Unfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings, we are required to suspend this service again until further notice. We can't share more details.
You can find the content you were looking for on the original website:
Continue to X
Thank you for your understanding. And the trust you have put into the XCancel project.
The same reason is wrong to require a Google or Apple phone to exercise basic civil duties within government services. You are gating the service, or information, behind a 3rd party ToS, a login, and basically stating that you are not allowed to have it until you hand over personal data to such companies.
Why is it wrong?
Is it wrong to require people to use certain tools? I don’t think so.
It’s the same thing as requiring dress code to go to the tribunal or anything formal.
> Is it wrong to require people to use certain tools?
As the state or a representative thereof, yes; that's why public service is either run by itself or contracts to operators who must then abide by requirements (like no discrimination, unconditional access to information, social pricing, or similar provisions depending on your jurisdiction), that they would scrape the very day their activity became free market.
In France, even banks, a sector without a public actor in most countries, are legally required to open accounts ("droit au compte"). I don't mean _any_ kind of account, but at least one. On which banks naturally don't make a profit...
Google or Apple on the other hand, have no legal duty to let you in, which means in practice that they can lock you out of public services that they gate access to.
To live in our 'free' western society, you need to register your birth, get a social security number, and attend state dictated education.
Life in general is now gated, and if you do not abide by the rules you do not get the benefits of society. How is this any different to "you are not allowed to have it until you hand over personal data".
The service works just fine and it is a decent way to get the latest news.
For example, rumors about latest AI developments are available there, but not here on HN.
X also works well for media, which on HN you can only see after navigating to an external website.
Many comment sections are rough, but usually not worth visiting apart from the top comments anyway.
I don't like that Ads are hard to distinguish from regular posts.
I believe the main reason for not using X is a political boycott. Many disagree politically, or don't entertain certain delusions about Musk that are popular with progressives.
There isn't much TBH. All newswires are even propaganda by selection mostly. I'd say the newswires that still sort of pretend to be news and usually are only biased through selection: AP and Reuters.
If you don’t like X, I don’t understand why anyone would use a service like XCancel which effectively maintains the cultural relevance of X. On a practical level, I’m wondering what consistent legal standard people want when it comes to copyright and terms of service. It’s impractical to have different rules based on some people’s feelings.
Exactly. If you boycott X, shouldn't you also boycott the people who are on X? But this kind of slacktivism has always been more virtue signaling than anything.
Not really, unfortunately. If it were just a bunch of bros laughing at fascist memes amongst themselves I would happily boycott everything, but unfortunately a lot of "public" service announcements and discourse also happens on 卐itter. Things like utility companies' and emergency services announcements, city council decisions, public transport notices, official statements by MEPs/local politicians/companies, etc. Not to mention a certain demented orange geriatric who happens to control nukes and posts his daily threats and declarations of war there.
These are all things I want to stay informed on, and given the choice would rather read elsewhere. Often I get the same information from secondary sources and manage to avoid that, but even then on controversial things I prefer to check the source directly.
>Things like utility companies' and emergency services announcements
I am shocked you get this served via twitter instead of usual service notices for these things. I don't use twitter and I still get these notices and other news.
It's a standard coordination problem: I don't like X, but some discussion happens there (e.g. plenty of competent mathematicians responding to the Navier-Stokes situation) and I cannot force people to move elsewhere.
I think Wikipedia has become a cancerous blight on world politics, and I would love to see Wikipedia die so that a Mastodon-like distributed alternative could rise from the ashes.
To people on the outside, Wikipedia appears to be a homogeneous community of well-intentioned people. Regardless of what people say, it is treated as highly trustworthy. But the community model necessarily means that control over the narrative ultimately falls to the most motivated and obsessive participants. Lift the lid on almost any contentious topic and you will find a fiefdom of committed obsessives who assert seniority, weaponise whatever rules they can, and ultimately wear down anyone with an opposing viewpoint.
In terms of species-level harm arising from the ways their systems can be abused, I’d rank them roughly as follows. To be clear, I’m ranking a platform’s potential for species-level harm based on its scale and its ability to concentrate, enforce, or algorithmically amplify a shared narrative or behaviour while limiting meaningful challenge or escape.
S-tier: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube [shorts, recommendations]
A-tier: Facebook
B-tier: Wikipedia, Reddit
C-tier: X, YouTube [subscriptions]
D-tier: Most major LLMs, e.g. ChatGPT.
Null-tier: Bluesky, Truth Social, Mastodon, etc. (too irrelevant to have any meaningful species-level effect.)
Say what you will about X, but at least the arguments are visible for all to see. By contrast, the proportion of Wikipedia readers who also read the talk pages to understand active disputes probably rounds to zero.
LLMs such as ChatGPT are problematic because they can reflect and reinforce prevailing views embedded across their source material, most significantly Wikipedia. But their conversational nature provides an important escape hatch: you can challenge an answer, interrogate its assumptions, ask for competing interpretations, and explore multiple perspectives.
For me, it's just the easiest fix whenever somebody shares a tweet with me, and it fails to load, or shows me some forced login popup. I just click between x and .com in my URL bar, write "cancel", and it suddenly just works.
I never liked Twitter and I don't like X as a medium but they were and still are used by others as a communication channel. To partake of what is communicated without having to sign up and/or subject myself to the barrage of nonsense spewed through X I use a self-hosted Nitter instance. This way I get to follow those X links without needing a (real, active) account. For passive X users Nitter offers a far better - lighter, faster - experience than X itself. This makes Nitter (which is what Xcancel - a misnomer since it doesn't cancel X - is based on) especially useful for those who only use X because others used it to distribute information.
I don't have an X account, and I only use xcancel when someone sends me a link. The reason it's impossible to completely avoid both of them, at least in my corner of the world is that a lot of public organisms seem to think publishing information online exclusively on Twitter is okay, and if you complain they tend to ignore you (I admit I haven't tried complaining about it on Twitter, which seems to be the only thing that works these days).
I've stopped using xcancel even for that. If anything is important enough, it will reach me via other channels. Particularly from any contact who give af ... if they don't it's not important.
Not every org is going to run their own site. I have a similar frustration with companies that post on Facebook or Instagram. I deleted my Facebook account years ago.
I want to read stuff from twitter not because I like the twitter culture but because sometimes something happens and the only place you can learn about it is twitter. Like it or not Twitter is still the most relevant platform for tech related information.
Why should we let one far right billionaire control how we interact with a large portion of the online space? Why shouldn't we try to exfiltrate the data from him instead of just letting him hoard it?
And regarding copyright, the same company owns an LLM that was no doubt trained through mass copyright infringement. Maybe the legal double standard is on their end?
It's because X is chosen (wrongfully) as the main communications channel of all kinds of important public institutions and people (police departments, city administrations, politicians, etc.).
Of course that's a real issue since the whole thing is login gated and inaccessible. But unfortunately it is the reality. So I think something like XCancel is needed.
I have no clue what my local government or any such authority could possibly tweet that would be relevant to me. I have not checked their twitter feeds ever and I am none the worse for wear.
The mountain passes near me have government-run twitter accounts, and it's usually the fastest way to get rich information on their status during storms.
There is a state government website with some of the same information, but it's usually more coarse (sometimes just the open/close status) and updated less frequently.
> It's because X is chosen (wrongfully) as the main communications channel of all kinds of important public institutions and people (police departments, city administrations, politicians, etc.).
What's really crazy about all this is that it isn't even necessary. I get emergency alerts from my county for things like severe weather warnings, mosquito spraying, etc. You know how I get them? Text messages and email. And you know how I find out more if I want to? I go to their website.
Text message alerts and a website require some level of technical know-how from someone at the company. For many people and the companies or organizations they lead, “everyone uses X/Twitter” and/or “everyone can access X/Twitter”.
We got to this state because, when it was called Twitter, it positioned itself in the market as, exactly this. It’s only now, when there’s been some major changes to it, that we’re paying the piper.
> Text message alerts and a website require some level of technical know-how from someone at the company.
Note that I was talking about my county's government, not a company. My sense is that whatever level of technical competence county governments have is pretty much the floor on technical competence. If they can do it, any company that can't doesn't deserve to be a company anyway.
Public communications from government entities really should be legally required to be disseminated on public forums (ideally properly hosted on .gov domains for easy verification, with RSS feeds) Cross-posting on other platforms should be allowed (with backlink to the .gov), but the .gov should be authoritative.
Unfortunately that requires a level of technical competence that most government entities don't have in the US. Not to mention the ridiculous requirements/processes that are placed on official govt software.
It is 2026, it is not hard to publish a "blog" , if you want to share that same content over social networks that's fine but it should be a requirement that the data doesn't solely live in private walled "social" networks
Technical competence can be acquired as needed. Or more likely the other way around, the government creates an entity that provides this competence to other government entities.
There are places like government agencies, public transit org aisations, and similar organisations, which still use it as adhoc quick notification channel. If I want to see if a train route ist interrupted it's the best source. However using it once in a while (not via app or such) has long loading times and nagging screens for sign in, cookie compliance and so on, which makes the whole thing an annoyance ...
Of course the right thing is to lobby those organizations to switch. But that won't help with the immediate situation.
Xcancel helps people migrate away from X, or simply stay outside of it. The fact that X is trying to shut them down, plus the fact that they silo replies and interactions in the first place, should be a good hint that X themselves don't regard that degree of openness to work in their favour.
They have something I want. Usually that’s to check an account for a status update on a service or organization, or view a link that’s been sent to me.
I was fine with occasionally wading into the shit pile for something I want. It’s fine, the door is open and I don’t live there. Get in get out.
But now they want me have a shit address and shit suit and a shitmail. They want me to say hey its me mr shit can you let me in so can I have some of that delicious shit?
Instead I think I’ll just put on a hazmat suit and steal the few pieces I want from their shit pile and get out.
Boycotting them is pointless. Holding to your principals does nothing but hinder your own usage of the internet and does not help bring about the end of X or whoever else. The 0.5% of X users using xcancel disappearing overnight would have no impact.
These monoliths of Internet consolidation are not worth our consideration. Steal their content, block their ads, get on with your life.
Not a popular question here, but what's the difference between xcancel or archive.org, and torrents and other pirate services alike?
(except twitter is user content, yet per their tos xcancel is still piracy)
Torrents can be used to spread information that is in the public domain or licensed freely, just as much as they can be used to spread copyrighted information. Obviously most of what people actually use torrents for is pirating copyrighted media against the wishes of the copyright-holders, but that's not inherent to the protocol.
Nitter instances by contrast are specific software intended to view information on a specific proprietary social media website in ways the owners of that website don't want them to. It's a question for lawyers if X declaring this to be a type of copyright violation will hold up in court, but X is also actively trying to block Nitter instances from accessing the site at all, which is a technological rather than legal mechanism.
Nowadays such clients are effectively impossible, because the XTwitter API pricing is designed for business users only. Some bigger services can afford to pay for the privilege to post via the API (e.g. Buffer I think?), which can work for corporate communications. The prices are such that often it's cheaper to pay a person to do the crossposting manually and do it properly while at it.
When I read this, the Arweave project [1] comes to mind.
Isn't this the exact use case it was built for, preservation of news data in a way that it cannot be tampered with and so that it is kept accessible for everyone forever?
I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X at this point when it doesn't serve the public interest or the interest of customers who deserve at least some choice. It's as unreasonable for them as using Instagram or a dating app for something intended for broad reach and accessibility.
I don't particularly like Bluesky, but it's publicly readable and has RSS. Any real solution would be protocol or standard instead of yet another closed service, though. For now, I see Nitter and XCancel as a temporary fix until people abandon it for whatever practical, economic, or political reason(s) they may have.
The reason is simple: they were using Twitter when it was publicly readable and had RSS, and they have no selfish reason to stop. (Selfless reasons don't count, everybody is selfish)
> I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X at this point
Open RSS wrote about exactly this a couple weeks ago [1]. Bluesky being publicly readable with RSS is an improvement. But government offices should be publishing on their own RSS feeds, and the platforms should be secondary, not the other way around. The amount of policy that gets announced on social media without even a mention on their own website is bizarre. Why isn't posting their content off platform legally required at this point?
I extend this to people. I understand old habits and what not, but I'm surprised at the culture on social media. Twitter is literally orthodox white supremacy or however they brand it. Quite odd, but not considering current politics. We've decided to devolve.
> I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X at this point
If your logic is that some citizens won't be able to read what is posted there, then I assume you similarly object to other social media platforms, newspapers, cable TV stations, etc.
A better analogy would be objecting to the government posting notices inside a privately-owned club that requires your personal details and ID as a condition of entry.
If my local government or some local business was limited to using one specific newspaper, this would indeed be a problem.
And in reverse, having a concentration of readers (users) on one platform, means that whoever controls that newspaper (platform) gets to be kingmaker for the government and the businesses.
Free speech as a constitutional requirement binding on a government to allow it is great; that government then using one specific private corporation that can use its own status as a non-government actor to have free speech rights rather than free speech responsibilities, means it is a de facto loss of free speech for everyone else.
That is your opinion and you are entitled to it, just remember other people have their own and they are entitled to theirs, and no one opinion is 'right'.
> You can find the content you were looking for on the original website:
> Continue to X
This was hard to swallow for me! Why you are redirecting to X, which is the exact opposite of what you are offering?! Don't get me wrong, I use XCancel and Nitter regularly an I like them, it just hits hard!
I know it’s hard for some people (for understandable reasons), but at some point we have to ignore the X site completely and make politicians and public services/institutions aware that some people do not have or want access to the site. That is the only way anything might change someday. Maybe I’m just being naive here, but what else can you do?
xcancel was amazing and I hope they can continue in some way. But since I have no actual need to go to the X site, I choose to completely ignore it, regardless of who posts what there. Most important things will be in the news anyway or you just pick it up from talking to other people.
about once a year I try signing up for X after friends tell me I really should be on there for news in certain niches.
multiple times now I've signed up with a fake name/handle/email/etc..., sometimes from a VPN, and within 10 minutes a friend usually tells me they see me as a recommendation to follow (they can tell, by the handle).
Nitter has to be logged into an account to read tweets so it can show them to you. Elon made it quite difficult to make even one account, let alone many. If you have an unused registered account, some Nitter instance operator would be happy to have it. The same is true for all the other alternative front-ends, like the ones for Instagram, and Play Store.
This isn't a criticism, but I do think this comment actually raises part of the problem. There are people on twitter telling people they should be on twitter, and it's apparently effective enough that at least some people are still signing up or trying to at least. The world needs more of the inverse, people telling those they care about who are on twitter to get off it.
And likewise, continuing to call it "Twitter" when that is long dead, which has amazingly positive brand association as near as I can tell entirely from the name doesn't do any of us a service.
If you want people to stop using it call it "X". Not something clever, like "Shitter" -- which I personally enjoy! Just call it by what it was intentionally renamed to:
"Oh you mean X? No I don't take part in that hateful stuff, sorry"
Not since then, but before it, I could read smart people's opinion there about random topics. Of course, when the takeover happened, almost all of them left already years prior.
There is no such place since. Most of them went back to anonymous internet presence, if at all.
This would be totally doable except for a couple of recent changes during the DOGE take-over where federal agencies mandated communication on X as their primary means.
This is clearly illegal as all comms need to be posted in different accessible places as well as the federal register - but that never stopped anybody in this administration from a bit of grifting to drive users to their own platform.
I’m bummed about this service being taken down. I will now just not be able to see updates from folks in the AI field that choose to post there and I’ll rely on aggregators instead.
It's gotten ridiculous. I get it if they have a login wall. I've had a Twitter account for years for occasional reasons. But suddenly it thinks I'm a bot and wants me to scan some QR code, download an app on my phone separately, and take photos of my hand. For whatever reason, that didn't work on my phone, maybe cause it's a Samsung phone they decided is too poor to generate ad money.
Maybe they have legit reasons for all that, but it's not my problem. Just not gonna view things on there at this point.
You know, as a television personality, Jeremy Clarkson is a pretty polarising figure. The gammons see him as all that's wrong with Britain with his pro-EU views, the cartoon student lefties are whining about "oh it's all just about him zoomzoomzooming about dangerously in fast cars", some people actually like him.
But whatever your views, you cannot deny that without his blend of journalistic acumen, wit and humour, and sheer talent, the world would be a poorer place.
Because, quite simply, it would be a world without the "Oh no! Anyway..." meme in it.
And every time I see a link about Twitter losing users or blocking some third-party client, guess what I think?
Support and platforming of neo-Nazis and nation state sockpuppets are big reasons to avoid X. Boycott, divest, sanction, and shun those who intend to harm society.
> I know it’s hard for some people (for understandable reasons), but at some point we have to ignore the X site completely
Remember when everybody said X would implode and fail within 30 days after the transition, and everyone would migrate to the Next Big Thing BlueSky? I also remember X continuing to increase its userbase after that, and BlueSky fading into obscurity. Give it up already.
maybe my brian is memory holed but twitter used to not require an account which made the whole public square gov thing very valid even if u were banned for political reasons u could still read and be informed.
x requiring an account to even read content from gov officials has to be a massive insane deal breaker for anything gov official.
i hate x, not because of elon but because it is still just twitter where the format breeds the most disgusting human interactions possible. Everyone is performative in every interaction which leads to a net negative. Instragram and meta cannot even claim such a divisive crown although they win on other fronts.
No, bluesky is just yet another twitter with the same fundamental problem because the format is the issue not the politics. At least on bs i can generally read without logging in tho so it wins for me.
The unfortunate part is that each individual who attempts to leave is fighting the Network Effect[0]. It's fighting against the human organism's basic social nature.
If every person wants to leave the platform but X person stays because Y person is there, and Y person stays because Z person is there, and Z person stays because X person is there then it's a feedback loop. Each person wants a better solution or platform, but none end up leaving because of the network effect.
Breaking that dependency involves the individual user but can't be overcome by the individual alone. Over time, the network re-asserts itself and monopolizes the connections.
If there were an API or reliable way to delete accounts programmatically, you could create a reverse-kickstarter-like site in which you pledged automatic future deletion of your account once a critical percentage of the people you followed (or who followed you) did the same. Action would be suspended for all participants until that critical threshold was reached.
Which social network has larger reach than X?
Which social network has stronger influence on humans who make policy decisions than X?
Which internet provider can deliver reliable access to remote regions than Starlink?
Which internet provider has manipulated access in contested regions than Starlink?
Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. I don't know.
What I do know is that your baseless assertions are meaningless to me.
Show the facts and figures that support your claims.
That's the only way to avoid being a garden-variety internet troll.
No, I did not claim "a massive percentage of the population accessed the internet (via starlink)". Try again.
I said that people in REMOTE regions, by which I mean those who are underserved by traditional internet access such as fiber or coax or twisted-pair, are served by Starlink in significant numbers.
Please give demonstrable facts that dispute this claim if you disagree.
> X and Starlink don't even remotely have a "firm grip" over the social media or Internet access markets. They have many active competitors.
Starlink's market isn't "Internet access" in general. Anywhere you can get fibre, fibre will be faster and cheaper. For many use cases a cell tower works better too, if you are in its coverage area.
Starlink's market is "high bandwidth / low latency Internet access no matter where you are on Earth". And for that it is by far the market leader. Its closest competitors are way behind – second place Amazon's Kuiper has under 400 satellites in orbit, Starlink has over 11,000. So Starlink is over an order of magnitude in front.
If you define a market narrowly enough then pretty much any company has a "firm grip" on some market. That doesn't mean much in terms of overall market dynamics or broader power. My local neighborhood taqueria has a firm grip on the burrito market for a radius of at least 3 miles.
> My local neighborhood taqueria has a firm grip on the burrito market for a radius of at least 3 miles.
This is a bit of a silly comparison though – the market of providing high-speed low latency Internet access (a highly general-purpose service) anywhere on the planet, versus the market of providing one particular type of food in a small localised area.
I agree that SV's regressive culture is a problem. I've seen it up close.
I don't have a solution, but I am concerned about where this trend might lead us.
Not really relevant for public service announcements like gp is talking about. I just want a live feed of my local services updates. I get weather alerts from my city and county over text (contracted by the government through a third party platform), I would take them as a dedicated app or rss feed or anything. I'm not connecting to my friends or family through a weather alert or train delay notice
I find texting pretty decent but not ideal. Most alert systems offer it already, you know it's going to be a short message, and you'll be informed quickly of things instead of having to reach out somewhere.
Maybe there should be a texting app where you can make pages of contacts to swipe between, and you can customize notifications. If you want to get fancy, maybe local AI to determine if something looks important or not? They'll always have ALERT or something in the message.
My solution to this is creating bots that repost content on sites like bluesky. The network effect can be overcome because people use a site for the content it has and not necessarily to interact with others
Of course I only do it with accounts that are very obviously intended to be public like news and government accounts otherwise x and meta can argue you were violating user privacy or some shit like that
The key point is that you must not post in XTwitter first, but you have to use the crossposter's client as source. Pulling content out of XTwitter, even your own, is onerous.
Why wouldn't it be? I know we've all got accustomed to the idea that preventing a billionaire from extorting money gets you in trouble, and it usually does, but it's not illegal.
Well, for one, because xcancel was forced to suspend its service.
There's legal as in "what the law says", and legal as in "what the judge will order you to do", and the latter sense is not as clear-cut as we'd want it to be.
Xcancel was accused of using the twitter API. You don't have to use it. You can have a machine vision model process screenshots. Or you can process the content into your own news account with ai which is what most news accounts do anyways.
xcancel wasn't actually forced to suspend its service. It got two increasingly threatening C&Ds, but nothing actually happened to it, and the creator took it offline in an abundance of caution.
I think Twitter is the best counterargument to this defeatism. I don't personally know anyone that uses the platform any more, and I don't recall needing it for anything for years. From that remove, it's now just the platform for lazy politicians, lazy journalists, and scammers of one form or another. If there's more exclusive information there I'm not aware of, I really don't need it.
I like this reasoning. Network effect means if a website gets very big it will be very big forever. This is why I get my news from the o rly owl on the world’s most popular website, the OffTopic Forums
Maybe it is different elsewhere but I have seen little reason to use X at all and none of the public services or institutions seems to use it all that much. If they do post to it, they are also posting to all the other major social media services.
All the news you want is available elsewhere and often with far less toxic commentary attached.
Very well said, and I'd like to extend the idea much further: Old reddit, Windows debloater, youtube adblock, ... There are plenty of services that turned into customer disrespect, but people do huge efforts to keep them a bit less abusive. Huge kudos to these people, but isn't it time to just let the bad businesses die? If the power users are just as unhappy as everyone else, the exoduses start much faster.
Nobody needs social media of any sort. Everyone should just turn it off and stop making excuses for yourselves to stay addicted. That said, it's easier said than done. Trust me, I know.
I'm not sure I would class Youtube as social media. It can be, but some people just watch it on their TV's and never engage in a social way at all.
I'm really just here because Google is shit and there are only so many alternative ways to find an aggregation of links to potentially interesting tech articles. I'm hoping to find new blogs or sites to follow, in part so I can stop coming here.
I might give up on it soon though, like I've given up on reddit. Too many junk article lately.
As for my commenting, that's because I, like everyone else here, am a bit of an idiot. HN makes it easy enough to comment that it's hard to resist sometimes.
We do, just not social media for the sake of extracting maximum ad revenue out of users. We're a widespread society we need large online spaces, but not ones algorithmically designed to addict and derrange users.
> but at some point we have to ignore the X site completely [...] xcancel was amazing and I hope they can continue in some way
To ignore the X site completely would mean to ignore the xcancel site aswell otherwise the 'politicians and public services/institutions' will stay aware that even people who don't use x/twitter still read whatever quips they come up with through xcancel, thus mission accomplished. Same for the seemingly increase of twitter/x toilet epiphany threads that somehow count as worthy enough of the first couple pages of HN.
I expect that the percentage of politicians and public services/institutions who have even heard of xcancel is incredibly small.
The real way to combat this is to write to your representative. The best way is probably to ask questions about something you care about, and when they reply "I've posted about this on X", tell them you are unable/unwilling to use that platform, and as a government official they should not be using a closed service as the sole means of communicating with constituents.
Of course, that probably still won't work, since politicians are lazy, and most care more about fundraising and getting re-elected than doing their jobs, but it's probably the best you can do.
> The real way to combat this is to write to your representative.
I always kind of chuckle at this advice. Is there any case of a representative changing their mind on an issue because someone wrote to them about it? I've written to representatives in the past and you are always going to get one of two outcomes:
1. If you are writing in support of something the representative already agrees with, you'll get a form letter back saying:
"Thank you for your input. Representative Jones fully supports initiative X and is fighting to enact it in Congress!"
2. If you are writing in support of something the representative disagrees with, you'll get a form letter back saying: "Thank you for your input. While your input is valuable, Representative Jones is adamantly against initiative X and will not be supporting it in Congress."
I think of lawmakers as unchanging boxes of fixed beliefs and you only get to vote for and change the contents of that box every N years. The real way to combat this is to elect representative who already align with what you want.
My experience of being on the other end of this is quite old (2001-2002) but I doubt the fundamental dynamics have changed.
There are some things for which your representative absolutely has a fixed vote, either because they personally have a strong view or because political constraints (district demographics, internal party pressure, whatever) are significant. For other things, they will likely pattern match against their broad inclinations (for free trade, anti taxes, for green energy, whatever) at least as an initial position. For many issues, though, your representative probably doesn't care much at all, by default.
But the ways things move from the second or third boxes to the first are pressure (enough voters/co-partisans/whoever caring makes inaction politically expensive), money (election campaigns cost cash and so cash buys attention if not actual votes on legislation), or convincement.
If enough people write on some esoteric subject someone in the rep's office will notice, because tracking political issues is part of their job. Staffers help shape reps' policy positions and voting behaviour, at least in part because reps are too busy to pay attention to everything that comes up. And if the campaign is big and noisy enough that it threatens to become a major electoral issue then that will also force a decision one way or another. So it is possible to influence positions and behaviour, but not on every issue and very likely not if you're doing it alone (and don't write large cheques).
You'll definitely get a form letter for anything they have a form letter for, though. And even without then the actual letter is likely written by an intern or junior staffer (or I guess GAI these days). But then when I was reading incoming mail most of that was form letters and pre-printed campaign postcards too, so it was difficult to feel too regretful that the replies were mostly mass-produced rather than artisanal.
Politicians are lazy, sure. I also believe that hearing sustained and prolonged resistance to X as a communication platform will make a difference. It's real grassroots effort.
I feel like the answer is not that hard... someone just needs to make a copy of the basic functionality of twitter with better intentions and then, if they are sufficiently trustworthy and competent, I think people will be willing and even eager to jump ship to something not owned by Musk et al.
Mastodon and others tried to do this but they keep spending all this energy on decentralization which is not the problem to solve. The problem is just to be Twitter but (a) not shit, (b) trustworthy, and (c) prosocial. People want to move, just give them somewhere to go.
You did the meme. ;) Literally billions of dollars are waiting for you, after you complete this simple task!
Problem is, what's stopping you? What stopping everyone else? Why did everyone that tried so far fail? If the answer to a billion dollar, highly public, problem is trivial, but nobody has done that trivial thing, then that entire aspect of the problem is not actually that important, or a factor at all!
I did it on purpose! In one sense it's really hard, of course, but in another it's simple, right? Simple enough that if a bunch of people who skim this a try plus their personal touches, I could easily imagine one of them succeeding.
As with many problems in the world... the first subproblem is that not many people many are very inspired to fight. Which is why it's important to emphasize its straightforwardness.
No, we don’t have to ignore it completely. You might be unable to tolerate a company CEO having a different worldview to your own, but the rest of us don’t care, and we’ll use whatever online services we like, thank you very much
I don't think ignoring is the right choice. This site has power that must be challenged.
One of the biggest issues I see is that governments still use X as a primary form of communication with the public. We need to push back on this with lawsuits.
There is absolutely no reason I should have to agree to a private company's TOS to receive communications from the government. It is a violation of my rights that refusal to agree to the X TOS would cut me off from public information.
It's fine if they post to X, but we need to demand laws that the government isn't allowed to have special private clubs where the general public isn't allowed without giving up some amount of their speech rights.
Or, you know, just be a normal reasonable person and just use X.
We got to get rid of this extremist-esque narrative. X is more unbiased than it has ever been, and Community Notes work better than any other platform's nearest attempts.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 92.6 ms ] threadUnfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings, we are required to suspend this service again until further notice. We can't share more details.
You can find the content you were looking for on the original website:
Continue to X
Thank you for your understanding. And the trust you have put into the XCancel project.
“Does the other side need to show any good faith?”
“No, in fact the judge is more likely to side either then the more angry and aggressive they are”
“….great”
People here overthink so much about this topic.
As the state or a representative thereof, yes; that's why public service is either run by itself or contracts to operators who must then abide by requirements (like no discrimination, unconditional access to information, social pricing, or similar provisions depending on your jurisdiction), that they would scrape the very day their activity became free market.
In France, even banks, a sector without a public actor in most countries, are legally required to open accounts ("droit au compte"). I don't mean _any_ kind of account, but at least one. On which banks naturally don't make a profit...
Google or Apple on the other hand, have no legal duty to let you in, which means in practice that they can lock you out of public services that they gate access to.
BTW: overthinking is how society moves forward :)
To live in our 'free' western society, you need to register your birth, get a social security number, and attend state dictated education.
Life in general is now gated, and if you do not abide by the rules you do not get the benefits of society. How is this any different to "you are not allowed to have it until you hand over personal data".
Why should that be allowed.
Yes you hate Elon Musk. How original.
For example, rumors about latest AI developments are available there, but not here on HN.
X also works well for media, which on HN you can only see after navigating to an external website.
Many comment sections are rough, but usually not worth visiting apart from the top comments anyway.
I don't like that Ads are hard to distinguish from regular posts.
I believe the main reason for not using X is a political boycott. Many disagree politically, or don't entertain certain delusions about Musk that are popular with progressives.
Social media isn't news. It's entertainment.
What is? TV, Radio, Newspapers, Town square, are all entertainment
These are all things I want to stay informed on, and given the choice would rather read elsewhere. Often I get the same information from secondary sources and manage to avoid that, but even then on controversial things I prefer to check the source directly.
I am shocked you get this served via twitter instead of usual service notices for these things. I don't use twitter and I still get these notices and other news.
But I still use Wikipedia.
Genuine question: why? I don't understand how Wikipedia is relevant to world politics, are people reading it as a news source?
LLMs such as ChatGPT are problematic because they can reflect and reinforce prevailing views embedded across their source material, most significantly Wikipedia. But their conversational nature provides an important escape hatch: you can challenge an answer, interrogate its assumptions, ask for competing interpretations, and explore multiple perspectives.
Just looked at it. Unfortunately it requests permissions for all domains, not only the relevant set.
1. Pretend it isn't there. 2. Flag it and pretend it isn't there. 3. Flag it and read the content somewhere else in case it's relevant.
If they post on Reddit, it gets lost in the sea.
Everyone using something was never a (good) reason to use it.
And regarding copyright, the same company owns an LLM that was no doubt trained through mass copyright infringement. Maybe the legal double standard is on their end?
Of course that's a real issue since the whole thing is login gated and inaccessible. But unfortunately it is the reality. So I think something like XCancel is needed.
IF those public institutions want to to connect with all their constituents, then move to a better platform. Not the other way around.
Flush out all the Shitter from your system, once and for all.
Good luck. It's gonna be a bumpy ride.
There is a state government website with some of the same information, but it's usually more coarse (sometimes just the open/close status) and updated less frequently.
Usually just information about events, road closures etc.
What's really crazy about all this is that it isn't even necessary. I get emergency alerts from my county for things like severe weather warnings, mosquito spraying, etc. You know how I get them? Text messages and email. And you know how I find out more if I want to? I go to their website.
We got to this state because, when it was called Twitter, it positioned itself in the market as, exactly this. It’s only now, when there’s been some major changes to it, that we’re paying the piper.
Note that I was talking about my county's government, not a company. My sense is that whatever level of technical competence county governments have is pretty much the floor on technical competence. If they can do it, any company that can't doesn't deserve to be a company anyway.
2. It is not reliant on any singular corporation, or trusting any singular corporation.
3. The established domain name system proves authenticity.
And of course the information can still be posted to X, etc.
Of course the right thing is to lobby those organizations to switch. But that won't help with the immediate situation.
I was fine with occasionally wading into the shit pile for something I want. It’s fine, the door is open and I don’t live there. Get in get out.
But now they want me have a shit address and shit suit and a shitmail. They want me to say hey its me mr shit can you let me in so can I have some of that delicious shit?
Instead I think I’ll just put on a hazmat suit and steal the few pieces I want from their shit pile and get out.
Boycotting them is pointless. Holding to your principals does nothing but hinder your own usage of the internet and does not help bring about the end of X or whoever else. The 0.5% of X users using xcancel disappearing overnight would have no impact.
These monoliths of Internet consolidation are not worth our consideration. Steal their content, block their ads, get on with your life.
I ditched xcancel for redirectors like https://twit.0r.cx/
or
https://xxcancel.com
Nitter instances by contrast are specific software intended to view information on a specific proprietary social media website in ways the owners of that website don't want them to. It's a question for lawyers if X declaring this to be a type of copyright violation will hold up in court, but X is also actively trying to block Nitter instances from accessing the site at all, which is a technological rather than legal mechanism.
Set up a mastodon account that mirrors your (or someone elses) X account.
This way people who want can continue using X, and other people can read & refer to their posts without needing to log into X.
People have been crossposting to Mastodon and the fediverse for many years.
In the old days you would do it with a desktop or mobile client for Twitter and Identi.ca. In the 2020s there were many server-side crossposters like moa.party. https://wiert.me/2025/05/19/moa-link-your-mastodon-account-t...
Nowadays such clients are effectively impossible, because the XTwitter API pricing is designed for business users only. Some bigger services can afford to pay for the privilege to post via the API (e.g. Buffer I think?), which can work for corporate communications. The prices are such that often it's cheaper to pay a person to do the crossposting manually and do it properly while at it.
The browser extension "Libredirect" will transparently redirect you to a working one or one of your choice.
I wouldn't even mind seeing advertisements.
I just don't want to have an X account.
Isn't this the exact use case it was built for, preservation of news data in a way that it cannot be tampered with and so that it is kept accessible for everyone forever?
[1] https://arweave.org/
I don't particularly like Bluesky, but it's publicly readable and has RSS. Any real solution would be protocol or standard instead of yet another closed service, though. For now, I see Nitter and XCancel as a temporary fix until people abandon it for whatever practical, economic, or political reason(s) they may have.
Open RSS wrote about exactly this a couple weeks ago [1]. Bluesky being publicly readable with RSS is an improvement. But government offices should be publishing on their own RSS feeds, and the platforms should be secondary, not the other way around. The amount of policy that gets announced on social media without even a mention on their own website is bizarre. Why isn't posting their content off platform legally required at this point?
[1] https://openrss.org/blog/government-updates-belong-in-an-ope...
If your logic is that some citizens won't be able to read what is posted there, then I assume you similarly object to other social media platforms, newspapers, cable TV stations, etc.
And in reverse, having a concentration of readers (users) on one platform, means that whoever controls that newspaper (platform) gets to be kingmaker for the government and the businesses.
Free speech as a constitutional requirement binding on a government to allow it is great; that government then using one specific private corporation that can use its own status as a non-government actor to have free speech rights rather than free speech responsibilities, means it is a de facto loss of free speech for everyone else.
That is your opinion and you are entitled to it, just remember other people have their own and they are entitled to theirs, and no one opinion is 'right'.
Include pattern:
Redirect to:https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/discussions/26...
https://github.com/gavinhungry/nitter-bitter
You can self-host it anywhere, and use the aforementioned Redirector [1] extension:
[1] https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/> Continue to X
This was hard to swallow for me! Why you are redirecting to X, which is the exact opposite of what you are offering?! Don't get me wrong, I use XCancel and Nitter regularly an I like them, it just hits hard!
yes, he can enforce whatever ToS he wants .
xcancel was amazing and I hope they can continue in some way. But since I have no actual need to go to the X site, I choose to completely ignore it, regardless of who posts what there. Most important things will be in the news anyway or you just pick it up from talking to other people.
multiple times now I've signed up with a fake name/handle/email/etc..., sometimes from a VPN, and within 10 minutes a friend usually tells me they see me as a recommendation to follow (they can tell, by the handle).
Insta delete, every time.
If you want people to stop using it call it "X". Not something clever, like "Shitter" -- which I personally enjoy! Just call it by what it was intentionally renamed to:
"Oh you mean X? No I don't take part in that hateful stuff, sorry"
Didn’t follow anybody or provide any interests. Open it up for the first time, and saw a bunch of posts by Elon musk.
Instant delete
I've been doing that for years. Since just prior to Elon's purchase of it. Nothing of value in my life has been lost.
There is no such place since. Most of them went back to anonymous internet presence, if at all.
In an ideal world nothing would be able to change that.
This is clearly illegal as all comms need to be posted in different accessible places as well as the federal register - but that never stopped anybody in this administration from a bit of grifting to drive users to their own platform.
I’m bummed about this service being taken down. I will now just not be able to see updates from folks in the AI field that choose to post there and I’ll rely on aggregators instead.
Maybe they have legit reasons for all that, but it's not my problem. Just not gonna view things on there at this point.
But whatever your views, you cannot deny that without his blend of journalistic acumen, wit and humour, and sheer talent, the world would be a poorer place.
Because, quite simply, it would be a world without the "Oh no! Anyway..." meme in it.
And every time I see a link about Twitter losing users or blocking some third-party client, guess what I think?
All we know is, he's called the Stig
What is next? Run some arbitrary command? Make photos of your feet?
We really ought to think what is an acceptable way to verify that someone is an actual human.
--new TOS
Remember when everybody said X would implode and fail within 30 days after the transition, and everyone would migrate to the Next Big Thing BlueSky? I also remember X continuing to increase its userbase after that, and BlueSky fading into obscurity. Give it up already.
x requiring an account to even read content from gov officials has to be a massive insane deal breaker for anything gov official.
i hate x, not because of elon but because it is still just twitter where the format breeds the most disgusting human interactions possible. Everyone is performative in every interaction which leads to a net negative. Instragram and meta cannot even claim such a divisive crown although they win on other fronts.
No, bluesky is just yet another twitter with the same fundamental problem because the format is the issue not the politics. At least on bs i can generally read without logging in tho so it wins for me.
Instagram is also hard to browse without an account.
It's all so annoying.
If every person wants to leave the platform but X person stays because Y person is there, and Y person stays because Z person is there, and Z person stays because X person is there then it's a feedback loop. Each person wants a better solution or platform, but none end up leaving because of the network effect.
Breaking that dependency involves the individual user but can't be overcome by the individual alone. Over time, the network re-asserts itself and monopolizes the connections.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
Futile? No.
Remember that AT&T once had a firm grip over human communication. That didn't last.
Remember that AOL once had a firm grip over how a massive percentage of the population accessed the internet. That didn't last.
Elon Musk currently has a firm grip on social media (via X) and internet access (via Starlink). This too will not last.
Which social network has larger reach than X? Which social network has stronger influence on humans who make policy decisions than X?
Which internet provider can deliver reliable access to remote regions than Starlink? Which internet provider has manipulated access in contested regions than Starlink?
Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. I don't know. What I do know is that your baseless assertions are meaningless to me. Show the facts and figures that support your claims. That's the only way to avoid being a garden-variety internet troll.
Why do remote regions matter? No one relevant lives there.
Please take a step back and remember that your original claim was "a massive percentage of the population accessed the internet (via starlink)"
That's demonstrably false. It's a small percentage. Even in Ukraine. You're now moving the goalposts.
I said that people in REMOTE regions, by which I mean those who are underserved by traditional internet access such as fiber or coax or twisted-pair, are served by Starlink in significant numbers.
Please give demonstrable facts that dispute this claim if you disagree.
Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube all have more users, more daily active users, more aggregate data transferred.
Starlink's market isn't "Internet access" in general. Anywhere you can get fibre, fibre will be faster and cheaper. For many use cases a cell tower works better too, if you are in its coverage area.
Starlink's market is "high bandwidth / low latency Internet access no matter where you are on Earth". And for that it is by far the market leader. Its closest competitors are way behind – second place Amazon's Kuiper has under 400 satellites in orbit, Starlink has over 11,000. So Starlink is over an order of magnitude in front.
This is a bit of a silly comparison though – the market of providing high-speed low latency Internet access (a highly general-purpose service) anywhere on the planet, versus the market of providing one particular type of food in a small localised area.
Maybe there should be a texting app where you can make pages of contacts to swipe between, and you can customize notifications. If you want to get fancy, maybe local AI to determine if something looks important or not? They'll always have ALERT or something in the message.
Of course I only do it with accounts that are very obviously intended to be public like news and government accounts otherwise x and meta can argue you were violating user privacy or some shit like that
Like say you want your Twitter forwarded to your Facebook page and email list, you just punch in the logins and it does the rest?
Ideally it would fill in the details like formatting the images/video correctly
I thought hubspot does that but looking at their website I have no idea what they do..
Search for social media management tools.
The key point is that you must not post in XTwitter first, but you have to use the crossposter's client as source. Pulling content out of XTwitter, even your own, is onerous.
Well, for one, because xcancel was forced to suspend its service.
There's legal as in "what the law says", and legal as in "what the judge will order you to do", and the latter sense is not as clear-cut as we'd want it to be.
What do we really think we're missing out on by not using X?
i'm surprised any human is still there
All the news you want is available elsewhere and often with far less toxic commentary attached.
I'm not sure I would class Youtube as social media. It can be, but some people just watch it on their TV's and never engage in a social way at all.
I might give up on it soon though, like I've given up on reddit. Too many junk article lately.
As for my commenting, that's because I, like everyone else here, am a bit of an idiot. HN makes it easy enough to comment that it's hard to resist sometimes.
To ignore the X site completely would mean to ignore the xcancel site aswell otherwise the 'politicians and public services/institutions' will stay aware that even people who don't use x/twitter still read whatever quips they come up with through xcancel, thus mission accomplished. Same for the seemingly increase of twitter/x toilet epiphany threads that somehow count as worthy enough of the first couple pages of HN.
The real way to combat this is to write to your representative. The best way is probably to ask questions about something you care about, and when they reply "I've posted about this on X", tell them you are unable/unwilling to use that platform, and as a government official they should not be using a closed service as the sole means of communicating with constituents.
Of course, that probably still won't work, since politicians are lazy, and most care more about fundraising and getting re-elected than doing their jobs, but it's probably the best you can do.
I always kind of chuckle at this advice. Is there any case of a representative changing their mind on an issue because someone wrote to them about it? I've written to representatives in the past and you are always going to get one of two outcomes:
1. If you are writing in support of something the representative already agrees with, you'll get a form letter back saying: "Thank you for your input. Representative Jones fully supports initiative X and is fighting to enact it in Congress!"
2. If you are writing in support of something the representative disagrees with, you'll get a form letter back saying: "Thank you for your input. While your input is valuable, Representative Jones is adamantly against initiative X and will not be supporting it in Congress."
I think of lawmakers as unchanging boxes of fixed beliefs and you only get to vote for and change the contents of that box every N years. The real way to combat this is to elect representative who already align with what you want.
There are some things for which your representative absolutely has a fixed vote, either because they personally have a strong view or because political constraints (district demographics, internal party pressure, whatever) are significant. For other things, they will likely pattern match against their broad inclinations (for free trade, anti taxes, for green energy, whatever) at least as an initial position. For many issues, though, your representative probably doesn't care much at all, by default.
But the ways things move from the second or third boxes to the first are pressure (enough voters/co-partisans/whoever caring makes inaction politically expensive), money (election campaigns cost cash and so cash buys attention if not actual votes on legislation), or convincement.
If enough people write on some esoteric subject someone in the rep's office will notice, because tracking political issues is part of their job. Staffers help shape reps' policy positions and voting behaviour, at least in part because reps are too busy to pay attention to everything that comes up. And if the campaign is big and noisy enough that it threatens to become a major electoral issue then that will also force a decision one way or another. So it is possible to influence positions and behaviour, but not on every issue and very likely not if you're doing it alone (and don't write large cheques).
You'll definitely get a form letter for anything they have a form letter for, though. And even without then the actual letter is likely written by an intern or junior staffer (or I guess GAI these days). But then when I was reading incoming mail most of that was form letters and pre-printed campaign postcards too, so it was difficult to feel too regretful that the replies were mostly mass-produced rather than artisanal.
Mastodon and others tried to do this but they keep spending all this energy on decentralization which is not the problem to solve. The problem is just to be Twitter but (a) not shit, (b) trustworthy, and (c) prosocial. People want to move, just give them somewhere to go.
You did the meme. ;) Literally billions of dollars are waiting for you, after you complete this simple task!
Problem is, what's stopping you? What stopping everyone else? Why did everyone that tried so far fail? If the answer to a billion dollar, highly public, problem is trivial, but nobody has done that trivial thing, then that entire aspect of the problem is not actually that important, or a factor at all!
As with many problems in the world... the first subproblem is that not many people many are very inspired to fight. Which is why it's important to emphasize its straightforwardness.
One of the biggest issues I see is that governments still use X as a primary form of communication with the public. We need to push back on this with lawsuits.
There is absolutely no reason I should have to agree to a private company's TOS to receive communications from the government. It is a violation of my rights that refusal to agree to the X TOS would cut me off from public information.
It's fine if they post to X, but we need to demand laws that the government isn't allowed to have special private clubs where the general public isn't allowed without giving up some amount of their speech rights.
We got to get rid of this extremist-esque narrative. X is more unbiased than it has ever been, and Community Notes work better than any other platform's nearest attempts.