> We have received cease and desist letters. Awaiting legal advice at the moment, but for now expect all nitter instances to remain down for the foreseeable future.
[for all those who - like me - first check the comments before clicking on the link]
C&D's don't really carry any legal weight in the US to my knowledge... but I don't see any harm in complying ahead of time just to be safe. The only "damage" I can see is just by nature of the service being down temporarily.
> Anyone can send an request.
As for emails, I think BIMI has solved this for some time now, at least for large companies.
"only damage". That's the damage. Five 9s is a thing, because being down means you lose market, your brand is harmed, and no one wants to use you. No one complies with 'cease and desist' orders before seeing if there's any meat at all. No one.
And the legal system "gets that". Reasonable compliance isn't "Oh, someone sent me a C&D. I should destroy my entire business on the off change it makes sense to do so. I'll just raze everything to the ground, hoping that it's better than just... having everything razed to the ground through a suit."
Just.. no. The legal system knows that due diligence is not simply complying, but instead taking time to validate the claim, see if it makes sense, and so on. After all, if the matter were truly urgent, an injunction could easily be obtained.
I don't think anyone was making money on nitter instances anyway, I don't see much in the way of any "brand" or business to lose... and lose to who? Not like there's a competitor. This is just a side project not worth playing games with IMO.
I wouldn't consider temporarily disabling a side project "razing the project to the ground" either.
I was having a generic conversation about the risks to continue service, when handed a C&D, prior to reasonable assessment time. And my point was? There is none.
This helps to give optics into what to do, when served a plate of absurdity.
And if this C&D is caved to, then so will future ones, and Nitter won't have any use anyhow.
> And if this C&D is caved to, then so will future ones, and Nitter won't have any use anyhow.
I don't agree with any of that but ok. It's not like they can stop instances in other countries they have no jurisdiction over, so I don't think its "use" will suddenly vanish.
Most of the C&D cases I've heard about on HN, have been against small open source projects that absolutely don't have the legal resources to fight it, and I'm sure the ones sending that letter know it. I suspect that companies are much more likely to send a C&D to an individual or small community than to a company with a legal team.
Everyone has the resources to fight a C&D since all it takes is a middle finger. Now if they actually have a case against you then sure its harder, but that case , if it exists, existed before they ever sent you a C&D. If you are scared about X being mad at you then the sensible thing to do is to not create something that pisses them off in the first place.
> Getting legal advice can absolutely take a long time, and the first thing they'll probably tell most people in this situation is "turn it off for now until we can do more research and collect money from you."
Normally I would agree, but Nitter has been an adversarial integration from the start. I would expect them to have anticipated this attack.
> However, C&D's don't really carry any legal weight in the US to my knowledge... but I don't see any harm in complying ahead of time just to be safe. The only "damage" I can see is just by nature of the service being down temporarily.
Which is significant damage. By complying too eagerly you give those notices power that they would not otherwise have.
> If there is even a possibility that a court may find the service violating a law, I think the legal advisor would likely say to just leave the service down unless you have many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to fight it... you can most likely avoid the entire lawsuit altogether just by complying with the C&D.
If you're of that mindset why create Nitter in the first place. And they are pretty much guaranteed public (including financial support) for any lawsuit if they ask for it since Nitter is something a lot of people want to exist.
> And this kind of suit is one that can easily ruin your company or even personal life... so avoiding it seems smart.
It's ultimately not that smart when you're in the "business" of creating Nitter because it just tells the bullies that all that's needed is a nicely formatted letter and you'll fold.
Yes and it's not like there hasn't been ton of precedent for scraping recently, including by X themselves, so why would they expect to not be able to win this?
> 1. Permanently take down nitter.net and the GitHub repository[...]
This is the one that they know they have absolutely no grounds to demand, which is why they started with it. Everything else can be conformed with without even really damaging Nitter (the project.)
> 4. Delete all X account credentials and session tokens
could be trouble for individual servers, but is on legally shaky ground, and servers can simply go down at the first strong challenge and open back up under another name. Nitter the project doesn't need to have any credentials or tokens.
I'm sure this has already been answered somewhere in slashdot hundreds of years ago, but why not just go with "free as in freedom"? And perhaps use the word freedom insted of free when possible
But in all seriousness, "free as in freedom" seems fine to me but it is replacing the already unambiguous "free as in speech". You're still stuck with the sometimes-confusing "free as in beer" and they're still cumbersome compared to gratis/libre.
Why not use those three days (or any time that can still be considered reasonable to respond to this) to contact the EFF before responding by taking down the site?
I hate how a jerk like him can tie up the courts with frivolous lawsuits while regular people have their cases slowed down for things that actually matter.
"For the forseeable future" doesn't sound very good. It's a vague phrase, but it usually isn't used to describe something that will change next week or even next month.
"For the time being" would have sounded like less bad wording than "for the forseeable future."
my guess is many people use nitter to do automatic scraping of Twitter for various projects, i.e. they can't believe they "have" to do it because so many people still use Twitter.
That’s a rather poor state of affairs but is surely an issue to take up with our local authorities. Is that their only communication channel? There’s no website, RSS feed or at least mirror feed on an alternative platform?
We should have prevented Twitter/X and other platforms becoming quasi-official communications channels for public institutions.
If he salutes like a Nazi, pushes antisemitism like a Nazi, and promotes Nazi policies, he's probably a Nazi (or at best, functionally indistinguishable). Plus, his parents had close ties to Nazis:
I can't believe people are still pushing these same propaganda talking points over and over. You people have overused the word Nazi so much, that it has no significance anymore. To you, it's a synonym for "people who aren't left wing that I disagree with".
Then can we please stop driving Volkwagens (original Nazi car), BMWs, Mercedez-Benz, Audis, Ford, and Porsches because they contributed to the actual holocaust and the Nazi regime.
Maybe stop using IBM's services, close your Deutsche Bank account and stop reading the Associated Press.
What you are describing is guilt via the sins of the father and diluting the word "Nazi" to become meaningless.
The renaming of Twitter, the MechaHitler incident, the Nazi salute, the 14 flags post, etc etc. It can't be any plainer. Not only does Musk ideologically align with Nazis, he can't stop expressing all sorts of literal Nazi symbols.
So first, there is at least some validity to calling it a nazi app. Elon Musk owns the app, and he gave a nazi salute during a speech for Trump's inauguration. People disagree about it but it is a well known and discussed thing, not a random insult.
While I think bgg2401's comment was wrong, it was at least interacting with the content in a respectful way. rvz in contrast, did not at all address the argument I made, and was the first comment in the chain to break the site guidelines. Breaking the site guidelines _should be surprising_. There's a reason they're there.
> So first, there is at least some validity to calling it a nazi app.
In your opinion.
> Elon Musk owns the app, and he gave a nazi salute during a speech for Trump's inauguration.
He dug himself in that hole through those bad optics, but that does not mean the entire app is a "Nazi app" that you are claiming since actual Nazi content (and accounts) get removed as soon as it is reported.
> rvz in contrast, did not at all address the argument I made, and was the first comment in the chain to break the site guidelines. Breaking the site guidelines _should be surprising_. There's a reason they're there.
You did not make an argument.
Not only you are diluting the word "Nazi" to become meaningless, you broke the guidelines via name-calling in the first place, and called everyone who uses the X app a Nazi. There are dedicated actual Nazi Mastodon instances in the fediverse, but that doesn't mean Mastodon is a Nazi platform.
But since you are looking for actual Nazis, you should look for them where they actually are many of them (Gab, 4chan, etc). Eventually you will find them.
I don't think what I said in my first post is name-calling - I was addressing the point the parent commenter made, not saying anything about whether or not I thought the app was in fact a nazi app or not.
It is not. Even all the major chatbots (Claude Fable 5, ChatGPT 5.6 Sol, Gemini 3 Pro, Grok 4.5) disagree with your assessment and each of the articles when we are objectively talking about actual Nazi social media platforms.
It's absurd to label an entire platform that moderates on banning and censoring Nazi content as a Nazi platform. Even with Mastodon which has multiple active uncensored neo-Nazi instances with zero moderation, it does not mean Mastodon itself is a Nazi platform. Only those specific instances are.
What actually are objectively Nazi social platforms are: nationalist[.]s_ocial, Gab, 4chan, Terrogram, "Stormfront" and "Iron March".
So you should actually look there, since you said:
> My argument is roughly that knowing what your enemy is doing is value. As evidenced by, say, the Enigma machine.
It seems you are more obsessed with Nazis than everyone else here. I have now given you the places where to look for them and where the majority of those actual Nazis are hiding.
What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be? Clearly the exodus that happened when Musk took it over didn't kill it but I do seem to see fewer links to it than I used to.
Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
There's people from all walks of life and all corners of the internet on there still, good and bad. Twitter was always a darned mess, the only difference now is you can't just report people and bully them off the site.
Contrast to me trying to open BlueSky, and seeing death threats and other insane things. I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem. Those two factors alone kept me from even trying it out.
What's really weird is there were a ton of claims that disappeared, about how X was full of bots, but X is the opposite of full of bots. Maybe there's one or another, but they're highly under the radar, X has improved their bot problem drastically.
Edit (tweaked some words, and wanted to add):
Then there was Threads, I am not in any way interested in "New Twitter" by Mark Zuckerberg, no thanks.
> I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem.
There really isn't, unless you mean anime content(of both SFW and NSFW alike) by "CSAM". In case you mean by that, then there is, otherwise no. It also appears to be highly locale dependent - some say they see timeline filled to the brim with fetish furry images and male gay nudity dressed with right wing politics, but my timeline is like just Twitter 2014 stuck at 3AM without any of those. I don't use any filters or blocklists, the place seem naturally nice-ish.
> about how X was full of bots
They appear to have largely given up and scaled back efforts to replace existing social graphs by funding African/Middle Eastern/Indian/South Asian content farms under the guise of revenue sharing programs, burning out talents west to east, likely with the conclusion that they're all equally incapable of understanding contents posted on Twitter even without the language barrier, let alone gaining popularity and even with literal algorithmic manipulations. Or they just burned through quite a deep talent pool globally.
That effort started after Twitter was bought, beginning around South Africa or Nigeria. So it's not an improvement, unless you count someone ceasing hostility as an improvement.
The biggest social networks can only die slowly. They have too much momentum for the the type of sudden exodus that was possible when the internet had not yet absorbed the entire population.
After some time, and muting/skipping through the usual japanese race-content, it’s more bearable. Fastest way for me to find the reason why a train line is down and etc.
Like last week my feed was all about Chiba flooding. Very relevant.
Like all social media, your feed depends partly on who you follow and partly on behavioural cues their algorithms can determine about you (such as who you interact with, sites you visit).
It may be skewed one way or another more than other social networks, but even so, you should be careful saying a social media is a racist bigoted right wing echo chamber because it can sound not like a recital of popular media but more personal experience
One of the many reasons I stopped using the platform is because after Elon took over, my carefully tuned algorithmic feed stopped showing me content I was interested in and instead promoted bigots and nazis into my feed. Nearly all of the accounts I followed promptly went elsewhere instead of having to endure the platform.
I only check literally one account occasionally, and via xcancel. The last post I looked at on the platform- all top replies were all blatantly homophobic had slurs in them. It was via xcancel so I wasn’t logged in. That’s not a personalized algorithm showing me bigotry that’s just what the platform is now.
Guess one has to, because there are just too many people on there. I don't like it but what can I do. What I hate the most is that states/countries, prime ministers and kings post on there. And that the emergency services of some countries have that as primary channel. I understand cross posting to the most popular social channels, but primary? That SHOULD be a local channel, not some dystopian shit hole you could be banned from randomly.
IIRC you can’t even read a single post without an account, it is equivalent to posting a link to a private Facebook group or whatever from an outsider point of view.
They changed this slightly, and 1-3 “top” comments are now sometimes visible, but you can’t dig into the thread. And if you click anything you get popups asking you to log in.
What's difficult is reading threads, or more broadly replies. But single posts? Absolutely fine, in fact it's about the only thing that is totally functional without being logged in.
Oh, weird. I didn’t think there was a way to get rid of the pop-over that hides the post on iOS Safari. But it turns out that there’s a button to close it, just, completely disconnected from the pop-over and hanging out with a bunch of unrelated UI.
If you are on iOS Safari (maybe it does this on Android too, I don’t have an Android phone to check) have you:
* Looked at the top-right corner of that popup.
* Then, scan upwards from that corner, maybe 1cm above it
That’s where the x to close it is, for me. I’m not sure if it is screen specific or what, if it is a bug, etc. It doesn’t seem like a UI anyone would build intentionally but then, who knows?
You can see the last few posts of an account [1], and the contents of a single posts, but minimal or no comments [2]. Videos play after dismissing the login popup.
All journalists and politicians are there, including left wing. If you want to know e.g. what the Prime Minister of Pakistan really said instead of some news spin, you have to read his tweets.
It is an elite club, and Musk wants you to pay for it.
I don't know why it is legal for EU politicians to use this walled garden for important messages.
Someone outside of the US jurisdiction (China?) has to keep xcancel.com running.
Personally I have zero interest. If it's a big enough deal, it'll get to me somehow. Knowing about it 15s after it happened and then seeing a flood of uninformed speculation would be stressful.
Others do value that, no judgment, but for me it's be a net negative.
Yeah, I used to watch things like this, I stopped using Twitter the second it became called 'X' and actually find I don't miss it including the major event live-tweeting.
Since then I've had a look on XCancel when there have been major events once or twice and yeah, most of the flurry of real time updates turn out to be misinformed or just plain wrong later anyway... I don't miss it.
Literally the next thing that happened after I posted this yesterday: my kid texted me that Dolly Parton had died. That’s how some news gets to me—- it’s important to someone I know. It turns out that that is both a good filter and fast enough propagation.
If nothing else news agencies publish articles that are nothing but copies of tweets. Sometimes just one sentence long, other times there's no text at all and just a link to the original post. It's basically the same experience, especially since the news media isn't always bothering to fact check or verify anything either in the rush to get views/ad serves.
Bluesky Social is more useful for news. I can use custom clients such as https://sill.social/ which just aggregate the links and commentary from my feeds, and catch up on what news is important to the ppl I'm following.
Whenever I check X, it's always just misinformation, and it's impossible to see what people actually say because bluechecks are always the first to show up in the algorithmic ranking. On political commentary: they were dying hard for Graham Platner saying he was the only option, but then Troy Jackson who replaced him did better in the polls.
I don't follow the war anymore but I used to follow twitter OSINT accounts supporting both sides; I find it hard to imagine pro-Russian accounts posting on bsky or fedi?
Dunno about fediverse, but there's definitely a bunch on bsky. Or there were, at least; I've blocked a bunch, and my feeds don't show me more, so maybe they're gone.
Huh, I'm not on bsky so I wouldn't know. To be clear, I was not talking about troll accounts, but about OSINT accounts that generally try to present accurate info and happen to be pro-Russian. E.g. when I was following this stuff there was a medical student in the Dominican Republic who was running such an account. And of course there are many pro-Russian Telegram channels who are highly critical of the government and military (often for being insufficiently hawkish).
This is only tenuously related but every single Mac app I see advertised on X by verified accounts is malware. I reported one last week to them, they said it's not malware. I appealed it and said the install link is copy and paste obfuscated base64 into your terminal, and they said after review it doesn't break their terms.
So whatever else they do, they take money to knowingly promote malware.
> the install link is copy and paste obfuscated base64
This doesn't make it malware, as likely as it is that malware would hide itself like that. base64 encoding avoids issues with quoting and escaping in the terminal, and is an easy way to include a bit of binary data that might be needed by a command (or even just written directly to disk somewhere). "Obfuscated base64" is only saying something if you decoded the base64 and still got an obfuscated result. Install-time code execution is more dangerous in the sense that you can't review between installation and program execution; but custom installers come from the same source as the program, so it's the same number of parties to trust.
For that matter, PyPA still maintains bootstrap.pypa.io so that Python users can get current versions of pip by downloading and running a Python script that loads a base85 string, decodes it and writes a wheel file based on that. (It even duplicates some of the standard library `ensurepip` logic.)
If you want a malware report to be taken seriously, in general, you should expect to roll up your sleeves and be able to provide an analysis of concrete malicious behaviour.
> If you want a malware report to be taken seriously, in general, you should expect to roll up your sleeves and be able to provide an analysis of concrete malicious behaviour.
I reported them all the Cloudflare and Cloudflare took them down. One moved away from Cloudflare, and Twitter kept them up.
I reported another to NiceNIC and they asked for:
1. Verifiable malicious download file or sample hash
2. Screenshot or screen recording with the full URL visible
3. Evidence of malicious scripts, obfuscated code, or download chain
4. HTTP response, redirect chain, headers, or packet capture data
5. Third-party security verdict tied to the specific URL or file
I just ignored them. I don't work for them and if they want to host illegal content then it's not my business decision.
This one in particular had the download in base64, piping into Javascript and running a binary as a fake Apple Updater script.
But I am sick of this attitude that it's my responsibility for a malware report to be taken seriously. If they introduce malware bounties then ok, but otherwise I'm doing them a favour by reporting it and if they want to continue to host it after reasonable being made aware of its existence, they should be legally responsible.
Saying it takes no effort is a low effort way to stop people reporting issues to you for free. They are getting paid to promote the site, so it's in their interest to not bother investigating.
Actually I retired from twitter before Musk, because twitter started to censor me. But of course once Musk took over, constantly raising his right arm, I knew twitter was dead. Here in Europe nobody wants to see selfish and ruthless right-wing nuts control ecosystems. Billionaires pulling the strings does not work; the USA need to learn this lesson first.
You know what, I'll throw my hat into the ring on Shitter censorship:
Once enough 'big' accounts block you for any arbitrary reason they like, your account is heavily downweighted enough to send your replies, posts, and everything into yet another class of shadowban that isn't a shadowban.
I've never interacted with the ilks of people like a16z and yet their Twitter block definitely causes a heavier algo downrank impact just 'being' there.
Terminally online, infighting and purity testing leftist weirdos who never have and never will achieve anything politically continue to push "nazi bar" rhetoric, but actual people just don't give a shit. Here's some far right nazis for your reference:
A lot of interesting people who do interesting things post on X. You can follow them and have interesting feed. You don't get it on FB/Insta or Tiktok.
>>Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
Yeah just a big tech CEOs posting (or an author of a big project, or an engineer working for a top lab), nothing to see here. On to another dancing teenager on TikTok. Let's watch some pranks or a "beauty influencer" on Insta where we are at it instead.
Thats sorta my situation, a scene I'm rather involved in has most the international users there, as such thats where things still live. Every other alternative has failed to gain enough traction for one reason or another.
Its usually either limited features, regional accessibility issues, or platforms like metas' just basically trading one big bad organization for another.
English is still the lingua franca of Europe. I find that users in all parts of Asia still use Xitter heavily (though some artists in East and Southeast Asia fled when the Grok edit button was added), and only nazis and campist communists still use Xitter in the US.
He has spent the last few months repeatedly posting the same comment about hitler being a socialist. If it was just the salute in isolation it could be questionable, but now there is no doubt.
White supremacist circle jerk and narcissistic "influencing." (Along with some international communities that, admittedly, don’t intersect with this muck at all.)
Recent choice words from Musk:
* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"
* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)
* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."
* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)
Musk is who you engage with on twitter. You're one of the people who makes his account the most engaged with. I follow tons of stuff on twitter, and have no idea what Musk is doing unless it gets in the mainstream news.
Musk inserts himself into the algorithmic feed, has nothing to do with interest, maybe you stay on chronological view since you have enough to follow you don’t need algorithmic
Incredibly unpopular opinion on Hacker News, but X remains the center of many circles, including tech. There is almost nothing posted on Hacker News that I haven't seen on X first, with better commentary.
I haven't left because there are still circles of people I follow that haven't bailed. Once a large enough majority move to Bluesky, I'll start browsing that app more.
On the other hand, I might start posting on Bluesky more because as of a week ago, I'm shadowbanned on X. I know people throw that term around, but nobody on the site can see any of my reply tweets, even me (unless I scroll my account's 'replies' tab); people who've followed me for years are asking why their tweet has a ghost reply.
I don't think X has that much of an incentive to filter out bots while keeping around accounts like me (200 followers, will never pay for Premium). The slightly higher effort bots that glaze tech CEOs will be basically indistinguishable from the real people glazing tech CEOs because they're wannabe founders trying to network/cloutfarm. And that style of dead internet is fine with Elon.
> as of a week ago, I'm shadowbanned on X. I know people throw that term around, but nobody on the site can see any of my reply tweets, even me
This is honestly the real value of nitter far beyond anti-Musk shriekers being obsessed with and addicted to X but not wanting to log into X. Nitter seems to simply give you everything - and you can plainly see which tweets are getting huge distribution and which ones nobody is seeing.
> Once a large enough majority move to Bluesky, I'll start browsing that app more
The problem is a network effect. Lot of people rage quit X and then they return to it because they realize the reach isn't there on Bluesky, and whenever that happens it just sends strong signals
I don't really like X either, I feel like the feed algorithm isn't very good and just shows the same thing repeated by multiple accounts.
I'm trying to objectively view the two platforms without the partisan rhetorics. There isn't that many places besides Threads.
I personally like the old php forums which had a real presence.
What's funny is that people who use social media to drive traffic seem to consistently say they get more real click throughs to their content from bsky than twitter, despite having a fraction of the follower counts and post engagement that they have on twitter (even before all the barriers Musk enacted to keep users on twitter).
I use it to follow people who either have ideas I find interesting or do stuff I find interesting, and typically I'm looking for accounts that are small enough that I know they will at least see my replies, and often interact with them. (Something like 3K-15K followers for most of them, I think.)
I also think it's indispensable for real-time commentary and niche commentary on current events: always requires grains of salt but there's just no better place on the Internet for that sort of thing, in part because...
It's the one major social network I'm on where it is easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order. A feed I TRULY control (and, if you follow the right people, insulates you from much of the nonsense on the site).
(And every once in awhile, some insane viral nonsense pokes in that makes you say "how could I ever quit this site".)
>Is it still as popular as it used to be?
A quick search roughly aligns with my perception: it bottomed out a couple of years ago and has gradually recovered, though not to where it was pre-X.
> It's the one major social network I'm on where it is easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order.
Oh weird, I'd rate X as medium-hard for that amongst the microposting sites I look at. Mastodon and Bluesky both default to almost-that, varying mostly in whether you need to jump through hoops to not see reposts.
X was always the one that (a) doesn't default to it, and (b) would keep "forgetting" and pushing you back to the algorithmic feed.
The problem is that network effects are everything
You are using a relic of what-used-to-be-Twitter. That's what people signed up for. I happen to think what Musk has done - although I'm highly skeptical of him - is not totally insane - Twitter did used to have some pretty notable censorship. But you follow people because that's where the people are. Competition does not spring up overnight, companies know this, and so they're left to gradually (or quickly!) enshittify
"easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order"
Yes, well. That should be the standard. Companies that don't follow that standard should be turned into pariahs
> Twitter did used to have some pretty notable censorship.
Can we stop this bullshit? It has away more censorship now. And its censorship before Musk was already biased toward conservatives, punishing left more severely. Must made it massively worst.
Then I wont stop respomding to it. Yes a lie repeated enough times becomes truth and what you wrote is attempt to repeat a lie. Both about old twitter and Musk changes.
> Twitter did used to have some pretty notable censorship.
Are you saying that the person you replied to is willfully deceiving people by saying this?
Because I think it's very obviously true, and we can say this without even bringing up the site as it is now. I think you think so too, given how you talked about your characterization of pre-Musk censorship.
There are lots of interesting people/orgs on X from AI/ML circles, as well as Ukraine war OSINT accounts and UA army helpers. I stay on X pretty much for these two topics.
In a UK context, journalists are on there because politicians are on there... and politicians are on there because journalists are on there. It's politicians that need to pull the plug - if they left en masse the journalists would go where they went, even if they stayed on X too - but nobody has the balls to do it. (Aside from one politician who for all practical purposes seems to do absolutely nothing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyrx1ee2r4o).
They could at least use both. I'm pretty annoyed with Andy Burnham. He's had a Bluesky account that has been pretty active... right up until he became a PM. Would it kill him to get a member of his team to repost his tweets to Bluesky?
I've made a lot of friends in Japan through shared interest communities that are mostly on twitter. Most are people I've actually met whenever I am in Japan.
It’s still fairly popular, but the statistics show that X usage is gradually declining. Elon claims that X is more popular than ever, but the platform doesn’t publicly release its own stats, and publicly available stats say otherwise.
If you like AI and tech, there are some pretty thriving sub-communities. AI stuff, and a lot of tech stuff happens on X first. Claudebot/OpenClaw/Hermes all began on X months before I commonly saw them appear on other platforms.
> What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be?
No idea comparatively, but an artist friend of mine tried out Bluesky and then complained about how there's way more of a limited reach and engagement there compared to Twitter.
I rarely use it (you need an account, so I need to add cancel to the url) but last time I had a "guest" account was two years ago and it was pretty much all bots. That being said, some (important) people or companies still use it for announcement but these are usually linked and xcancel works just fine.
I honestly have no idea if there are real people who actually use it daily. Who can read that stuff?
twitter/x remains the domain of intelligence agencies worldwide. It is a semi-open (the world first virtual leader, the ayatollah affirms he exists from there ..) psychological operations platform that permits the avatars of "world leaders" to speak to masses and also hosts a parasitical community of grifters ("opinion makers" and "influencers") that feed off of the festering fetid matter served up by the Spook International.
a secondary purpose of the twitter/x is a reverse doomsday clock, based on above. As long as the ghost of this unprofitable "business entity" is kept alive by funny money and funny deals, we can sleep soundly at night knowing there won't be ww3 or any other such extreme negotiating tactics by global elite, since they are all 'playing their role' on twitter currently known as x.
I don't believe the extremism engine of Xitter is reducing the risk of global catastrophe. I think it's accelerating that risk. Certainly it helped elect Trump, and no one can argue that's been good for advancing the cause of peace on earth or avoiding several other causes of mass death.
It's deplorable, but our president in Mexico recently was asked about some current affairs a d her answer was "ive written about it in X , go see it there" ...
As if X was an official government publishing channel . WTH, they should publish it on they official government pages.
There should be laws that require all government statements to be published on an official government site and be forever archived there no matter where or however else they were published. That way politicians can take advantage of the reach of social media sites while not requiring anyone to use them and also providing a means for those statements to be verified and preserved.
This right here is the thing that shows how much influence big tech has. Everyone has their anecdotal story about porn, spam, malware or whatever flooding Twitter meanwhile your local city government treats it as an official communications channel.
More of a political echo chamber than anything else. I mothballed my original account when things were getting spicy which was primarily focused on dev, UI/UX, and InfoSec news. I finally went back and have had some great interactions with people about technical stuff that interests me. Right now, the data center and AI discussions are getting intense along with Omarchy, lol. If you steer clear of the political stuff, you can find some good stuff still.
>> Is it still as popular as it used to be?
Probably not but it still ranks ahead of sites like Reddit. Its like the 13th, 14th most popular platform right now. I log on mainly just to see if I'm missing anything. Other than that, most of the engagement I have is curiosity and just fun stuff like seeing people posting retro games, stuff like that.
>> Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
X is now kind of the social media cul-de-sac . It used to be one of the go to places for breaking tech, popular cultural and political stuff. Now its usually two or three days late to the party on anything worthwhile. So the posts from the CEO probably made the rounds before you finally saw it on X. lol
Its main use for myself was that posts were public by default so lots of government orgs and whatnot posted real time status updates. I never really used it except for occasionally checking those.
Now that more and more are going "walled garden" I don't get it at all
I see many, many Twitter posts here. I flag every single one. Many of them are AI-related, and not something from a big tech CEO. It seems that the fans of AI don’t have any moral quandaries with using it. I will let you be the judge of whether that says anything about their moral compass in general.
What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be?
Yes, because influential, non-evil people who should know better just will not fucking leave. The vast majority of public-minded ML developers and researchers, including people who compete with xAI, being an obvious example.
And because skilled, knowledgeable people who could create a replacement service just will not do so. At least not without finding new and innovative forehead-slapping ways to fail at it.
Incredibly frustrating that Xitter is still as popular as it is.
Companies and celebrities are a major use case here. Lots of them (especially ones from non-English speaking countries) still use the site as their primary means of communication. For example, Nintendo doesn't have an official presence on Bluesky, Threads or Mastodon, just Twitter.
There's a decent number of old school companies and creatives who either don't know/care about alternatives, or who tried them and went back to Twitter/X.
It's become just another doomscroll content mill like the rest. Public figures and well known names have been replaced with random content creators and repost bots.
For one of the big use cases, you can look at the NCMEC's reports-by-ESP numbers.
For example, X has 816K and X AI has 135K reports. Reddit, despite having 200M (36%) more MAU, only has 65K reports. OpenAI, despite having about 8x MAU than X.ai, has 182K reports.
It's hardly unique to Twitter but it's so frustrating how much "content" online requires an account. Whenever my friends send me something on Instagram or TikTok or a restaurant puts their menu on Instagram, I'm barraged with a thousand dark patterns forcing me to log in. Even Reddit is doing it now. I do wonder how much of this is to boost engagement versus another "wonderful" side effect from LLMs since they need training data.
libredirect is very good for these kinda of things. But the platforms keep trying to make it stop working so is a constant battle of the frontents to build workarounds
The other day someone on here gave me a useful framing. Non-publicly accessible sites are the dark web. If a project told you they were moving all their docs and support to the dark web they would sound crazy, but if they say they're moving it to discord (the same thing) then it's fine.
I prefer the older term "deep web" [1]. It's mentioned in Wikipedia that the terms are used as synonyms now, but I think it's important to differentiate between sites behind login/authentication/etc, and sites that are still openly accessible, albeit over Tor, i2p, etc.
> Don’t go there. Plenty of other restaurants to choose from. They just lost a customer due to their hostility.
This is a wild take to me.
Around here pretty much nobody posts their menu online on any website, the technical literacy is just quite poor.
If you limited yourself to places that did, you'd only get big fast-food chains.
Given the tone of the post, I was assuming the menu was only available on Instagram, i.e. they did not have a paper menu. Obviously if they have a paper menu, which most restaurants do, you can just go there and read it.
I didn't assume a paper menu, I'd love it if there was though.
Those at least can be scanned, pinned to the fridge, etc.
But in my experience they mostly have a board over the counter that I'm forced to stand there and take slightly blurry photos of.
Right now, I can do about two searches on xcancel before it gives me the "instances have been rate limited" message. Then if I completely close out of my web browser, clear my web history from the last hour, and go back into my web browser, I can do another one or two searches, before xcancel again gives me that message about ""instances have been rate limited".
In theory I can still read the same things I could read before on xcancel by doing an endless cycle of doing one or two searches, then closing out of my web browser and clearing history, and then going back to xcancel and doing another search or two. But certainly that process is very annoying.
Now, I'm not 100% sure if this is related to Musk's cease and desist letter. I've run into this problem or similar technical problems about twice a month before when using XCancel. Usually the technical problem is resolved within 2 or 3 hours and I can use xcancel normally again. So I guess I'll check back in a few hours and see if I can use xcancel normally again.
You're doing voodoo. It's not you that's being rate limited, it's xcancel itself that is being rate limited. If you wait a few moments and reload, things will likely work.
Although now I should say that this was the truth yesterday, but now twitter seems to be actively killing the credentials that nitter instances are using, and they're returning rate limit messages permanently. My guess is that this is a function of how many credentials/tokens a nitter instance was cycling through to get content x the amount of traffic that nitter instance gets. They probably just set the rate-limiting bans longer for everybody (or steadily increase them on each offense), instead of trying to find the specific offending credentials.
edit: xcancel officially gone, so none of this matters.
That actually leaked tracking back to twitter which is really the entire point of something like nitter. xcancel.com was always my last choice after nitter.net and nitter.poast.org. nitter.net was the only one without callbacks for scripts and media back to panopticon.
I always thought that xcancel showing "X Cancelled" proudly on loading screen to be sounding like it was written by someone more spiteful with gender politics than they are familiar with computers. The wording just didn't sound Internet.
> On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.
The service XCancel is stopped until further notice.
We are seeking legal advice and won't share more details for now.
Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel.
Reminder that hosting your own won’t last long either if it got popular, as long as you don’t control your domain, you are always under the mercy of being shutdown.
Sad for the project but unsurprising knowing how much SpaceX (sigh) relies on xAI which it mostly a shelf for a neocloud bootstrapped precisely from Twitter/X as a dataset. I imagine they will legally fight to close as much as possible in order to make it look like a valuable dataset that is exclusive.
I would literally stop opening twitter links, for me the utility of twitter is not having an account, but sometimes certain projects or governments and businesses use it for announcements. Before Musk put the login only for seeing tweets and comments, I would use regular twitter and when they did that I switched to nitter. (I had an account for some time but it was a complete was of time)
The open web is dead. The open web remains dead. And we have killed it.
I'm actually much less anti-Musk than the average HN commentator but it should be universally agreed here that a small handful of mega-corp websites dominating the majority of content on the web is a bad thing. Nitter was hardly a solution. Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed, and "free speech" platforms like X are "technically" closed.
IMO we all need to start vibe coding PHP bulletin boards again. 'RETVRN' etc.
Maybe they're referring to defederation? It's quite common on Mastodon as I understand it, due to disagreements on things like moderation between server operators.
Getting them federated properly was pretty tough a while ago (since any spammer could just set one up, there had to be a bar to clear), did that get fixed?
I'm not sure if it ever was that hard but if you follow a bunch of people the network effects will kick in eventually, you can also add relays to pull in posts from other servers if you're impatient. A fresh instance can take some time before the known network starts filling in, especially if you don't know who to follow (or have anyone following you), but fedi is a series of tubes: it only pushes and pulls stuff from places it knows. I didn't have problems federating outgoing messages to my friends' instances when I started, but I wouldn't be surprised if some Mastodon servers use some stupid anti-spam measure that keeps low peer count servers away.
I follow some people who have moved to single-user instances after the instance they were on shut down/etc, and I haven't seen anyone mention any trouble getting federated.
What does it even mean, period? MAGA losers are free to establish a community on Bluesky, the only difference between that and Twitter is that Bluesky isn't built to optimize for ragebait and culture war fighting. But they can still socialize among themselves on Bluesky even if no one else wants anything to do with them.
the problem here is, that a large large group of people do want something "to do with them" (and "them" not just being "maga losers"), but that for NORMAL users that sign up and use bluesky, there are others who choose that they must not socialize with them.
normal people dont understand how they can join specific communities or instances or whatever it is on the specific platform, they want something like "twitter" and then thats where they are, they dont want "some weird twitter instance thats not the main one"
Nothing, fedi is extremely anarchic by design. If you don't like a server you can move to a different one, or start your own. The big Mastodon servers put in a great deal of effort to police what their users can see and interact with (see FediBlock), but it's impossible to shut certain people or groups out of the network entirely. It's a double-edged sword, but it's a net good for the kind of network it was intended to be, which is a hacker's network; it wasn't designed for normies.
If we reflect on the debate from years ago about whether to nationalize Twitter, all the downsides we were warned about have come true. They censor / promote whoever the state wants anyways, the CEOs was literally in the cabinet for a time, but now they also have to enshittify and degrade the experience for the benefit of an also-ran AI lab.
All of the downsides you listed started with Jack Dorsey, and were significantly improved once Musk took over. I’d tell you to check out the “Twitter Files”, but it seems Wikipedia has been completely compromised.
And I’m hesitant to recommend you read about it on Grokipedia (you’ll assume there is major bias), but it does seem to be the most accurate retelling of the scandal that I can find online. Here are both though:
At a certain point it's just words; what makes those meaningful? Musk bans and limits distribution for people he dislikes or who criticize him, intentionally directs hate mobs, promotes hate and disinformation, ...
You can read the talk page yourself. Wikipedia's editors are annoying and impossible to work with, but their obsessions are weighted towards the truth. And while some editors have acted in bad faith for smaller articles; articles like that are generally treated with as much good faith as possible.
Though I also recommend reading the talk page, "weighted towards the truth" is not how I'd describe it.
Personally I found the debate on the Jordan Lasker talk page very enlightening. Mother Jones is of course a very reliable paper, practically Arxiv really, totally reasonable to have it as a single source for a biographical article with extremely weak quotation in the article text...
Has nothing to do with what I said. I'm aware Twitter got better for right-wingers under Musk. It would've gotten better for right-wingers under Trump nationalization anyways.
The difference is if it were nationalized they might still have some incentive to crack down on crypto scams, AI-generated csam, etc.
> I've heard that - what is your experience? Downvotes and exclusion? Are there more 'open' servers?
Fediverse has plenty of servers which are "free speech" adjacent, which most Mastodon servers close off since its easier for them to police what their users can see than let them do it themselves. The vast majority of them do not run the Mastodon software, and feel far more "wild west" with all the shitposters. But if you want to talk with actual hackers and are into that sort of thing, it's fun times.
https://fba.ryona.agency/ lets you browse instance block lists, sort by most defederated, who defederates the most, etc. There used to be FediBlock which maintained a centralized blocklist, but it doesn't exist anymore (gee, I wonder how something like that would end up eating itself?).
As far as reasoning goes, I think you can grasp how people would try and wield a tool like blocklists. A lot of blocks are merited, while some arent. I've had several blocks put on my instance from servers that I never even interacted with, for reasons that seemingly appear out of thin air.
https://fedilist.com/ is a good instance browsing/monitoring tool maintained by the guy who runs fsebugoutzone.org, one of the more prominent and "fun" servers. He's a good dude.
You can browse by software, whether its open registration or not, allows tor, etc. You can glean statistics off of certain instances, which is really useful if you run one yourself. Most of the instances on the other side of fedi run the Pleroma software.
Don't reinvent the wheel PHPBB, MyBB and others are still updated.
I hate the closed web purely for disrupting archiving efforts, you can add chat apps like discord, whatsapp, zoom and teams in that list as well. As a lot of communities have moved there.
Anyone familiar with the legal reasons Twitter might be able to prevent sites like nitter from working? I believe scraping is legal but I'm sure there are details that make this different
if i understand correctly, in Meta v. Bright Data, the court ruled that brightdata was allowed to scrape public profiles because the user is unauthenticated. thus I do not believe that precedent is in favor of nitter currently
This is sad. The government, in doing so, awards e. g. twitter/Musk a de-facto total control over the communication space. I think ALL protocols need to be made fully open, and everyone should be able to write clients adhering these protocols. Any "cease and desist" also must be instantly made public. Right now there is a rogue government running the USA, run by a corrupt orange clown king. All oligarchs who supported this system need to pay compensation money to the other taxpayers.
Nitter is a great project, way lighter than using Twitter and gets the job done if you want to check few accounts. I have a list of 30 accounts that I'm checking with Nitter and it's absolutely fantastic for this. Oh well, I guess I'll live without following those accounts.
Nitter permitted perusing of twitter (x-cremente) without being tracked by whoever has the keys to the backdoors to twitter. This is why nitter is being killed - it destroys the surveillance capability provided by twitter/x/musk to interested parties.
This means that you need to stop posting links to it anywhere, unless you attach to the link everything you find interesting about it (so the discussion too, if it's interesting).
As long as people are using X and linking to it this pain will just go on. If you have an account there you will not notice how unusable it is for others. And that's by design.
I think it's less that "this place" loves X, more that there is a committed segment of folks with flagging privileges that really really like a certain South African business guy.
More accurately, there are people here who don't hate the guy with a burning passion, and find the rhetoric of those who do really, really obnoxious. Especially the persecution complex and the dark hinting.
530 comments
[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 20.7 ms ] thread> We have received cease and desist letters. Awaiting legal advice at the moment, but for now expect all nitter instances to remain down for the foreseeable future.
[for all those who - like me - first check the comments before clicking on the link]
The legal system gets this concept. Otherwise random, unwarranted desist orders from your enemies could break you.
Anyone can send an request.
Weird.
> Anyone can send an request.
As for emails, I think BIMI has solved this for some time now, at least for large companies.
And the legal system "gets that". Reasonable compliance isn't "Oh, someone sent me a C&D. I should destroy my entire business on the off change it makes sense to do so. I'll just raze everything to the ground, hoping that it's better than just... having everything razed to the ground through a suit."
Just.. no. The legal system knows that due diligence is not simply complying, but instead taking time to validate the claim, see if it makes sense, and so on. After all, if the matter were truly urgent, an injunction could easily be obtained.
I wouldn't consider temporarily disabling a side project "razing the project to the ground" either.
This helps to give optics into what to do, when served a plate of absurdity.
And if this C&D is caved to, then so will future ones, and Nitter won't have any use anyhow.
I don't agree with any of that but ok. It's not like they can stop instances in other countries they have no jurisdiction over, so I don't think its "use" will suddenly vanish.
Normally I would agree, but Nitter has been an adversarial integration from the start. I would expect them to have anticipated this attack.
> However, C&D's don't really carry any legal weight in the US to my knowledge... but I don't see any harm in complying ahead of time just to be safe. The only "damage" I can see is just by nature of the service being down temporarily.
Which is significant damage. By complying too eagerly you give those notices power that they would not otherwise have.
> If there is even a possibility that a court may find the service violating a law, I think the legal advisor would likely say to just leave the service down unless you have many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to fight it... you can most likely avoid the entire lawsuit altogether just by complying with the C&D.
If you're of that mindset why create Nitter in the first place. And they are pretty much guaranteed public (including financial support) for any lawsuit if they ask for it since Nitter is something a lot of people want to exist.
> And this kind of suit is one that can easily ruin your company or even personal life... so avoiding it seems smart.
It's ultimately not that smart when you're in the "business" of creating Nitter because it just tells the bullies that all that's needed is a nicely formatted letter and you'll fold.
This is the one that they know they have absolutely no grounds to demand, which is why they started with it. Everything else can be conformed with without even really damaging Nitter (the project.)
> 4. Delete all X account credentials and session tokens
could be trouble for individual servers, but is on legally shaky ground, and servers can simply go down at the first strong challenge and open back up under another name. Nitter the project doesn't need to have any credentials or tokens.
As for an actual answer: parties, weddings.
But in all seriousness, "free as in freedom" seems fine to me but it is replacing the already unambiguous "free as in speech". You're still stuck with the sometimes-confusing "free as in beer" and they're still cumbersome compared to gratis/libre.
"For the time being" would have sounded like less bad wording than "for the forseeable future."
If the commenter truly believes it’s a Nazi app, why are they the slightest bit upset to lose access to any version of it?
It’s astonishingly easy to not use toxic social media platforms.
We should have prevented Twitter/X and other platforms becoming quasi-official communications channels for public institutions.
perhaps tone down the whole nazi shit. X is clearly not nazi, and neither is musk.
edit: and yes, I think its atrocious that they only post on X, they should be punished severely for that
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/3/27/elon_musk_south_afric...
It would be funny if it weren't so sad.
Then can we please stop driving Volkwagens (original Nazi car), BMWs, Mercedez-Benz, Audis, Ford, and Porsches because they contributed to the actual holocaust and the Nazi regime.
Maybe stop using IBM's services, close your Deutsche Bank account and stop reading the Associated Press.
What you are describing is guilt via the sins of the father and diluting the word "Nazi" to become meaningless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/88_(number)#In_neo-Nazism
The renaming of Twitter, the MechaHitler incident, the Nazi salute, the 14 flags post, etc etc. It can't be any plainer. Not only does Musk ideologically align with Nazis, he can't stop expressing all sorts of literal Nazi symbols.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/elon-musks-14-flags-po...
That commenter has pronouns in his profile. Tells you everything you need to know.
While I think bgg2401's comment was wrong, it was at least interacting with the content in a respectful way. rvz in contrast, did not at all address the argument I made, and was the first comment in the chain to break the site guidelines. Breaking the site guidelines _should be surprising_. There's a reason they're there.
In your opinion.
> Elon Musk owns the app, and he gave a nazi salute during a speech for Trump's inauguration.
He dug himself in that hole through those bad optics, but that does not mean the entire app is a "Nazi app" that you are claiming since actual Nazi content (and accounts) get removed as soon as it is reported.
> rvz in contrast, did not at all address the argument I made, and was the first comment in the chain to break the site guidelines. Breaking the site guidelines _should be surprising_. There's a reason they're there.
You did not make an argument.
Not only you are diluting the word "Nazi" to become meaningless, you broke the guidelines via name-calling in the first place, and called everyone who uses the X app a Nazi. There are dedicated actual Nazi Mastodon instances in the fediverse, but that doesn't mean Mastodon is a Nazi platform.
But since you are looking for actual Nazis, you should look for them where they actually are many of them (Gab, 4chan, etc). Eventually you will find them.
My argument is roughly that knowing what your enemy is doing is value. As evidenced by, say, the Enigma machine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine
I don't think what I said in my first post is name-calling - I was addressing the point the parent commenter made, not saying anything about whether or not I thought the app was in fact a nazi app or not.
It's absurd to label an entire platform that moderates on banning and censoring Nazi content as a Nazi platform. Even with Mastodon which has multiple active uncensored neo-Nazi instances with zero moderation, it does not mean Mastodon itself is a Nazi platform. Only those specific instances are.
What actually are objectively Nazi social platforms are: nationalist[.]s_ocial, Gab, 4chan, Terrogram, "Stormfront" and "Iron March".
So you should actually look there, since you said:
> My argument is roughly that knowing what your enemy is doing is value. As evidenced by, say, the Enigma machine.
It seems you are more obsessed with Nazis than everyone else here. I have now given you the places where to look for them and where the majority of those actual Nazis are hiding.
Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
Contrast to me trying to open BlueSky, and seeing death threats and other insane things. I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem. Those two factors alone kept me from even trying it out.
What's really weird is there were a ton of claims that disappeared, about how X was full of bots, but X is the opposite of full of bots. Maybe there's one or another, but they're highly under the radar, X has improved their bot problem drastically.
Edit (tweaked some words, and wanted to add):
Then there was Threads, I am not in any way interested in "New Twitter" by Mark Zuckerberg, no thanks.
There really isn't, unless you mean anime content(of both SFW and NSFW alike) by "CSAM". In case you mean by that, then there is, otherwise no. It also appears to be highly locale dependent - some say they see timeline filled to the brim with fetish furry images and male gay nudity dressed with right wing politics, but my timeline is like just Twitter 2014 stuck at 3AM without any of those. I don't use any filters or blocklists, the place seem naturally nice-ish.
> about how X was full of bots
They appear to have largely given up and scaled back efforts to replace existing social graphs by funding African/Middle Eastern/Indian/South Asian content farms under the guise of revenue sharing programs, burning out talents west to east, likely with the conclusion that they're all equally incapable of understanding contents posted on Twitter even without the language barrier, let alone gaining popularity and even with literal algorithmic manipulations. Or they just burned through quite a deep talent pool globally.
That effort started after Twitter was bought, beginning around South Africa or Nigeria. So it's not an improvement, unless you count someone ceasing hostility as an improvement.
G+ comes to mind.
(Several billion profiles, tens of millions active. Shut down 1 Apr 2019. Yes, April Fools' Day.)
NA tuned account has more of what you said.
Yet. Japanese twitter users are a reflection of who they are, etc etc
Doesn’t mean there isn’t toxic stuff though.
Like last week my feed was all about Chiba flooding. Very relevant.
It may be skewed one way or another more than other social networks, but even so, you should be careful saying a social media is a racist bigoted right wing echo chamber because it can sound not like a recital of popular media but more personal experience
I only check literally one account occasionally, and via xcancel. The last post I looked at on the platform- all top replies were all blatantly homophobic had slurs in them. It was via xcancel so I wasn’t logged in. That’s not a personalized algorithm showing me bigotry that’s just what the platform is now.
* Looked at the top-right corner of that popup.
* Then, scan upwards from that corner, maybe 1cm above it
That’s where the x to close it is, for me. I’m not sure if it is screen specific or what, if it is a bug, etc. It doesn’t seem like a UI anyone would build intentionally but then, who knows?
You can see the last few posts of an account [1], and the contents of a single posts, but minimal or no comments [2]. Videos play after dismissing the login popup.
[1] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack
[2] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2091983940609245467
It is an elite club, and Musk wants you to pay for it.
I don't know why it is legal for EU politicians to use this walled garden for important messages.
Someone outside of the US jurisdiction (China?) has to keep xcancel.com running.
Others do value that, no judgment, but for me it's be a net negative.
Since then I've had a look on XCancel when there have been major events once or twice and yeah, most of the flurry of real time updates turn out to be misinformed or just plain wrong later anyway... I don't miss it.
The comment section was pretty awful; 90% people yelling about Canada's government being a tyranny and/or in bed with Communist China.
Whenever I check X, it's always just misinformation, and it's impossible to see what people actually say because bluechecks are always the first to show up in the algorithmic ranking. On political commentary: they were dying hard for Graham Platner saying he was the only option, but then Troy Jackson who replaced him did better in the polls.
Except you now need to create a Xitter account to view posts in chronological order (i.e. breaking news).
No thanks.
So whatever else they do, they take money to knowingly promote malware.
This doesn't make it malware, as likely as it is that malware would hide itself like that. base64 encoding avoids issues with quoting and escaping in the terminal, and is an easy way to include a bit of binary data that might be needed by a command (or even just written directly to disk somewhere). "Obfuscated base64" is only saying something if you decoded the base64 and still got an obfuscated result. Install-time code execution is more dangerous in the sense that you can't review between installation and program execution; but custom installers come from the same source as the program, so it's the same number of parties to trust.
For that matter, PyPA still maintains bootstrap.pypa.io so that Python users can get current versions of pip by downloading and running a Python script that loads a base85 string, decodes it and writes a wheel file based on that. (It even duplicates some of the standard library `ensurepip` logic.)
If you want a malware report to be taken seriously, in general, you should expect to roll up your sleeves and be able to provide an analysis of concrete malicious behaviour.
I reported them all the Cloudflare and Cloudflare took them down. One moved away from Cloudflare, and Twitter kept them up.
I reported another to NiceNIC and they asked for: 1. Verifiable malicious download file or sample hash 2. Screenshot or screen recording with the full URL visible 3. Evidence of malicious scripts, obfuscated code, or download chain 4. HTTP response, redirect chain, headers, or packet capture data 5. Third-party security verdict tied to the specific URL or file
I just ignored them. I don't work for them and if they want to host illegal content then it's not my business decision.
This one in particular had the download in base64, piping into Javascript and running a binary as a fake Apple Updater script.
But I am sick of this attitude that it's my responsibility for a malware report to be taken seriously. If they introduce malware bounties then ok, but otherwise I'm doing them a favour by reporting it and if they want to continue to host it after reasonable being made aware of its existence, they should be legally responsible.
It takes no effort to make the claim, and considerable effort to act upon it. Why should they believe you, a priori?
Once enough 'big' accounts block you for any arbitrary reason they like, your account is heavily downweighted enough to send your replies, posts, and everything into yet another class of shadowban that isn't a shadowban.
I've never interacted with the ilks of people like a16z and yet their Twitter block definitely causes a heavier algo downrank impact just 'being' there.
https://x.com/vonderleyen https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa https://x.com/liandersson https://x.com/AmnestyEU
1. Japanese community 2. Porn (good god, so much porn)
>>Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
Yeah just a big tech CEOs posting (or an author of a big project, or an engineer working for a top lab), nothing to see here. On to another dancing teenager on TikTok. Let's watch some pranks or a "beauty influencer" on Insta where we are at it instead.
Its usually either limited features, regional accessibility issues, or platforms like metas' just basically trading one big bad organization for another.
I can give you freeze frames of many prominent leftwing celebs also raising their arm during speeches.
Please stop with the silly politically-motivated pretense that the man is a N4zi.
Recent choice words from Musk:
* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"
* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)
* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."
* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)
Per Nate Silver, Musk's is the most engaged-with account on Twitter by far, followed by his far-right allies: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...
So, yeah: open sewer.
On the other hand, I might start posting on Bluesky more because as of a week ago, I'm shadowbanned on X. I know people throw that term around, but nobody on the site can see any of my reply tweets, even me (unless I scroll my account's 'replies' tab); people who've followed me for years are asking why their tweet has a ghost reply.
I don't think X has that much of an incentive to filter out bots while keeping around accounts like me (200 followers, will never pay for Premium). The slightly higher effort bots that glaze tech CEOs will be basically indistinguishable from the real people glazing tech CEOs because they're wannabe founders trying to network/cloutfarm. And that style of dead internet is fine with Elon.
This is honestly the real value of nitter far beyond anti-Musk shriekers being obsessed with and addicted to X but not wanting to log into X. Nitter seems to simply give you everything - and you can plainly see which tweets are getting huge distribution and which ones nobody is seeing.
The problem is a network effect. Lot of people rage quit X and then they return to it because they realize the reach isn't there on Bluesky, and whenever that happens it just sends strong signals
I don't really like X either, I feel like the feed algorithm isn't very good and just shows the same thing repeated by multiple accounts.
I'm trying to objectively view the two platforms without the partisan rhetorics. There isn't that many places besides Threads.
I personally like the old php forums which had a real presence.
I use it to follow people who either have ideas I find interesting or do stuff I find interesting, and typically I'm looking for accounts that are small enough that I know they will at least see my replies, and often interact with them. (Something like 3K-15K followers for most of them, I think.)
I also think it's indispensable for real-time commentary and niche commentary on current events: always requires grains of salt but there's just no better place on the Internet for that sort of thing, in part because...
It's the one major social network I'm on where it is easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order. A feed I TRULY control (and, if you follow the right people, insulates you from much of the nonsense on the site).
(And every once in awhile, some insane viral nonsense pokes in that makes you say "how could I ever quit this site".)
>Is it still as popular as it used to be?
A quick search roughly aligns with my perception: it bottomed out a couple of years ago and has gradually recovered, though not to where it was pre-X.
Oh weird, I'd rate X as medium-hard for that amongst the microposting sites I look at. Mastodon and Bluesky both default to almost-that, varying mostly in whether you need to jump through hoops to not see reposts.
X was always the one that (a) doesn't default to it, and (b) would keep "forgetting" and pushing you back to the algorithmic feed.
You are using a relic of what-used-to-be-Twitter. That's what people signed up for. I happen to think what Musk has done - although I'm highly skeptical of him - is not totally insane - Twitter did used to have some pretty notable censorship. But you follow people because that's where the people are. Competition does not spring up overnight, companies know this, and so they're left to gradually (or quickly!) enshittify
"easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order"
Yes, well. That should be the standard. Companies that don't follow that standard should be turned into pariahs
Can we stop this bullshit? It has away more censorship now. And its censorship before Musk was already biased toward conservatives, punishing left more severely. Must made it massively worst.
I stand by what I said. And I'm not a Musk lover or anything
> Twitter did used to have some pretty notable censorship.
Are you saying that the person you replied to is willfully deceiving people by saying this?
Because I think it's very obviously true, and we can say this without even bringing up the site as it is now. I think you think so too, given how you talked about your characterization of pre-Musk censorship.
There are lots of interesting people/orgs on X from AI/ML circles, as well as Ukraine war OSINT accounts and UA army helpers. I stay on X pretty much for these two topics.
The same as it ever was. Short-form gossip. News, discussion, jokes.
If you like AI and tech, there are some pretty thriving sub-communities. AI stuff, and a lot of tech stuff happens on X first. Claudebot/OpenClaw/Hermes all began on X months before I commonly saw them appear on other platforms.
Sensor Tower shows a consistent ~10% YoY decline.
DataReportal/Kepios shows a ~5.3% decline in ad reach.
EU DSA Transparency repoorts shows ~10% decline
Pew Research shows a >20% decline in the US.
Regardless, I still use X and find a lot of value from the people I follow. I'm paradoxically optimist.
No idea comparatively, but an artist friend of mine tried out Bluesky and then complained about how there's way more of a limited reach and engagement there compared to Twitter.
I honestly have no idea if there are real people who actually use it daily. Who can read that stuff?
twitter/x remains the domain of intelligence agencies worldwide. It is a semi-open (the world first virtual leader, the ayatollah affirms he exists from there ..) psychological operations platform that permits the avatars of "world leaders" to speak to masses and also hosts a parasitical community of grifters ("opinion makers" and "influencers") that feed off of the festering fetid matter served up by the Spook International.
a secondary purpose of the twitter/x is a reverse doomsday clock, based on above. As long as the ghost of this unprofitable "business entity" is kept alive by funny money and funny deals, we can sleep soundly at night knowing there won't be ww3 or any other such extreme negotiating tactics by global elite, since they are all 'playing their role' on twitter currently known as x.
As if X was an official government publishing channel . WTH, they should publish it on they official government pages.
More of a political echo chamber than anything else. I mothballed my original account when things were getting spicy which was primarily focused on dev, UI/UX, and InfoSec news. I finally went back and have had some great interactions with people about technical stuff that interests me. Right now, the data center and AI discussions are getting intense along with Omarchy, lol. If you steer clear of the political stuff, you can find some good stuff still.
>> Is it still as popular as it used to be?
Probably not but it still ranks ahead of sites like Reddit. Its like the 13th, 14th most popular platform right now. I log on mainly just to see if I'm missing anything. Other than that, most of the engagement I have is curiosity and just fun stuff like seeing people posting retro games, stuff like that.
>> Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
X is now kind of the social media cul-de-sac . It used to be one of the go to places for breaking tech, popular cultural and political stuff. Now its usually two or three days late to the party on anything worthwhile. So the posts from the CEO probably made the rounds before you finally saw it on X. lol
Now that more and more are going "walled garden" I don't get it at all
Yes, because influential, non-evil people who should know better just will not fucking leave. The vast majority of public-minded ML developers and researchers, including people who compete with xAI, being an obvious example.
And because skilled, knowledgeable people who could create a replacement service just will not do so. At least not without finding new and innovative forehead-slapping ways to fail at it.
Incredibly frustrating that Xitter is still as popular as it is.
> ML developers and researchers
Brother in Christ, pick one.
There's a decent number of old school companies and creatives who either don't know/care about alternatives, or who tried them and went back to Twitter/X.
For example, X has 816K and X AI has 135K reports. Reddit, despite having 200M (36%) more MAU, only has 65K reports. OpenAI, despite having about 8x MAU than X.ai, has 182K reports.
I prefer the older term "deep web" [1]. It's mentioned in Wikipedia that the terms are used as synonyms now, but I think it's important to differentiate between sites behind login/authentication/etc, and sites that are still openly accessible, albeit over Tor, i2p, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web
Reply with a screenshot showing that you can’t view the content.
> a restaurant puts their menu on Instagram
Don’t go there. Plenty of other restaurants to choose from. They just lost a customer due to their hostility.
This is a wild take to me. Around here pretty much nobody posts their menu online on any website, the technical literacy is just quite poor. If you limited yourself to places that did, you'd only get big fast-food chains.
Edit: I see it's not working either "Instance has been rate limited"
In theory I can still read the same things I could read before on xcancel by doing an endless cycle of doing one or two searches, then closing out of my web browser and clearing history, and then going back to xcancel and doing another search or two. But certainly that process is very annoying.
Now, I'm not 100% sure if this is related to Musk's cease and desist letter. I've run into this problem or similar technical problems about twice a month before when using XCancel. Usually the technical problem is resolved within 2 or 3 hours and I can use xcancel normally again. So I guess I'll check back in a few hours and see if I can use xcancel normally again.
Some sites throw annoying captchas your way though.
Although now I should say that this was the truth yesterday, but now twitter seems to be actively killing the credentials that nitter instances are using, and they're returning rate limit messages permanently. My guess is that this is a function of how many credentials/tokens a nitter instance was cycling through to get content x the amount of traffic that nitter instance gets. They probably just set the rate-limiting bans longer for everybody (or steadily increase them on each offense), instead of trying to find the specific offending credentials.
edit: xcancel officially gone, so none of this matters.
> On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel. The service XCancel is stopped until further notice. We are seeking legal advice and won't share more details for now. Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel.
IYKYK
I'm actually much less anti-Musk than the average HN commentator but it should be universally agreed here that a small handful of mega-corp websites dominating the majority of content on the web is a bad thing. Nitter was hardly a solution. Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed, and "free speech" platforms like X are "technically" closed.
IMO we all need to start vibe coding PHP bulletin boards again. 'RETVRN' etc.
What does the even mean if you can host your own
normal people dont understand how they can join specific communities or instances or whatever it is on the specific platform, they want something like "twitter" and then thats where they are, they dont want "some weird twitter instance thats not the main one"
And I’m hesitant to recommend you read about it on Grokipedia (you’ll assume there is major bias), but it does seem to be the most accurate retelling of the scandal that I can find online. Here are both though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
https://grokipedia.com/page/Twitter_Files
Censorship-wise… Twitter was worse than Reddit at its peak (before being bought).
At a certain point it's just words; what makes those meaningful? Musk bans and limits distribution for people he dislikes or who criticize him, intentionally directs hate mobs, promotes hate and disinformation, ...
Personally I found the debate on the Jordan Lasker talk page very enlightening. Mother Jones is of course a very reliable paper, practically Arxiv really, totally reasonable to have it as a single source for a biographical article with extremely weak quotation in the article text...
The difference is if it were nationalized they might still have some incentive to crack down on crypto scams, AI-generated csam, etc.
Musk boots off and/or limits distribution of people he disagrees with. I can't fathom how you think that's 'free speech' - it's the opposite.
> Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed
I've heard that - what is your experience? Downvotes and exclusion? Are there more 'open' servers?
Fediverse has plenty of servers which are "free speech" adjacent, which most Mastodon servers close off since its easier for them to police what their users can see than let them do it themselves. The vast majority of them do not run the Mastodon software, and feel far more "wild west" with all the shitposters. But if you want to talk with actual hackers and are into that sort of thing, it's fun times.
They'll include reasons for the block, which you should pay attention to.
As far as reasoning goes, I think you can grasp how people would try and wield a tool like blocklists. A lot of blocks are merited, while some arent. I've had several blocks put on my instance from servers that I never even interacted with, for reasons that seemingly appear out of thin air.
You can browse by software, whether its open registration or not, allows tor, etc. You can glean statistics off of certain instances, which is really useful if you run one yourself. Most of the instances on the other side of fedi run the Pleroma software.
Have fun!
The most recent release of phpbb was 2 months ago
I hate the closed web purely for disrupting archiving efforts, you can add chat apps like discord, whatsapp, zoom and teams in that list as well. As a lot of communities have moved there.
If at all, people should only fully quote content or post screenshots now.
Doing otherwise should be banned here.
HN mods may wish to take notice.