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)
newsomix9xl•Aug 26, 2026
I ignored Twitter before Musk bought it and oddly I still have no problem ignoring it.
It doesn't even have good cat pictures.
RIMR•Aug 26, 2026
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•Aug 26, 2026
Totes. I searched for cat pics and within a few results I was being given racially charged fights.
baggachipz•Aug 26, 2026
I built dailycat.app and it has good cat pictures!
abraham•Aug 26, 2026
Yay for daily cat apps! I run daily.cat
drop_star•Aug 26, 2026
you guys are doing the important work. Keep it up!
benjaminclauss•Aug 26, 2026
It's disappointing that this is even necessary given earlier promises of opening up the Twitter algorithm.
The algorithm is free, it's the data that matters.
SoKamil•Aug 26, 2026
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.
Repo is fake, only a README and a LICENSE. I guess we'll take what we can get now.
gruez•Aug 26, 2026
>handled by Cloudflare and claims to be in California
Where? are you just pulling cloudflare's ip info?
skeledrew•Aug 26, 2026
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•Aug 26, 2026
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.
IPFS might be in trouble. Haven't really followed the tech so I have no idea how much of an effect there will be with Shipyard dropping it, but from the number of things I see named in their exit post I'd guess the blast radius is sizable.
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
Jtarii•Aug 26, 2026
The search is somehow faster than twitter's own search.
bigbadfeline•Aug 26, 2026
whackamole is the only way for now, unfortunately.
DivingForGold•Aug 26, 2026
It does not work for me like xcancel did
kemotep•Aug 26, 2026
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.
anotherpaul•Aug 26, 2026
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.
a_imho•Aug 26, 2026
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?
GPerson•Aug 26, 2026
My phone can’t even open most of the apps since it’s so old. Reddit does not load (this actually helped me a lot).
CTDOCodebases•Aug 26, 2026
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.
fuzzfactor•Aug 26, 2026
>suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted
To some decision-makers their idea of "disruption" is limited to enshittification more than anything else.
Exoristos•Aug 26, 2026
Disruption was never an unblemished positive for society.
uygiugiu•Aug 26, 2026
Musk’s takeover of Twitter was a net win for free speech
inigyou•Aug 27, 2026
Thanks, new account that only posts to support Musk
arjie•Aug 26, 2026
The governments go where the people are. If they post on their own sites it’s the equivalent of “on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’”.
But government information should definitely be first source on their site with federation elsewhere.
andrepd•Aug 26, 2026
The problem is not governments or people posting there. The problem is platforms/utilities not being treated as such.
phforms•Aug 26, 2026
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•Aug 26, 2026
ATProto attempted to do this with their PDS based structure but it isn’t fully decentralized yet. The vision is similar to what you describe though.
pfraze•Aug 26, 2026
Thats entirely how atproto works now!
inigyou•Aug 27, 2026
Except for the part where bluesky maintains a central registry and also the part where the protocol is really complicated with its authenticity stuff.
tharmas•Aug 26, 2026
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.
rplnt•Aug 26, 2026
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•Aug 26, 2026
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•Aug 26, 2026
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
alyeska2•Aug 26, 2026
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.
filoleg•Aug 26, 2026
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.
alyeska2•Aug 26, 2026
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.
inigyou•Aug 27, 2026
Right now X requires either a phone number, or email + phone hardware ID.
omoikane•Aug 26, 2026
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:
But I didn't try to create an account recently, maybe they went back to requiring phone numbers.
deltoidmaximus•Aug 26, 2026
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!
cassepipe•Aug 26, 2026
But I don't think that's the case for Bluesky
hparadiz•Aug 26, 2026
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.
inigyou•Aug 27, 2026
AI would classify anything disagreeing with the government as spam. For example right now it would classify anything opposing Israel as spam.
aucisson_masque•Aug 26, 2026
> 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•Aug 26, 2026
in the US? no.
deltoidmaximus•Aug 26, 2026
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•Aug 26, 2026
I don't remember giving my phone to bluesky
alexfortin•Aug 27, 2026
I didn't
inigyou•Aug 27, 2026
You might try attacking the problem from the other direction. If your country allows buying a SIM card without KYC, then do that.
nomilk•Aug 26, 2026
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.
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.
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•Aug 26, 2026
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•Aug 26, 2026
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.
nomilk•Aug 26, 2026
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.
numpad0•Aug 27, 2026
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.
inigyou•Aug 27, 2026
He didn't buy twitter for data, he bought it to shut down criticism of himself and it worked
angoragoats•Aug 26, 2026
> Musk is aggressively optimistic on what can be achieved and by when
That’s 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 don’t count that work as “product decisions,” 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•Aug 26, 2026
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•Aug 26, 2026
> 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.
giancarlostoro•Aug 26, 2026
> 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•Aug 26, 2026
Notably this was called a “temporary emergency measure” by Elon Musk — yet another promise he couldn’t keep
“Temporary emergency” should always be considered skeptically - especially when it comes to government. They almost always stay permanent.
ibejoeb•Aug 26, 2026
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•Aug 26, 2026
Because it worked without an account before Elon came to Twitter and changed it?
Pedro_Ribeiro•Aug 26, 2026
Would've happened either way. Data is more valuable and also trivial to scrape now.
tmp10423288442•Aug 26, 2026
Should governments not have posted announcements in newspapers back when they were widely read, even though they require paying to read them?
jm4•Aug 26, 2026
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.
mxschll•Aug 26, 2026
In the EU, EU-Alert exists. They can push alarms to any phone with that system.
jasonfarnon•Aug 26, 2026
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.
inigyou•Aug 27, 2026
Amber alerts accomplish nothing, with or without twitter links
cassepipe•Aug 26, 2026
> Even Bluesky has this problem!
Bluesky is totally accessible for me without an account. What do you see ?
kemotep•Aug 27, 2026
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 isn’t as egregious as other sites but it’s still restrictive.
ghusto•Aug 26, 2026
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.
wldcordeiro•Aug 26, 2026
Reminds me of what Brasil did with Pix which of course the outside payment processors have been trying to undo.
toomuchtodo•Aug 26, 2026
Do you think if government accounts were on Signal, people would install it?
Fnoord•Aug 27, 2026
Signal is an improvement, but not federated.
baxtr•Aug 26, 2026
I think my main communication is probably the last tool that I want to be government backed tbh.
valleyer•Aug 26, 2026
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•Aug 26, 2026
Communications/announcements from the government can easily be posted on the government's website or, if really needed, sent as an SMS
iamnothere•Aug 27, 2026
My local government still lets you sign up for email notifications about services and local alerts. It’s great!
vasco•Aug 27, 2026
Too expensive, bad idea.
inigyou•Aug 27, 2026
What do you mean? They'll just pass a law saying carriers have to deliver them for free
r_lee•Aug 26, 2026
are those your "main communication" tools?
veeti•Aug 27, 2026
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.
inigyou•Aug 27, 2026
There is a carrier neutral WhatsApp, called SMS.
maxlin•Aug 26, 2026
Blame boundless AI scraping. X would like very much to be more open.
inigyou•Aug 27, 2026
You don't think he has the resources to sue the scrapers?
Create an account then? Not sure why that's an issue.
Am4TIfIsER0ppos•Aug 26, 2026
You can't make new accounts on twitter. You can only use existing apple or google accounts.
baggy_trough•Aug 26, 2026
I think you can, if you install their app.
charcircuit•Aug 26, 2026
>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.
inigyou•Aug 27, 2026
It doesn't. Have you actually tried? Recently?
Melatonic•Aug 26, 2026
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)
inigyou•Aug 27, 2026
So HTTP and IP
wackget•Aug 27, 2026
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.
inigyou•Aug 27, 2026
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.
eudamoniac•Aug 27, 2026
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."
inigyou•Aug 27, 2026
Twitter requires your phone number to sign up
tlvbaf•Aug 26, 2026
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":
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.
What is the uid parameter for? It looks to me it's ignored.
f0e4c2f7•Aug 26, 2026
Having the same issue. I think they might have turned it off. Was looking forward to using this.
1vuio0pswjnm7•Aug 26, 2026
uid optional
daedrdev•Aug 26, 2026
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.
iAMkenough•Aug 26, 2026
I don’t think it’s an issue. Their site, their rules.
johannes1234321•Aug 26, 2026
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.
MiscCompFacts•Aug 26, 2026
Is there a link to this argument?
xacky•Aug 26, 2026
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.
celsoazevedo•Aug 26, 2026
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•Aug 26, 2026
I wish I understood why the majority of the AI discussions happen on Twitter/X.
jesse_dot_id•Aug 26, 2026
A lot of crypto bro grifter crossover in AI.
nlitened•Aug 26, 2026
Network effect. Most people worth discussing with are already there, so more people join the discussion there, and so on.
moomoo11•Aug 26, 2026
why not?
anigbrowl•Aug 26, 2026
Don't be obtuse. the reasons why not were spelled out in the GP.
moomoo11•Aug 26, 2026
vague and useless reply
why are AI researchers and everyone else on X
preg_match•Aug 27, 2026
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.
redox99•Aug 26, 2026
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.
anigbrowl•Aug 26, 2026
Read Social and Economic Networks by Michael O Jackson.
itomato•Aug 27, 2026
Tells me how valuable they actually are.
LightBug1•Aug 26, 2026
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
andrewmutz•Aug 26, 2026
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?
swyx•Aug 27, 2026
sad that i come here for technical information and yours is the first lonely comment asking about how this works
inigyou•Aug 27, 2026
No, and nitter the software still works too. Apparently the only barrier he could create was a cease and desist letter.
ThouYS•Aug 26, 2026
Thanks Peter! Now do the same for the 'gram!
jp_sc•Aug 26, 2026
I don't think the worldwide trendings are right. The ones I see (with personalization disabled) are not all in arabic (?)
dhiraj113•Aug 26, 2026
Nice, how do you make this freely available?
oriettaxx•Aug 26, 2026
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•Aug 26, 2026
Now designated a terror organization by the current US administration.
oriettaxx•Aug 26, 2026
yes, I've answered in the wrong post, sorry
twilo•Aug 26, 2026
What is Twitter?
nancyminusone•Aug 26, 2026
the enduring result of the stupidest brand name change ever
vlod•Aug 26, 2026
How does this work, does it use the twitter api?
bsimpson•Aug 26, 2026
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.
Marsymars•Aug 26, 2026
Depends if you want an alternate front-end and you can self-host, or you're looking for a third party.
I've never had an Instagram account, and I'm trying to keep it that way.
grishka•Aug 27, 2026
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.
xg15•Aug 26, 2026
Cease and desist in 3... 2... 1...
randyrand•Aug 26, 2026
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.
tyre•Aug 26, 2026
there is no chance that people would assume this is about a startup that's about to get nuked by copyright cease and desists
urbandw311er•Aug 26, 2026
I don’t think there will be any confusion. Clearly this is not referring to this random new Twitter thing you’ve 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.
randyrand•Aug 26, 2026
Well, I was confused. New Twitter got big coverage today [1] and then more Twitter related news on HN today too.
Who in their right mind would take that site seriously?
nozzlegear•Aug 27, 2026
Are you talking about Twitter or X?
jacobgorm•Aug 26, 2026
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.
thallavajhula•Aug 26, 2026
not going to be long before they cut access to this app.
amazingamazing•Aug 26, 2026
Why are people so obsessed about twitter
chr15m•Aug 26, 2026
The general rule: any social media owned by a corporation will eventually lock posts behind a login.
grishka•Aug 27, 2026
And stuff their UX full of dark patterns, and get very angry whenever someone tries building a third-party client without the bullshit.
itomato•Aug 27, 2026
Any social media product will be acquired and co-opted.
trompetenaccoun•Aug 27, 2026
The X account of the person running this has been suspended.
35 Comments
How dare someone disagree with our MSM opinions!
Are you mad other users have their own opinions?
Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283
according to https://www.whois.com/whois/twitterwebviewer.com
Looks fine, they don't care about the notices i guess
Is the legal basis just copyright of the contents?
It doesn't even have good cat pictures.
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.
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.
Where? are you just pulling cloudflare's ip info?
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421489
- https://ipshipyard.com/blog/2026-the-end-of-ipfs-at-shipyard...
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.
To some decision-makers their idea of "disruption" is limited to enshittification more than anything else.
But government information should definitely be first source on their site with federation elsewhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Ironically AI could fix this when trivial spam detection inference becomes cheap enough to throw away on every upload.
Holy moly, don't you have any law at all to protect people's privacy ?
> 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
[0] https://elonmusk.today
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s 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 don’t count that work as “product decisions,” 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).
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.
Yes, as I said, bad product decisions.
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.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-now-needs-users-s...
Bluesky is totally accessible for me without an account. What do you see ?
It isn’t as egregious as other sites but it’s still restrictive.
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.
I too am constantly frustrated that official communications from governments happen on Twitter or Facebook.
It's for the best.
You say like this like it doesn't literally take like 10 seconds to make an account to see it.
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.
But you won't. And they know you won't. Not even small claims.
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.
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
https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/tweets/[username]?uid=[...
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.
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.
why are AI researchers and everyone else on X
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.
PSA: I'm not interested in your shitter-specific content. Hit me up elsewhere. Thanks
Very proud of their work, and kudos for affecting how the world is handling information and their will to do good
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.
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
If not, then this is just going to lead to confusion.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/new-twitter-laun...
https://x.com/PeterAndersonE