant menu platform unless you have restaurant menus on it. Have you considered going around your city and taking pictures of restaurant menus, then attaching them to a map?
Marsymars 1 days ago [-]
Depends if you want an alternate front-end and you can self-host, or you're looking for a third party.
Something to use with a normal web browser that requires no login would be nice. Like Libreddit or Nitter.
Marsymars 16 hours ago [-]
Well the description for Kittygram is: "Kittygram is an anonymous, privacy-friendly, lightweight, and open-source Instagram frontend inspired by Nitter."
Melatonic 15 hours ago [-]
I don't think it works anymore. Tried various instances out there. Have you used it or found a working one ?
bsimpson 1 days ago [-]
I've never had an Instagram account, and I'm trying to keep it that way.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Most of these front ends need to be stocked with login cookies, that's how they bypass the login wall. If you want to self host a bypass you need to create at least one dummy account on that service.
grishka 1 days ago [-]
I've had people send me reels as links to ddinstagram.com and kkinstagram.com, which at least in Telegram, get transformed into a video that can be played inline from the link preview and downloaded.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
These "embed fixers" aren't hated by platforms nearly as much as alternative front-ends are.
grishka 11 hours ago [-]
Yes but they do let you view the content without an account, so that does partially answer the question in the comment I was replying to.
kevinprk 16 hours ago [-]
It is very annoying and both sad the Twitter is somewhat against the user and going towards a closed manner.
charles_f 2 days ago [-]
To this day I am still calling the website Twitter and access it every single time typing twitter.com. That rename was so dumb. So, I really love the name
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
The number of people who do this is the number of reasons Elon can give to the trademark judge that he is actually using the trademark Twitter and it shouldn't be invalidated for non-use.
Melatonic 1 days ago [-]
Anybody find a good way to use a regex redirect to this that consistently works ?
vlod 2 days ago [-]
How does this work, does it use the twitter api?
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Probably just fetches the page with a login cookie, like Nitter.
ThouYS 2 days ago [-]
Thanks Peter! Now do the same for the 'gram!
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Why don't you do it?
skeledrew 2 days ago [-]
Prepping for another C&D I see. The only way something like this can survive is through Tor or similar, fully anonymous and decentralized.
jjordan 2 days ago [-]
What ever happened to IPFS? Wasn't it built for just this kind of thing? I remember trying it years ago and it was absolutely unusable, but was kinda hoping it had made a turnaround by now.
skeledrew 2 days ago [-]
IPFS might be in trouble. Haven't really followed the tech so I have no idea how much of an effect there will be with Shipyard dropping it, but from the number of things I see named in their exit post I'd guess the blast radius is sizable.
You've been told for years not to use X, (twitter is now clearly the pre Musk era), but Elon knows you crave his dopamine so he can keep imposing harsher conditions.
nottorp 20 hours ago [-]
Again, what's the point?
If a site wants your eyeballs it should allow you access without jumping through hoops.
fearmerchant 17 hours ago [-]
I don't understand the issue. Am I the only person with a fake account, using a throw away email and fake information? It doesn't have to be this complicated. It's the internet. You can lie.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
You have to either run their garbage app, have their tracking cookies in your browser, use a Firefox container or log in every time in incognito mode. None of it is convenient.
thallavajhula 1 days ago [-]
not going to be long before they cut access to this app.
1 days ago [-]
ee334y5rthsrth 23 hours ago [-]
Twitter does not have freedom of speech.
bigbadfeline 2 days ago [-]
whackamole is the only way for now, unfortunately.
twilo 2 days ago [-]
What is Twitter?
nancyminusone 2 days ago [-]
the enduring result of the stupidest brand name change ever
2 days ago [-]
kuuuzya 1 days ago [-]
X. It's not twitter anymore
KellyCriterion 23 hours ago [-]
This burndown of the Brand Twitter by renaming it to X will make it to digital marketing textbooks for Universities across the world, I promise:
The word Twitter itself became a mega/global brand throughout the years, and Musk detroyed it completely. The verb "to tweet" made it also into dictionaries around the world. You could speak the name in more or less every language, and the bird was widely known just by its iconic styling.
(also dont forget the fail whale! :-)
telmo 1 days ago [-]
Free speech right? We can call it whatever we want.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
But you shouldn't, because it helps Elon argue that his old trademark is not abandoned.
m4ck_ 20 hours ago [-]
As a compromise, I call it xitter. The main benefit is apparently in some languages x has a "sh" sound so really i'm just calling it exactly what it is (and always has been.)
scrollop 23 hours ago [-]
"Gulf of America"?
Nope.
benjaminclauss 2 days ago [-]
It's disappointing that this is even necessary given earlier promises of opening up the Twitter algorithm.
The algorithm is free, it's the data that matters.
shevy-java 18 hours ago [-]
To be fair: after a certain billionaire who keeps on raising his right arm and talks about enslaving mankind took over, I lost all interest in twitter. I also think the platform is dead. What we need is a de-centralised system that also works.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
We don't need a twitter replacement for any purpose other than pointless dopamine, and we already have tiktok for that. What we actually need is a good discussion about what we actually need, which is not a carbon copy of yestertwodecade's platform.
amazingamazing 1 days ago [-]
Why are people so obsessed about twitter
uygiugiu 19 hours ago [-]
it doesn't allow mob censorship unlike HN and Reddit. You can't downvote or hide opposing opinions
inigyou 9 hours ago [-]
Instead, Elon decides which opinions are hidden
wesleywt 19 hours ago [-]
There is nothing of use to be viewed over there.
ck2 2 days ago [-]
paypal should have never ever given back Musk the x domain
and ICANN should have nuked it long ago
but all that aside, wtf is anyone still on it
Musk is a mass murderer
apparently the nazis would still be in power today if they just had a web service people were too freaking lazy and addicted to ever quit
and Tesla "FSD" is still trying to murder passengers a decade later but that's also definitely a choice
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
I mean, that basically is how the Nazis had power
kijashdkujdfhas 2 days ago [-]
Based on the downvotes, there's a lot of folks who just can't stand to be reminded who and what they're associating with by continuing to use Twitter.
Folks, you don't have to give the nazi bar your business. You will live without Twitter.
uygiugiu 1 days ago [-]
'everyone who disagrees with me is a nazi'
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
When what they said is that Nazis are bad... literally yes? Literally everyone who disagrees with "Nazis are bad" is literally a nazi.
iAMkenough 2 days ago [-]
I think you’re talking to bots. Anything that doesn’t align with Trump/Elon’s perceived worldview gets downvoted here.
kijashdkujdfhas 2 days ago [-]
Don't care. The occasional human who might see the comment still makes it worth it. Even if they don't change their behavior, they've been reminded that they are hanging out at the nazi bar.
It's important to remind people of what they're doing, when they're doing something like that.
bigstrat2003 1 days ago [-]
No, he's downvoted because he's saying objectively false things like "Musk is a mass murderer", and subjective but unproductive things like "he's a Nazi". You can dislike Elon Musk and make that point in a mature way that actually leads to a good discussion. People do that all the time and don't get flak for it. This poster has chosen to be incendiary, and people dislike flamebait so it got downvoted.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
DOGE killing a few million people is no secret.
kijashdkujdfhas 1 days ago [-]
Yeah we get it, you like to hang out at the nazi bar.
iAMkenough 12 hours ago [-]
My point is still valid. The richest man in the world cares so much about public perception that he pays to influence public discussions and elections.
He is petty enough to buy bots to downvote valid criticisms and interject AI-generated logical fallacies to derail discussion attempts.
jocelyner 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
marsx-dev 23 hours ago [-]
[dead]
LightBug1 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
andunie 19 hours ago [-]
Isn't it called X for years now?
randyrand 1 days ago [-]
Is this referring to the new Twitter company that recently launched (https://twitter.now)?
If not, then this is just going to lead to confusion.
urbandw311er 1 days ago [-]
I don’t think there will be any confusion. Clearly this is not referring to this random new Twitter thing you’ve linked to that most people have never heard of, it is referring to Twitter the previously global piece of software with hundreds of millions of former users.
randyrand 1 days ago [-]
Well, I was confused. New Twitter got big coverage today [1] and then more Twitter related news on HN today too.
there is no chance that people would assume this is about a startup that's about to get nuked by copyright cease and desists
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
First off I think you mean trademark, secondly you're allowed to just ignore a C&D, thirdly your trademark is invalid if you don't use it so Elon might not actually have a trademark on Twitter any more
orsorna 1 days ago [-]
Who in their right mind would take that site seriously?
nozzlegear 1 days ago [-]
Are you talking about Twitter or X?
orsorna 19 hours ago [-]
Whatever twitter.now is which is neither.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
It's Twitter. It legally owns the trademark "Twitter", the bird logo and the color blue. Musk really screwed up that one huh? Under UDRP rules it'll be pretty hard for them to seize their rightful domain name twitter.com, but maybe they'll manage.
orsorna 2 hours ago [-]
I guess I couldn't believe it. The LLM copy on that homepage is unbearable and amateurish.
randyrand 8 hours ago [-]
Their USPTO is still pending, so we'll see. But yes legally they have good grounds to continue DBA as Twitter.
freakynit 21 hours ago [-]
Honest question: Why don't we have a UN-operated global social media that is used by all officials worldwide, instead of them using privately owned social media?
throwfaraway135 21 hours ago [-]
Because whatever you think of how Musk is running Twitter it's still the most pro freedom of speech platform out there. You can hear ideas(propaganda) from almost all major players, while a UN-operated global social media would be even more censored than reddit.
armchairhacker 21 hours ago [-]
We already have the internet, anyone can make a site to aggregate all announcements from major officials.
For a more general social media, you’d have to get Russia, China, various European nations, and the US to agree on something.
freakynit 15 hours ago [-]
why tf downvotes? What is wrong in asking an honest question?
But I find it ridiculous that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable without being logged in (and in some cases requiring an app instead of the site). Even Bluesky has this problem!
Sometimes this information is really important! And I even if I did have an account I may not have access to log in on every device (or even want to).
It’s absurd that social media can become this like critical communications platform for severe weather alerts or business hours or anything but the sites hosting it are completely hostile to allowing you to see it.
Sites like this are a bandaid on a gangrenous foot. Thanks for allowing me to see links from twitter but it isn’t a sustainable solution clearly.
It's a missed opportunity for the digital soverignty the EU says it so badly needs. The code for a government backed WhatsApp competitor is there, in multiple instances even. Launch a WhatsApp clone and put all governement communication through it so everyone has to have it installed, and you have an instant EU-wide userbase. From there, people will naturally start to use it between themselves.
It's for the best.
(how is whatsapp paid for again?)
WhatsApp is one company so if they want to enable sending images they can just do it, and they don't have to coordinate with anyone else. MMS was a failure because you couldn't be sure if your recipient would actually get it, or if your carrier would actually let you send it.
it's like when they wanna get rid of Visa/MC by switching to EU apps, which will require Google/Apple verification, what an improvement...
Don't know what EU apps are you talking about, but yes, mobile apps need Google services. Web interfaces don't.
Like Cell Broadcast just duplicates the SMS on carrier level?
Hardly a complete solution, it devolved into a Google power grab, in my opinion.
For once I half agree with apple when they say its less secure, as apple-to-google comms are not E2EE like they are for google-to-google. While that is fixable with a hack its still a hack, not part of the protocol.
I too am constantly frustrated that official communications from governments happen on Twitter or Facebook.
- the dangers of fascism are very real
- technological choices won't save you from the snatch squads, although grassroots use of tech by communities can help
- fascism is extensively promoted by some corporations and their owners
- a non-captured government that is willing to push back is much better than relying on corporations
- anything headquartered in America is potentially subject to arbitrary sanctions against non-US users
- just because we don't like the solution doesn't mean the problem isn't real (see age verification debate)
I think you have completely misjudged how much the majority of people would not want to use an EU-controlled chat app.
Anyone remembering the French minitel?
But in either case we do have the ability to make a new system every 10 years.
In this, I trust the government way less than either the open source movement or the actual Silicon Valley. Both of the latter are much better at iterating of their designs when a new idea comes along.
I grant you 2014 is 12 years ago now and you could plausibly argue it was their doing to grow network effects but I'm pretty sure WA had that infrastructure already in place - Acton, Koum et al already did the ground work to get carriers to... whatever it is
Zuckerberg stole it like he steals everything
Whether that's 'too much' depends on your view of it
I'm tired of people calling them 'savvy acquisitions'. Not when Zuck's on record as saying 'Instagram can hurt us'
I've tried to create pseudoanonymous accounts on both Bluesky and Twitter and then had them be instantly banned before I ever used them. Not even doing anything real privacy like TOR or a VPN, just trying to create an account without revealing my personal phone number.
Ironically, their attempts to crack down on bots means real people like me can't access the sites, while the scammers, propagandists and shills will put in the work to register accounts.
Did you use a voip number (e.g., Google Voice/Twilio/etc.) instead? Or somehow no number at all? Or a secondary (real) phone number, and Twitter somehow determined it wasn't your primary personal phone number?
Not pushing back against what you said, just trying to understand what factually happened.
https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/2762
But I didn't try to create an account recently, maybe they went back to requiring phone numbers.
Walmart recently deleted my phone number from my account for vague reasons but most likely because another account had the same number. That other account is my wife and the number is our VoIP line. I have no desire to interact with walmart through my cell phone so I didn't give it to them. So I used a google voice number, which is not my number, to get back in. Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company and autopopulated the field. Jokes on me!
Holy moly, don't you have any law at all to protect people's privacy ?
Ironically AI could fix this when trivial spam detection inference becomes cheap enough to throw away on every upload.
I think Bluesky didn't require a phone number to sign up, just an email. Maybe I'm misremembering though and it forced a phone number so I had to provide a fake one or a voip one.
Which is why OpenAI formed a partnership with reddit, in exchange for access to OpenAI's models, OpenAI gets access to reddit's data, and access to reddits live feed.
The reason X and Reddit started forcing accounts is to prevent or add barrier for web scraping, and forcing companies to pay for access to the data.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-now-needs-users-s...
I've always loathed LinkedIn due to their poor security and their data mining practices, starting from day 1. I haven't used LinkedIn in over 10 years and only used it briefly to connect with old colleagues. I never had a problem getting work without it. Due to AI, scammers, and infiltration by countries like North Korea, LinkedIn seems to be the only other source outside of "networking" to get hired these days though, unfortunately.
At this point nothing would make me happier than to see Meta, X, LinkedIn, and their friends collapse. They are a cancer and only amplify the enshittification of everything.
If there is one thing I miss on the internet is indeed stackoverlow jobs. Crazy that it didn't work out.
LinkedIn is the Facebook of people who don't want to be on Facebook but want to post Facebook kind of stuff.
But government information should definitely be first source on their site with federation elsewhere.
In a broader sense, I believe that every person who publishes on the internet should have a standard way to keep their profile data (accounts, posts, etc.) in a secure, user-owned vault that is independent of any company or institution and platforms should have to pull data from that place (in a restricted, user-controlled way) instead of from their own servers. Platforms should be exchangeable, profiles should be entirely user-owned. But of course, this is just a dream and hard to realise technically and economically (incentive-wise) with our current systems. Decentralised protocols are a step in this direction, but unfortunately still too technical/complicated for most people to really "own" or host their data themselves.
> As the next step of maturing governance of the PLC identity system, Bluesky Social PBC is supporting the creation of an independent organization to operate the directory.
If the US government sanctions you, your PLC will get deleted. Only the US government will have this power.
We went through a hurricane in 2022 and that was an eye opener too. Most "land lines" are no longer a line to anywhere it's just a phone connected to the Internet. Anyone with that type phone had no service after 24 hours without power. My 85 uncle still (even now) had an actual land line and it worked no issues.
After the hurricane no citizen had any way to communicate. Cell towers failed when generators ran out of fuel. No fuel because gas stations couldn't pump gas without power.
My dad passed away just a year earlier he had been on an oxygen generator that needed power 24/7. I don't think he would have survived. I'm not sure if I could even have reached 911.
For awareness radio is the best solution but even emergency services radio stations are being decommissioned here in Canada in favour of Internet services.
Of course, neither will happen, so there's that.
Sadly, I don't think that makes sense. Switches have a lot more to do a lot faster when it comes to the internet as compared to a phone. 100 years ago, calls were completed by a person physically moving one or more wires from one plug to another.
Better to have an emergency system that will always work - and maybe the only way to keep an emergency system maintained is to use it during non-emergencies. Hard phone lines and radio.
The actual problem people have with VoIP landlines is that they require power at the customer end. A traditional analog POTS line supplies power from the central office so it doesn't need any from the customer, unless they want to use a cordless phone, which takes more power than the central office provides. A fiber VoIP line requires power at both ends no matter what.
Note the original phones actually didn't have "central battery" as they call it. Instead each phone had its own battery, designed for about 6 months of usage, and every 6 months the phone company sent a wagon around to replace everyone's phone batteries.
Bluesky is totally accessible for me without an account. What do you see ?
It isn’t as egregious as other sites but it’s still restrictive.
The reason these sites require login is because they also want to control the resulting conversations, whether for moderation (generous) or selling your data (more likely).
Announcements/political campaigning doesn't require feedback in the same way so no reason for them to use X, FB or anything else.
Seeing the state of most conversations on X or FB, I'm quite happy with limiting the general public's ability to broadcast to the world.
Many companies also rely on socials as their only effective means of customer service. If you have a problem or want to provide feedback but you don't use social media then you are SOL.
But you won't. And they know you won't. Not even small claims.
You can still use https://old.reddit.com with no login. It's cleaner and snappier.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
See HN classics of "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame" and "you can replicate dropbox with webdav"; at some point you have to stop thinking that it's everyone else who is wrong and work out what they want which you're missing, which is convenience.
Also, replies and retweets.
Nostr.
> we should not be prohibiting read-only scroll
Seems Musk agreed Twitter shouldn't require an account just to view the site. Wonder why the change of mind.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=50m47s
[0] https://elonmusk.today
Musk stating that read-only scroll should be allowed seems very sensible (I think we all agree on that). But he (or someone he delegated to) clearly changed their mind. Intrigued to know why. Occam's razor would probably suggest that allowing scrapers to host twitter posts elsewhere costs them ad revenue, so they make it difficult.
Grok 4.0, before it deteriorated, had a phase when it was good at writing tweets. The feature was used by Musk sycophants but it becomes boring soon.
Since Grok is closed now too and Cursor is pivoting to octocnt (GitHub clone), nobody knows where things are heading.
It is only clear with hindsight, but now everyone knows that tweets are literally detrimental for LLM style AI for whatever reason. Personally I think it's because tweets are responses without CoT or prompts, or could be also because all its meat is in the shape incompatible with en-US culture, even when it's in English, though all that matters is it's actively useless.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/12/elon-musk-admits-he-only-b...
You know, LLM hallucination is a phenomenon where the AI would generate syntactically bulletproof chunks of text that are not grounded in reality. Lots of efforts by frontier LLM labs had been made in past few years to solve this by enabling AIs to refute premises in the prompt.
Ordinary people still need to be instructed to google stuffs. They don't go to a niche de facto non-American social media to be disappointed by its notoriously bad search to then conclude its notoriously dumb AI can be abused as a makeshift search tool. People are simply unable.
Twitter has been doing so much things backwards lately. That's reminiscent of how hallucination hurts whatever you do with AIs.
Remember when you were a kid, your teacher probably told you "At an exam, leave no question unanswered, even if you don't know what to write. Nobody is penalised for wrong answers, but even total gibberish might sometimes add a half-point to your score".
To the extent that an LLM generates something factual or realistic, it's doing so either accidentally, or because of the various band-aids that the grandparent post describes which will never fully solve the problem.
That’s putting it quite charitably, IMO.
> but rational on product decisions
Hard disagree. You only need to look to his entire tenure at DOGE for literally hundreds (thousands?) of counterexamples.
Or, if you don’t count that work as “product decisions,” there are other highly questionable product decisions that he is responsible for: the rear doors on the Model X; the lack of instruments/gauges of any kind in front of the driver on the Model 3 and Y; the lack of proper safety sensors/protection for the hood of the Cybertruck, leading to mangled fingers; that stupid yoke steering wheel; and the entirety of Neuralink (just to name a handful).
Now, on the flipside, the yoke also exists in the Tesla Model S Plaid, which has a traditional manual rack. In here it is the worst god-damned thing to ever curse a vehicle. The width is roughly the diameter of a school bus steering wheel and going hand over hand with it is annoying at best and the whole experience feels like utter garbage.
Yes, as I said, bad product decisions.
The US House of Representatives posts their live hearings exclusively on YouTube. This is information that should be ungated and freely available, yet is a pain to acquire or archive because YouTube absolutely does not want you getting to the raw video.
I don't understand how this is legal, honestly.
Nobody should be relying on any social media company to share information widely, and citizens shouldn't be required to sign up for Facebook, X, or anything, to get that information.
So it's just bad behavior requiring reduction of the openness. Like with any open things when people can't behave anymore :(
Its all part of the plan: the Digital Control Grid.
Just wait till the Genius Act kicks in with Stable Coins. Programmable money is coming.
To some decision-makers their idea of "disruption" is limited to enshittification more than anything else.
You say like this like it doesn't literally take like 10 seconds to make an account to see it.
Only had a handful of accounts banned.
You can start by making a burner account and viewing some pages in a browser and watching the developer network tab. Either you'll see some dynamic JSON request that fetches the main page content, or it'll be in the initial page request. In either case you can copy that request and parse it. If it's in the initial page then it's in HTML so parse it with BeautifulSoup or similar. A minority of sites are using TLS fingerprinting, so try curl-impersonate if plain curl doesn't work.
At least in Firefox I suggest right click "copy as cURL [command]" and then delete parts of the command to see what's actually needed to get the data, or copy the whole exact thing if you're worried about getting fingerprinted based on the parts you deleted.
There's certainly some kind of auth cookie or token. How long does it last? Maybe 15 minutes, an hour, a day, forever? If it's not forever there's a way to refresh it so look through the network requests again, or maybe the network requests when you log in.
If you get rate limited it's probably by IP address and you can try a few things. Rebooting your router to change IP? If you have IPv6 you can change your address arbitrarily within a /64 and if the site is really dumb it will consider that a new IP, but most know about that. If your ISP gives you a /48 or /56 you can change subnet. You can try running on cloudflare workers or Amazon lambda, which have big IP pools that continually churn. Some sites that use cloudflare may exempt all of cloudflare from rate limiting and you may greatly benefit from running on a cloudflare worker. You can try a mobile connection that may use CGNAT, forcing the site to choose between unblocking you or blocking your carrier. If all else fails, residential proxy access is either very cheap or very expensive to buy, depending on how much data you need to move.
In the end you just need to try it and see.
https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/user/[username]
https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/user/[username]&uid=[id...
Beware the website is jam-packed with ads and tracking
https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/tweets/[username]?uid=[...
https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/search/tweets?q=[query]
Better than Nitter search IMHO, works more like original public Twitter API
These may or may not work
https://twitterwebviewer.com/api/trends?country=[capitalised...
https://twitterwebviewer.com/api/trends?country=Worldwide
https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/tweet/[tweetid]
https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/tweet/[tweetid]/replies
according to https://www.whois.com/whois/twitterwebviewer.com
Looks fine, they don't care about the notices i guess
Is the legal basis just copyright of the contents?
a C&D is reasonably understood as an intent to sue if you continue whatever they want you to cease.
my comment can be read as "i just know that i wouldnt want to have to spend the time or money fighting twitter over it (where "it" = ignoring their C&D and being sued)"
We can't read a multi-part tweet (or follow-ups from the author) or check the latest updates from an official account without an account, which requires a mobile phone number and sometimes extra verifications. A digital "town square" can't require an account and a phone number to read what's said there.
Same with Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Linkdin, etc.
So eventually people stop posting. I stopped posting on Reddit entirely for example even though I had dozens of very highly upvoted technical posts mainly because I would regularly see highly inaccurate information get upvoted while the real accurate information is downvoted.
HN has the same problem with Elon Musk overall and SpaceX / Twitter.
On Twitter there is a highly active community of space enthusiasts. Absolutely none of them would post slop like "Elon is not an engineer" but on HN that is what passes for discourse.
I mean at least they tell on themselves but I would prefer a technical forum have actually smart people in it. Not just larpers.
I just can't take this discourse seriously.
You live in an algo bubble!
TONS of intelligent people with backgrounds in space, defense and technology say it all the time on Twitter.
When it comes down to 99% of these "why are people using sucky thing?" questions, the answer is inertia. Never confuse popularity for quality, they're completely orthogonal.
So I can only be happy that such service exists (though if there was a better support for an API would be 10x better)
But it may only takes another X-ed lawyer letter to make it go all away again.
I wonder whether there could be a decentralized (torrent-based?) way that would be robust ?
In the end, the only real solution that would take away the power of the SM Propaganda networks is regulatory Interoperability
https://spectrum.ieee.org/doctorow-interoperability
https://twitterwebviewer.com/?tweet=2092490213121761787
I am kind of addicted to studying propaganda and reading about baseball stadiums on the moon to drive up the SpaceX stock price. For this I need the Twitter gateways.
It doesn't even have good cat pictures.
I guess other people have more tolerance than I do for the constant stream of hatred that floats to the top of the algorithm like scum over there.
Very proud of their work, and kudos for affecting how the world is handling information and their will to do good
https://github.com/peters-lab/twitter-viewer
Repo is fake, only a README and a LICENSE. I guess we'll take what we can get now.
Where? are you just pulling cloudflare's ip info?
Speaking of twitter, are there any posts here about the ycombinator discourse?
Given a high level member of ycombinator blocked the chairman of the FTC after an argument over immigration, I foresee issues in the future.
https://x.com/PeterAndersonE
Doing it and making money from it was always going to end in a ban.
It's also legal for X to pressure you in many ways to stop doing a legal thing, to take technical measures to prevent you from doing it, and to ban your account on X.
Are you mad other users have their own opinions?
How dare someone disagree with our MSM opinions!
I would say don't burn anything, especially not an innocent neophyte without an ounce of maturity who doesn't know right from wrong yet.
I'm certainly not going to downvote them either, and surely not silently, that would be kind of chickenshit. Plus it's like their opinion, man.
OTOH who needs a "witch hunt" when it's self-described.
When you think about it lots of people around here don't even need to hunt for that missing sock any more ;)
People love to virtue signal by linking to Twitter proxies, but Instagram is still a walled garden that all sorts of useful information (event details, restaurant menus, etc.) is locked inside. I occasionally have luck with whatever the top Google results are, but they're all encrusted with dodgy ads.
For the former, I generally look at what LibRedirect has as options: https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
Proxigram seems unmaintained, but kittygram seems to be actively developed: https://codeberg.org/irelephant/kittygram
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421489
- https://ipshipyard.com/blog/2026-the-end-of-ipfs-at-shipyard...
Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283
If a site wants your eyeballs it should allow you access without jumping through hoops.
The word Twitter itself became a mega/global brand throughout the years, and Musk detroyed it completely. The verb "to tweet" made it also into dictionaries around the world. You could speak the name in more or less every language, and the bird was widely known just by its iconic styling.
(also dont forget the fail whale! :-)
Nope.
and ICANN should have nuked it long ago
but all that aside, wtf is anyone still on it
Musk is a mass murderer
apparently the nazis would still be in power today if they just had a web service people were too freaking lazy and addicted to ever quit
and Tesla "FSD" is still trying to murder passengers a decade later but that's also definitely a choice
Folks, you don't have to give the nazi bar your business. You will live without Twitter.
It's important to remind people of what they're doing, when they're doing something like that.
He is petty enough to buy bots to downvote valid criticisms and interject AI-generated logical fallacies to derail discussion attempts.
If not, then this is just going to lead to confusion.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/new-twitter-laun...
For a more general social media, you’d have to get Russia, China, various European nations, and the US to agree on something.