I agree with the spirit of your comment though. More resistance would be a good thing. It’s just unfortunate how it seems to cost like $20k to $100k.

Nitter should put up a request for donations for legal fees. Lots of people are willing.

However, C&D's don't really carry any legal weight in the US to my knowledge... but I don't see any harm in complying ahead of time just to be safe. The only "damage" I can see is just by nature of the service being down temporarily.

If there is even a possibility that a court may find the service violating a law, I think the legal advisor would likely say to just leave the service down unless you have many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to fight it... you can most likely avoid the entire lawsuit altogether just by complying with the C&D. And this kind of suit is one that can easily ruin your company or even personal life... so avoiding it seems smart.

> Anyone can send an request.

As for emails, I think BIMI has solved this for some time now, at least for large companies.

This is the one that they know they have absolutely no grounds to demand, which is why they started with it. Everything else can be conformed with without even really damaging Nitter (the project.)

> 4. Delete all X account credentials and session tokens

could be trouble for individual servers, but is on legally shaky ground, and servers can simply go down at the first strong challenge and open back up under another name. Nitter the project doesn't need to have any credentials or tokens.

I don’t get it.

If so, that’s appalling.

We should have prevented Twitter/X and other platforms becoming quasi-official communications channels for public institutions.

Funny thing though. I've heard the claims of "CSAM on Twitter" and now "CSAM on BlueSky". I've never had any of that ransomly show up. I do still have 2 or so random follows from clip-art female avatars with no tweets - per week. I've never quite figured out how that scam is supposed to work. I used to block 'em, now I ignore 'em.

I've got no idea if they're somehow making money off it or what's up

I left X permanently because the unfathomable amount of CSAM being generated by Grok, without seeing it myself, sickened me to the point of no return.

I don’t use Bluesky but it seems to me that if this is a real concern to you, then you should have left X as well.

There really isn't, unless you mean anime content(of both SFW and NSFW alike) by "CSAM". In case you mean by that, then there is, otherwise no. It also appears to be highly locale dependent - some say they see timeline filled to the brim with fetish furry images and male gay nudity dressed with right wing politics, but my timeline is like just Twitter 2014 stuck at 3AM without any of those. I don't use any filters or blocklists, the place seem naturally nice-ish.

> about how X was full of bots

They appear to have largely given up and scaled back efforts to replace existing social graphs by funding African/Middle Eastern/Indian/South Asian content farms under the guise of revenue sharing programs, burning out talents west to east, likely with the conclusion that they're all equally incapable of understanding contents posted on Twitter even without the language barrier, let alone gaining popularity and even with literal algorithmic manipulations. Or they just burned through quite a deep talent pool globally.

That effort started after Twitter was bought, beginning around South Africa or Nigeria. So it's not an improvement, unless you count someone ceasing hostility as an improvement.

G+ comes to mind.

(Several billion profiles, tens of millions active. Shut down 1 Apr 2019. Yes, April Fools' Day.)

Yet. Japanese twitter users are a reflection of who they are, etc etc

Doesn’t mean there isn’t toxic stuff though.

Others do value that, no judgment, but for me it's be a net negative.

The comment section was pretty awful; 90% people yelling about Canada's government being a tyranny and/or in bed with Communist China.

Whenever I check X, it's always just misinformation, and it's impossible to see what people actually say because bluechecks are always the first to show up in the algorithmic ranking. On political commentary: they were dying hard for Graham Platner saying he was the only option, but then Troy Jackson who replaced him did better in the polls.

This doesn't make it malware, as likely as it is that malware would hide itself like that. base64 encoding avoids issues with quoting and escaping in the terminal, and is an easy way to include a bit of binary data that might be needed by a command (or even just written directly to disk somewhere). "Obfuscated base64" is only saying something if you decoded the base64 and still got an obfuscated result. Install-time code execution is more dangerous in the sense that you can't review between installation and program execution; but custom installers come from the same source as the program, so it's the same number of parties to trust.

For that matter, PyPA still maintains bootstrap.pypa.io so that Python users can get current versions of pip by downloading and running a Python script that loads a base85 string, decodes it and writes a wheel file based on that. (It even duplicates some of the standard library `ensurepip` logic.)

If you want a malware report to be taken seriously, in general, you should expect to roll up your sleeves and be able to provide an analysis of concrete malicious behaviour.

https://x.com/vonderleyen https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa https://x.com/liandersson https://x.com/AmnestyEU

Its usually either limited features, regional accessibility issues, or platforms like metas' just basically trading one big bad organization for another.

This is honestly the real value of nitter far beyond anti-Musk shriekers being obsessed with and addicted to X but not wanting to log into X. Nitter seems to simply give you everything - and you can plainly see which tweets are getting huge distribution and which ones nobody is seeing.

Oh weird, I'd rate X as medium-hard for that amongst the microposting sites I look at. Mastodon and Bluesky both default to almost-that, varying mostly in whether you need to jump through hoops to not see reposts.

X was always the one that (a) doesn't default to it, and (b) would keep "forgetting" and pushing you back to the algorithmic feed.

You are using a relic of what-used-to-be-Twitter. That's what people signed up for. I happen to think what Musk has done - although I'm highly skeptical of him - is not totally insane - Twitter did used to have some pretty notable censorship. But you follow people because that's where the people are. Competition does not spring up overnight, companies know this, and so they're left to gradually (or quickly!) enshittify

"easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order"

Yes, well. That should be the standard. Companies that don't follow that standard should be turned into pariahs

didn't the scrapers scrape everything well before concerns were raised. were the concerns raised after the LLMs were released and then people realized what happened? so, forcing logins just closed the barn door after the horses got out.

I prefer the older term "deep web" [1]. It's mentioned in Wikipedia that the terms are used as synonyms now, but I think it's important to differentiate between sites behind login/authentication/etc, and sites that are still openly accessible, albeit over Tor, i2p, etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web

In theory I can still read the same things I could read before on xcancel by doing an endless cycle of doing one or two searches, then closing out of my web browser and clearing history, and then going back to xcancel and doing another search or two. But certainly that process is very annoying.

Now, I'm not 100% sure if this is related to Musk's cease and desist letter. I've run into this problem or similar technical problems about twice a month before when using XCancel. Usually the technical problem is resolved within 2 or 3 hours and I can use xcancel normally again. So I guess I'll check back in a few hours and see if I can use xcancel normally again.

Edit: Xcancel is working perfectly if you first go to somebody's X profile, and then you turn the x in the url to xcancel. For example, here is Elon Musk's profile on xcancel, where you can still view Elon's tweets, Elon's replies, and the replies that people have made to Elon's tweets.

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/with_replies

XCancel still has a problem right now where I can only make a few searches on the xcancel website itself before it tells me I'm rate limited, and I have to sign out of the browser and sign back in before I can make searches on xcancel again.

However, I occasionally have had this problem on xcancel even before today. And I'd assume that this probably isn't related to the cease and desist letter. If this was due to the cease and desist letter, I'd assume that xcancel would be completely down right now rather than having limited functionality.

I’d tell you to check out the “Twitter Files”, but it seems Wikipedia has been completely compromised. And I’m hesitant to recommend you read about it on Grokipedia (you’ll assume there is major bias), but it does seem to be the most accurate retelling of the scandal that I can find online. Here are both though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files https://grokipedia.com/page/Twitter_Files Censorship-wise… Twitter was worse than Reddit at its peak (before being bought).

Fediverse has plenty of servers which are "free speech" adjacent, which most Mastodon servers close off since its easier for them to police what their users can see than let them do it themselves. The vast majority of them do not run the Mastodon software, and feel far more "wild west" with all the shitposters. But if you want to talk with actual hackers and are into that sort of thing, it's fun times.

They stole the Nitter code too of course without attribution. Does SpaceX really want to go into this?

You’re absolutely right. It’s taken almost daily work from April till now, but I finally have almost everything. Navigation links were particularly tricky. I’d love to see yours too.

Right now it’s running locally on my laptop, but I plan to deploy it to https://news.ycombinator.lol soon. I was gonna make AI generated comments but the API costs are pretty high.

Source is fully available: https://github.com/shawwn/sharc

I started with arc 3.2, which is ancient, and implemented every missing feature one by one until I’ve mostly run out. https://github.com/shawwn/sharc/tree/main/docs/agents/handof... shows a chronological journal of the whole process.

Is yours up somewhere? Would love to compare notes.

EDIT: Here's a side by side screenshot:

HN Simulator: https://i.imgur.com/iZk5ypK.png

HN: https://i.imgur.com/ZocuK0L.png

It's fun to tab back and forth and look at the diffs.

otherwise my browser could not make reproductions and store caches

There's also going to be an opt-out feature: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49439657

Some people have asked for a "No AI" version of HN. That's one possibility.

Another possibility is to just stop cloning comments, so that only the articles are mirrored, and then launch the site. There would be few comments, but that might be a feature. I sometimes miss when HN was small.

A third is to AI-generate the comments. That way it's like https://reddit.com/r/subsimulatorgpt2.

Personally if anyone asked me, I’d happily let them take all comments I’ve ever posted to Reddit or HN and repost all of them on their own site.

In fact, I would like to declare the following right now: All comments I ever have made and ever will make on HN are available to use for anyone and everyone who wants to under the terms of the CC0 license. You can point to this comment if questions about copyright ever come up in relation to wanting to copy my comments from HN and rehost them elsewhere.

It’s just a shame that I am not a particularly famous or interesting person, and my comments are not all that interesting especially if taken out of the threads they are posted in without the surrounding comments from others in those threads.

In order for someone to be able to fully replicate all of the user content from a site such as X or HN or whatever, they would maybe need similar permission from every contributor in every thread if there wasn’t already a permissive license the site itself had gotten its users to agree to let their content be distributed under.

Even if you could somehow get permission from each and every user on a site that you could rehost their comments, it might or might not be doing something wrong to download all of the content from the original site itself unless there’s an ok from the site itself to do so.

Idk, IANAL.

But at ATProto/Bluesky, account portability was a consideration from the start.

Before Elon, Twitter would give him some login reminders roughly every 5-10 minutes if you viewed the site while logged out. It was a little annoying, but it wasn't that bad, and you could get rid of the reminder by just clicking the x button.

Now, under Elon, they force you to login to read any replies to posts. Currently, a person's 5 most recent posts can be viewed without an account, but none of the replies can be.

Reddit is now forcing people to login to view old Reddit. IIRC, old Reddit is posts that are from before 2009 or something like that. It's not that important of a loss in the grand scheme of things, but it might be the first step towards making the entire Reddit website login only.

With a disclaimer that there's one zillion governmental entities on the planet overall, so its plausible that one requires no fee and no signup required.

My tolerance for people posting to X without also posting to an open platform is over.

Public institutions especially.

There's zero excuse, none.

There are open meeting laws like the Brown Act but I think that only restricts relying on social media for deliberation. Not communication

There is also Lindke v. Freed (2024) which holds that public officials using social media can be sued under the First Amendment violations like blocking users or deleting comments.

Fail upwards. That's all they know how to do

I had multiple Reddit accounts, simply because I did not want my more "professional" account linked to the other accounts (some for more controversial opinions, some for more adult talk, etc.) Apparently that's a problem for them. So they banned most of my accounts. If I really was up to no good, I'd have used VPNs, etc. to hide my activities. But I just wanted to segregate my personas. e.g. I like discussing local SF and California politics, and often times take controversial positions. I don't want my activities as a respectable(?) member of the Linux Kernel group to be colored through my activities in these other groups. But now I can't do that.

Oh, and back in the day Reddit (when it wanted to pad its user numbers) didn't care for an email address or a phone number. Now, 15 years later, it suddenly wants to confirm the email address!

And don't even get me started on the moderation at Reddit. Typical example: "Hey! We deleted your comment. If you have any questions about it, email the mods." except ... they deleted the comment and now I don't even know what was wrong with it! :-D

Also, blocking scraping is very rich (and expectedly hypocritical) for an AI company, which SpaceX is now.

It really gives the sense that you’re not wanted there.

And so I gladly oblige.

Only 5 posts, and when you click on any of them, you don't see the post, you see a sign up popup

On mobile right now, I can't scroll past the second post of [1] without getting blocked by an undismissable popup.

If I click on the "read more" button of the first post, I can't scroll down at all before getting that same non-dismissable popup. It makes it hard to read the post itself, because even scrolling a tiny bit (e.g. to get what I'm reading closer to the center of my vision) triggers it.

I've also had other times where I couldn't play a video someone linked to me, but sometimes I can, don't know why.

Edit: also can't read a thread because each new post is considered a "reply", so blocked too.

What?

a) This is not about trying to protect the incomes of people working in Big Tech

b) In his talk Doctorow gives examples of business opportunities that are actually being repressed by the laws against reverse engineering

Those of us wanting to believe USA was more better than not have struggled to recalibate our beliefs.

China was right to block US tech companies to promote their own, most large and capable countries will do the same over time.

Hiding tweets for users without accounts does absolutely nothing for either of those goals.