return to table of content

So long and thanks for all the fish

koito17
102 replies
17h13m

On one hand, this is unfortunate since X always directs me to a login page, and Nitter was the only way I could view whatever gets posted nowadays. On the other hand, the cynical side of me is thankful that I have no more desirable means to see the contents of posts on X.

Edit: a similar thing happened with Reddit and Teddit(?). API restrictions effectively killed alternative frontends, so I simply don't look at Reddit posts anymore. I am aware of old.reddit.com, but in the case of Reddit I preferred the alternative frontends not only for no-JS compatibility, but also a (possibly false) sense of privacy

AstroJetson
36 replies
16h40m

Yep, it will be easier to cut the X habit off. I'll miss Nitter, but I'll be happier in the long run.

I was a Reddit Apollo user, and it was easier to wean off of Reddit when I had to use their horrible app or their website. Even using old.reddit has been painful.

jjackson5324
34 replies
16h28m

Interesting because the content I get on X is far, far more valuable than HN + Reddit + Facebook combined.

It’s the only place you can follow subject matter experts and get their real time thoughts.

I think people on HN just don’t know how to use Twitter?

If you want to use it effectively, you have to utilize lists. Curate your own lists or find someone you respect and follow their lists.

If someone is posting things you don’t enjoy then remove them.

Frankly, if X is causing you to be angry/depressed then a big part of that is on you.

superhumanuser
12 replies
16h11m

Why is this reply getting downvoted?

jjackson5324
11 replies
16h0m

I'm guessing

1) HN readers don't like Elon Musk (I don't like him either) so they don't like Twitter

2) I implied HN readers are doing something wrong (as any other human being, they don't like being told that)

3) I (slightly) insulted the intelligence of HN readers by saying they didn't know how to use Twitter and they really don't like that

I've just gotten downvotes and no one's responded with any actual rebuttals so I don't think what I've posted is wrong.

jameshart
6 replies
15h56m

You are missing the fact that, for many of us who used to enjoy Twitter in exactly the way you described, X no longer fills that need, because the subject matter experts whose real-time thoughts we used to follow have left the platform, and all that remains are people whose real-time thoughts we don't generally want to hear.

That may differ from your experience - your real-time expert community might be different than mine.

But for a lot of us who actually used to enjoy Twitter, what you're describing is no longer to be found there.

jjackson5324
5 replies
15h12m

because the subject matter experts whose real-time thoughts we used to follow have left the platform

Do mind naming 10 subject matter experts who've permanently left twitter?

I'm really curious as to which communities used to be vibrant on Twitter and then died after the X switch over.

Yeah, as you stated, my personal experience is that all the communities I follow continue to be active.

travisporter
2 replies
14h41m

Andrej Karpathy - I guess. The tweets i see when i click on it are out of chronological order, maybe there's something new i don't see

jjackson5324
1 replies
11h17m

Nah Andrej is still active on [Twitter](https://i.imgur.com/KEa6dx4.png)

I'm guessing he's less active now because he's back at OpenAI and not on sabbatical anymore.

travisporter
0 replies
35m

Thanks!

jameshart
1 replies
14h6m

Not going to indulge in an 'oh, you like Twitter? Name ten of their albums' kind of question.

My friends left. I left.

jjackson5324
0 replies
11h18m

The entire discussion is based on subject matter experts. I asked you to name a few and you didn't name a single one.

My friends left. I left.

Ok? That has no relevance to our discussion.

shermantanktop
0 replies
14h39m

It’s HN. Everyone here has encountered many true believers who, when confronted with a criticism of their favorite tool, responds “well, you are using it wrong. Change your workflow to match mine, which is superior anyway, and then you’ll see.”

It’s tiresome, and I for one have little patience for someone patronizingly suggesting that I'm being stubborn for refusing to allow them to enlighten me.

Is that what you were doing? Maybe not. But you certainly matched my regex, so to speak.

lvass
0 replies
15h12m

For me it's the abysmal SNR no matter where I look, except if it absolutely needs to be real-time. Even considering just the "content" and ignoring the unfathomable interface that we're left with now.

genevra
0 replies
15h44m

I used to use Twitter and I simply disagree with it being more useful than HN. I suppose it depends on the focus of content you want to learn or read about

dgacmu
0 replies
15h53m

Nah, you're probably wrong about HN users not knowing how to use Twitter. You're assuming the worst - perhaps assume that people have good reasons for avoiding it and ask what those might be?

I have about 5k followers on Twitter and have posted roughly 10k tweets over the last 16 years of having an account there. I'm pretty familiar with how to use it. I've moved to mastodon - the part of Twitter I used to value is a dumpster fire, many of my colleagues have moved, and I don't want to contribute to monetizing hateful garbage. And that includes preferring not to log in, which means threads don't show up any more. So it was nitter or nothing.

belter
12 replies
16h25m

far more valuable than HN + Reddit + Facebook combined

What do you learn from 280 characters at a time?

jjackson5324
8 replies
16h24m

You realize you can tweet a link right?

People also write interesting essays and tweet a screen shot of that.

For ex - https://x.com/lessin/status/1741244547580182953?s=20

(Ignore the contents of the essay, I’m just giving that as an example)

And then there’s the tweetstorm and videos.

I honestly can’t tell if you’re intentionally being dumb to mock me or something. But I’ll give you a genuine reply regardless.

cruano
2 replies
15h47m

"Yeah, the best content is on twitter, you have everything from links to Medium to links to personal websites, sometimes there's even screenshots of them!"

jodrellblank
0 replies
15h12m

You know how Stallman browses the web by emailing a scraper that replies only the text? And he avoids all the Medium flurry of popups and overlays and trackers and cookies and other rubbish?

Seeing a screenshot of the text in Twitter accidentally does that too, and provides a better experience than visiting the site for anyone who doesn't need to customise the text for readability.

jjackson5324
0 replies
15h15m

Yep, it's way better than HN because I can block people like you who just make a dumb sarcastic, mocking comment when they can't come up with a counter-argument!

paulgb
1 replies
16h13m

There's also a much higher character limit for paying users, so you can post an entire essay in a tweet now. Look at basically everything Bill Ackman[1] posts, for example.

[1] https://twitter.com/BillAckman

jjackson5324
0 replies
16h11m

Yep exactly, that too!

dpkirchner
1 replies
16h1m

Tweeting screenshots of text demonstrates how poor a platform Twitter is, IMO. A core feature -- sharing text -- must sometimes be done in the least efficient way possible, as an image or a series of tweets (that can only be viewed while signed in).

Swizec
0 replies
15h25m

must sometimes be done in the least efficient way possible, as an image or a series of tweets

Try tiktok and instagram, they’re to kids these days what twitter was to us 10 years ago. There’s a huge trend on those platforms of people sharing a single tweet as a 20s video with a face grimacing and pointing at the text as commentary.

Literally 280char of content turned into a 20s full screen selfie video.

sufficer
0 replies
14h12m

You are being really defensive for no reason...

fragmede
1 replies
16h1m

The 280 character limit was raised to 4,000 in February of 2023.

KomoD
0 replies
15h48m

Only for people who pay.

edflsafoiewq
0 replies
16h2m

Mostly I follow artists who post pictures, so the character limit doesn't matter.

cgh
3 replies
15h43m

Nearly every subject matter expert I followed has left. Scientists, mathematicians, journalists, authors, comic book people, and so on.

What I now see are people with demented political opinions about women and American politics. It sucks.

jjackson5324
1 replies
15h16m

Scientists, mathematicians, journalists, authors, comic book people, and so on.

Intersting, I haven't had a single person leave. People make a big fuss about leaving, but the traffic you get from Twitter is too attractive to leave.

What I now see are people with demented political opinions about women and American politics. It sucks.

As I said, that's because you're not using lists. It's literally impossible to see posts from accounts you don't like if you're using lists.

vwcx
0 replies
15h7m

As a journalist who has been involved in newsroom analytics at three organizations since Twitter launched, I can assure you that most online news outlets have seen very little to no referral traffic from Twitter in nearly a decade. Journalists love to point to some viral retweet of their story, but most of the time: the number of likes/retweets > actual referrer traffic.

See NPR: https://niemanreports.org/articles/npr-twitter-musk/

dustingetz
0 replies
15h30m

i follow about a thousand physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists, try searching keywords like “quantum mechanics” and then “follow all” when recommended. Really no place like twitter for math/science content

sergiotapia
1 replies
16h14m

Interesting because the content I get on X is far, far more valuable than HN + Reddit + Facebook combined.

That has been my experience as well. Easily. I learned a ton about LLMs, open source projects, growth hacks, marketing tips, a lot of great from the trenches lessons. Best site on the web.

jjackson5324
0 replies
16h8m

Yep exactly. I’m also a big formula 1 fan and it’s the only place where I can get insight from engineers who are involved in the day to day of building race cars for ex.

Reddit’s f1 subreddit has really degraded in quality unfortunately (just people posting clickbait articles).

It’s the same for investing, politics, cars, poker and everything else I enjoy.

amatecha
0 replies
15h6m

I follow subject matter experts on Mastodon/ActivityPub. Scientists, engineers, librarians, mathematicians, doctors, programmers, designers, artists, musicians, retro computing enthusiasts, amateur radio operators, etc. etc.... They've been migrating away from Twitter for a long time, because it has shown us how horribly "millions of people in the same room" works out, especially when a sociopathic algorithm rewards conflict and sensationalism at the expense of thought/consideration and kindness.

0xjpa
0 replies
13h0m

Getting more value from tech twitter these days.

I mostly follow L7+ SWEs, creators of popular tech like dynamoDB, and professors in AI/systems/DB/PL. The ones who tried to move to sites like mastodon eventually came back, or are now using twitter much more than these alternatives. There's been more top SWEs and professors especially in AI and systems sharing content there.

Noticed as well that twitter is also more optimistic about tech than HN, especially with subcultures like e/acc, learning/building in public, etc.

kevin_thibedeau
0 replies
14h19m

I lurk Reddit for local news without ever logging in. They recently started restricting anonymous users to a limited amount of comments on long threads. That finally motivated me to switch to Firefox plugins that re-layout old.reddit.com to be usable on mobile. Thanks Reddit for the much improved free web experience.

duxup
24 replies
16h13m

I'm inclined to have the same wishes.

There's a weird world of outrage about twitter ... on twitter by people who keep providing content for twitter. I don't get that.

The further downside being that all the alternatives I've dipped my toes in, the content is pretty much similar to twitter and all the alternatives are offering are various back end type differences, but the same content. So personally I'm not particularly happy with those either.

yterdy
20 replies
15h48m

People are working through their grief, knowing that a utility that is essentially the modern postal service was sold to someone who is essentially the modern Hearst.

ryandrake
18 replies
15h38m

But Twitter is/was not a utility, not a “modern post office” not a “town square” (before someone tries to bring up that terrible analogy too) and really doesn’t deserve people’s grief. It’s yet another corporate-owned and controlled messaging app and we are seeing the inevitable result of that control.

nomilk
10 replies
15h31m

Twitter is/was not a utility

I've found no substitute for getting breaking news on a specific topic (e.g. natural disasters, war, politics, sport). Google News is second best, but the sites it indexes are at the absolute least 20 minutes behind twitter.

Zite was my favourite app from many, many years ago. But it was good at collating daily reading, not for up to the minute/second curation.

For certain topics that are time sensitive, I haven't found anything that comes close to twitter.

fshbbdssbbgdd
3 replies
15h29m

Unless you are working as a journalist, or for some other reason you need to respond immediately to world events, you could just abstain.

nomilk
1 replies
15h22m

you could just abstain.

True for the most part. But occasionally there's good reason to want to know some information sooner rather than later: outbreaks of war, dangerous/breaking events in your localised area, dangerous weather alerts etc.

chii
0 replies
14h21m

all of those should have a primary source. Twitter is merely a secondary source.

So to avoid twitter, you can subscribe to the primary source.

At least it used to be this way. But then a few official places that annouce things have turned to use twitter as their primary source.

Acrobatic_Road
0 replies
15h11m

Twitter was great for reporting on court cases. For example, last year the Biden administration essentially made millions of Americans into felons via an obscure ATF rule change. The rule has since been enjoined by at least three federal courts, which anyone who follows @2aupdates would know about because he crawls the PACER feeds. My local newspaper has been following this story, but as recently as last week reported that the rule was still in effect. I submitted a correction and they fixed it.

stouset
2 replies
15h10m

the sites it indexes are at the absolute least 20 minutes behind twitter

Genuine question: who cares?

There is almost no news where the difference between getting it now, twenty minutes from now, or tonight makes a meaningful differ to your life. Much of the information in the first twenty minutes of an event will be confusing, misleading, and/or wrong.

tzs
0 replies
14h43m

It was useful for local news.

E.g., when I saw police helicopter that seemed to be doing a low altitude search pattern about 300 m away, and a TV news helicopter hovering higher up in the same area, I wanted to know if this was something I needed to be concerned about.

A quick search on Twitter and I found a recent tweet about gunfire in a store in that area and a shooter on the loose.

micromacrofoot
0 replies
14h43m

it’s not just big news though, twitter was very useful for hyper local news in cities… to the point that if there were helicopters overhead or some loud noise nearby… usually someone posted about it on twitter - this has been irreplaceable for me, I know less about what’s around me now

bilbo0s
0 replies
15h11m

I guess it depends on what content you want.

I don't really get into the news enough to want a real time feed. Even if I did, I think I'd look for something more reliable than a collection of posts from Twitter users. It probably even goes deeper than not getting into news for me though, because heck, I don't even watch much TV really.

But I am into sports. And I think the best real time sports feeds out there are the reddit game threads. Now maybe the threads on X are better for some people? I don't know? But reddit game threads are far superior for my purposes. ie - Finding out if everyone else is thinking "What The Actual F--- was that?" Whenever Drew Allar threw the ball in a bowl game for instance.

Similar to you not having found a substitute for news over Twitter, I haven't found a substitute for reddit game threads where these kinds of sanity checks are concerned.

Eji1700
0 replies
14h23m

This is a void that should be filled but is akin to tv or news paper of the past which were as close as you could get to breaking and also privately owned.

The tech is there now for the government and other entities to distribute with open protocols or things like rss, but Twitter never was that

Acrobatic_Road
0 replies
15h18m

Twitter was really good for some things. For example, there was a thread yesterday contrasting public data on fertility rates with the latest official data as collected by Twitter users. In short, the UN, Macrotrends and CIA World Factbook are publishing data that is extremely inaccurate. For example, Macrotrends reports that China's TFR was 1.7 in 2023, when the official data says it was 1.09. Accounts like @morebirths and @birthgauge even report estimated fertility based on monthly data so following those accounts is like having a time machine.

idontpost
3 replies
15h27m

But Twitter is/was not a utility

The way twitter was used by local governments during emergencies absolutely made it equivalent to one.

Fortunately at least my area has moved away from twitter and towards SMS based notifications for that purpose.

serf
2 replies
15h17m

The way twitter was used by local governments during emergencies absolutely made it equivalent to one.

those governments should be held responsible rather than giving Twitter a free ticket to calling itself a utility.

micromacrofoot
0 replies
14h41m

but they won’t and now it’s gone anyway, just because it shouldn’t have been that way doesn’t mean we didn’t lose anything

godelski
0 replies
14h3m

While I don't disagree, it requires that both the members of government and the public have a decent technical literacy. I'm not sure how true this is even on HN.

I'd personally love to see the government build a lot of frameworks that can be considered "public goods" and be less reliant on private entities who must generate a profit. I happily pay taxes to serve many networks which operate as natural monopolies, such as roads. I'd also be happy to have that extended to such things as telecommunications. I'd happily pay more taxes if it got rid of my phone bill or internet bill. Though I'd say that personally this is conditioned on them being E2EE and privacy focused, since I consider that information having a higher potential for abuse in a single governmental entity than distributed among corporate powers (even if they still want to abuse it, they can do less and there are competitors).

ticos
0 replies
14h56m

Not really a utility, but it meant that someone at the parks and rec department with virtually zero computer skills could let everyone know when things were closed due to rain and when they were open again.

godelski
0 replies
14h20m

But Twitter is/was not a utility, not a “modern post office” not a “town square”

Yes and no. The thing that makes a social media useful (not necessarily good) is the same thing that makes it hard to leave: userbase. Centralization.

I think it would be weird if people __weren't__ upset. You act as if it is easy to make a collective decision to move platforms. I can't get a collective decision in my friend group for where we should go get food and drinks, and that requires far lower consensus and the stakes/effort needed are much lower. People also frequently complain about places they visit in real life, including restaurants they frequent.

It’s yet another corporate-owned

Btw, being privately owned doesn't mean it isn't a public space.[0] This should be a bit unsurprising when we look around places and how people organize. People go where other people are, full stop. Doesn't matter if it is public or private property (clear example being malls or cafes). Doesn't matter of online or offline. The major difference is we don't treat online spaces as abstracted versions of offline spaces despite them often being built to serve as that exact thing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privately_owned_public_space

amatecha
0 replies
15h3m

Yeah, in 2008 when we signed up for it, we didn't realize the implications of that -- now we're learning, between Myspace, FB, and now Twitter. I made a LOT of connections on Twitter, a lot of meaningful interactions, and it absolutely had a large effect on my life. It's without a doubt one of the biggest disappointments to me in modern web/internet tech, that it has gradually been eroded into the trash it is now. Well, as I can say about so many things, "it was good while it lasted".

mvdtnz
0 replies
14h46m

If you believe that twitter is, or was ever, "a utility that is essentially the modern postal service" you are absolutely delusional beyond belief. Twitter is a shitty little website for narcissists to talk about nothing useful.

add-sub-mul-div
1 replies
15h26m

I don't get that.

It's the same enshittification we're always talking about now. Something you once enjoyed strategically turns to shit once it believes people are too locked in and docile to leave.

duxup
0 replies
13h53m

I disagree, it's a choice.

jen729w
0 replies
14h23m

the content is pretty much similar to twitter

I disagree. I find Mastodon to be much more like the Twitter of '08 that we all loved.

It's like watching over the shoulder of a stranger as they go about their day. But you're welcome there! You can say hi and the stranger is happy to have you.

It's real people sharing their weird hobbies. The often-boring minutiae of their daily life. Their feelings and hopes and dreams.

I've made friends. I feel like I know people. I love it.

monero-xmr
14 replies
15h52m

Well the “experts” among us here, WaPo, and the NYT predicted Twitter would surely collapse after firing their SREs and admin that were crucial to keeping the servers running. Any day now Twitter will collapse and all of us will be saved. Surely

viraptor
12 replies
15h32m

Here's a challenge: find an article from either wapo or nyt which actually predicted a sure collapse. And I mean a collapse as you said rather than issues with operations. (which they had many of since the takeover) I may have missed one if it exists, but I'd bet they didn't publish anything that certain.

viraptor
7 replies
15h8m

The first link is reporting about users panicking and one of the few comments from NYT itself is "Though there are no official signs that Twitter is going anywhere,...".

The second documents actual issues and makes no predictions.

Even the third one which is just an opinion piece about how bad of a decision maker Elon is doesn't come close to suggesting a collapse.

Please read the actual articles.

monero-xmr
6 replies
14h59m

For the “Newspaper of Record” to report such fantastical news stories, as if anecdotal reports and opinions are real news, shows the obsession with the left wing media against Twitter and their hope and vibe about its imminent collapse.

Why write such articles at all? It’s “The NYT never said it would collapse, they just reported numerous articles implying it MIGHT collapse and everyone says it will!” OK!

viraptor
5 replies
14h47m

Knowing what many people believe is itself useful, especially if you annotate it with "there are no signs that this is actually going to happen".

obsession with the left wing media against Twitter and their hope and vibe about its imminent collapse.

Yet, you can't show me an article that says this. Is this left wing media obsession, or is this what you believe about NYT? Twitter was a hot topic and they reported on what's happening there. It's not like there were many positive things to say since the takeover.

There are similar reports of positive things people said https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/technology/musk-twitter-s... so it's not like only one side is presented.

monero-xmr
4 replies
14h20m

Sure sure, down the memory hole. No one said Twitter would collapse after firing 7500 people. Everyone assumed it would be fine. All of these articles were simply conjecture, just something to speculate.

When facts are uncomfortable, just rewrite the narrative.

maxbond
2 replies
11h49m

When facts are uncomfortable, just rewrite the narrative.

The sources you presented failed to substantiate your argument, and instead of looking for different ones or considering you might be mistaken, you've doubled down.

Are you quite sure you are willing to take a hard look at uncomfortable facts and hazard having your mind changed?

15457345234
1 replies
8h9m

Sorry but the 'twitter will die any day now' narrative was utterly pervasive across reddit and endless media sources were cited on a daily basis in the 6-month period that followed the buyout. It was basically the _only_ topic on r/whitepeopletwitter which had 3+ posts hit the frontpage daily.

It isn't something you can gaslight away. Everyone who was there saw it. It happened.

Interestingly enough most of the reddit posts were deleted after 3 days once they'd fallen off the frontpage. It didn't matter, there were always more being made lol. Does make it awfully hard to cite, though. Odd.

maxbond
0 replies
7h15m

I'm not on Reddit so I'll take your word for it, but that isn't the claim being discussed.

djur
0 replies
11h3m

It's not fine. It's become a cesspit and virtually every new development over the past year has been to the detriment of its users.

nateglims
0 replies
15h2m

Other than a quote from a political activist, these don't seem that certain about a total collapse or even speculate it

jph00
0 replies
15h9m

None of these 3 articles "predict a sure collapse".

One of them reports on what twitter users were saying, one reports on technical problems occurring at that time, and one is an opinion piece titled "Elon Musk Has No Idea What He’s Doing at Twitter" (but which doesn't predict a collapse AFAICT).

crotchfire
0 replies
15h8m

Zing.

djur
0 replies
11h5m

They just had a very high-profile event involving deepfake porn of one of the world's most popular musical artists. They appear to have belatedly responded to this by shutting down all searches of that famous artist's name. This does not suggest an organization that has the capacity to quickly or effectively manage the systems they are running.

sphars
11 replies
16h51m

While it is unmaintained now due to the API changes, Libreddit (reddit frontend) is still working for me. Granted, I self-host it, and I'm the only user so I never hit the rate limit, but no issues at all, save for some of the changes reddit has made (namely the new share links)

lucb1e
7 replies
16h19m

The repository says at the top in a HUGE FONT that "Libreddit is currently not operational" and the website just shows a oneliner saying Germans are not allowed to read that page. The issue tracker talks of forking and stuff. Doesn't feel too welcoming or functional.

But in actuality it works just fine? Is the message simply wrong when you plug in your own api key and stay in the free tier of reddit's API?

SushiHippie
2 replies
15h4m

and the website just shows a oneliner saying Germans are not allowed to read that page.

Curious which website do you mean? The official instance is not online anymore. And I'm not aware of an official libreddit website.

lucb1e
1 replies
1h28m

One of the top search results was this page, <https://libreselfhosted.com/project/libreddit/>, which links to <https://libredd.it> as homepage. Domain sounds plausible so I just assumed that's the official one. The project github page has as "website" one of their tickets listed... can't say if that website field once contained something different

SushiHippie
0 replies
1h17m

Ah yes that was the official instance, but they disabled this one at least half a year ago IIRC.

sphars
1 replies
16h13m

I think that message was to let users know it's basically on it's last legs and could 100% stop at anytime. When the API changes started, most all of the instances ran into rate limits due to the number of requests. But it works just fine until that rate is hit.

Like I mentioned, I've been running my own private instance and I've never hit the rate limit so it's been working fine for me.

And I don't know about any API key. AFAIK, Libreddit uses the publicly available JSON, no need for a key (hence why it's read-only). Since it's still working for me, those JSON endpoints must still be available, just highly rate limited now

lucb1e
0 replies
16h5m

Oh, that's cool! Sounds like it should suffice for my usage also, which is extraordinarily light since they shut down reddit-is-fun. I've mostly replaced that with mastodon, not the same concept but serves a similar "let's scroll and see what's new" function.

After doing some analysis (a while ago) on reddit comment/submission rates before and after the boycott and new rate limits, it seems either only a tiny tiny fraction actually left reddit and/or reddit benefited from the negative publicity as much as or more than they lost. Since nothing has changed since then, I suppose there's no point in me staying off the platform anymore, especially if I'm not contributing with OC submissions or comments. Libreddit sounds like a good way to do that, thanks :)

sodality2
0 replies
14h45m

Is the message simply wrong when you plug in your own api key and stay in the free tier of reddit's API?

Correct.

Also, I forked it with some OAuth spoofing and have been maintaining it there: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

graphe
0 replies
14h34m

If they don't want you to use their API just respect their wishes and scrape Reddit. https://github.com/JosephLai241/URS it's the only moral thing we can do.

MallocVoidstar
1 replies
16h13m

It's been forked by a maintainer as redlib: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

sphars
0 replies
16h12m

Thanks for posting, I'll check this out. I knew that maintainer was working on a fork, but I never saw it advertised.

Share6323
0 replies
15h44m

Interesting, I thought they completely disabled the APIs

dinvlad
6 replies
15h59m

I've recently learned that Twitter can actually be quite good for building genuine connections online, but it takes a very conscious effort and a lot of diligence

throwup238
5 replies
15h57m

I'm sure that could be said for Erowid or any number of sites with a discussion forum function.

dinvlad
4 replies
15h3m

I was cynical about X like that too, but recently learned some good techniques that make a lot of difference to the overall experience. And then there's really nothing like it, in terms of reach.

Also, it's easy to see bad in everything, and then all we see is bad. But there're good things to find as well, it's just a matter of what we focus on..

alwa
3 replies
14h24m

What are some of the good techniques you’ve found success with?

throwup238
1 replies
13h20m
dinvlad
0 replies
13h9m

Thanks, had a laugh!

dinvlad
0 replies
13h6m

A lot of the things described here, for example: https://publiclab.co/building-in-public

twelvechairs
0 replies
16h9m

Reddit the non-profit frontends are still working (redreader for android is good).

Twitter, instagram etc. there's nothing even this reasonable.

Begs the question what will the future open web forum/discussion place be? Lemmy doesn't seem to have really hit the simplicity to attract users

superhumanuser
0 replies
16h11m

I have not been to Reddit after they effectively shut down RiF.

hexage1814
0 replies
15h50m

Ironically enough, to me what it bothers me the most on twitter is how bad and slow its front-end is. Sure, I'm not a fan of having to use an account, but if twitter at least had a nitter instance, like literally the same front-end, I would have way less problems with that.

globalnode
0 replies
15h34m

twitter and facebook have mostly been garbo for me, what i would like to know is where are the interesting mathematicians and software engineers posting now? or have they had enough too. i suspect that may be the case.

giancarlostoro
0 replies
16h6m

API restrictions effectively killed alternative frontends, so I simply don't look at Reddit posts anymore.

They recently did a poll to users, asking which UI you use most. I put old reddit because it is. I cannot understand how in what? 6+ years they developed new reddit and still don't have true feature parity? This tells me they don't have their priorities in line, and they want to IPO to boot.

Personally I think some websites don't really have any need to become publicly traded companies, I rather they become profitable and not controllable by the whims of tech illiterate investors.

Tenemo
0 replies
15h22m

I still use Reddit is Fun (RiF) with no problems. There's a ReVanced version, you provide with your API key and it works like it always had.

neilv
29 replies
16h57m

If all Nitter instances get shut down, that's another reason for people to stop putting information into the Twitter/X walled-garden.

Nitter has had the effect of a pressure release valve, for the people who object most to Twitter/X.

Without the Nitter compromise, more people will stop linking to Twitter/X threads, indulging people who still post there, etc.

xwowsersx
16 replies
16h18m

I'm with you that this is disappointing, but folks who use these sorts of tools tend to be a bit naive about the impact of them going away. It's a little silly, to be honest. Best numbers I could come by is X does something like 100B impressions/day and x.com saw 1.2B visits in the month of December. Will some people stop seeing X posts on Nitter? Sure, maybe. Will it matter to X? I doubt it.

muppetman
9 replies
16h9m

Exactly. Even the reddit blackouts etc did nothing really - sure a few people left in a huff and all that jazz, but Reddit is still trucking along happily. The only time I've seen the "eff it, we're leaving!" thing actually work was with Digg v4.

nunez
4 replies
14h30m

Nah, the blackouts definitely hurt Reddit. Deleted posts are the norm now. This was not the case before the API changes.

MikusR
2 replies
8h24m

Deleted and overwritten posts were a thing for long before the api change.

jdiff
1 replies
4h22m

"A thing" is substantially different from what they claimed, that it's now the norm.

MikusR
0 replies
2h34m

Not in my experience.

muppetman
0 replies
12h11m

Fair point, I have myself noticed a lot more deleted posts. I doubt their bottom line has hurt much though.

neilv
1 replies
15h24m

Although, I'm surprised how often I'm seeing the key comments I was searching for deleted. I haven't been keeping stats, but maybe around half the time.

Some Reddit metrics might've hardly noticed the blips, but if they had metrics for early-Reddit qualities, such as for smart (or clever) comments, helpful information, humor, or goodwill... I suspect those would be bad. Where they're not bad might be non-frontpage subs that are still cruising along with their earlier communities. But those communities started in earlier Reddit, and I suspect that today would not have started there.

what
0 replies
12h10m

metrics for early-Reddit qualities

Those had already tanked before any API changes.

Eisenstein
0 replies
15h26m

I have seen a considerable degrading of quality on reddit since the blackouts. I use reddit for quality subject discussion in topics ranging from pressure cooking to circuit design but I also use it for general crappy banter and time wasting, and the people who would contribute useful content in the former have decreased in number while the latter have increased making the signal to noise much worse.

It doesn't help that they have started placing content from more obscure subreddits onto people's front pages seemingly randomly, so people wander into places and have no idea what the culture is they are contributing to and add content which is wildly out of place.

To get subject matter discussion which is reasonable I have been wandering back to bespoke forums, which isn't necessarily bad, but they still have a lot of issues. A lot of other content has moved to discord, but I won't get into how I feel about that.

AndroTux
0 replies
11h2m

Tumblr with their NSFW removal change as well.

add-sub-mul-div
5 replies
16h9m

It's created a reverse eternal September. The masses stay confined to one place. Other places can flourish with the old school smaller community kind of feel and quality. Let twitter live in its current state if it means other places won't be taken over by influencers and other bullshit.

nomilk
2 replies
15h27m

This is nice in theory. I haven't used any twitter alternatives but others seem to report that their content is more or less the same as twitter's.

rakoo
0 replies
7h24m

Speaking for the fediverse only, the experience is what you make of it. Stay on the largest, averagest instance and your experience will be bland; get on an instance with people who share your values, an instance that connects with other instances OK with you, follow accounts posting content you want to see and the experience will be much better.

add-sub-mul-div
0 replies
15h20m

We're all sharing the same links, articles, jokes, memes, ideas, cat pictures. What differentiates a place is its sense of community, not its content. It's easy to forget that because Twitter long ago stopped being a community.

hexage1814
1 replies
15h29m

Will the other places resist to VC money or other shenanigans though? That's the question...

jdiff
0 replies
4h24m

There's too many other places. VC can't find every tiny community out there, or even any noteworthy portion of them. Places small enough to still have a coherent sense of community are beneath the notice of VC.

Dalewyn
8 replies
16h52m

I am quite sure the people who use Nitter or otherwise detest Mysterious Twitter X are a vocal minority of people.

timeon
3 replies
16h44m

I do not think that people without account are minority.

echelon
1 replies
16h41m

They just aren't the ones posting on the platform.

timeon
0 replies
16h35m

I have misunderstood you/OP. In this case you are right. I was commenting from perspective of someone that do not have account but came across the twitter links on sites like HN.

Tanoc
0 replies
7h28m

I'm struggling heavily to find the traffic statistic that I read a year or so ago, but it said that point seven to point nine percent of all Twitter traffic came from Nitter. Considering that at the time there were three different third party front ends that is no small amount, I think somewhere around thirty million visits daily.

tentacleuno
2 replies
14h58m

I use Twitter, and I detest it. It's mostly spam.

This actually came up in a conversation yesterday, funnily enough: I'm mostly using Twitter because I'm curious as to how much worse it's going to get. So far, I've seen them allow NSFW paid-for advertisements, doxxing of well-known figures, daily crypto mention farming spam (with highly suspicious, easily-detectable patterns, spread across ~10 accounts per day), obvious engagement bait to benefit from ad-revenue sharing, fake interaction spam, and plenty more.

As an excerpt, the @support account on Twitter is completely dead, too -- if I remember correctly, the last reply to an issue was around August / June of last year. So clearly they don't have the staffing needed to support... well, the support, and they seem to have issues admitting that.

That becomes even more clear when you look at the spam on the platform: obvious spam patterns are completely ignored, with reports going to the wayside, and crypto / NFT spam being left up to victimize someone who doesn't know what it really is. It's quite grotesque.

Even though a lot of people may use the platform, quite a substantial amount of people also speak out about how much worse Twitter has got since the acquisition -- while I have nothing against Elon Musk, I find it quite amazing how badly the platform seems to be doing ever since he's been at the helm.

TheChaplain
0 replies
11h6m

I find it quite useful, with the exception of the porn ads.

But I strictly follow python developers, bsd people and retro computing enthusiasts. None post any politics.

I think any social media platform can be good/bad just like people in general, it all depends who you interact with.

Dalewyn
0 replies
12h25m

None of what you said contests what I said.

davorak
0 replies
16h36m

Comparing traffic, pre sale, of logged in twitter users vs traffic generated by those without accounts would give insight into what percentage of users have to take action to continue to use twitter normally.

I spent a 1-2 minutes googling and could not come up with numbers though.

I know I am part of the percentage of people that used to read twitter without an account, or at least not logged in, and now read twitter a trivial amount.

lucb1e
1 replies
16h50m

Twitter/X walled-garden

I think the MIME type should be `X-Walled-Garden/Twitter`

teddyh
0 replies
3h17m

Internet media types (previously known as “MIME types”) with “X-” prefixes are now discouraged.

HackerThemAll
0 replies
4h20m

Don't despair. I've never heard of this Nitter, and I'm living quite a successful life.

Me1000
25 replies
17h6m

This is disappointing because often times people link to threads on Twitter but if you’re lucky enough to not get a login wall, the full thread wont be visible without logging in. (Which I’m not going to do)

I really wish people would just stop linking me to twitter (or better yet, stop using it altogether).

s1artibartfast
15 replies
16h34m

Why not make an account if you want to read it?

quickthrower2
4 replies
16h14m

1. Don’t want to give Twitter their personal phone number

2. Twitter SMS system can’t deliver to personal number on my network so can’t create account.

3. Banned from Twitter already.

4. Hate Elon.

5. Ethics (various reason)

6. Privacy

7. A lot of work to read a hot take

8. Social media is addictive. The site gives you crack when you log in.

9. Chinese Firewall (and in some occupied lands it may be a crime to use Twitter)

10. Too many logins for shit already.

11. NSFW bot accounts trying to chat you up

vwkd
2 replies
3h44m

4. Hate Elon

Somehow this sounds like something also a progressive anti-hate censorship advocate would say: You must not hate me, but I can hate you just fine.

mlrtime
1 replies
1h45m

My guess is that it is 90% hate Elon, and the 10% extra (while true) is because most people want to sound balanced and not hinged.

Macha
0 replies
1h21m

Yes, I secretly quit Twitter in 2018 because I psychically learned that Elon would take it over in 2021 and hate him.

(Really though the actual delete account moment was their post-GDPR ultimatum to consent to tracking or delete your account)

1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 are pre-Elon problems.

addaon
0 replies
15h8m

12. Uncomfortable agreeing to their terms of service. (e.g. according to their own summary as well of the text, you are not permitted to learn from the experience of using their mobile app, e.g. about app design principles, because it is "solely for the purpose of enabling you to use and enjoy the benefit of the Services.")

dkjaudyeqooe
4 replies
16h2m

Having to make an account to read a website sounds idiotic.

Why should twitter be special in that regard?

It's not so you're essentially promoting the idea that we should have to make an account to read any website, which is idiotic.

lancesells
1 replies
15h38m

Twitter isn't special in that regard. Not having Facebook or Instagram does the same thing or at least you get a very limited view. I think it's all bullshit as those networks exist because of the people are posting as a means to share.

nativeit
0 replies
1h5m

It’s special in its utterly hypocritical espousing of Twitter as some digital “town square” led by “free speech absolutists”.

ipaddr
1 replies
14h57m

Many places require an account, many even paid like New York Times but you have all other social media offering limited views to facebook, instagram, tiktok with signing in.

xigoi
0 replies
9h12m

All of those are just as stupid and should not be linked on HN.

Me1000
2 replies
16h21m

I refuse to login to twitter for ethical reasons. If someone links me to a tweet I assume it’s because they thought I’d find it interesting. It’s a thoughtful act which deserves a little bit of effort on my part, so I’m willing to change the domain to see it. I’m not willing to login though. It’s a principle thing.

MikusR
1 replies
8h23m

So it's ethical to pirate, but not to not pirate?

davidcbc
0 replies
4h27m

Sometimes, yes

jrflowers
0 replies
15h46m

I can happily just not read the tweet. There’s no FOMO if the pool of worthwhile posts is getting smaller, not larger

amenhotep
0 replies
16h21m

Not the OP but: because I've never wanted to post there and as far as I'm concerned there's no compelling reason I should need one and I'm so offended by Musk and his attempt to force me to get one that I would rather not read it than let him succeed.

add-sub-mul-div
3 replies
16h56m

It's a terrible site though and calls to disallow submissions from there (in comments here) were common going back well before Musk took over, so the Twitter dislike originated independently of anyone's views about him.

timeon
2 replies
16h40m

Dislike is not priority or let say common denominator. Problem is that X/Twitter cannot be viewed without login. This was not the case before.

smoldesu
0 replies
1h5m

In fairness, before Nitter (or even Musk) there was a highly inconsistent guest browsing policy on Twitter. One week you could read entire threads without logging in, the next week every inbound link would redirect to the registration page. Before Nitter I just stopped clicking Twitter links entirely, because I never knew if it would show any content.

At this point, submitting screenshots of a thread you like would unfortunately be more accessible. Shocking that we have to say that about static text content, but here we are in 2024...

add-sub-mul-div
0 replies
16h7m

It used to be widely disliked even before the additional newer problem you mentioned.

mvdtnz
2 replies
16h57m

If we're lucky this will discourage HNers from linking to Twitter at all.

system2
1 replies
16h36m

Especially those stupid blog-like formatted ones.

ekianjo
0 replies
16h11m

That's a net positive then

2OEH8eoCRo0
1 replies
16h18m

It sucks. I don't want to use twitter but it's where people post. Nitter fulfilled my lurker only use case.

HereIGoAgain
0 replies
8h48m

Same.

npunt
24 replies
16h21m

I just want to run a headless browser that logs into my socials periodically and scrapes the stuff I want from the account I follow and puts it into a less addictive format that provides an upper limit on my possible exposure and engagement. I’m happy to run it locally from my device. Ideally it redirects links to socials I come across too. Where is such a thing?

throwaway84846
5 replies
16h9m

This was the dream of RSS, but it went against the long-term business interests of the corporations hosting content, so it has since largely faded away

neuracnu
1 replies
11h15m

I literally reached this discussion thread via the RSS feed for HN.

It’s out there. Social networking sites with a vested interest in monopolizing your attention don’t use it. So I don’t use them.

throwaway84846
0 replies
9h6m

Outside of the tech community those see little use. Listings for my local music and arts scenes are on Instagram and Facebook. Underground community events are planned using proprietary group chats.

Free culture and open internet activists lost this battle

geor9e
1 replies
14h1m

I started using RSS again recently for this reason. I use it for for facebook, twitter, hackernews, etc. Feedbro extension supports public facebook profiles. Nitter clones like https://farside.link/nitter/elonmusk/rss still work.

crtasm
0 replies
12h37m

That URL redirects me to various instances, some of which are not working.

hot_gril
0 replies
14h46m

A lot of news sites still support RSS. Could be that not very many regular people understand RSS or want to use it, aside from podcasts.

strogonoff
5 replies
14h51m

You may want social media to be pipes, not platforms.

Convince the government to forbid the business model in which most of users are not paying customers but a product offered to advertisers. Then, social platforms will not care if you use whatever client you desire.

Big Social shareholders don’t want it, though. Being a double-sided market is addictive, and no one can compete with them if they capture the market by not charging money.

sokoloff
2 replies
10h26m

Convince the government to forbid the business model in which most of users are not paying customers but a product offered to advertisers

I like broadcast TV and radio (especially radio while driving) and think that most Americans would object to their removal.

Just look at the uproar over a few NFL games being unavailable on broadcast TV for a hint as to how well such a ban might go.

strogonoff
1 replies
9h23m

I like broadcast TV and radio (especially radio while driving)

If you suggest to apply the same model to social media (where they don’t get to know about a single thing about the user, strictly one way ads) then I’d be totally for it.

However, I don’t think they’ll find this model profitable enough (advertisers like to target), and because charging users is easier with social media compared to radio broadcasting the barrier to start doing that is lower.

That is, disallowing profiting from PII and only allowing one-way ads in social media, while difficult to enforce will also mean they start charging users anyway. So why not skip that model altogether.

Local broadcast models don’t work on global scale anyway.

sokoloff
0 replies
4h10m

It sounded like your proposal would ban the business model of broadcast TV and radio, which I think would be difficult policy for Americans to accept.

xyzzy123
0 replies
9h16m

New issue is AI. Even sites with no ads will want limits on scraping / apis / composability.

Kye
0 replies
8h36m

Another future was possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid...

It's too bad the silofication of the 2010s killed it off.

ipv6ipv4
3 replies
14h43m

This can be done with little AWS Lambda scripts that periodically scrape (or API) whatever sites you want and e-mail you results. All the credentials to login to whatever sites can be personal/dedicated to your instance (so no real API limits), and the usage will almost certainly fall into the AWS free tier since it's only for you.

The ideal install workflow would be to have a repo of AWS CloudFormation templates to automate the installation of the lambdas for different sites in your account. Anyone can open an AWS account, and using CloudFormation is a few fields, and a button click.

Also, if the scripts are developed properly, they are runnable locally. A sane developer will run them locally during development, and then test deployed before releasing.

geor9e
1 replies
13h59m

In theory, anything is possible with months of developer work. The trouble is, there are billions of people addicted to social media. There aren't many widespread solutions to scrape it. Whenever a scraper becomes even remotely popular, Facebook takes action against it, as accessing posts outside the walled garden is a violation of their terms of service. Currently, I am using a combination of Feedbro and Nitter to scrape all the accounts I want to follow. They currently work with Facebook and have not been blocked.

ipv6ipv4
0 replies
13h51m

Yes.

But there is no aggregation - each user runs their own instances. For any site the offers an API, the API would need to have breaking changes to disable this, or block access from AWS.

It's easy to make work for a developer like crowd (very little time to write). It would work for most developers just fine, and could, with more considerable development time, be good for anyone.

Distributed guerilla social media deconstruction.

vwkd
0 replies
3h50m

With an AWS IP and a bot usage pattern they’ll surely ban your account pretty quickly or put you in front of a CAPTCHA. I wish it was as easy as a small script. Without anti-bot techniques, sites would be overflown by scraping bots. Try to scrape a Cloudflare protected site, for example. They’re really good in figuring out if you’re human or a bot. IIRC they even fingerprint your TLS handshake or cypher suite, which ultimately made me give up with headless Chrome and Puppeteer even after proxying through my residential IP, spoofing user-agent and screen size and rate limiting. Unfortunately, there’s no way to distinguish good bots for personal usage from bad bots.

justnotworthit
2 replies
15h25m

im reminded of an ipad app 10 years ago that did roughly this, creating a magazine like interaction with your twitter, google reader, etc.

yreg
0 replies
15h9m
amatecha
0 replies
15h11m

Oh yeah, Paper.li, right? https://web.archive.org/web/20120204055823/http://paper.li/

Unfortunately they've shut down at some point, it seems (thus my linking to archive.org instead of their actual domain).

flexagoon
1 replies
14h18m

You can generate an RSS feed of any twitter user using RSS Bridge:

https://rss-bridge.org/bridge01/

crtasm
0 replies
12h34m

I tried that earlier.

"Message: Missing configuration option: twitterv2apitoken"

npilk
0 replies
3h29m

This is what I made for myself at https://www.bulletyn.co - regular email digests of content from Reddit, HN, RSS feeds, etc. It's helped me significantly cut down the amount of time I spend on Reddit particularly.

I had been planning to add Twitter before the API changes...alas.

maxglute
0 replies
13h44m

I want the vision that Rabbit is selling, a headless browser that periodically scrolls through my socials and have AI assemble all entries into a readable digest. I would settle for manually scrolling through my timetime to a screen recorder that OCRs all the text and removes the fluff.

lucb1e
0 replies
16h14m

That sounds like a case of be the change you wish to see. Such a project sounds rather substantial, not only initially but also in upkeep. Might want to be more specific, such as "does this exist for my favorite social network called <insert network here>?"

pard68
16 replies
17h9m

This is just an instance shutting down, not all of the Nitter instances. Sort of a deceptive title.

koito17
7 replies
17h7m

The important part is the linked GitHub comment from the primary maintainer (and owner) of the Nitter project. To save readers a click

  Guest accounts have been removed, they weren't just led to believe that. With real accounts getting rate limited immediately and likely banned, I don't see any path forward for Nitter.
Source: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983#issuecomment-191...

The way I interpret this comment is that all public Nitter instances are at risk of becoming inoperable (at their current scale).

mastazi
5 replies
16h51m

(and owner) of Nitter.

I would say that Nitter as a whole is not owned by anyone, that person is the owner of one of the Nitter instances, in addition to being the primary maintainer of the project as you correctly stated.

I agree with the second part of your comment about all instances being in danger. It is unfortunately a common problem faced by many privacy-respecting frontends (Nitter, Libreddit, Proxigram, Piped etc)

koito17
4 replies
16h43m

I really meant to say "owner of the Nitter project", but you are nonetheless correct about ownership of Nitter instances. I have edited my post.

drewdevault
3 replies
9h13m

It's also factually incorrect to suppose that this person owns the Nitter project, too. There's no CLA so the copyright is held in common by all of the contributors. Free software projects don't have owners, they have maintainers, and the maintainers are a social construction rather than a matter of property law.

plg94
0 replies
3h53m

But zdeus is the 'owner' of the nitter project on Github. That's their official word for it, even though it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the legal concept of (copyright) ownership.

And then there's 'owner' in the software dev sense, i.e. the one that ultimately decides which direction the project takes, what patches to merge etc. is sometimes referred to as "product owner".

mistrial9
0 replies
3h15m

sometimes yes, but not always, no

gunapologist99
0 replies
2h31m

This seems factually incorrect, but in a nuanced way.

The copyright owner of a code is the one listed as such. In cases of multiple contributors, each owns the copyright to their individual contributions. For projects with shared contributions, it's more accurate to say each necessary part has its own copyright owner, rather than a common ownership.

Free software projects do have copyright owners, which can be entities like non-profits or companies. This ownership is crucial for legal standing in copyright infringement cases, except for public domain code, which isn't copyrighted.

It's wise to have a Contributing.md or similar, stating that contributors affirm their creation is original, free from patent issues, and they agree to license their contribution under the project's terms.

Without such agreements, there's a risk contributors might withdraw their code, claiming it wasn't licensed under the project's terms, potentially leaving gaps in the project.

Simply hosting code on a site with a common license doesn't automatically apply that license to your code unless you explicitly agree to it.

riedel
0 replies
10h26m

I counted 10 instances recently going down on the status page. There is at least a correlation, probably a cause.

nubinetwork
3 replies
17h6m

Except half of the instances are rate limited, so unless you know the username or tweet you are looking for, good luck searching for anything.

Dylan16807
1 replies
17h1m

Oh, does it mostly affect searching?

99% of the time I touch twitter, it's to go to a specific tweet or timeline.

nubinetwork
0 replies
16h58m

I don't know for sure, I've been watching a couple accounts that have been dormant for a while, but several instances have broken search, so maybe the account pages are cached.

Edit: I just checked an instance and it seems to have tweets from the past minute or two, but if the backend accounts that drive them are getting banned, it's probably gonna tank in the upcoming weeks.

geor9e
0 replies
14h3m

Good to hear. I only follow specific users via nitter (via Feedbro extension)

proctrap
0 replies
16h48m

This is one of the long time running instances shutting down, linking to the primary nitter author saying it's the end for all instances eventually. And providing insights from the status page.

If they don't get new guest accounts, they're all going to shut down withing 30 days. It's just left over accounts and caches giving you the impression everything is fine.

Don't forget the rolling DoS herds of scrapers having no more ways to do stuff on their own, which are now trying to use the remaining instances - killing even more.

lapcat
0 replies
6h1m

It's unfortunate that this mistaken comment is top voted.

"If nothing changes, all remaining instances will go down eventually: Instances rely on guest accounts, which are valid for a certain time and of which you need a ton to run a public instance. The API for this got taken down and it doesn't look like a fluke this time."

amatecha
0 replies
15h19m

I shouldn't have to paste this here, but: "If nothing changes, all remaining instances will go down eventually: Instances rely on guest accounts, which are valid for a certain time and of which you need a ton to run a public instance. The API for this got taken down and it doesn't look like a fluke this time."

Astraco
0 replies
3h25m

nitter.cz and nitter.net are having issues and being rate limited.

hexage1814
14 replies
15h34m

I wonder if Youtube will ever do the same with Invidious by requiring an account for people to view videos.

Sure, it might seen unthinkable for this to happen in 2024, but give it more 5 or 10 years and I could see this being something acceptable to the eyes of the average user. I don't like the direction the internet is going :\

amatecha
6 replies
15h22m

Oh yeah, I see it as inevitable. I'm blown away that YouTube is still accessible without an account. It's only a matter of time, though, I'd wager. I never thought Twitter would require an account to view its content.

hexage1814
5 replies
15h13m

It's not the same site, but it's the same company: one thing that caught my attention lately is those little messages nagging you whenever you access Google without being logged in. And... those sorta passive aggressive behavior always start like this. Like, "Oh, why don't you log in? It's good for you, log in!", and as the time passes that behavior just gets more and more hostile towards the user until you end up reaching twitter/instagram levels.

amatecha
2 replies
14h59m

Oh yeah, that's right! I've noticed those nag modals are filling over 1/3 of my screen! On all kinds of sites! So coercive and manipulative. I can see why some people just browse with JS disabled and just forget about sites that require it.

TylerE
1 replies
12h50m

Thank the EU. Cookie dialogs trained people to mindlessly click ok to make them go away, so they convert like crazy.

xigoi
0 replies
9h9m

People have learned to auto-click OK long before cookie banners. Also, cookie banners are not the fault of the EU, but the malicious compliance of companies.

ogurechny
1 replies
14h23m

You can try to guess the reason for such high temperature user boiling, it's not hard.

There is a single TOS and privacy agreement for all Google services. If you “just” log in to Chrome to synchronize history because “it's convenient”, you also allow everything else, including AdSense and other all-across-the-web tracking. By formally becoming a client, you lose most of legal protections against indiscriminate data collection.

jacooper
0 replies
6h22m
qaziquza
5 replies
15h24m

The point being: archive with yt-dlp while we still can.

amatecha
4 replies
15h21m

Yes, assume every video you watch and like is going to get deleted in a week or month or year, or whatever. We don't know the timeline but it's really not a question of "if", just when.

ipaddr
1 replies
14h56m

It's surprising how much gets removed often by creators or youtube.

amatecha
0 replies
14h22m

That too! If I go to my old "Favorites" playlists (or whatever they're called), something like 3/4 of the content is gone! Sad stuff.

globular-toast
0 replies
3h36m

Not just videos. If you find something useful or enjoyable and want to ensure future access you need your own copy.

TylerE
0 replies
12h51m

The vast majority of content is essentially ephemeral. I don’t tend to go back and rewatch random videos from years ago.

graphe
0 replies
14h29m

I don't think so, with other sites giving out free video content. If they all did...

tgsovlerkhgsel
8 replies
15h47m

Sadly, important content is sometimes still posted (only) in the form of Twitter threads.

Short of signing up for an account, is there currently a reasonable way of reading those?

tjpnz
3 replies
15h30m

What do you mean by important? If it's something related to public safety (civil defence for instance) then it's a real issue that you as a citizen should fight. For everything else you could just stop engaging and hope that enough others do for the content creators to get the message.

tgsovlerkhgsel
0 replies
5h30m

A classic example would be a description of the findings about some security bug or breach.

rc_mob
0 replies
14h7m

Often people who witness live event report what they witness on twitter. Like the boston massacre or Jan 6th attack had a lot of people reporting important eyewitness post right on social media

alligatorplum
0 replies
15h10m

Unfortunately, waiting for them to ‘get the message’ is a losing battle. The main issue i find is that non-tech related folks just don’t care enough about this stuff to move to different platform.

ogurechny
2 replies
13h56m

Just accept that it's lost. Like tears in the rain, yada yada. Some people don't want permanent chains of information, they prefer sand mandalas that are broken after completion.

After all, it's just a big fake bullshit. There are “fabulous kids clubs” in school. There are “limited membership” snake oil selling and paper medal awarding companies. There are social network services relying on invites and other stuff to make public believe being there is something valuable. It is clear as day that Twitter is at the stage where it has to inflate usage stats by requiring sign-in, and hold user data hostage because it's one of the remaining ways to make some money. If people decide to have a nice chat in a building that is getting demolished without thinking about consequences, it's their choice, after all.

All historic MySpace data was thrown out at some point. Have people killed themselves over that? No, they simply forgot. And you will forget all that, too.

tgsovlerkhgsel
1 replies
5h31m

This is not about past content that is lost, this is about future content that is still being posted there.

Including things like info about security incidents that affect me.

At least I think most government authorities have stopped posting life safety information there.

mlrtime
0 replies
1h24m

Then login and just sub to those channels? This isn't life/death situation. It's not complicated.

eek2121
0 replies
15h42m

wget or curl.

deadbabe
8 replies
16h9m

X/Twitter is a gross network. It’s like posting links to 4chan.

mardifoufs
3 replies
15h48m

It's just like the fediverse, what you see depends on where you hang out around. I can easily find extremely bad corners of the fediverse but again, that's not representative

ipaddr
2 replies
14h50m

I wish a map existed. I'd like to see the bad corners.

mardifoufs
0 replies
12h51m

It's weird to say but the "worst" parts (as in, questionably legal content and not just controversial content) in my experience has been in non English speaking instances. But just think of basically any community and they have a mastodon spin off, especially they have been deplatformed somewhere else.

CaptainFever
0 replies
13h57m
LAC-Tech
1 replies
15h56m

Dunno who you followed, but my little corner of twitter is not gross at all. A lot of smart people, doing cool things, and linking to interesting stuff.

AFAIK you can't curate stuff in 4chan by following/muting/blocking, so it's more like reddit or HN than twitter.

deadbabe
0 replies
15h37m

I don’t follow anyone on Twitter or even look at it. Content from there just feels slimy. Usually if someone posts a link, it’s something popular or viral, and that means the comments section will be filled with all kinds of crap. Right now I prefer Threads.

shrimp_emoji
0 replies
3h8m

So a place on the Internet that's still fun? It's sad you're so serious that you're grossed out by that.

You might be from the Tumblr side of the tracks, a place of humorless, distributed Orwellian purity testing and virtue signalling where people sublimate their depression and anxiety disorders by trying to police and cancel each other online while pretending they're making the world a better place. That's way less gross than just having a good time. :D

Astraco
0 replies
3h14m

Leave 4chan alone. 4chan compared to Twitter is Heaven

walterbell
6 replies
16h50m

Would a self-hosted private instance of Nitter be an option to avoid rate limits, or are Twitter accounts being penalized for using any third-party API client?

DistractionRect
5 replies
16h40m

You could, but you'd have to make your own personal twitter account. At that point you're using Twitter with extra steps.

walterbell
2 replies
15h44m

For those who need timely access to information that is only available on Twitter, the account is unavoidable.

The benefit of extra steps is a client under user control, e.g. filtering, RSS, better threading and more.

TylerE
1 replies
12h48m

If timely is the key criterion isn’t sticking a caching layer in the middle the opposite of helping?

walterbell
0 replies
11h33m

Transparent, deterministic, user-controlled caching and filtering > black-box Twitter display algos that change unpredictably.

fragmede
0 replies
16h19m

yes but those extra steps make the difference. those extra steps are the entire point. The difference between using the blessed client and using a preferred client that previously accessed the platform via an API is those steps!

dinosaurdynasty
0 replies
15h46m

RSS!

matt3210
4 replies
16h10m

Just make a Twitter account and install an ad blocked

wffurr
1 replies
15h38m

And you have to use the incredibly slow official front end. Seriously how much JS do you need to show 280 characters and some links.

ogurechny
0 replies
13h22m

Dear customer, your system is too old to run 20 third party browser fingerprinting libraries in parallel with OS window manager and GUI toolkit re-implemented in Javascript. Please use our service on a recent enough device capable of browser fingerprinting.

ekianjo
0 replies
16h10m

you won't be able to browse anonymously anymore

Astraco
0 replies
3h12m

No

1vuio0pswjnm7
4 replies
14h33m

This one still works

nitter.poast.org

I noticed not long ago they started requiring a user-agent string.

Top comment affirms that this is not an announcement as to all instances.

HN title was changed so as not to mislead.

This one still works. That's all I know.

nubinetwork
2 replies
6h24m

I'm not touching a server owned by kiwifarms.

vwkd
1 replies
3h39m

Care to elaborate for those not familiar with kiwifarms?

nubinetwork
0 replies
3h30m

No, you can read the Wikipedia article yourself.

rc_mob
0 replies
14h5m

per the linked page, its only a matter of time until all go down

sphars
3 replies
16h40m

Has there been any guides about self-hosting Nitter and using your own personal account, rather than trying to generate a bunch of guest accounts?

I ask because while I no longer use Twitter, I have been using the RSS feature from Nitter to follow a few accounts that aren't available elsewhere. So if there's any way to keep doing that, I'd appreciate it if anyone has a solution. And I really don't want to login to Twitter anymore.

_ache_
1 replies
16h15m

Yeap, the Installion section of the Github Readme.md of Nitter. Docker based.

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter#Installation

SushiHippie
0 replies
15h14m

They asked about using their personal account. The README does not mention this. And without a personal account, you won't have any luck with self-hosting this, as guest accounts don't work anymore.

MallocVoidstar
0 replies
16h12m

Keep in mind that Twitter might ban you for doing that. They really don't like anything that could be considered scraping (unless you pay them a lot of money).

cubefox
3 replies
16h23m

Websites like Quora, Instagram, TikTok, and now X, work against the idea of an open Web. Content is increasingly concentrated into separated silos. But I understand why it's happening: People who don't have an account can't receive personalized ads.

bogomipz
1 replies
15h14m

FB, Linkedin, Pinterest as well. All of these walled gardens are "built on the shoulder of giants", whose work pioneered the open internet.

Further, what isn't silos seems to be content chum whose main purpose is collecting the reader's email address.

Oddly the modern web seems to be driving me offline and back to books.

klabb3
0 replies
6h51m

FB, Linkedin, Pinterest as well. All of these walled gardens are "built on the shoulder of giants", whose work pioneered the open internet.

Very true. Using the openness when it’s convenient and actively shutting the door behind you, it’s one of the most morally reprehensible things that one can do in a shared ecosystem.

yreg
0 replies
15h0m

I don’t use TikTok much, but when I see a (web) link to content there it’s always publicly available.

paul_funyun
2 replies
15h24m

Good. Join X if you want to see X posts.

xigoi
0 replies
8h59m

Alright. And if you like your walled garden, please stay there and don’t link to it from other sites.

Astraco
0 replies
3h11m

No

promiseofbeans
1 replies
8h7m
lapcat
0 replies
6h11m

"Nitter is dead." on issue "nitter.net certificate expired on 15:08:30 GMT"

proctrap
1 replies
18h10m

Looks like this is the end

dylan604
0 replies
16h59m

Jim Morrison style or Seth Rogen style?

hackerlight
1 replies
16h52m

Any alternative?

jayknight
0 replies
16h26m

Not exactly the same thing, but https://threadreaderapp.com/ will allow you to read threads (but not replies) if you come upon a link you can't see.

Edit: I guess that only works if someone has already requested the thread to be unrolled...

burgerrito
1 replies
14h14m

What's frustrating about social media closing off public access is that, most of the time, they don't even do it correctly--instead of showing a dialog or a message to sign in to view content, they just straight up show an unclear, ambigous error message. Twitter and Instagram does this AFAIK.

Also a bit OOT but there is also something that I think needed to be said: search engines SHOULD be clear whether a content is accessible without account or not, whether a content is accessible is paywalled or not.

InCityDreams
0 replies
10h50m

search engines SHOULD be clear whether a content is accessible without account or not, whether a content is accessible is paywalled or not.

And HN.

tortoise_in
0 replies
15h48m

Well, very good time we had. It was great experience with nitter,wish it stayed for years to come. Hope to see something like that for mastodon

rvz
0 replies
14h3m

A reminder of a simple fact that Twitter / X did not shutdown or completely collapse after the layoffs two years ago as incorrectly predicted.

It should be dead by now, but it’s now more alive than ever with 500M+ MAUs.

Just facts.

renewiltord
0 replies
15h23m

What a pity. I used their API to bridge my Twitter posts to my Slack instance.

maxglute
0 replies
16h57m

Are there any services that make daily twitter digests out of lists that doesn't cost arm and leg in terms of API access? I've been running a pretty hacky google sheet script to parse nitter list rss on supported instances, but guess that's going to be DOA in the coming days.

martin_a
0 replies
5h26m

Terrible title, can someone please fix that?!

kopirgan
0 replies
15h21m

Sad. Used to browse since it was so nice and easy. Strangely they didn't accept one off donations only monthly. Musk has dismantled left control over Twitter but this is a side effect.

Uninstalled Reddit app it was battery draining plus slow.

hsuduebc2
0 replies
15h35m

Thank for your service comrade.

genevra
0 replies
15h48m

Unsurprising that Twitter continues these decisions, just means I interact with it even less

dools
0 replies
15h13m

The Epoch Clock

chandamama
0 replies
4h0m

While browsing website on Android devices, avast is showing a popup of malicious website detected.

chandamama
0 replies
4h1m

Avast is complaining that this website is detected as malicious??

Macha
0 replies
16h56m

Great, now I will miss patio11, and....

Oh that's the list of all the value I find on Twitter anymore.

Kenji
0 replies
17h0m

Nitter is the only thing that made Twitter/X accessible without a goddamn account. Well, good bye, X.

HereIGoAgain
0 replies
8h49m

And with that twitter is once again dead to me.. Not even by choice. The layout/UI is utter crap and my computer hates it. I refuse to use it. For a short time i was able to read things.. guess it's back to nothing again. lol

Havoc
0 replies
16h19m

To be fair I was kinda surprised their create thousands of accounts strategy worked at all

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK
0 replies
14h46m

Thanks, AI.