Twitter Viewer â View Twitter Without Account
374 points - yesterday at 2:11 PM
Sourcekemotep
yesterday at 3:19 PM
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).
Itâs 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 isnât a sustainable solution clearly.
0xDEAFBEAD
today at 5:38 AM
[delayed]
ghusto
yesterday at 8:20 PM
Here in the Netherlands, WhatsApp has the defacto communication tool. Everyone is expected to have it installed, not just by friends but also municipals and companies. Same level as having an e-mail address.
It's a missed opportunity for the digital soverignty the EU says it so badly needs. The code for a government backed WhatsApp competitor is there, in multiple instances even. Launch a WhatsApp clone and put all governement communication through it so everyone has to have it installed, and you have an instant EU-wide userbase. From there, people will naturally start to use it between themselves.
Eurocrats could never in a million years make it happen. For starters, every country would insist on having its own ChatsApp, with roll out taking years. Then, to satisfy strict security and compliance regulations it would be restricted to devices passing Google & Apple hardware attestation checks. And once everyone is finally forced to be on board, any confidentiality guarantees can go out the window to catch pedos and terrorists.
It's for the best.
There is a carrier neutral WhatsApp, called SMS.
wldcordeiro
yesterday at 8:54 PM
Reminds me of what Brasil did with Pix which of course the outside payment processors have been trying to undo.
baxtr
yesterday at 9:34 PM
I think my main communication is probably the last tool that I want to be government backed tbh.
valleyer
yesterday at 9:57 PM
Even if it's communication/announcements from the government?
I too am constantly frustrated that official communications from governments happen on Twitter or Facebook.
thevinter
yesterday at 10:01 PM
Communications/announcements from the government can easily be posted on the government's website or, if really needed, sent as an SMS
iamnothere
today at 1:31 AM
My local government still lets you sign up for email notifications about services and local alerts. Itâs great!
Too expensive, bad idea.
What do you mean? They'll just pass a law saying carriers have to deliver them for free
r_lee
yesterday at 10:15 PM
are those your "main communication" tools?
toomuchtodo
yesterday at 9:16 PM
Do you think if government accounts were on Signal, people would install it?
Signal requires a mobile phone for an account; so it's not entirely web-friendly. Plus, can you read what's posted to signal without an account?
Signal is an improvement, but not federated.
a_imho
yesterday at 3:51 PM
Increasingly access is hidden behind mobile apps too, which in turn requires succumbing to app stores and handing over the keys to 2 giant US companies. For slopware and social media, fine. Some would even argue it is a blessing in disguise. However on the government level it is totally unacceptable. E.g. why should anyone and especially non US citizens accept the Google/Apple TOS in order to file their taxes, access their health recds or schedule a gov appointment?
CTDOCodebases
yesterday at 9:21 PM
It's all by design to. People call for social media regulation without realizing that it is by no coincidence these companies have been able to grow so large. The security state has been outsourced to private industry.
GPerson
yesterday at 6:18 PM
My phone canât even open most of the apps since itâs so old. Reddit does not load (this actually helped me a lot).
alyeska2
yesterday at 4:58 PM
Even worse, it's hard or impossible to even have an account with any shred of privacy.
I've tried to create pseudoanonymous accounts on both Bluesky and Twitter and then had them be instantly banned before I ever used them. Not even doing anything real privacy like TOR or a VPN, just trying to create an account without revealing my personal phone number.
Ironically, their attempts to crack down on bots means real people like me can't access the sites, while the scammers, propagandists and shills will put in the work to register accounts.
You might try attacking the problem from the other direction. If your country allows buying a SIM card without KYC, then do that.
filoleg
yesterday at 5:09 PM
Just to clarify, what do you mean by "without revealing my personal phone number"?
Did you use a voip number (e.g., Google Voice/Twilio/etc.) instead? Or somehow no number at all? Or a secondary (real) phone number, and Twitter somehow determined it wasn't your primary personal phone number?
Not pushing back against what you said, just trying to understand what factually happened.
omoikane
yesterday at 6:25 PM
Bluesky didn't require phone numbers back when it was invite only, and then there was a period of time after they allowed everyone to create accounts where users need a phone number to verify. That requirement might have been replaced by a captcha according to:
https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/2762
But I didn't try to create an account recently, maybe they went back to requiring phone numbers.
deltoidmaximus
yesterday at 6:37 PM
Lots of services demand your phone number after the fact now, hoping to use the sunk cost fallacy to extort it out of you when you're in a hurry.
Walmart recently deleted my phone number from my account for vague reasons but most likely because another account had the same number. That other account is my wife and the number is our VoIP line. I have no desire to interact with walmart through my cell phone so I didn't give it to them. So I used a google voice number, which is not my number, to get back in. Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company and autopopulated the field. Jokes on me!
aucisson_masque
yesterday at 9:17 PM
> Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company
Holy moly, don't you have any law at all to protect people's privacy ?
fcarraldo
yesterday at 10:05 PM
in the US? no.
cassepipe
yesterday at 7:21 PM
But I don't think that's the case for Bluesky
hparadiz
yesterday at 11:19 PM
It's because of spam. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Ironically AI could fix this when trivial spam detection inference becomes cheap enough to throw away on every upload.
AI would classify anything disagreeing with the government as spam. For example right now it would classify anything opposing Israel as spam.
alyeska2
yesterday at 6:17 PM
It's been years since I tried making a Twitter account, I believe at the time it sometimes required a phone number to sign up but other times it was optional (some A/B test).
I think Bluesky didn't require a phone number to sign up, just an email. Maybe I'm misremembering though and it forced a phone number so I had to provide a fake one or a voip one.
Right now X requires either a phone number, or email + phone hardware ID.
deltoidmaximus
yesterday at 6:33 PM
I wouldn't even care if they blocked my anonymous account from posting or really interacting besides reading things. But of course, preventing bot actions isn't actually why I need an account so they aren't going to let you do that.
cassepipe
yesterday at 7:19 PM
I don't remember giving my phone to bluesky
alexfortin
today at 4:17 AM
I didn't
giancarlostoro
yesterday at 5:31 PM
> Reddit is now this way too.
Which is why OpenAI formed a partnership with reddit, in exchange for access to OpenAI's models, OpenAI gets access to reddit's data, and access to reddits live feed.
The reason X and Reddit started forcing accounts is to prevent or add barrier for web scraping, and forcing companies to pay for access to the data.
ModernMech
yesterday at 5:43 PM
Notably this was called a âtemporary emergency measureâ by Elon Musk â yet another promise he couldnât keep
https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-now-needs-users-s...
sailfast
yesterday at 5:45 PM
âTemporary emergencyâ should always be considered skeptically - especially when it comes to government. They almost always stay permanent.
ibejoeb
yesterday at 6:29 PM
I'm fine with the criticism, but what's the solution? And what makes this a uniquely Elon problem when the rest of the social media industry does the same? There was backlash when the models learned computer programming from open source repositories, so I wonder if the same applies to casual speech.
kelvinjps10
yesterday at 7:55 PM
Because it worked without an account before Elon came to Twitter and changed it?
Pedro_Ribeiro
yesterday at 8:13 PM
Would've happened either way. Data is more valuable and also trivial to scrape now.
arjie
yesterday at 4:09 PM
The governments go where the people are. If they post on their own sites itâs the equivalent of âon display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying âBeware of the Leopardââ.
But government information should definitely be first source on their site with federation elsewhere.
phforms
yesterday at 8:56 PM
Yeah, "first source" is the key here. The information should be available openly and independently of any 3rd-party platform.
In a broader sense, I believe that every person who publishes on the internet should have a standard way to keep their profile data (accounts, posts, etc.) in a secure, user-owned vault that is independent of any company or institution and platforms should have to pull data from that place (in a restricted, user-controlled way) instead of from their own servers. Platforms should be exchangeable, profiles should be entirely user-owned. But of course, this is just a dream and hard to realise technically and economically (incentive-wise) with our current systems. Decentralised protocols are a step in this direction, but unfortunately still too technical/complicated for most people to really "own" or host their data themselves.
arjie
yesterday at 9:20 PM
ATProto attempted to do this with their PDS based structure but it isnât fully decentralized yet. The vision is similar to what you describe though.
pfraze
yesterday at 10:51 PM
Thats entirely how atproto works now!
Except for the part where bluesky maintains a central registry and also the part where the protocol is really complicated with its authenticity stuff.
andrepd
yesterday at 5:13 PM
The problem is not governments or people posting there. The problem is platforms/utilities not being treated as such.
anotherpaul
yesterday at 3:32 PM
totally agree, businesses that only have Facebook or Instagram are basically hidden from me. I can not see their opening hours, nor the menue, if it is a restaurant. I understand why the businesses use facebook, its easy, but its also a bit sad.
rplnt
yesterday at 4:25 PM
Similarly, society decided at some point that linkedin, a completely private and constantly hacked social network, is a must-have when looking for work (not any work, but for a lot of jobs it applies). Just give them all your private data and we'll have a look.
y-c-o-m-b
yesterday at 5:32 PM
Makes one miss the days when Craigslist or Monster (and its clones) were legitimately the best places to find employment.
I've always loathed LinkedIn due to their poor security and their data mining practices, starting from day 1. I haven't used LinkedIn in over 10 years and only used it briefly to connect with old colleagues. I never had a problem getting work without it. Due to AI, scammers, and infiltration by countries like North Korea, LinkedIn seems to be the only other source outside of "networking" to get hired these days though, unfortunately.
At this point nothing would make me happier than to see Meta, X, LinkedIn, and their friends collapse. They are a cancer and only amplify the enshittification of everything.
tuesdaynight
yesterday at 4:55 PM
It's frustrating, but we need to accept that we are not the kind of user that these platforms want. I stopped using Reddit for the same reason, and I accepted that I'm not the best user for them. For my luck, Reddit is not used as the main communication channel for government agencies
cassepipe
yesterday at 7:20 PM
> Even Bluesky has this problem!
Bluesky is totally accessible for me without an account. What do you see ?
Plenty of people restrict their account to require that you too have an account to see their posts. A link to Bluesky often feels like roulette on whether I can see a post or not.
It isnât as egregious as other sites but itâs still restrictive.
Melatonic
yesterday at 11:43 PM
That's why we really need some kind of non profit or maybe two "social media" sites made with the public good in mind. One could be officially government sanctioned and funded (sort of like Voice of America but internal to the US more so) and have a strict organisation verification policy for local police / government and other quasi public entities (say like transportation systems and energy companies - etc)
I wholeheartedly agree on every point. I've felt this way for years. It's scandalous.
Many companies also rely on socials as their only effective means of customer service. If you have a problem or want to provide feedback but you don't use social media then you are SOL.
Or you sue them and (if they did something wrong) they're SOL.
But you won't. And they know you won't. Not even small claims.
tmp10423288442
yesterday at 6:08 PM
Should governments not have posted announcements in newspapers back when they were widely read, even though they require paying to read them?
mxschll
yesterday at 7:09 PM
In the EU, EU-Alert exists. They can push alarms to any phone with that system.
jasonfarnon
yesterday at 11:35 PM
They have Amber Alert here and the other day I noticed it linked to twitter for more information...which I couldn't actually but for a split-second when a pop-up loaded. This is silly. Perhaps govt can reach more people by posting a message to twitter vs their website. But if you're sending a link out, there is no excuse not to link to your website or any number of other open, stable hosts.
Amber alerts accomplish nothing, with or without twitter links
eudamoniac
today at 2:52 AM
I'm sympathetic, as I also don't have an account, but honestly I don't think requiring a free account that takes 10 seconds to make and needs no personal info constitutes "completely hostile to allowing you to see it."
Twitter requires your phone number to sign up
The Reddit thing is disappointing. I stopped being a user a long time ago, but their links often show up in search results. I started noticing I couldn't see the page without logging in. I ended up blocking Reddit in my search results. It's not worth it.
baggy_trough
yesterday at 9:21 PM
Create an account then? Not sure why that's an issue.
Am4TIfIsER0ppos
yesterday at 10:04 PM
You can't make new accounts on twitter. You can only use existing apple or google accounts.
baggy_trough
yesterday at 10:22 PM
I think you can, if you install their app.
charcircuit
yesterday at 11:00 PM
>are completely hostile to allowing you to see it.
You say like this like it doesn't literally take like 10 seconds to make an account to see it.
It doesn't. Have you actually tried? Recently?
nomilk
yesterday at 5:25 PM
From Musk in Dec 2022 (right after purchasing Twitter):
> we should not be prohibiting read-only scroll
Seems Musk agreed Twitter shouldn't require an account just to view the site. Wonder why the change of mind.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=50m47s
angoragoats
yesterday at 5:38 PM
I learned from experience at least a decade ago that you should not take anything he says seriously or as an assertion of fact. Countless examples[0] prove that this is the case.
[0] https://elonmusk.today
nomilk
yesterday at 5:52 PM
Musk is aggressively optimistic on what can be achieved and by when, but rational on product decisions.
Musk stating that read-only scroll should be allowed seems very sensible (I think we all agree on that). But he (or someone he delegated to) clearly changed their mind. Intrigued to know why. Occam's razor would probably suggest that allowing scrapers to host twitter posts elsewhere costs them ad revenue, so they make it difficult.
assagr
yesterday at 6:03 PM
He thinks Twitter data is valuable for AI training. He also blocks archive.org.
Grok 4.0, before it deteriorated, had a phase when it was good at writing tweets. The feature was used by Musk sycophants but it becomes boring soon.
Since Grok is closed now too and Cursor is pivoting to octocnt (GitHub clone), nobody knows where things are heading.
numpad0
yesterday at 10:38 PM
I think buying Twitter for data was a blunder big as expecting self driving to be solved by 2015 or whenever it originally was.
It is only clear with hindsight, but now everyone knows that tweets are literally detrimental for LLM style AI for whatever reason. Personally I think it's because tweets are responses without CoT or prompts, or could be also because all its meat is in the shape incompatible with en-US culture, even when it's in English, though all that matters is it's actively useless.
He didn't buy twitter for data, he bought it to shut down criticism of himself and it worked
nomilk
yesterday at 11:05 PM
Maybe for training, but how about look up? I often use claude voice and grok voice (both on iOS) and reasonably frequently claude simply cannot find any info about a breaking topic, whereas grok always can.
I wonder if "no one says no" culture is practically the same thing as instructing LLMs to always hallucinate.
You know, LLM hallucination is a phenomenon where the AI would generate syntactically bulletproof chunks of text that are not grounded in reality. Lots of efforts by frontier LLM labs had been made in past few years to solve this by enabling AIs to refute premises in the prompt.
Ordinary people still need to be instructed to google stuffs. They don't go to a niche de facto non-American social media to be disappointed by its notoriously bad search to then conclude its notoriously dumb AI can be abused as a makeshift search tool. People are simply unable.
Twitter has been doing so much things backwards lately. That's reminiscent of how hallucination hurts whatever you do with AIs.
angoragoats
yesterday at 6:14 PM
> Musk is aggressively optimistic on what can be achieved and by when
Thatâs putting it quite charitably, IMO.
> but rational on product decisions
Hard disagree. You only need to look to his entire tenure at DOGE for literally hundreds (thousands?) of counterexamples.
Or, if you donât count that work as âproduct decisions,â there are other highly questionable product decisions that he is responsible for: the rear doors on the Model X; the lack of instruments/gauges of any kind in front of the driver on the Model 3 and Y; the lack of proper safety sensors/protection for the hood of the Cybertruck, leading to mangled fingers; that stupid yoke steering wheel; and the entirety of Neuralink (just to name a handful).
100percentjake
yesterday at 6:42 PM
I am certifiably not a fan of Musk but the yoke in the cybertruck when combined with the drive by wire steering is an absolute engineering masterpiece and a masterclass in systems calibration. The yoke itself has a relatively narrow range of motion of .94 turns lock-to-lock and at slow parking lot speeds that means you can do a 3 point turn, park, parallel park, navigate around, without making large movements of the steering input and you never have to (because you physically cannot) go hand-over-hand. Then at highway speeds the steering ratio is vastly different and the vehicle feels solid as a rock. It's absolutely effortless.
Now, on the flipside, the yoke also exists in the Tesla Model S Plaid, which has a traditional manual rack. In here it is the worst god-damned thing to ever curse a vehicle. The width is roughly the diameter of a school bus steering wheel and going hand over hand with it is annoying at best and the whole experience feels like utter garbage.
angoragoats
yesterday at 6:50 PM
> Now, on the flipside, the yoke also exists in the Tesla Model S Plaid, which has a traditional manual rack. In here it is the worst god-damned thing to ever curse a vehicle.
Yes, as I said, bad product decisions.
maxlin
yesterday at 8:59 PM
Blame boundless AI scraping. X would like very much to be more open.
You don't think he has the resources to sue the scrapers?
tharmas
yesterday at 4:13 PM
And you have to have a phone number to login to these sites (Authenticate). Even On-line Banking, you need a phone number to log in. And in my country Mobile contracts are hideously expensive.
Its all part of the plan: the Digital Control Grid.
Just wait till the Genius Act kicks in with Stable Coins. Programmable money is coming.
fuzzfactor
yesterday at 4:00 PM
>suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted
To some decision-makers their idea of "disruption" is limited to enshittification more than anything else.
Exoristos
yesterday at 6:59 PM
Disruption was never an unblemished positive for society.
uygiugiu
yesterday at 9:48 PM
Muskâs takeover of Twitter was a net win for free speech
Thanks, new account that only posts to support Musk
celsoazevedo
yesterday at 4:34 PM
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.
seahorseemoji
yesterday at 6:42 PM
I wish I understood why the majority of the AI discussions happen on Twitter/X.
nlitened
yesterday at 8:09 PM
Network effect. Most people worth discussing with are already there, so more people join the discussion there, and so on.
redox99
yesterday at 9:48 PM
Because obviously everyone who participates in a discussion has an account, so they don't feel this annoyance other than maybe when sharing a link to someone else.
Tells me how valuable they actually are.
anigbrowl
yesterday at 11:05 PM
Read Social and Economic Networks by Michael O Jackson.
jesse_dot_id
yesterday at 7:15 PM
A lot of crypto bro grifter crossover in AI.
moomoo11
yesterday at 8:17 PM
why not?
anigbrowl
yesterday at 11:01 PM
Don't be obtuse. the reasons why not were spelled out in the GP.
moomoo11
yesterday at 11:06 PM
vague and useless reply
why are AI researchers and everyone else on X
preg_match
today at 2:24 AM
Inertia. Twitter has basically no value, it's just a bad app and bad website. It was never actually "good" for information communication, but it was tolerable.
When it comes down to 99% of these "why are people using sucky thing?" questions, the answer is inertia. Never confuse popularity for quality, they're completely orthogonal.
andrewmutz
yesterday at 4:49 PM
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?
No, and nitter the software still works too. Apparently the only barrier he could create was a cease and desist letter.
sad that i come here for technical information and yours is the first lonely comment asking about how this works
SoKamil
yesterday at 2:51 PM
It would be nice if URL schema was compatibile with X. In case of Nitter, I couldâve just replaced x.com with xcancel.com with a web extension and URL still works.
john_strinlai
yesterday at 2:42 PM
it's brave to look at other companies receiving cease and desist notices and treat it as a market opening
C&D has zero legal weight. They're just relying on developers being conflict-averse. At my local hacker space, at least five members are in some kinds of protracted legal battles (five different ones)
thehamkercat
yesterday at 2:58 PM
twitterwebviewer.com was registered in Hong Kong
according to https://www.whois.com/whois/twitterwebviewer.com
Looks fine, they don't care about the notices i guess
.com domain zone is managed by Verysign US company. They will just C&D them.
pibaker
yesterday at 8:58 PM
"Check our Wikipedia page for our latest domain. Next stop the Central African Republic!"
doublepg23
yesterday at 3:18 PM
I guess my brain has been cooked by internet libertarianism but what's the basis of a C&D for proxying a website?
Is the legal basis just copyright of the contents?
xmprt
yesterday at 3:35 PM
Bigger "guns" diplomacy. They don't need any legal basis for a C&D. Just depends on whether you have enough money to fight it in court.
john_strinlai
yesterday at 3:37 PM
i dont know the legal basis used, or the validity. i just know that i wouldnt want to have to spend the time or money fighting twitter over it
paxys
yesterday at 4:30 PM
Well yeah the copyright violation is pretty clear cut here.
itintheory
yesterday at 5:24 PM
My understanding is that copyright of what's posted is retained by the poster. The Nitter C&D was around a ToS violation for scraping.
Violating ToS is legal, but so is sending a C&D for anything you like
oriettaxx
yesterday at 6:47 PM
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
unethical_ban
yesterday at 8:34 PM
Now designated a terror organization by the current US administration.
oriettaxx
yesterday at 9:23 PM
yes, I've answered in the wrong post, sorry
randyrand
yesterday at 8:58 PM
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.
urbandw311er
yesterday at 9:21 PM
I donât think there will be any confusion. Clearly this is not referring to this random new Twitter thing youâve linked to that most people have never heard of, it is referring to Twitter the previously global piece of software with hundreds of millions of former users.
there is no chance that people would assume this is about a startup that's about to get nuked by copyright cease and desists
First off I think you mean trademark, secondly you're allowed to just ignore a C&D, thirdly your trademark is invalid if you don't use it so Elon might not actually have a trademark on Twitter any more
orsorna
yesterday at 10:08 PM
Who in their right mind would take that site seriously?
nozzlegear
today at 4:40 AM
Are you talking about Twitter or X?
skeledrew
yesterday at 2:58 PM
Prepping for another C&D I see. The only way something like this can survive is through Tor or similar, fully anonymous and decentralized.
jjordan
yesterday at 3:09 PM
What ever happened to IPFS? Wasn't it built for just this kind of thing? I remember trying it years ago and it was absolutely unusable, but was kinda hoping it had made a turnaround by now.
pfraze
yesterday at 10:54 PM
That dev community continued into iroh and atproto. We built atproto with whyrusleeping as a very active consultant
I2P Nitter instances exist: va7j3ssqh7e26twc2sflrwjrn7uxryuenatcmfp7njnr5hmvtuiq.b32.i2p
You can just ignore a C&D if you have the balls to enrage Elon
chr15m
yesterday at 11:46 PM
The general rule: any social media owned by a corporation will eventually lock posts behind a login.
Any social media product will be acquired and co-opted.
And stuff their UX full of dark patterns, and get very angry whenever someone tries building a third-party client without the bullshit.
daedrdev
yesterday at 3:46 PM
Listen I know this comment is off topic, flag this if you want but I think itâs 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.
MiscCompFacts
yesterday at 4:51 PM
Is there a link to this argument?
iAMkenough
yesterday at 4:39 PM
I donât think itâs an issue. Their site, their rules.
johannes1234321
yesterday at 4:50 PM
And compared to Twitter or others discussed here no government agency or similar uses Hacker News as their primary channel for news updates. However Twitter, Instagram and auch are used for such official purpose from different agencies worldwide. Thus access for the respective citizens is relevant.
alexthedigger
yesterday at 4:33 PM
[dead]
jacobgorm
yesterday at 10:32 PM
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.
Because it's not a real platform, it's a series of tiny microplatforms
bsimpson
yesterday at 8:04 PM
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.
It's impossible to build a foobar equivalent unless it's literally foobar, because the value of foobar isn't the software, but the fact that other people post stuff there. There's no point having a restaurant menu platform unless you have restaurant menus on it. Have you considered going around your city and taking pictures of restaurant menus, then attaching them to a map?
I've had people send me reels as links to ddinstagram.com and kkinstagram.com, which at least in Telegram, get transformed into a video that can be played inline from the link preview and downloaded.
Marsymars
yesterday at 9:05 PM
Depends if you want an alternate front-end and you can self-host, or you're looking for a third party.
For the former, I generally look at what LibRedirect has as options: https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
Proxigram seems unmaintained, but kittygram seems to be actively developed: https://codeberg.org/irelephant/kittygram
bsimpson
yesterday at 9:35 PM
I've never had an Instagram account, and I'm trying to keep it that way.
Most of these front ends need to be stocked with login cookies, that's how they bypass the login wall. If you want to self host a bypass you need to create at least one dummy account on that service.
tlvbaf
yesterday at 3:27 PM
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.
Jtarii
yesterday at 3:10 PM
The search is somehow faster than twitter's own search.
121kahG
yesterday at 2:56 PM
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.
gruez
yesterday at 10:48 PM
>handled by Cloudflare and claims to be in California
Where? are you just pulling cloudflare's ip info?
seebeegeebee
yesterday at 2:19 PM
We need this for Linkdin too!
add-sub-mul-div
yesterday at 2:34 PM
Sometimes a walled garden can be a good thing, if it functions as a quarantine.
tantalor
yesterday at 3:37 PM
More like a tall fence around a superfund site.
uygiugiu
yesterday at 9:50 PM
indeed, bluesky is a great example of self-quarantine
pfraze
yesterday at 10:56 PM
New account, 4 comments, one includes âMuskâs takeover of Twitter was a net win for free speechâ
seebeegeebee
today at 4:44 AM
Oh, is this supposed to be a liberal echo-chamber?
Are you mad other users have their own opinions?
New account, -2 karma, mostly posts about how evil immigrants are
fuzzfactor
today at 12:17 AM
Bless his heart, babies don't know any better.
seebeegeebee
today at 4:44 AM
Yes, burn the witch!!!
How dare someone disagree with our MSM opinions!
newsomix9xl
yesterday at 2:47 PM
I ignored Twitter before Musk bought it and oddly I still have no problem ignoring it.
It doesn't even have good cat pictures.
baggachipz
yesterday at 3:17 PM
I built dailycat.app and it has good cat pictures!
abraham
yesterday at 4:52 PM
Yay for daily cat apps! I run daily.cat
drop_star
yesterday at 6:22 PM
you guys are doing the important work. Keep it up!
Literally every time I decide to stop ignoring X, I log in and am greeted with overt racism and religious hatred. Always a good reminder to just ignore that cesspit.
I guess other people have more tolerance than I do for the constant stream of hatred that floats to the top of the algorithm like scum over there.
newsomix9xl
yesterday at 6:54 PM
Totes. I searched for cat pics and within a few results I was being given racially charged fights.
How does this work, does it use the twitter api?
Probably just fetches the page with a login cookie, like Nitter.
charles_f
yesterday at 3:01 PM
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
The number of people who do this is the number of reasons Elon can give to the trademark judge that he is actually using the trademark Twitter and it shouldn't be invalidated for non-use.
jp_sc
yesterday at 6:04 PM
I don't think the worldwide trendings are right. The ones I see (with personalization disabled) are not all in arabic (?)
Cease and desist in 3... 2... 1...
ThouYS
yesterday at 5:18 PM
Thanks Peter! Now do the same for the 'gram!
DivingForGold
yesterday at 3:19 PM
It does not work for me like xcancel did
dhiraj113
yesterday at 6:20 PM
Nice, how do you make this freely available?
thallavajhula
yesterday at 10:54 PM
not going to be long before they cut access to this app.
xacky
yesterday at 4:32 PM
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.
twilo
yesterday at 6:48 PM
What is Twitter?
nancyminusone
yesterday at 6:57 PM
the enduring result of the stupidest brand name change ever
bigbadfeline
yesterday at 3:15 PM
whackamole is the only way for now, unfortunately.
amazingamazing
yesterday at 11:28 PM
Why are people so obsessed about twitter
benjaminclauss
yesterday at 2:49 PM
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
I mean, that basically is how the Nazis had power
kijashdkujdfhas
yesterday at 4:35 PM
Based on the downvotes, there's a lot of folks who just can't stand to be reminded who and what they're associating with by continuing to use Twitter.
Folks, you don't have to give the nazi bar your business. You will live without Twitter.
uygiugiu
yesterday at 9:51 PM
'everyone who disagrees with me is a nazi'
When what they said is that Nazis are bad... literally yes? Literally everyone who disagrees with "Nazis are bad" is literally a nazi.
iAMkenough
yesterday at 4:41 PM
I think youâre talking to bots. Anything that doesnât align with Trump/Elonâs perceived worldview gets downvoted here.
kijashdkujdfhas
yesterday at 4:52 PM
Don't care. The occasional human who might see the comment still makes it worth it. Even if they don't change their behavior, they've been reminded that they are hanging out at the nazi bar.
It's important to remind people of what they're doing, when they're doing something like that.
bigstrat2003
yesterday at 11:55 PM
No, he's downvoted because he's saying objectively false things like "Musk is a mass murderer", and subjective but unproductive things like "he's a Nazi". You can dislike Elon Musk and make that point in a mature way that actually leads to a good discussion. People do that all the time and don't get flak for it. This poster has chosen to be incendiary, and people dislike flamebait so it got downvoted.
DOGE killing a few million people is no secret.
kijashdkujdfhas
today at 12:32 AM
Yeah we get it, you like to hang out at the nazi bar.
LightBug1
yesterday at 4:43 PM
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