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neilv 3 hours ago [-]
A non-technological way to give negative feedback to Twitter/X is to stop using it, even "just reading an occasional post".
Continuing to read things on it, even through Nitter, is in the interests of Twitter/X and of the people who continue to support Twitter/X by posting there.
Tell the people who use it no. The decent people won't hear them on Twitter/X, and the decent people will wonder what's wrong with them if they persist in supporting that thing.
Tech industry circles nowadays are sometimes tinged with individualist selfish "take whatever you can" thinking, and anarchic or even underhanded methods. Including the thinking "an express no doesn't mean no, if i can find a way to take it from them anyway."
Grassroots collective social action can work, if it isn't constantly undermined by selfish and short-sighted taking.
wolvoleo 3 hours ago [-]
> Tech industry circles nowadays are sometimes tinged with individualist selfish "take whatever you can" thinking, and anarchic or even underhanded methods. Including the thinking "an express no doesn't mean no, if i can find a way to take it from them anyway"
I agree with that though. It's better to circumvent than to submit and do what you're told.
The same way piracy keeps streaming services somewhat honest, I'm sure that if piracy didn't exist, subscriptions would be even pricier.
rpdillon 35 minutes ago [-]
> I agree with that though. It's better to circumvent than to submit and do what you're told.
Not always. Sometimes the rules are stupid, and by simply obeying them, their stupidity becomes apparent. The governments that are trying to force Facebook and Google to pay to link to their news stories are a great example. The governments foolishly assumed that the media companies would comply by paying, but instead they chose to comply by leaving. Leaving is a powerful signal.
bayesnet 2 hours ago [-]
The piracy thing is a bit backwards I think. Piracy is a consequence of subscription price so higher prices induce more piracy. The only way piracy doesn’t exist is if all content is free to begin with
aftbit 47 minutes ago [-]
There's subscription cost, then there's other factors, like DRM, usability, single source, etc. If you want to find the latest media, you can either hunt for it on one among several subscription services or you can find it on any of the big torrent sites. Once you torrent it, you can watch it on any or every device, without internet, forever.
If first party media companies sold one-off DRM free downloads of movies and TV shows for a reasonable price (not even that cheap, just not requiring bundling with other content you don't want to see), I bet that'd have more of an impact on piracy rates than lowering subscription prices by 10% or whatever.
phlakaton 1 hours ago [-]
And the reason that piracy doesn't exist in that case is because the creators have all had to go out of business. ;-)
asnf-qwpz 10 minutes ago [-]
Twitter is the country club for right and left wing elites. They don't care about viewership, they want to influence each other and chat.
They have thousands of other ways to influence the masses by owning media, other discussion platforms, owning institutions and foundation members and running PR campaigns.
It is better if their actions on Twitter are observed, documented and archived rather than letting them have complete privacy. That is also why journalists of all political leanings are still there.
mrobot 1 hours ago [-]
i too was thinking the Star Dink may just welcome nitter anyway
eudamoniac 2 hours ago [-]
This all already happened, it's called bluesky, and the "decent" (people who agree with you on politics) people had their exodus already
orwin 2 hours ago [-]
To me, the divide Twitter/Bluesky is the divide between terminally only idiots and terminally online simpletons (you decide which is which). Decent people are on neither.
dminik 2 hours ago [-]
I see that they're not on HN either.
bitwize 2 hours ago [-]
You mean the people who hate Nazis? Yes, they're not on X.
yde_java 44 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
josh_p 2 hours ago [-]
There are reasonable people who can grasp nuance on both platforms, but you can't deny that twitter/x has become known as a place that allows Nazi politics on it. Just look Elon, the owner..
It's seriously disingenuous to frame the bluesky vs twitter/x as a difference in political opinion.
beanjuiceII 1 hours ago [-]
you need a mental check if you think there are not decent people who use and enjoy X
customguy 58 minutes ago [-]
If THEY would use themselves as excuse for the rest, like you do with them, I wouldn't consider them decent people. There are decent people in the US military and police force, there may be even a stray decent ICE agent. I bet you there's decent people getting sent into the meat grinder by Putin, too. But if any of them were adamant about not wanting to hear about all sorts of fuckery of what they are part of or any overarching context, because they are oh so decent, they're not decent, they're just spineless. It's subjective anyway, and bitching about it never ever helps the verdict.
someothherguyy 1 hours ago [-]
> The decent people won't hear them on Twitter/X
Who are the "decent people"? Anyone who isn't "individualist", "selfish", and "short-sighted"?
wpietri 21 minutes ago [-]
I was one of Twitter's first 500 users. Later, I worked at Twitter on anti-abuse. I was a big fan. But I quit using it after Musk's takeover because I didn't want to be supporting somebody who's awful in a half-dozen ways that have only become more obvious. [1] And X reflects that.
I'm not the OP, but anybody honestly wanting to know why people think good humans should not use Twitter does not have far to look.
Those are certainly some words to describe people who share on sites that require readers to log in when there are many alternatives that don't.
43 minutes ago [-]
MostlyStable 12 hours ago [-]
The not needing an account is obviously not minor, but honestly, the UI is just better, by a lot. I made a twitter account a while ago using one of those throw away email address sites, so I have an account that I don't care about that I can use for twitter....but the experience just sucks. I don't know how any stands it, even if they don't mind needing an account.
prophesi 4 hours ago [-]
I remember the days that Bibliogram worked for Instagram. They've given up. A decade ago I could have an RSS feed for what my friends posted, besides the toxic short-form content of IG reels that everyone is now obsessed with post Meta acquisition and their battle to compete with Tiktok.
ComputerGuru 4 hours ago [-]
Instagram is actively hostile to good ui. They constantly go out of their way to break extensions that add a video scrubber.
prophesi 3 hours ago [-]
Last I was on the platform, they eventually added a tab for only chronological posts on the timeline a-la how IG used to work. But they gave no exposure to it, _and_ it completely hid the IG stories of your friends so nobody would want to use it in the first place.
rasz 1 hours ago [-]
Good UI makes it easier to be selective. social media owners dont want you to be selective, they are selling you to advertisers and influencers after all.
ronsor 10 hours ago [-]
The UI/UX is the main thing. I technically have an X-Twitter account that I rarely use, but loading plain HTML with a bit of JS beats loading a whole SPA experience just to read a post.
Obviously such a thing would be horrible, but there is sourcehut.
dalmo3 6 hours ago [-]
Diffshub is a start
throwaway27448 5 hours ago [-]
eh anyone going to github knows what they want. At this point it's a flex to be hosted elsewhere
silverwind 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the UI is the real and only reason to use Nitter. It's a very similar situation with old reddit.
throwaway27448 5 hours ago [-]
The only reason to use nitter is that for whatever reason twitter allows it access to its api. The UI is terrible and completely irrelevant.
prophesi 4 hours ago [-]
I could use it without an account and know that any comment I clicked into would take me to the thread of posts under it without sponsored ads or posts.
OtomotO 7 hours ago [-]
Since a couple of weeks they force you to login to use old.reddit.
My visits have dropped by about 95%
jwilk 2 hours ago [-]
You can use www.reddit.com (yes, this domain, not old.reddit.com) with the old UI if you set cookie "redesign_optout=true".
Leonard_of_Q 6 hours ago [-]
Use Redlib [1] or one of the other alternative Reddit frontends.
At that point though, it's like why. Reddit is, well, trash. It's barely worth visiting without an account, and if you're going to make me jump through hoops to visit, it's time to accept the message of "we don't want you here" and go somewhere else.
Leonard_of_Q 3 hours ago [-]
The reason to use it is that Reddit does provide the occasional answer to questions like "how to get a Samsung SCX 3400 to run on a Raspberry Pi" (etc.).
throwaway27448 5 hours ago [-]
I've been making money from reddit, and for about a decade and a half and at this point, why bother? It's basically drained and what remains is of zero value.
vlyan 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
sillyfluke 4 hours ago [-]
>the UI is the real and only reason to use Nitter.
Why is not wanting to share my reading habits with Elon not a real reason?
Saris 2 hours ago [-]
Same with Redlib for Reddit, it's just so much nicer to look at.
cebert 3 hours ago [-]
I agree. I think the UI is the best part. It seems more responsive to me too.
utopiah 7 hours ago [-]
Shows the true cost of surveillance capitalism.
throooooo 12 hours ago [-]
Seriously. The UX/UI on Twitter has always been a dumpster fire.
ksenzee 11 hours ago [-]
Eh. It was pretty great in 2008, when I used my spotty cell service to tweet road trip updates by texting 40404. O tempora, o mores, etc. etc.
notpushkin 9 hours ago [-]
Haven’t had that luxury in Russia. Though being a script kiddie I’ve set up a shortcode just for myself (there were these “paid content SMS as a Service” thingies that forwarded SMS text to an HTTP endpoint you provide).
embedding-shape 5 hours ago [-]
Didn't have that luxury either, but at one point, "Twilio" was the star and poster-child of startups, with their "Guerilla marketing" and completely fresh and new roles of "developer advocates" so of course everyone and their mother had been to at least one Twilio meetup, or your local meetup with a "developer evangelist" from Twilio. Lots of us built our first SMS-capable service as a "Forward this SMS to this HTTP endpoint", I too did the SMS-to-Tweet thing as the US number didn't accept my SMSes (or wasn't available, or something).
encom 6 hours ago [-]
All of the WWW was better in 2008. Unironically. We've all been frog-boiled into this current hellscape.
moron4hire 5 hours ago [-]
There was a brief moment when smartphones first came out but the rest of the world's companies weren't taking them seriously yet that was a truly brilliant time and ever since then it's been nothing but downhill.
hnlmorg 3 hours ago [-]
Smartphones came out in 2008. So your date aligns with the GPs.
moron4hire 2 hours ago [-]
... yes. Yes, that was the point.
whateveracct 2 hours ago [-]
back on when websites were websites. HN of today on my phone reminds me of that.
btreecat 9 hours ago [-]
It can't suck all that much if you're not willing to give it up.
Dylan16807 8 hours ago [-]
It sounds to me like they did give up on using the builtin UI.
ichad99 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
charcircuit 8 hours ago [-]
The X app loads posts much faster than these sites, so I find the app has a better UI.
Zambyte 3 hours ago [-]
I wonder what data Elon is able to slurp up through the app that he can't get through the website. Seems like a good incentive to keep the site worse.
7 hours ago [-]
bluecalm 10 hours ago [-]
I think it's great. My feed is people posting tech/AI news, scientific publications, videos of rockets and self-driving cars, things made with coding agents etc. It's full of people who do meaningful work as well and you can see who they are.
Dark mode, ability to easily copy images, link to posts, see posts of interesting people by going to their profile. On top of that the feed algorithm is open source and actually sane. What else would I want?
It's by far the best designed social media site out there. I know it's a low bar but still.
embedding-shape 5 hours ago [-]
> On top of that the feed algorithm is open source
Do you genuinely believe what is public is exactly what's deployed? If so, what makes that belief justified?
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jasonvorhe 6 hours ago [-]
I'm a nostr user first and X is lurk only but I seldomly see anything by or about Musk and so does everyone else I speak to who actually uses it.
I suspect this has become more of a meme by Mastodon/Bluesky users than anything real.
Hammershaft 6 hours ago [-]
I understand you can still tailor a good experience, but if you create a fresh X account the density of Elon Musk posts is genuinely absurd. There's no way he isn't putting his thumb on the algorithm to boost his reach.
Also the density of pure hate & ragebait by mask-off fascist accounts! It shocks me how much of that I saw unprompted right away after making a new account recently.
epiccoleman 4 hours ago [-]
I don't really use X but I'm in a chat where I'll often follow links, and man do I see a lot of racist stuff in replies. It's gross.
TitaRusell 6 hours ago [-]
The Dutch PM for some reason uses X (or his PR agents do). There is always a lot of impotent homophobic rage coming from the retweets. It is all very sad.
But that's the US first amendment for you.
coldpie 5 hours ago [-]
The US first amendment has nothing to do with what a private company chooses to host on their platform. That content is there because the users and owners of the platform want it to be there.
ceejayoz 3 hours ago [-]
> The US first amendment has nothing to do with what a private company chooses to host on their platform.
The First Amendment (largely) prevents the government from choosing what a private company hosts on their platform for them.
A version of X hosted in Germany would look quite different.
3 hours ago [-]
grosswait 5 hours ago [-]
No different than an uncurated Reddit profile. You’ll get bombarded with garbage until effort is placed into the curation.
epiccoleman 4 hours ago [-]
I made a new reddit account for a side project a few months ago and I couldn't believe how terrible reddit is when you don't have 10 years of subreddit curation. The default experience is to be dumped into what basically amounts to "Facebook boomer slop" mixed with a ton of hustle / small business / get rich quick content.
It's an unpleasant experience. My main Reddit account doesn't "solve reddit" by any means - I often find myself thinking "man this site sucks, I should stop coming here," but the difference between that curated account and a fresh one is night and day.
jasonvorhe 5 hours ago [-]
Weird, we must have very different definitions of "fascists".
lloydatkinson 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
teiferer 10 hours ago [-]
I can concur though. I have a rarely used account and I get Elon on top of the feed all the time. Even as mobile notifications. I don't click on them and scroll past, but they keep coming.
bsoqk 8 hours ago [-]
Have you tried blocking him? It’s always seemed an effective strategy to me when I want to stop seeing someone online.
8 hours ago [-]
pronik 6 hours ago [-]
I might cut into my own flesh right now, but the funny thing about that XCancel shutdown is that while the website is down, the RSS feeds still work. Almost like they've just been required to shutdown the visible website and they complied with exactly that.
embedding-shape 5 hours ago [-]
Isn't Twitter archived by Library of Congress or something similar? Can't remember the exact details, but maybe something (enforced by law even perhaps?) is depending on those feeds with punishment sufficient enough for Elon to actually listen. Or they don't actually realize those are still online, and there is some lone engineer trying their best to never raise any attention to it and we just made their day a lot worse...
Really important for you to mention this. People just love to tell when they know something no one else does. Does "cut into my own flesh" mean that you only think you'll be affected by this becoming common knowledge?
pronik 2 hours ago [-]
I don't want to lose my feeds and someone might tell XCancel to actually shutdown everything instead of just the website. And not, I've user other Nitter instances before and they either had their RSS feeds disabled or were particularly unstable.
tolerance 11 minutes ago [-]
People refuse to let the concept of microblogs as conventional communications platforms die. Why?
arjie 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but most of these will fall. I used to use one or two of these to scrape my friends' posts because I stopped using Twitter and they'd inevitably all disappear in time. It's like chasing the latest TPB. In the end, I just logged in a headless browser and told an agent to fetch daily.
embedding-shape 5 hours ago [-]
> It's like chasing the latest TPB.
What do you mean? TPB been online and at the exact same URL (give or take some days/weeks around raids) for like two decades, and still has the same URL today. Might not be the same group, but not sure what "chasing" you're referring to?
ahoka 4 hours ago [-]
It's distributing malware, do not use any of the "TPB" sites.
embedding-shape 4 hours ago [-]
Lol, of course, it has since day 1, and will continue to do so. I don't think anyone use these piracy websites without being aware of the risks here.
Brian_K_White 3 hours ago [-]
It's distributing everything, including things that aren't available any other way, and if you want the good you have to pluck it out of the bad.
Living without the good just to avoid that is maybe one philosophy of life, but certainly not the only valid one.
someonebaggy 11 hours ago [-]
They're all perfect substitutes. When one is down you can use another. They can't stop us all. I just wish there was a way to automatically redirect to a working instance.
jasonvorhe 5 hours ago [-]
Found this Android app to work quite well. It just lacks working nitter instances right now but you can customize them:
That's true, but TBP has been going pretty strong for over 2 decades. It can be hard to totally shut something down, if people want it.
noduerme 11 hours ago [-]
Sadly, the music selection has fallen off a cliff, and the rest is in a sharply downward spiral... in one sense this is because the music industry finally settled on a streaming model that most people are willing to rent, and it's also because the new generation has been brainwashed or trained out of storing their own files.
petcat 3 hours ago [-]
> the new generation has been brainwashed or trained out of storing their own files.
It has very little to do with this and more just about the ubiquitous availability of 5G and always-available streaming.
I stopped caring about data hoarding once I could just access anything I wanted reliably wherever I was.
hedora 3 hours ago [-]
Streaming is getting worse fast. I basically just pay for curation, and AI slop is creating cracks in that model. Some of the musicians I like are getting crushed by sybil style attacks, where there are 10 new albums in their artist page, but only one is theirs.
Fortunately, sending a screenshot to Claude tells me what to push in a minute or so, but, unfortunately, I can’t just hand it an API endpoint and have it scrub all this crap weekly.
(No idea why the streaming service can’t just do that themselves, of course…)
Of course, for movies, it’s gotten to the point where I just drive to the used DVD store. $1-5 per movie used (including blurays); $20-30 new. I usually walk out with a dozen or so films for $100. This is easier than tpb.
jamwil 2 hours ago [-]
I am not sure what streaming service you are using but it sounds awful. I have not encountered anything like what you describe on Apple Music.
conradfr 7 hours ago [-]
Soulseek is working fine.
But to be honest I never found TPB (or rarbg etc.) really useful for music.
tosti 9 hours ago [-]
It's also because it's difficult to add your own magnet links.
tancop 9 hours ago [-]
It's also because torrents are a bad fit for music. The whole protocol is designed for throughput and reliability on big downloads like movies and games, not fast start on 2MB files you don't need to split with today's broadband.
A lot of uploaders still zip everything so you can't download one song out of some album. And the discoverability is shit because DHT doesn't let you ask peers for all their torrents so you need to run a server that index multiple trackers or look things up manually.
The only alternative is Soulseek where it's a direct connection model instead of hash based. That means there are no stable IDs to get a file if the original uploader is down and users can send you anything they want like troll audio or malware.
If we want people to start pirating music again we need to make the UX as good as Spotify. That means no explicit downloads, when you click play the app gets the file from a peer, saves it to a cache then starts playing and seeding automatically. Songs and albums should be content addressed in a global namespace instead of living on trackers, and there should probably be a reputation system. I think something based on iroh blobs for content and atproto for discovery can work.
7 hours ago [-]
Leonard_of_Q 6 hours ago [-]
The solution is to run your own instance, create a few accounts for it to use and put it behind a reverse proxy with basic auth. Hand out logins to a few people and it will remain useable. If you put your instance out in the open it will sooner or later end up temporarily blocked - I tried this for a few years, same results every time - but smaller instances remain useable.
It isn't hard to run an instance, just park it next to your SearXNG [1], Invidious [2], Redlib [3],PeerTube, ... instances.
Wdym "chasing the latest TPB"? Isn't 1337x and others better and offer a complete alternative?
Twitter is different there's many stories that are only there.
papyrus9244 9 hours ago [-]
> Isn't 1337x and others better and offer a complete alternative?
The best way is always private trackers. They're easy to get into, easy to keep (if you're a serious and honest person), malware free, high quality content, great community, etc.
troupo 9 hours ago [-]
> The best way is always private trackers. They're easy to get into
If they were easy to get into, they wouldn't be good
papyrus9244 9 hours ago [-]
It's as easy as buying 1 month of seedbox for around 10 bucks.
8 hours ago [-]
troupo 8 hours ago [-]
Buying a seedbox doesn't get you into a private tracker. It's a download client.
mitxela 8 hours ago [-]
mid tier trackers partner with seedbox providers who give them kickbacks for referrals, in exchange for an account
troupo 8 hours ago [-]
So. Easy to get into is: "some unspecified mid-tier trackers may or may not give out accounts to some unspecified seedbox providers".
It's probably easier to lurk in r/trackerinvites (or whatever it's called) hoping to snatch an invite
mitxela 8 hours ago [-]
Yep it's not easy. Easy was a lie. The best are actually curated public trackers. TPB is not curated.
troupo 8 hours ago [-]
Sadly, curated public ones are also harder and harder to find (for obvious reasons) :(
Gander5739 6 hours ago [-]
Rutracker's a good one.
someonebaggy 11 hours ago [-]
Switching torrent sites every time one gets taken down.
But why wouldn't you?
yoavm 10 hours ago [-]
Did TPB ever change a domain? I've been using the .org domain listed on Wikipedia for as long as I can remember.
tosti 9 hours ago [-]
I don't think .org is still official. Look for an orange isometric K
yoavm 3 hours ago [-]
It seems to be the "official" one according to Wikipedia though?
I've already encountered two instances of something I was interested in learning about being linked using Nitter / XCancel, and those links are now quite deceased.
Please link to primary sources. If I need an alternative method of accessing the site, I'll figure it out.
akkartik 3 hours ago [-]
A key design decision was you only need to replace the domain in the URL. So you need only replace it back. It's not like archive.is where I need to also save the original.
klntsky 10 hours ago [-]
Is there something like a balancer that redirects me to an instance that is not down?
DavCreator 7 hours ago [-]
xxcancel.com (just add an x to xcancel.com) will redirect you to a working instance!
Unfortunately it also shut down a few days before the nitter takedowns.
netniuq 8 hours ago [-]
The LibRedirect browser extensions lets you configure a list and quickly hot between, but it doesn't check whether they are up before redirecting you to one of them iirc
Seems to work decently well, I've seen it being linked to on HN.
mitxela 8 hours ago [-]
You just host it and if you're not big they don't notice you. Nitter is legal btw.
code_duck 8 hours ago [-]
Like some other things reddit tells visitors, they're basically lying, or at best, being inconsistent. I've tried old reddit here and there in the past month or so and sometimes it says I need an account for "safety", other times, it doesn't.
phrotoma 8 hours ago [-]
old.reddit still works anonymously for me. maybe an a/b test?
embedding-shape 5 hours ago [-]
It's regional, in some countries they force logins, in others not. In some countries, r/all isn't available at all on mobile for example, you get redirected regardless of how you try to access it, but seemingly work in other countries.
raffael_de 8 hours ago [-]
possible that they just changed it for mobile.
wanderingpixel 9 hours ago [-]
for personal use you can just host one on your internal network
6 hours ago [-]
corvad 14 hours ago [-]
I guess X never heard of the Streisand effect...
noduerme 11 hours ago [-]
Elon has bought immunity to that. Streisand's flaw was that she gave a shit. Elon has unlocked the kinda reverse-Streisand that Trump has, where their popularity actually feeds on the effect.
0xDEAFBEAD 7 hours ago [-]
The internet peanut gallery will whine about literally everything under the sun. At a certain point I can see why some people would want to harness that energy for their advantage. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em and all that.
encom 6 hours ago [-]
Elon Derangement Syndrome is real, like the Trump equivalent.
slig 5 hours ago [-]
It's worse. Elon was very well praised by the same people, Trump was never liked.
noduerme 4 hours ago [-]
To be fair, it's possible that he changed, rather than that everyone who now hates him did.
0xDEAFBEAD 4 hours ago [-]
Many people regard Elon as a hero or villain. I regard him as a tragedy: A great entrepreneur who wrecked his sanity due to drugs, genetics, and/or overwork.
throw-the-towel 1 hours ago [-]
What if insanity is required to be a great entrepreneur?
cmrdporcupine 3 hours ago [-]
If you read his ex-wife's account of their history together, and also the drama of what happened at PayPal etc... he was always kinda .. off.. and full of shit.
Then again, I often think that about myself. But I'm not a trillionaire.
It does sound like losing his first child at 10 weeks really messed him up. It definitely would do that to anybody.
> This way, you relay the account register process to the seller. These tokens are sold in the format username|password|2fa_code|cookies (including auth token, id and ct0), which makes it very easy and convenient for us to use.
is this legit? this sounds extremely shady. maybe an ad?
miningtcup 10 hours ago [-]
I know the guy and it does work, and it's not an ad. Accounts from that website are used on shitter.thepixora.com. The website is extremely sketchy though, he recommends that you don't give it more than a dollar at a time.
mitxela 8 hours ago [-]
No way to know if that particular site is legit without trying it, but account buying and selling on internet gray markets is very normal and the prices quoted are reasonable.
Yes, you have to give up all your personal data and submit to anal probing to get an account on a sillycon valley service, but a bad actor just has to pay $10 in bitcoin to get a thousand of them.
a3qhg 3 hours ago [-]
There are some extremely sketchy instances with "are you a robot" click dialogs that redirect to exploit URLs.
I would search for other options not listed. I'm not going to name them here because X is lazy and reads HN for scheduling takedown notices.
agnosticmantis 14 hours ago [-]
Any user scripts that automatically redirect to a working instance?
netniuq 8 hours ago [-]
Not a user script, but the LibRedirect extension does most of that already
Will this list automatically update as instances hit rate limits or break for other reasons? Some public instances only have one account to log in with, some have thousands and use residential proxies.
throwaway27448 5 hours ago [-]
How do you get API approval?
add-sub-mul-div 14 hours ago [-]
We could stop thinking of them as walled gardens we're trying to get into and start thinking of them as quarantines for the Eternal September population.
delichon 14 hours ago [-]
> quarantines for the Eternal September population
Hacker News actually has a way to do this quarantine, a version that only counts votes from accounts created before 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/classic. About a decade after Eternal September started, but not bad.
defrost 14 hours ago [-]
FWiW as an aside, it appears to count votes from December 2008 accounts (as just tested using this 2008-12-26 account).
So that's at least strictly before 2009.
mitxela 11 hours ago [-]
The vote count is just the normal vote count, so I guess only the ordering is different?
defrost 10 hours ago [-]
It is, isn't it .. serves me right for breezing through that too quickly.
If there's something magical going on, the ordering would be the only real distinction possible.
Apparently the original (still the same?) dates back to the OG PG days:
It's what the frontpage would look like if only the votes of users who joined in the first year counted. I made it to check if the site is declining. In practice it's usually just a slower-changing version of the frontpage.
~ pg
DangitBobby 3 hours ago [-]
Cool experiment! It's still possible that the "high quality" users have stopped visiting (and stop voting) as the vibes Septemberized, leaving us with older accounts that act roughly in line with the way September accounts have made it. I'd be interested to know what portion of these older accounts are still voting.
bananaflag 12 hours ago [-]
Wow that's very interesting but it only works for the front page (and also only changes the order not the numbers), not for each comment page.
Maybe we should have a setting "count only votes before date yyyy-mm-dd" but this would probably make the site too dynamic (?) and consume a lot of resources.
randallsquared 13 hours ago [-]
Decade and a half, really. Eternal September was 1993 or 1994, right?
aaron695 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
LightBug1 3 hours ago [-]
Simpler solution:
If you're on Shitter, I'm not interested in your content.
Not even through proxy.
Get on another platform then hit me up if you want some engagement.
Abimelex 6 hours ago [-]
Hot take: All those instances keep the service relevant giving it more reach than necessary. Just shut it down. Cancel Twitter and jump on the BlueSkye or Mastodon train.
jasonvorhe 5 hours ago [-]
Nah, I like my freedom of speech, thanks.
Abimelex 3 hours ago [-]
Freedom of speech as long as it fit's in Elmos narrative. It's bit naive to think twitter offers this.
joenot443 2 hours ago [-]
Eh, it's a lot less restrictive than Bluesky with its block lists maintained by weirdos. What are some things you aren't allowed to say on Twitter?
I see people talk all the time about how great Bluesky is, yet I never see any great posts there. The discussion is almost always just in relation to Twitter.
Reminds me a bit of when people were pushing for Lemmy.
kamma4434 11 hours ago [-]
With or without the original interface, twitter is still a dumpster fire
shevy-java 6 hours ago [-]
Streisand effect.
11 hours ago [-]
alex1138 11 hours ago [-]
What do we want the web to look like? Lock everything down behind logins, in the name of 'security' when the real goal is nyeh nyeh nyeh you can't see anything, sign up so we get more user metrics
Brian_K_White 2 hours ago [-]
I think today it's not in the name of security but to deal with ridiculous levels of ai scraping.
Sure they also just want everyone to make accounts anyway so it's absolutely a convenient excuse, but it's also real that ais are killing all public sites with constant massive scraping.
There was a thing recently about the kernel gitweb that ais are just clobbering because of the way they stupidly hit every possible valid url, and on a gitweb instance that results in a gobjillion duplicate clones of the entire universe for every tiny commit.
pessimizer 3 hours ago [-]
This is a silly fact that doesn't matter, because nobody knows where they are anymore. Even worse, this goofy gloating post ensures that these are about to taken down, too. Nitter can literally be run for a single user, so if a hundred people set it up for their own personal use, I guess that's also more working instances than before the takedown. A real victory if you're dumb.
So for everyone who managed to find another working nitter instance after a long hard search, or in whose friend group one person stood one up so all their friends can use it - fuck you I guess. Somebody wanted to brag on HN about how Musk somehow shot himself in the foot by reducing nitter usage by 99.9% in one day, so now your hoster, and maybe you personally, are getting a legal letter from one of the richest men in the world.
Brian_K_White 2 hours ago [-]
Apparently incorrect. Many comments right on this page have mentioned several automatic redirect services, sites, libraries, extensions and apps, any one of which does it all for you, just automatically redirect to a random working instance.
And there are always many because apparently it's easy to just run one yourself and not even need anyone else's.
It seems there is simply no such problem.
pessimizer 17 minutes ago [-]
All of the comments on this page serve to expose things that were surviving by flying under the radar. It's delusional to pretend like they're somehow bulletproof when their survival has been due to being infinitesimal in size, and has lasted all of a week.
If some stable service gets put up in Russia, China, Iran, or some other country that will throw up some obstacle to Musk, post it everywhere. Anna's Archive has proven to be tough. This here is bullshit and the people who posted it should be ashamed of themselves for risking a lot of people's safety and access for internet points.
> Many comments right on this page have mentioned several automatic redirect services, sites, libraries, extensions and apps, any one of which does it all for you
Yes, stop mentioning these.
Sites are being mentioned on this page that have already been cut off or shut down. As you watch them go down over the course of the next day or two, maybe reevaluate your priors.
edit: these internet points are imaginary; they turn attention seekers into narcs. Imagine going to the scene where a dozen villages had been razed to the ground and claiming victory because instead of only a dozen villages, there were now several dozen refugee camps where stragglers had fled to. "Streisand Effect" you say, while giving out the GPS coordinates of every refugee camp you're aware of.
15 hours ago [-]
sparrowidle 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Petersipoi 15 hours ago [-]
Awesome. Let's all start using this on HN so we end up with a bunch of broken links in a few years
dadoum 14 hours ago [-]
They would become links with only a wrong domain, so I am not very worried about that personally.
mitxela 11 hours ago [-]
It would be cool if libredirect could redirect a broken frontend instance to a working one.
bigbadfeline 13 hours ago [-]
> a bunch of broken links in a few years
Who cares, by that time the originals and their copies would be a lot less worthy of viewing.
Continuing to read things on it, even through Nitter, is in the interests of Twitter/X and of the people who continue to support Twitter/X by posting there.
Tell the people who use it no. The decent people won't hear them on Twitter/X, and the decent people will wonder what's wrong with them if they persist in supporting that thing.
Tech industry circles nowadays are sometimes tinged with individualist selfish "take whatever you can" thinking, and anarchic or even underhanded methods. Including the thinking "an express no doesn't mean no, if i can find a way to take it from them anyway."
Grassroots collective social action can work, if it isn't constantly undermined by selfish and short-sighted taking.
I agree with that though. It's better to circumvent than to submit and do what you're told.
The same way piracy keeps streaming services somewhat honest, I'm sure that if piracy didn't exist, subscriptions would be even pricier.
Not always. Sometimes the rules are stupid, and by simply obeying them, their stupidity becomes apparent. The governments that are trying to force Facebook and Google to pay to link to their news stories are a great example. The governments foolishly assumed that the media companies would comply by paying, but instead they chose to comply by leaving. Leaving is a powerful signal.
If first party media companies sold one-off DRM free downloads of movies and TV shows for a reasonable price (not even that cheap, just not requiring bundling with other content you don't want to see), I bet that'd have more of an impact on piracy rates than lowering subscription prices by 10% or whatever.
They have thousands of other ways to influence the masses by owning media, other discussion platforms, owning institutions and foundation members and running PR campaigns.
It is better if their actions on Twitter are observed, documented and archived rather than letting them have complete privacy. That is also why journalists of all political leanings are still there.
It's seriously disingenuous to frame the bluesky vs twitter/x as a difference in political opinion.
Who are the "decent people"? Anyone who isn't "individualist", "selfish", and "short-sighted"?
I'm not the OP, but anybody honestly wanting to know why people think good humans should not use Twitter does not have far to look.
1. E.g., https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/04/24/musk-on... or his Economist interview.
My visits have dropped by about 95%
[1] https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
Why is not wanting to share my reading habits with Elon not a real reason?
It's by far the best designed social media site out there. I know it's a low bar but still.
Do you genuinely believe what is public is exactly what's deployed? If so, what makes that belief justified?
I suspect this has become more of a meme by Mastodon/Bluesky users than anything real.
Also the density of pure hate & ragebait by mask-off fascist accounts! It shocks me how much of that I saw unprompted right away after making a new account recently.
But that's the US first amendment for you.
The First Amendment (largely) prevents the government from choosing what a private company hosts on their platform for them.
A version of X hosted in Germany would look quite different.
It's an unpleasant experience. My main Reddit account doesn't "solve reddit" by any means - I often find myself thinking "man this site sucks, I should stop coming here," but the difference between that curated account and a fresh one is night and day.
What do you mean? TPB been online and at the exact same URL (give or take some days/weeks around raids) for like two decades, and still has the same URL today. Might not be the same group, but not sure what "chasing" you're referring to?
Living without the good just to avoid that is maybe one philosophy of life, but certainly not the only valid one.
https://github.com/circumspace/linkahest
https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
It has very little to do with this and more just about the ubiquitous availability of 5G and always-available streaming.
I stopped caring about data hoarding once I could just access anything I wanted reliably wherever I was.
Fortunately, sending a screenshot to Claude tells me what to push in a minute or so, but, unfortunately, I can’t just hand it an API endpoint and have it scrub all this crap weekly.
(No idea why the streaming service can’t just do that themselves, of course…)
Of course, for movies, it’s gotten to the point where I just drive to the used DVD store. $1-5 per movie used (including blurays); $20-30 new. I usually walk out with a dozen or so films for $100. This is easier than tpb.
But to be honest I never found TPB (or rarbg etc.) really useful for music.
A lot of uploaders still zip everything so you can't download one song out of some album. And the discoverability is shit because DHT doesn't let you ask peers for all their torrents so you need to run a server that index multiple trackers or look things up manually.
The only alternative is Soulseek where it's a direct connection model instead of hash based. That means there are no stable IDs to get a file if the original uploader is down and users can send you anything they want like troll audio or malware.
If we want people to start pirating music again we need to make the UX as good as Spotify. That means no explicit downloads, when you click play the app gets the file from a peer, saves it to a cache then starts playing and seeding automatically. Songs and albums should be content addressed in a global namespace instead of living on trackers, and there should probably be a reputation system. I think something based on iroh blobs for content and atproto for discovery can work.
It isn't hard to run an instance, just park it next to your SearXNG [1], Invidious [2], Redlib [3],PeerTube, ... instances.
[1] https://github.com/searxng/searxng
[2] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
[3] https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
Twitter is different there's many stories that are only there.
The best way is always private trackers. They're easy to get into, easy to keep (if you're a serious and honest person), malware free, high quality content, great community, etc.
If they were easy to get into, they wouldn't be good
It's probably easier to lurk in r/trackerinvites (or whatever it's called) hoping to snatch an invite
But why wouldn't you?
https://github.com/skorokithakis/detour, running on https://twit.0r.cx.
Just replace x.com with twit.0r.cx.
Example:
https://twit.0r.cx/Stavros/status/2096184846993314184
Please link to primary sources. If I need an alternative method of accessing the site, I'll figure it out.
Unfortunately it also shut down a few days before the nitter takedowns.
https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
https://github.com/skorokithakis/detour, running on https://twit.0r.cx.
Just replace x.com with twit.0r.cx.
Example:
https://twit.0r.cx/Stavros/status/2096184846993314184
how would you (EDIT: publicly) host such a nitter instance while avoiding the risk of legal consequences?
since old.reddit (EDIT: on mobile) is closed for visitors without an account it would be great if there was also a neddit project.
It has a few public instances - https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/ins...
Seems to work decently well, I've seen it being linked to on HN.
Then again, I often think that about myself. But I'm not a trillionaire.
It does sound like losing his first child at 10 weeks really messed him up. It definitely would do that to anybody.
points to a working nitter instance.
> This way, you relay the account register process to the seller. These tokens are sold in the format username|password|2fa_code|cookies (including auth token, id and ct0), which makes it very easy and convenient for us to use.
is this legit? this sounds extremely shady. maybe an ad?
Yes, you have to give up all your personal data and submit to anal probing to get an account on a sillycon valley service, but a bad actor just has to pay $10 in bitcoin to get a thousand of them.
I would search for other options not listed. I'm not going to name them here because X is lazy and reads HN for scheduling takedown notices.
https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
I think it doesn't check whether the chosen instance is up before redirecting, but switching to another one if that one is down is a single click.
Hacker News actually has a way to do this quarantine, a version that only counts votes from accounts created before 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/classic. About a decade after Eternal September started, but not bad.
So that's at least strictly before 2009.
If there's something magical going on, the ordering would be the only real distinction possible.
Apparently the original (still the same?) dates back to the OG PG days:
Ask HN: who knows about this - "http://News.YCombinator.com/classic"? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1832884
Maybe we should have a setting "count only votes before date yyyy-mm-dd" but this would probably make the site too dynamic (?) and consume a lot of resources.
If you're on Shitter, I'm not interested in your content.
Not even through proxy.
Get on another platform then hit me up if you want some engagement.
I see people talk all the time about how great Bluesky is, yet I never see any great posts there. The discussion is almost always just in relation to Twitter.
Reminds me a bit of when people were pushing for Lemmy.
Sure they also just want everyone to make accounts anyway so it's absolutely a convenient excuse, but it's also real that ais are killing all public sites with constant massive scraping.
There was a thing recently about the kernel gitweb that ais are just clobbering because of the way they stupidly hit every possible valid url, and on a gitweb instance that results in a gobjillion duplicate clones of the entire universe for every tiny commit.
So for everyone who managed to find another working nitter instance after a long hard search, or in whose friend group one person stood one up so all their friends can use it - fuck you I guess. Somebody wanted to brag on HN about how Musk somehow shot himself in the foot by reducing nitter usage by 99.9% in one day, so now your hoster, and maybe you personally, are getting a legal letter from one of the richest men in the world.
And there are always many because apparently it's easy to just run one yourself and not even need anyone else's.
It seems there is simply no such problem.
If some stable service gets put up in Russia, China, Iran, or some other country that will throw up some obstacle to Musk, post it everywhere. Anna's Archive has proven to be tough. This here is bullshit and the people who posted it should be ashamed of themselves for risking a lot of people's safety and access for internet points.
> Many comments right on this page have mentioned several automatic redirect services, sites, libraries, extensions and apps, any one of which does it all for you
Yes, stop mentioning these.
Sites are being mentioned on this page that have already been cut off or shut down. As you watch them go down over the course of the next day or two, maybe reevaluate your priors.
edit: these internet points are imaginary; they turn attention seekers into narcs. Imagine going to the scene where a dozen villages had been razed to the ground and claiming victory because instead of only a dozen villages, there were now several dozen refugee camps where stragglers had fled to. "Streisand Effect" you say, while giving out the GPS coordinates of every refugee camp you're aware of.
Who cares, by that time the originals and their copies would be a lot less worthy of viewing.