Xcancel and Nitter have been taken down
93
mmadduci about 3 hours ago 54 comments
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Nitter.net and Xcancel.com have been both taken down by the X Corp "cease and desist" letter

Discussion (54 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
But... instead of tweeting for an hour a day, I spend that hour reading long form dead tree format texts. I'm not saying this is what you should do, just offering it as an observation that it is an option.
it's done wonders for my mental.
I wholeheartedly recommend you do the same - remove your account and forget about it. Almost certainly you won't miss it, as I didn't miss it. And there is a big chance you will get a big sight of relief, as I did.
If you really must, use https://twitterwebviewer.com/ which imo has better interface than Nitter.
But when I was doing it, I got a big warning that anyone could come up and register that handle for themselves. So I instead ended up just deleting every post, my personal details, and left the account alone (not using it anymore).
I know they do this intentionally (it's bad intentions all over the place on social networks nowadays, except HN, of course).
I'm terrified of somebody else just creating the account with the same handle I used to have, and impersonate me across old friends and contacts.
What do you suggest?
I'm not sure this is a great idea, if you have a somewhat unique username or you use that same username elsewhere.
Multiple times, me and others have changed usernames on some platform, and either immediately when you rename, or few seconds afterwards, some squatter will grab your old username, and most platforms don't care about helping you recover anything, so suddenly you've opened up phishing/spam venues associated with your old username.
Personally I'm not sure what the solution is to this, I've resorted to just not deleting accounts where this might happen, but leave the account inactive and unused.
Nitter is good software, I have no idea how Twitter users put up with this garbage fire.
The brainwashing against free, open, uncensored and community-corrected platforms is crazy.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/journalists-who-wrote-ab...
I got several engineering jobs via twitter in the olde days, when it had engineers on it, and I've lost absolutely nothing of value by not having it in its current state.
But hey, I'm also someone who thinks we should've nuked 4chan and all the chan boards from orbit 15 years ago before they turned into nazi pedo meeting grounds.
But in reality I suspect that group isn't actually large enough to have much impact, especially since some will just give in and register on the Everything App.
It's been a long time since I've seen them (thank god), but the worst culprits were subs like facepalm, white people twitter, leopards ate my face, and pretty much any left-leaning or liberal sub.
They did a fantastic job of platforming the ideologies they stand against simply by screenshotting the most vocal advocates and talking heads and sharing them so commenters could get angry. That shit lived rent free in the subscribers' heads to an unhealthy degree and for everybody who hate-engaged, there were plenty more who saw it as an introduction.
One day I'll do for Reddit what I did for the rest of social media but for now it's easy enough to stay off Popular and All and just stick with the smaller subs with a specific subject matter.
I remember blowing everyone’s mind when i wrote a php script to scrape my bands myspace to keep our website up to date with show details. It was like a magic trick.
That sort of power is in the hands of the masses now, they just don’t know it yet.
Although, I don't see how this will hold up in court as they're pretty much an archive-like site hosting UGC.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49449576
It's certainly more diverse than Bluesky, if this is an echo chamber-measuring contest.
>>then proceed to use bluesky
lmao
There are news that are circulating much faster on Twitter than anywhere else (for example about war in Ukraine). There are people and companies that post only on Twitter and nowhere else (especially in tech).
The Twitter experience is a highly algorithmic feed where tweets from the people you follow are not guaranteed to be in chronological order, or even shown to you at all. The default experience also mixes it other tweets "you might be interested in", that is, things they want you to see.
There's also the fact people could freely see tweets and follow discussion threads, that's now locked behind an account requirement.
This site is a good alternative for tech news.
Especially annoying when Twitter is a source for something.
> There are news that are circulating much faster on Twitter than anywhere else (for example about war in Ukraine).
I am certain that Twitter is not the only place where you can find these updates, if you really care for up-to-the-minute news. But I don’t.
> There are people and companies that post only on Twitter and nowhere else (especially in tech).
These people and companies are (knowingly or unknowingly) supporting a Nazi billionaire and they are not worth paying any attention to until they change their behavior.
Option B: a power tripping drug-addled Nazi billionaire owns the entire site and can change the site behavior for every user on a whim, with no recourse.
This doesn’t seem like a hard choice to make.
Reddit can be good if you stay in your niche and off the default subs. Twitter is good if you similarly curate your experience and don’t let it push you into garbage.
I don’t use either much anymore.
Are you anti-drugs? Do you think drug users are bad people or using drugs is condemnable? I'm asking because anti-fascists are typically pro-drugs. So I'm confused.
Also the Asian community (Korea, Japan etc) is incredibly strong on Twitter. They don't really care about the whole politics around the platform.
And they all require accounts that I don't want to have.
If you follow specific profiles/channels/pages and just read the feeds from them as if they were news, you are removing the toxic part (mostly infinite scrolling) and getting a resourceful feature.
If for some reason someone you need to follow is on X (twitter) only, you have to choose between losing a source or compromise with the platform.
I personally belong to the former group (and possibly you do, too), leaving behind sources, but not everyone likes it that way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I thought so too. But after leaving 3 years ago it turns out: Not a single source is that important.
Also, as the importance increases, the likelihood of seeing the same information outside that hellhole increases linearly.
And then I avoid them.
Hacker News and basically everyone from YC have an official profile on Twitter: https://x.com/hackernews