For me that’ll mean I just don’t read content on there any more. Which I realise X doesn’t care about, I’m not monetisable anyway. But a shame nonetheless.

America is a hostile nation, who has sought to align everyone with its interests, under a false pretense of mutual benefit, while instead its tech sector has caused much harm at a global scale. America is now doubling down on value extraction, at an obvious expense to everyone else.

Middle powers should not be granting to America any goodwill whatsoever. There is nothing in it for them anymore, except irresponsible reliance on a bad faith actor.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46509019

https://bsky.app/

https://www.threads.com/

Pick literally any one of those, just seriously, if you're still on that platform, leave.

> We have received cease and desist letters. Awaiting legal advice at the moment, but for now expect all nitter instances to remain down for the foreseeable future.

[for all those who - like me - first check the comments before clicking on the link]

Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.

Not sure what to do with it yet. Maybe I could let users have custom filtering rules. But the point is, companies should support community projects like this, not throw around ToS violation claims like they’d hold up in court.

But Twitter or X comes up, someone will say they don't use it, and people will start calling out their supposed virtue signaling and making wild speculations about their politics in no time.

Why?

I need to start preparing for Redlib to meet the same fate, as this god-damned site will be the only other site I care about on the Internet left once that happens.

Here's what X does "well":

- Witness media/citizen journalism.

- Text publishing (narrowed down to short-form and very opinion-based, but still).

- Link sharing (there are TONS of links to great pieces of media; the vast majority of posts containing links to pirated content are never removed).

- Self-promotion (art, video games, software, etc.).

Now, imagine all of these facets turned into dignified, decentralized, and uncensorable platforms or protocols. It might sound like wishful thinking or some kind of utopian aspiration, but I really think we're fighting a battle for Internet freedom RIGHT NOW. What we do in the next two to five years will establish how much of it we'll get to keep in the long term, because there might be no turning back.

If at all, people should only fully quote content or post screenshots now.

I wish them the best in the legal fight!

Irritates me every time there is a hn link to tiwtter

"Gated Community" is a much better description, but I guess that doesn't sound so cool.

[1]: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/

Of course, the content on Twitter/X has gone down the toilet. While I am anything but “woke” (you can my posts defending RMS from the “woke mob” a few years ago), having a lot of content showing a random <<person in group Twitter posters don’t like>> committing a crime, and none of the comments letting us know when and where the incident in question happened (and, back when anyone could ask Grok where a given incident happened, it would invariably be something that happened five years ago or eight years ago), but a lot of comments going full Stormfront, saying that’s how all people in <<group they are bigoted against>> act.

Nitter was useful for archiving threads on Twitter/X, since it’s not possible to archive the same threads when they are directly on X. Even though anyone sensible has left Twitter/X, I will miss being able to archive the kind of content (as much as it is garbage) that is on X.

This seems predictable, so at least one goal is to reduce the reach of people posting on X.

As far as I understand, people use XCancel because they do not like X (and Elon) so do not want to give money or traffic to X. But they still want to read and share content posted there.

The added value of XCancel is they are not owned by Elon Musk.

Am I correct here?

I donated to xcancel because id rather support that than pay for Twitter blue or whatever.

HN mods may wish to take notice.

https://status.d420.de

I left Twitter few years ago as active user, it was not really giving me anything in return for contribution, I was still passively reading few accounts I followed through Nitter and used also Nitter redirect for all Twitter links in news articles.

If Musk thinks by shutting down Nitter instances I will return to Twitter he could not be further from truth, it doesn't really provide me anything essential I would not find elsewhere. It's almost as Google thinking I will ever pay for Youtube premium, if adblockers would stop working.

I'm also surprised they don't already have their response prepared to this inevitable event, though maybe they are just seeking to fine-tune it.

I'm actually much less anti-Musk than the average HN commentator but it should be universally agreed here that a small handful of mega-corp websites dominating the majority of content on the web is a bad thing. Nitter was hardly a solution. Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed, and "free speech" platforms like X are "technically" closed.

IMO we all need to start vibe coding PHP bulletin boards again. 'RETVRN' etc.

It's not "security". You know it's not. I feel like Facebook started the whole thing in their desperate attempt to get more users (while simultaneously screwing around with privacy settings on posts). It's incredibly widespread (I refuse to sign up for Instagram)

"Scraping" isn't an argument (LLMs for example) either

The leadership of these companies, are incredibly ethically bankrupt

It turns out that Twitter / X has never been more alive!

So you have to get an X account to get access to "your" own politicians. Similarly, on Truth Social hedge funds are paying $100,000 bribes to Trump for premium access (essentially frontrunning).

This is from the company (X is owned by xAI) that distilled OpenAI against the terms of service.

Doing otherwise should be banned here.

If you guys are really going to stay down otherwise because you are worried, transfer ownership of the Nitter servers to me on paper and I will approve turning them back on and resume operations as usual.

I have zero problem telling Musk to fuck off. In court, if needed.

this wikipedia page will be there for that day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...

There is a reason these Nitter based gateways exist. If you want to change it, come up with a better alternative.

To the people who say there are only "right wing" figures. Really?

https://x.com/maxblumenthal

https://x.com/richimedhurst

https://x.com/ryangrim

https://x.com/aoc

If you only read Musk and AI boosters, you may get a wrong impression.

To me it sounds reasonable that you can't just take that content and repost it without their or the author of the post explicit permission. It sounds like a fair use case and copying the whole content is not that.

Now there are technical details: "are they really copying or generating on the fly for the user" but I don't think it matters. At the end of the day the content belongs to either X or their users. I think arguments against that are arguments against copyright in general.

If I ever posted something on X my expectations would be that if people want to read it they need to obey X's terms and conditions. I wouldn't be happy if there was a platform copying it somewhere else. If I wanted my post to be public I would post on freely available public website (and then maybe repost or link it from my X's account).

If the commenter truly believes it’s a Nazi app, why are they the slightest bit upset to lose access to any version of it?

It’s astonishingly easy to not use toxic social media platforms.