Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

I am not on Twitter/X.

It’s still the go-to platform for public figures to broadcast unfortunately, so if you want to verify the original comments you need an alternate frontend or an X account.

There’s a system that is not replicable unless you have majority of the population on the same social media.

Surely a public post on a CHP website would have gotten the job done better.

Can you share how you prevent spammers from simply using this to do what they usually do, or, if not, how you will stop Cloudflare et al. from marking your browsers as bots and hammering them with captchas? Easy access to the plain web for bots is a pretty tough cat and mouse game and I have been playing it with very short term success at best myself.

The internet we had in the 90's and early 00's was amazing. Everything felt free, indie, hackable, composable, ingestible. You didn't worry about platforms because most platforms exposed their data via friendly APIs (remember when Reddit and Twitter had an API and that they encouraged people to actually use them?)

RSS everywhere, websites with honest to god Bittorrent links. Software you could download and own without a subscription. Forums, Geocities, personal websites, IRC (no Discord ads, server caps, rules against scripting), RPG Maker 2000.

Google and Facebook and Twitter fucked us. The 2010's - 2020's were cellphone incrementalism and walled garden overgrowth.

Hell, even Flash was awesome pre-Adobe. It was buggy, full of zero day vulns, and was inefficient for mobile, but children as young as 8 could build games and animations -- and they were! We got left with a pile of "standards" CSS, Javascript transpilers, competing standards, nodegrunts, and library churn and it was never the same.

Thankfully, I'm starting to feel that AI models are going to let us tear down the walls. We can easily spin up indie experiments again in our spare hours after work and do a lot of neat stuff. It feels like the late 90's / early 00's again.

I think the biggest mistake Google made was developing AI, which seem to be the seeds of big tech's undoing. We can totally overrun them now.

AI = actually a threat to big tech, not a moat. They're going to kill themselves with their own product.

We'll probably build distributed protocols that can finally get the product and UX love that compel people to start using them.

And it feels so awesome to just build things I love - games on the weekend, custom audio players, file organizers, SRS software. I'm loving software again for the first time in a long time. Robotics...

This is some sort of absolute, fundamental difference between the early web and now, at least how I experienced it as a teen in the late 90s in Hungary. Back then I made a site, because you wanted to make something of my own, in my style, as I wanted. There was nobody else online from my friends, and I made new friends online. I actually found my age people on ICQ, within the same subculture.

This "oh my friends are there" approach is what destroys everything. More precisely the people who can't decide for themselves.

most people in bluesky moved to bluesky driven by hate and fear instead of love and curiosity

i notice they talk bad a lot about other people's posts in other platforms

Perhaps part of the reason we don't do that any more is that signup is so high friction? It used to be just username, password, confirm password, captcha, submit. But now it's username, password, confirm password, email, phone number, captcha, submit, go to phone, open email app, wait for slow loading, refresh, wait for slow refresh, click email, see long link, click link, "this must be opened on the device you signed up with", back, retype 100 random characters on the computer with perfect accuracy, "email verified", next step, go to phone, open SMS app, wait for slow loading, no new SMS, back to computer, "send code again (wait 60 seconds)", wait 60 seconds, click it, go to phone, finally get a 6-digit code, back to computer, type it in, submit.

Signing up for things is a massive chore now. Because they want so much personal identification data, that they don't actually need for the function because they never send an email or an SMS.

And if you're signing up on the same device you're checking your email and SMS on, it's straight up impossible because every time you switch to the email app, it unloads the browser app and forgets its state so the verification is invalid. You have to keep trying 6-7 times and hope maybe one time you'll do it quick enough that the browser will stay resident in memory.

I actually have at least two phone apps that are social-adjacent that do signup secretly in the background. You just install the app, and it generates a random identifier and uses that as your account ID. Nothing is visible to the user. In the settings is an import/export option for device migration. If you want signups, this is how to get them.

We need open APIs, transparent algorithms, and above all, accountability.

If you're engaging in discussions you need the network. If you're reading municipal weather warnings you don't really, it's just a data source that can be copied anywhere.

When choosing a social network, probably the top priority for most people is where the people they want to talk to are.

If CEO antics were the thing that mattered, I would certainly choose Bluesky over X. But the reality is the tech community -- at least, the part of it I want to interact with -- is mostly on X. Many of us tried to switch to Bluesky for a bit but ironically got pushed back to X due to Bluesky culture being hostile to tech and especially hostile to AI. I'd post the same non-political tech thing on X and Bluesky and get lots of interesting feedback on X while getting screamed at on Bluesky, so I stopped posting on Bluesky.

Would love for this to change but it's a hard problem.

Figuring out how to make people actually care, and also figuring out how to make migration easier would both be a big deal.

Maybe forcing the platforms to make it possible to make followers/following portable would be worth it though.

He made the "my heart goes out to you" motion (thump your hand over your heart, then fling it out towards the audience), people took a static image of the last part of it, and left out the context to create outrage bait for clicks.

He has shown time and again that the underlying philosophy is “free speech for me, but not for thee”…

…or more specifically “don’t tell me (and people who agree with me) what we can or can’t say”, while actively censoring opposition.

He does this without believing he is abandoning a “free speech absolutist” stance.

Blind hypocrisy? Unrestrained privilege? Both? Something else? Not sure.

Censorship is not refusing to listen to people we find abusive. People are not entitled to force me to listen.

A federated platform is far more resistant to censorship than X is.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/14/on-elons-whim-x-now-treats...

The platform that randomly banned journalists for using Substack?

https://newrepublic.com/post/179067/twitter-files-matt-taibb...

The same platform that banned left-wing journalists because they were criticizing Musk?

https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-journalists-f...

I don't know, it sounds like there's some very good reasons to move away from a centralized platform where the owner can randomly decide he doesn't like you and ban you.

Someone's name needs to be at the bottom of the paperwork, and those court filing costs would also add up.

Regardless of advice quality, legal proceedings aren't free-to-play, and the adversary in question here has bottomless pockets.

Nitter uses Jester which seems dead for sure, but doing static binaries is easy. Personally I just forked Mummy to continue as MummyNG since I prefer threaded servers so things like JSON parsing doesn’t cause latency issues.

Though that being written over a year ago it’s either not a high priority or harder than it seems. I’ll be curious to see which. LLMs make it easier than ever for others to contribute or to fix up deps.

https://theintercept.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-leaks-twitter/

Nitter might want to make sure that their scrapes are bit-identical to other accounts to defeat this.

Not to mention, many "maths challenges" out there are nothing more than a 'wait loop' in the end. Namely, you could replace them with a HTTP hard refresh timer with human scale wait times in order to get the same pertinent result. Those are actually even worse because they are pleasing the whatwg cartel since those are made to work only in their web engines.

The least they could do is to standardize those 'maths challenges' and make them HTTP header friendly.

Turns out only one of the major platforms banned this account…

That's a feature I'm thankful for.

> they are control freaks over speech - they don’t let people share their opinions and they are too ban happy.

I constantly shit on capital interests here, and am thrilled they tolerate it considering what YC does as a company. This place has extremely fair moderation compared to basically all other platforms, including X (don't forget about rampant dark patterns).

> A guy like Dang will never make anything people want because he gets off too much on shutting people down.

I don't know him, but that seems absurd based on all posts I've seen by him. Also, if you want something so bad, build it yourself or stfu.