XCancel Taken Down Again

It's because X is chosen (wrongfully) as the main communications channel of all kinds of important public institutions and people (police departments, city administrations, politicians, etc.).

Of course that's a real issue since the whole thing is login gated and inaccessible. But unfortunately it is the reality. So I think something like XCancel is needed.

For me, it's just the easiest fix whenever somebody shares a tweet with me, and it fails to load, or shows me some forced login popup. I just click between x and .com in my URL bar, write "cancel", and it suddenly just works.

Suppose you're on HN and someone posts a link to X. Is the correct reaction

1. Pretend it isn't there. 2. Flag it and pretend it isn't there. 3. Flag it and read the content somewhere else in case it's relevant.

It's a standard coordination problem: I don't like X, but some discussion happens there (e.g. plenty of competent mathematicians responding to the Navier-Stokes situation) and I cannot force people to move elsewhere.

There are places like government agencies, public transit org aisations, and similar organisations, which still use it as adhoc quick notification channel. If I want to see if a train route ist interrupted it's the best source. However using it once in a while (not via app or such) has long loading times and nagging screens for sign in, cookie compliance and so on, which makes the whole thing an annoyance ...

Of course the right thing is to lobby those organizations to switch. But that won't help with the immediate situation.

I don't have an X account, and I only use xcancel when someone sends me a link. The reason it's impossible to completely avoid both of them, at least in my corner of the world is that a lot of public organisms seem to think publishing information online exclusively on Twitter is okay, and if you complain they tend to ignore you (I admit I haven't tried complaining about it on Twitter, which seems to be the only thing that works these days).

Exactly. If you boycott X, shouldn't you also boycott the people who are on X? But this kind of slacktivism has always been more virtue signaling than anything.

I want to read stuff from twitter not because I like the twitter culture but because sometimes something happens and the only place you can learn about it is twitter. Like it or not Twitter is still the most relevant platform for tech related information.

I never liked Twitter and I don't like X as a medium but they were and still are used by others as a communication channel. To partake of what is communicated without having to sign up and/or subject myself to the barrage of nonsense spewed through X I use a self-hosted Nitter instance. This way I get to follow those X links without needing a (real, active) account. For passive X users Nitter offers a far better - lighter, faster - experience than X itself. This makes Nitter (which is what Xcancel - a misnomer since it doesn't cancel X - is based on) especially useful for those who only use X because others used it to distribute information.

Why should we let one far right billionaire control how we interact with a large portion of the online space? Why shouldn't we try to exfiltrate the data from him instead of just letting him hoard it?

And regarding copyright, the same company owns an LLM that was no doubt trained through mass copyright infringement. Maybe the legal double standard is on their end?

The reason is simple: they were using Twitter when it was publicly readable and had RSS, and they have no selfish reason to stop. (Selfless reasons don't count, everybody is selfish)

> I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X at this point

Open RSS wrote about exactly this a couple weeks ago [1]. Bluesky being publicly readable with RSS is an improvement. But government offices should be publishing on their own RSS feeds, and the platforms should be secondary, not the other way around. The amount of policy that gets announced on social media without even a mention on their own website is bizarre. Why isn't posting their content off platform legally required at this point?

[1] https://openrss.org/blog/government-updates-belong-in-an-ope...

You go where your people are. I think it’s very reasonable to post updates on Facebook and X.

I extend this to people. I understand old habits and what not, but I'm surprised at the culture on social media. Twitter is literally orthodox white supremacy or however they brand it. Quite odd, but not considering current politics. We've decided to devolve.

> I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X

It makes me so mad. The Paris public transportation company (RATP) owns not one but two whole apps. Yet, whenever there's an incident they immediately reach for X (on which I can't access their posts), while their apps lag behind with several minutes.

As far as I'm concerned, my government should issue a blanket ban on public actors using social medias for communication.

Yeah, or local governments, or governments in general, seems strange to me too. But then probably they'd use Facebook/Instagram/Whatever instead of Twitter if Twitter wasn't available, and seemingly it's impossible for them to use something that isn't built like a panopticon that also wants to slurp up as much data from their users as possible.

Why?

Why is it “so wrong” to meet your audience where they are?

I've been wondering why ~everyone hasn't already been doing this, so my guess is that Twitter's API doesn't allow it.

The service works just fine and it is a decent way to get the latest news.

For example, rumors about latest AI developments are available there, but not here on HN.

X also works well for media, which on HN you can only see after navigating to an external website.

Many comment sections are rough, but usually not worth visiting apart from the top comments anyway.

I don't like that Ads are hard to distinguish from regular posts.

I believe the main reason for not using X is a political boycott. Many disagree politically, or don't entertain certain delusions about Musk that are popular with progressives.

Torrents can be used to spread information that is in the public domain or licensed freely, just as much as they can be used to spread copyrighted information. Obviously most of what people actually use torrents for is pirating copyrighted media against the wishes of the copyright-holders, but that's not inherent to the protocol.

Nitter instances by contrast are specific software intended to view information on a specific proprietary social media website in ways the owners of that website don't want them to. It's a question for lawyers if X declaring this to be a type of copyright violation will hold up in court, but X is also actively trying to block Nitter instances from accessing the site at all, which is a technological rather than legal mechanism.