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#twitter#nitter#platform#legal#don#social#platforms#https#where#data
Discussion (175 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Interesting that they were inspired by Invidious (alternative YouTube frontend). That’s another project that could use some love. Hopefully AI coding tools can do some good and make it easier for these projects to find ways into the walled gardens and work around the counter measures.
Waiting for the day all the social networks allow api access and become usable again. Maybe we can call it “agent first” to help move things along.
"Agent First" API access for social networks. What could possibly go wrong.
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.
the currency intervention took place on July 31, during active market hours. It was immediately detected by global trading desks and reported by major news wires like Reuters and Bloomberg as it happened.
When CENTCOM issued the statement regarding the strikes on IRGC targets, the text went live on the official U.S. Central Command Media Portal at the exact same second the automated post hit their X account.
Before anything was posted online, Lightcap sent an official farewell note to the OpenAI team. Once an email is sent to hundreds of tech employees, it was immediately leaked to tech journalists.
It seems, for all three examples, the platform was used merely as a broadcasting service for information that was either already occurring in the public eye or was simultaneously distributed through formal channels.
Surely a public post on a CHP website would have gotten the job done better.
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...
Whatever politics or technologies that make alternative platforms "better" to some people doesn't matter to most. The idea that new platforms should even have the "millions" (read: the masses) in mind comes across as being antithetical to the trend toward decentralized tech.
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
Move people over slowly as you add new features the old platform doesn't porvide.
But of course, even among HNers, there's amazing cognitive dissonance among "decentralization is hard and takes effort" and "omg, of course the next centralized platform won't be bought by an insecure dictator-wannabe".
I'm not that old, it's played out over and over. I shouldn't even comment here. Decentralization or bust.
People have also been conditioned to mostly trust whatever is on Wikipedia despite years of efforts to hammer it into people that this is not an okay assumption.
It would be better for there to be a bunch of Wikis that are competing with each other evenly. Having only Wikipedia is not a healthy thing.
And in the context of twitter-style platforms, federation to me has always seemed like a "which wind would you like to piss into?" situation where you have no idea what servers/people can even see what you're posting, especially when many (even large) servers not only share centralized error-prone block/ban lists but also keep defederating from each other.
Less radically, we can demand that any entity that takes any public money (and of course public entities themselves) avoid communicating solely through closed platforms.
It's insane that the primary public communication channel for e.g. certain UK government institutions and the Norwegian police, was Twitter at one point!
The billionaires make using their products quite simple. It was easy to sign up for twitter back when it was still usable. Even before Elon took over, it basically died.
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.
His response was - they've got a team of lawyers on payroll whose job it is to make you run out of money...
Someone's name needs to be at the bottom of the paperwork, and those court filing costs would also add up.
The entire business model of the AI industry, who resell and launder the scraped data, would collapse.
Nitter just makes it visible to a human and has anti-scraper measures necessitated by the thieves like xAI.
Additionally, a GoFundMe would reach astronomical proportions given how unpopular Musk is.
Then they stopped it, because "eNgaGeMEnT" or w/e
The code looks surprisingly easy to hack on: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/src/nitter.nim
"The long-term plan is to rewrite the source code in Go, as I'm no longer interested in using Nim. This isn't a small task, but building more features with the current state of things is painful. Before doing that I'll fix some feature parity issues, and work on some conveniences for instance operators. Stay tuned."
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/discussions/1212
No this is the hard problem. HN people live in a bubble. Anything else than signup with oauth and then having access to everyone and its too hard and 99% of people will click away.
https://annas-archive.gd for reference.
Regardless of advice quality, legal proceedings aren't free-to-play, and the adversary in question here has bottomless pockets.
The word "project" doesn't make a clear distinction between the repo and the instances. Nitter is on good ground with respect to the repo. The instances will be much harder to defend. From that one sentence it isn't clear if this is what the legal advice says or not.
Nitter changed their design such that it now requires an X account to scrape through. This was to stay functional after X removed guest accounts. This exposes them to a legal attack through the terms of service that must be accepted for the account, and to technical attack by blocking the scraping accounts.
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.
Those people should seek their own legal advice.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49567595
Put a tip jar out, let’s get archiving. “You can just do things.”
Same reason at least one person in your company has a windows machine with a copy of excel, even though its a locked in platform which is paid and opaque: its what everyone else uses.
More broadly, it’s a platform where prominent people say noteworthy things. I don’t think it’s surprising people want to read it.
One small service provider I use updates its X/Facebook status much faster than its official status page during outages. There can be a gap of a few hours.
A guy like Dang will never make anything people want because he gets off too much on shutting people down.
Any kind of moderator culture type scenario will always be an echo chamber and cesspool.
That’s why X wins.
Look at this very comment section:
If you join X you are a literal Nazi
Nobody likes that
Literally the only cost is setting up an IFTTT workflow or a script, or having an AI agent do it for you, etc.
People will complain, in the same sentence, that bsky/mastodon will dilute their follower count and interactions, and "nobody uses it."
It's actually sad to see how deeply do we depend on monopolies.
Other solutions might not have the exact same functionality, but in this context of mere availability... it really doesn't matter.
It's getting to the point where his private security are harassing people for walking down the street in their own neighborhood that runs alongside one of his "compounds."
Now we need an alternative that works well and is de-centralized from the get go.
It's called Nostr. I post on it every day.
- refuses to speak to the press and lies about having a PR department, but still expects the press to cover everything his companies do
- is ignoring environmental regulations wholesale and literally poisoning tens to hundreds of thousands of people with very high NOx emissions, for which there is a great deal of high quality evidence showing causes significant health issues
- knew his giant rocket test would send debris miles, which caused extensive damage to wildlife near the launchpad and substantial private property damage...but he wanted to launch on 4/20
- runs a car company which was caught speeding up the odometers on cars nearing their end of warranty, purposefully either erases logs from its cars involved in crashes or lies to investigators and in court about whether logs exist/are retrievable, and has blamed its customers for car windows randomly shattering, drive units being destroyed by water ingress due to faulty seals (literally telling people they drove in too heavy a rainstorm)...not to mention currently have a significant problem with their suspensions failing, something that is wildly dangerous and just generally does not happen...not to mention being top per vehicle in deaths, fires, crashes...
- felt entitled to get his hands on nearly every kind of personal data the government has
- produces AI tools that have been repeatedly found to have some of the worst safety limitations on deepfake porn, and also sexual imagery involving minors
- set records for the largest number of complaints at numerous federal regulators and at one point his companies combined were under investigation by ~30 different federal regulatory agencies
- literally paid people to vote for his preferred candidate, because....see prior point
...throws such a major wobbly over nearly anyone doing anything he doesn't like "to" him.
It's entirely unacceptable, is suicidal corporatism to riff off the bad man, to have humanity's "public" messaging system be off limits to researchers, academics, observers. To trust a network at their word that they and they alone have a right to defend and protect us from propaganda, from malicious & shadow influence. This is not an ok basis that our information driven civilization can rest on.
I look forward to getting out of this trap. https://bsky.app/profile/jauntywunderkind.bsky.social/post/3...
Lawsuits and cease and desists should never exist for software. I've just seen 10 more instances go live, you can't just go and sue everyone in the world.
It makes no sense to do this to an OSS community project just trying to provide information for free.
I hope as a society we stop censoring projects by using shallow and evil tactics like this.