I used Twitter for over 10 years without an account then suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted and no longer an option. Reddit is now this way too.

But I find it ridiculous that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable without being logged in (and in some cases requiring an app instead of the site). Even Bluesky has this problem!

Sometimes this information is really important! And I even if I did have an account I may not have access to log in on every device (or even want to).

It’s absurd that social media can become this like critical communications platform for severe weather alerts or business hours or anything but the sites hosting it are completely hostile to allowing you to see it.

Sites like this are a bandaid on a gangrenous foot. Thanks for allowing me to see links from twitter but it isn’t a sustainable solution clearly.

Politics aside, Twitter/X has become a bad place to share information on and to link to. It's a bad option from a technical point of view.

We can't read a multi-part tweet (or follow-ups from the author) or check the latest updates from an official account without an account, which requires a mobile phone number and sometimes extra verifications. A digital "town square" can't require an account and a phone number to read what's said there.

Same with Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Linkdin, etc.

Anyone know the specifics of how this works under the hood? I assumed the people over at Twitter/X would aggressively block systems like this from working. Are they doing something creative to get around that?

API works great, for now

https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/user/[username]

https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/user/[username]&uid=[id...

Beware the website is jam-packed with ads and tracking

It would be nice if URL schema was compatibile with X. In case of Nitter, I could’ve just replaced x.com with xcancel.com with a web extension and URL still works.

it's brave to look at other companies receiving cease and desist notices and treat it as a market opening

Anybody find a good way to use a regex redirect to this that consistently works ?

Show HN some months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46513823

https://www.autistici.org offer great services with very strong effort to protect privacy, for more then 20 years, now... and all is done by volunteers.

Very proud of their work, and kudos for affecting how the world is handling information and their will to do good

The X account of the person running this has been suspended.

https://x.com/PeterAndersonE

Is this referring to the new Twitter company that recently launched (https://twitter.now)?

If not, then this is just going to lead to confusion.

Prepping for another C&D I see. The only way something like this can survive is through Tor or similar, fully anonymous and decentralized.

The general rule: any social media owned by a corporation will eventually lock posts behind a login.

Listen I know this comment is off topic, flag this if you want but I think it’s an important discussion

Speaking of twitter, are there any posts here about the ycombinator discourse?

Given a high level member of ycombinator blocked the chairman of the FTC after an argument over immigration, I foresee issues in the future.

I've been on Mastodon for a few years, and though it has less drama than Twitter/X, it does seem to have reached critical mass of users and does cover most of my needs for random gossip. I am surprised that that nobody has mentioned it here.

Are there any Instagram equivalents that don't suck?

People love to virtue signal by linking to Twitter proxies, but Instagram is still a walled garden that all sorts of useful information (event details, restaurant menus, etc.) is locked inside. I occasionally have luck with whatever the top Google results are, but they're all encrusted with dodgy ads.

Hmm, on the one hand Elon begs for new users with animated ads on the x.com front page, on the other hand one of his (likely) alt accounts claims that "Every $1 [of advertising on X] spent delivered an average return of $5.42":

https://twitterwebviewer.com/?tweet=2092490213121761787

I am kind of addicted to studying propaganda and reading about baseball stadiums on the moon to drive up the SpaceX stock price. For this I need the Twitter gateways.

The search is somehow faster than twitter's own search.

The site is very fast even though it should be overloaded now. Registered in Hong Kong (good), handled by Cloudflare and claims to be in California:

https://github.com/peters-lab/twitter-viewer

Repo is fake, only a README and a LICENSE. I guess we'll take what we can get now.

We need this for Linkdin too!

I ignored Twitter before Musk bought it and oddly I still have no problem ignoring it.

It doesn't even have good cat pictures.

How does this work, does it use the twitter api?

To this day I am still calling the website Twitter and access it every single time typing twitter.com. That rename was so dumb. So, I really love the name

I don't think the worldwide trendings are right. The ones I see (with personalization disabled) are not all in arabic (?)

Thanks Peter! Now do the same for the 'gram!

Cease and desist in 3... 2... 1...

Related:

Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283

It does not work for me like xcancel did

Nice, how do you make this freely available?

not going to be long before they cut access to this app.

You've been told for years not to use X, (twitter is now clearly the pre Musk era), but Elon knows you crave his dopamine so he can keep imposing harsher conditions.

What is Twitter?

whackamole is the only way for now, unfortunately.

Why are people so obsessed about twitter

It's disappointing that this is even necessary given earlier promises of opening up the Twitter algorithm.

paypal should have never ever given back Musk the x domain

and ICANN should have nuked it long ago

but all that aside, wtf is anyone still on it

Musk is a mass murderer

apparently the nazis would still be in power today if they just had a web service people were too freaking lazy and addicted to ever quit

and Tesla "FSD" is still trying to murder passengers a decade later but that's also definitely a choice

How about ... fuck shitter ... I don't even want to view via proxy anymore.

PSA: I'm not interested in your shitter-specific content. Hit me up elsewhere. Thanks