> We have received cease and desist letters. Awaiting legal advice at the moment, but for now expect all nitter instances to remain down for the foreseeable future.
[for all those who - like me - first check the comments before clicking on the link]
What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be? Clearly the exodus that happened when Musk took it over didn't kill it but I do seem to see fewer links to it than I used to.
Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
This is only tenuously related but every single Mac app I see advertised on X by verified accounts is malware. I reported one last week to them, they said it's not malware. I appealed it and said the install link is copy and paste obfuscated base64 into your terminal, and they said after review it doesn't break their terms.
So whatever else they do, they take money to knowingly promote malware.
I use it to follow people who either have ideas I find interesting or do stuff I find interesting, and typically I'm looking for accounts that are small enough that I know they will at least see my replies, and often interact with them. (Something like 3K-15K followers for most of them, I think.)
I also think it's indispensable for real-time commentary and niche commentary on current events: always requires grains of salt but there's just no better place on the Internet for that sort of thing, in part because...
It's the one major social network I'm on where it is easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order. A feed I TRULY control (and, if you follow the right people, insulates you from much of the nonsense on the site).
(And every once in awhile, some insane viral nonsense pokes in that makes you say "how could I ever quit this site". There's a certain genre of satirical accounts that is very entertaining as well. Definitely a guilty pleasure component to it all!)
>Is it still as popular as it used to be?
A quick search roughly aligns with my perception: it bottomed out a couple of years ago and has gradually recovered, though not to where it was pre-X.
Thats sorta my situation, a scene I'm rather involved in has most the international users there, as such thats where things still live. Every other alternative has failed to gain enough traction for one reason or another.
Its usually either limited features, regional accessibility issues, or platforms like metas' just basically trading one big bad organization for another.
In a UK context, journalists are on there because politicians are on there... and politicians are on there because journalists are on there. It's politicians that need to pull the plug - if they left en masse the journalists would go where they went, even if they stayed on X too - but nobody has the balls to do it. (Aside from one politician who for all practical purposes seems to do absolutely nothing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyrx1ee2r4o).
I haven't left because there are still circles of people I follow that haven't bailed. Once a large enough majority move to Bluesky, I'll start browsing that app more.
On the other hand, I might start posting on Bluesky more because as of a week ago, I'm shadowbanned on X. I know people throw that term around, but nobody on the site can see any of my reply tweets, even me (unless I scroll my account's 'replies' tab); people who've followed me for years are asking why their tweet has a ghost reply.
I don't think X has that much of an incentive to filter out bots while keeping around accounts like me (200 followers, will never pay for Premium). The slightly higher effort bots that glaze tech CEOs will be basically indistinguishable from the real people glazing tech CEOs because they're wannabe founders trying to network/cloutfarm. And that style of dead internet is fine with Elon.
My initial suspicion was that my account was flagged because I only used the web version (the PWA experience on mobile is pretty good) so I've been using the Android app the last few days, and I'll see if that has any signal on my account.
In another view days I'll try filing a support ticket, maybe claiming something like "I was mass-reported by DSA leftists for my right-wing views"; things along those lines have gotten some peoples' permanent suspensions lifted.
I've made a lot of friends in Japan through shared interest communities that are mostly on twitter. Most are people I've actually met whenever I am in Japan.
Personally I have zero interest. If it's a big enough deal, it'll get to me somehow. Knowing about it 15s after it happened and then seeing a flood of uninformed speculation would be stressful.
Others do value that, no judgment, but for me it's be a net negative.
Guess one has to, because there are just too many people on there. I don't like it but what can I do. What I hate the most is that states/countries, prime ministers and kings post on there. And that the emergency services of some countries have that as primary channel. I understand cross posting to the most popular social channels, but primary? That SHOULD be a local channel, not some dystopian shit hole you could be banned from randomly.
There are lots of interesting people/orgs on X from AI/ML circles, as well as Ukraine war OSINT accounts and UA army helpers. I stay on X pretty much for these two topics.
There's people from all walks of life and all corners of the internet on there still, good and bad. Twitter was always a darned mess, the only difference now is you can't just report people and bully them off the site.
Contrast to me trying to open BlueSky, and seeing death threats and other insane things. I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem. Those two factors alone kept me from even trying it out.
What's really weird is there were a ton of claims that disappeared, about how X was full of bots, but X is the opposite of full of bots. Maybe there's one or another, but they're highly under the radar, X has improved their bot problem drastically.
Edit (tweaked some words, and wanted to add):
Then there was Threads, I am not in any way interested in "New Twitter" by Mark Zuckerberg, no thanks.
I really can't deal with BlueSky. I wanted to because I had a lot of good "starter packs" for NeoVim and OCaml development. Nerd stuff is the reason I visit these sites. The problem is, I start following people and it almost always turns into politics. I may even AGREE with the person's politics but I hate reading and talking about it. God forbid I ever disagree.
Funny thing though. I've heard the claims of "CSAM on Twitter" and now "CSAM on BlueSky". I've never had any of that ransomly show up. I do still have 2 or so random follows from clip-art female avatars with no tweets - per week. I've never quite figured out how that scam is supposed to work. I used to block 'em, now I ignore 'em.
Fedi is a lot better if you want nerd stuff specifically, running instances attracts a lot of hackers who're geared toward it. The big instances are pretty much the same shlock you get on Twitter/Bluesky but there's a lot of cool people in the margins (tip: look for instances that aren't running Mastodon).
Never had issues with bluesky, but i'm a lurker and I have a llm filtering (here on HN, X, bluesky, reddit etc) which removes political stuff and boosts stuff I likely will like.
iirc there were newer instances too, but why bother reading on that, when you can just look at how the system is built.
Twitter and Twitter-ish systems are just fundamentally anti-human.
The same can be said about most of social media, actually, but Twitter is high up on the worst offender list, and Bluesky just cloned it. Again.
If you look at the replies to basically any big post, you'll see all the blue checkmark bots in there. Usually just copying posts, sometimes doing a weird ai summary of the original post in a way that isn't actually replying to it.
I've got no idea if they're somehow making money off it or what's up
Followed by the porn bots, the racist bots, the "American" bot, etc. I'm really surprised how someone can use X and say that it is not full of bots. It's the same on Reddit.
> I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem.
There really isn't, unless you mean anime content(of both SFW and NSFW alike) by "CSAM". In case you mean by that, then there is, otherwise no. It also appears to be highly locale dependent - some say they see timeline filled to the brim with fetish furry images and male gay nudity dressed with right wing politics, but my timeline is like just Twitter 2014 stuck at 3AM without any of those. I don't use any filters or blocklists, the place seem naturally nice-ish.
> about how X was full of bots
They appear to have largely given up and scaled back efforts to replace existing social graphs by funding African/Middle Eastern/Indian/South Asian content farms under the guise of revenue sharing programs, burning out talents west to east, likely with the conclusion that they're all equally incapable of understanding contents posted on Twitter even without the language barrier, let alone gaining popularity and even with literal algorithmic manipulations. Or they just burned through quite a deep talent pool globally.
That effort started after Twitter was bought, beginning around South Africa or Nigeria. So it's not an improvement, unless you count someone ceasing hostility as an improvement.
> There's people from all walks of life and all corners of the internet on there still, good and bad.
No, not really, it's only people who are fine or apathetic about the CEO of that platform doing a Nazi salute in front of cameras, twice. It is a very specific kind of people.
I mean you'd wish that that was the case, but the reality is even bleaker. The "specific kind" is not all that specific.
Like yeah, of course, the crypto, AI and business grifters are a lot louder on Twitter now, but.. wouldn't say that they're not on HN as well, so.
I mean I understand that you would want to shame people into leaving that platform, but to feel shame you first need to be present in the room and conversation. Apathic people on autopilot are not even taking part in the conversation you'd like to have. They just scroll.
I think those are ultimately a locale dependent content bandwidth problem. Unwanted content has to be recommended if there were nothing else to show. Discovery feed on bsky.app gives me game news, local news, cat pics, some center-left politics, manga panels, food pics, random personal updates, cat pics, all warm and fuzzy stuffs.
I don't get any CSAM, alt-right, nazism, weed, ragebaits, unwanted gay contents. Simply none of those. But I don't normally set the language to English, and I suspect that might have to do with not getting those stuffs.
I only log in to X a couple times a month, but the only type of Grok post I've ever seen is somebody retweeting a post and adding something like "grok, is this true?".
The biggest social networks can only die slowly. They have too much momentum for the the type of sudden exodus that was possible when the internet had not yet absorbed the entire population.
A lot of interesting people who do interesting things post on X. You can follow them and have interesting feed. You don't get it on FB/Insta or Tiktok.
>>Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
Yeah just a big tech CEOs posting (or an author of a big project, or an engineer working for a top lab), nothing to see here. On to another dancing teenager on TikTok. Let's watch some pranks or a "beauty influencer" on Insta where we are at it instead.
They have those payouts for check marks? A lot of people post click bait for views to bring in small amounts of money, usually from a poorer country I think
All journalists and politicians are there, including left wing. If you want to know e.g. what the Prime Minister of Pakistan really said instead of some news spin, you have to read his tweets.
It is an elite club, and Musk wants you to pay for it.
I don't know why it is legal for EU politicians to use this walled garden for important messages.
Someone outside of the US jurisdiction (China?) has to keep xcancel.com running.
IIRC you can’t even read a single post without an account, it is equivalent to posting a link to a private Facebook group or whatever from an outsider point of view.
I made the mistake of searching it yesterday via a proxy while trying to search for local police news (why do our govts use these mechanisms to publish first) and ran into threads calling for ethnic cleansing of south asians from Texas. Not a great read.
Where else do you suggest they post? Publishing to the socials casts the widest net form them. If they operate their own website and post there, a number approaching zero would see the posts.
Do you expect a new app per municipality to be a solution? Or one app to become a new platform just to interact with gov't agencies that the other platforms already provide? You have the question, but have you spent any time coming up with answers/suggestions?
Multi-publish is a thing that is managed by numerous publishers. Right now, most govt sites ime no longer publish at all on their sites or rss but instead update one of facebook or twitter, depending on their preference. If they can afford to buy 70k usd suvs at taxpayer expense, they should also be able to figure out how to publish on mechanisms without walls, such as rss or their own site.
In Norway most withdrew from X. Norwegian police made a webpage, an rss feed, some push system and an API. So others have made bots that repost on various social media, but the source is no longer in a walled garden.
I'd love to see public agencies or anyone making any sort of significant public announcements use any other platform. FTP a text file to a server for all I care, but I'm not risking a search of a platform that openly encourages extremism and discourages moderation.
Like all social media, your feed depends partly on who you follow and partly on behavioural cues their algorithms can determine about you (such as who you interact with, sites you visit).
It may be skewed one way or another more than other social networks, but even so, you should be careful saying a social media is a racist bigoted right wing echo chamber because it can sound not like a recital of popular media but more personal experience
White supremacist circle jerking and narcissistic "influencing." (Along with some international communities that, admittedly, don’t overlap with this muck at all.)
Recent choice words from Musk:
* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"
* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)
* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."
* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)
Incredibly unpopular opinion on Hacker News, but X remains the center of many circles, including tech. There is almost nothing posted on Hacker News that I haven't seen on X first, with better commentary.
Actually I retired from twitter before Musk, because twitter started to censor me. But of course once Musk took over, constantly raising his right arm, I knew twitter was dead. Here in Europe nobody wants to see selfish and ruthless right-wing nuts control ecosystems. Billionaires pulling the strings does not work; the USA need to learn this lesson first.
Nitter is a great project, way lighter than using Twitter and gets the job done if you want to check few accounts. I have a list of 30 accounts that I'm checking with Nitter and it's absolutely fantastic for this. Oh well, I guess I'll live without following those accounts.
I would literally stop opening twitter links, for me the utility of twitter is not having an account, but sometimes certain projects or governments and businesses use it for announcements. Before Musk put the login only for seeing tweets and comments, I would use regular twitter and when they did that I switched to nitter. (I had an account for some time but it was a complete was of time)
From a legal perspective, I can guess why you think it's bad. But aside from some legitimate use cases (apparently some towns and cities only issue announcements on X, really?) if you hate the platform itself so much but still feel compelled to check out content there then this may be a great opportunity for freedom and growth.
Anyone familiar with the legal reasons Twitter might be able to prevent sites like nitter from working? I believe scraping is legal but I'm sure there are details that make this different
> X has documentary evidence that you are scraping X Data, circumventing X’s API access controls and rate limits, accessing X using X accounts and session tokens in violation of X’s rules, and republishing X Data to the public. X’s Terms of Service, Developer Agreement, and Developer Policy strictly forbid such conduct. See https://x.com/en/tos (“[C]rawling or scraping the Services in any form . . . is expressly prohibited.”). By your own description, Nitter “uses Twitter’s unofficial API” and routes all requests through your servers, and requires operators to supply real X accounts to function.
> Your actions constitute a flagrant breach of the contractual and legal obligations you agreed to when accessing the X services. Your actions also violate various state and federal laws, including, but not limited to, the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act (§ 143.001 and § 33.02) and the Lanham Act (15 U.S.C. §§ 1114, 1125).
if i understand correctly, in Meta v. Bright Data, the court ruled that brightdata was allowed to scrape public profiles because the user is unauthenticated. thus I do not believe that precedent is in favor of nitter currently
The open web is dead. The open web remains dead. And we have killed it.
I'm actually much less anti-Musk than the average HN commentator but it should be universally agreed here that a small handful of mega-corp websites dominating the majority of content on the web is a bad thing. Nitter was hardly a solution. Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed, and "free speech" platforms like X are "technically" closed.
IMO we all need to start vibe coding PHP bulletin boards again. 'RETVRN' etc.
If we reflect on the debate from years ago about whether to nationalize Twitter, all the downsides we were warned about have come true. They censor / promote whoever the state wants anyways, the CEOs was literally in the cabinet for a time, but now they also have to enshittify and degrade the experience for the benefit of an also-ran AI lab.
What does it even mean, period? MAGA losers are free to establish a community on Bluesky, the only difference between that and Twitter is that Bluesky isn't built to optimize for ragebait and culture war fighting. But they can still socialize among themselves on Bluesky even if no one else wants anything to do with them.
Maybe they're referring to defederation? It's quite common on Mastodon as I understand it, due to disagreements on things like moderation between server operators.
It's hardly unique to Twitter but it's so frustrating how much "content" online requires an account. Whenever my friends send me something on Instagram or TikTok or a restaurant puts their menu on Instagram, I'm barraged with a thousand dark patterns forcing me to log in. Even Reddit is doing it now. I do wonder how much of this is to boost engagement versus another "wonderful" side effect from LLMs since they need training data.
The other day someone on here gave me a useful framing. Non-publicly accessible sites are the dark web. If a project told you they were moving all their docs and support to the dark web they would sound crazy, but if they say they're moving it to discord (the same thing) then it's fine.
libredirect is very good for these kinda of things. But the platforms keep trying to make it stop working so is a constant battle of the frontents to build workarounds
Twitter was doing stupid growth hacks, like requiring login to view replies, even before AI scrapers were a concern. (And I suspect many of the scrapers are just using logged-in accounts.)
didn't the scrapers scrape everything well before concerns were raised. were the concerns raised after the LLMs were released and then people realized what happened? so, forcing logins just closed the barn door after the horses got out.
Sad for the project but unsurprising knowing how much SpaceX (sigh) relies on xAI which it mostly a shelf for a neocloud bootstrapped precisely from Twitter/X as a dataset. I imagine they will legally fight to close as much as possible in order to make it look like a valuable dataset that is exclusive.
Right now, I can do about two searches on xcancel before it gives me the "instances have been rate limited" message. Then if I completely close out of my web browser, clear my web history from the last hour, and go back into my web browser, I can do another one or two searches, before xcancel again gives me that message about ""instances have been rate limited".
In theory I can still read the same things I could read before on xcancel by doing an endless cycle of doing one or two searches, then closing out of my web browser and clearing history, and then going back to xcancel and doing another search or two. But certainly that process is very annoying.
Now, I'm not 100% sure if this is related to Musk's cease and desist letter. I've run into this problem or similar technical problems about twice a month before when using XCancel. Usually the technical problem is resolved within 2 or 3 hours and I can use xcancel normally again. So I guess I'll check back in a few hours and see if I can use xcancel normally again.
As long as people are using X and linking to it this pain will just go on. If you have an account there you will not notice how unusable it is for others. And that's by design.
This means that you need to stop posting links to it anywhere, unless you attach to the link everything you find interesting about it (so the discussion too, if it's interesting).
This is sad. The government, in doing so, awards e. g. twitter/Musk a de-facto total control over the communication space. I think ALL protocols need to be made fully open, and everyone should be able to write clients adhering these protocols. Any "cease and desist" also must be instantly made public. Right now there is a rogue government running the USA, run by a corrupt orange clown king. All oligarchs who supported this system need to pay compensation money to the other taxpayers.
Reminder that hosting your own won’t last long either if it got popular, as long as you don’t control your domain, you are always under the mercy of being shutdown.
That’s a rather poor state of affairs but is surely an issue to take up with our local authorities. Is that their only communication channel? There’s no website, RSS feed or at least mirror feed on an alternative platform?
We should have prevented Twitter/X and other platforms becoming quasi-official communications channels for public institutions.
If your local town government for example only posts city updates to twitter, your options are to make a twitter account, use something like nitter, or miss out on updates.
There's that, and the fact that the "town square" for my city ended up being a city citizens page on Facebook. So we've got the city government and the sheriff's office posting updates to X and/or Facebook, and anything coming from the residents can only really be seen on Facebook. I don't want an X or Facebook account. I guess I'm just supposed to remain in the dark if I don't submit to corpos. The merger of corporation and state is very real, and I guess it often arrives unintentionally rather than intentionally.
yes. Lots of smaller city governments are barely capable of running a functioning website.
Twitter used to be an easy and free way to distribute updates publicly. That has changed, but the inertia is still there and there isn't a good low friction alternative.
I would not say astonishingly as most people are full-on addicted to these platform and addictions are hard to kick, but definitely doable (9 years for me)
Well, when heads of state, important ministers, politicians etc post things there, it's an unfortunate reality that you sometimes have to read it to stay in the loop. (I think Nazi app is a bit of an overstatement myself)
my guess is many people use nitter to do automatic scraping of Twitter for various projects, i.e. they can't believe they "have" to do it because so many people still use Twitter.
Not much detail so far.
> We have received cease and desist letters. Awaiting legal advice at the moment, but for now expect all nitter instances to remain down for the foreseeable future.
[for all those who - like me - first check the comments before clicking on the link]
Are they expecting legal advice to take a long tine?! It's fairly reasonable to check with a lawyer first, before damaging yourself by complying.
The legal system gets this concept. Otherwise random, unwarranted desist orders from your enemies could break you.
Anyone can send an request.
Weird.
Legal advice costs a lot of money unless you find a lawyer doing it for free, which is rare.
I agree with the spirit of your comment though. More resistance would be a good thing. It’s just unfortunate how it seems to cost like $20k to $100k.
Nitter should put up a request for donations for legal fees. Lots of people are willing.
[dead]
What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be? Clearly the exodus that happened when Musk took it over didn't kill it but I do seem to see fewer links to it than I used to.
Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
This is only tenuously related but every single Mac app I see advertised on X by verified accounts is malware. I reported one last week to them, they said it's not malware. I appealed it and said the install link is copy and paste obfuscated base64 into your terminal, and they said after review it doesn't break their terms.
So whatever else they do, they take money to knowingly promote malware.
>What is the main use case for X these days?
I use it to follow people who either have ideas I find interesting or do stuff I find interesting, and typically I'm looking for accounts that are small enough that I know they will at least see my replies, and often interact with them. (Something like 3K-15K followers for most of them, I think.)
I also think it's indispensable for real-time commentary and niche commentary on current events: always requires grains of salt but there's just no better place on the Internet for that sort of thing, in part because...
It's the one major social network I'm on where it is easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order. A feed I TRULY control (and, if you follow the right people, insulates you from much of the nonsense on the site).
(And every once in awhile, some insane viral nonsense pokes in that makes you say "how could I ever quit this site". There's a certain genre of satirical accounts that is very entertaining as well. Definitely a guilty pleasure component to it all!)
>Is it still as popular as it used to be?
A quick search roughly aligns with my perception: it bottomed out a couple of years ago and has gradually recovered, though not to where it was pre-X.
From what I can tell, most Twitter users outside English speaking countries don't care about who is the CEO at all. Business as usual.
Thats sorta my situation, a scene I'm rather involved in has most the international users there, as such thats where things still live. Every other alternative has failed to gain enough traction for one reason or another.
Its usually either limited features, regional accessibility issues, or platforms like metas' just basically trading one big bad organization for another.
Depends on the algos. My jp account sees none of that, mostly news, jokes and some random what’s happening in parts of Japan.
NA tuned account has more of what you said.
The algos aren’t language neutral yet.
Yet. Japanese twitter users are a reflection of who they are, etc etc
Doesn’t mean there isn’t toxic stuff though.
I'm surprised people didn't mention this, but I find it to be unbeatable in these two areas:
1. Japanese community 2. Porn (good god, so much porn)
In a UK context, journalists are on there because politicians are on there... and politicians are on there because journalists are on there. It's politicians that need to pull the plug - if they left en masse the journalists would go where they went, even if they stayed on X too - but nobody has the balls to do it. (Aside from one politician who for all practical purposes seems to do absolutely nothing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyrx1ee2r4o).
I haven't left because there are still circles of people I follow that haven't bailed. Once a large enough majority move to Bluesky, I'll start browsing that app more.
On the other hand, I might start posting on Bluesky more because as of a week ago, I'm shadowbanned on X. I know people throw that term around, but nobody on the site can see any of my reply tweets, even me (unless I scroll my account's 'replies' tab); people who've followed me for years are asking why their tweet has a ghost reply.
I don't think X has that much of an incentive to filter out bots while keeping around accounts like me (200 followers, will never pay for Premium). The slightly higher effort bots that glaze tech CEOs will be basically indistinguishable from the real people glazing tech CEOs because they're wannabe founders trying to network/cloutfarm. And that style of dead internet is fine with Elon.
That sounds infuriating. I hope you can recover your account.
My initial suspicion was that my account was flagged because I only used the web version (the PWA experience on mobile is pretty good) so I've been using the Android app the last few days, and I'll see if that has any signal on my account.
In another view days I'll try filing a support ticket, maybe claiming something like "I was mass-reported by DSA leftists for my right-wing views"; things along those lines have gotten some peoples' permanent suspensions lifted.
I've made a lot of friends in Japan through shared interest communities that are mostly on twitter. Most are people I've actually met whenever I am in Japan.
There is a lot of Ukraine war reporting on twitter.
Breaking news. If a bomb goes off or a plane goes down people post it to X.
Personally I have zero interest. If it's a big enough deal, it'll get to me somehow. Knowing about it 15s after it happened and then seeing a flood of uninformed speculation would be stressful.
Others do value that, no judgment, but for me it's be a net negative.
I mean, if it is real it's on every wire service there is too, with slightly less hysteria.
Guess one has to, because there are just too many people on there. I don't like it but what can I do. What I hate the most is that states/countries, prime ministers and kings post on there. And that the emergency services of some countries have that as primary channel. I understand cross posting to the most popular social channels, but primary? That SHOULD be a local channel, not some dystopian shit hole you could be banned from randomly.
> What is the main use case for X these days?
There are lots of interesting people/orgs on X from AI/ML circles, as well as Ukraine war OSINT accounts and UA army helpers. I stay on X pretty much for these two topics.
There's people from all walks of life and all corners of the internet on there still, good and bad. Twitter was always a darned mess, the only difference now is you can't just report people and bully them off the site.
Contrast to me trying to open BlueSky, and seeing death threats and other insane things. I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem. Those two factors alone kept me from even trying it out.
What's really weird is there were a ton of claims that disappeared, about how X was full of bots, but X is the opposite of full of bots. Maybe there's one or another, but they're highly under the radar, X has improved their bot problem drastically.
Edit (tweaked some words, and wanted to add):
Then there was Threads, I am not in any way interested in "New Twitter" by Mark Zuckerberg, no thanks.
I really can't deal with BlueSky. I wanted to because I had a lot of good "starter packs" for NeoVim and OCaml development. Nerd stuff is the reason I visit these sites. The problem is, I start following people and it almost always turns into politics. I may even AGREE with the person's politics but I hate reading and talking about it. God forbid I ever disagree.
Funny thing though. I've heard the claims of "CSAM on Twitter" and now "CSAM on BlueSky". I've never had any of that ransomly show up. I do still have 2 or so random follows from clip-art female avatars with no tweets - per week. I've never quite figured out how that scam is supposed to work. I used to block 'em, now I ignore 'em.
> Nerd stuff is the reason I visit these sites.
Fedi is a lot better if you want nerd stuff specifically, running instances attracts a lot of hackers who're geared toward it. The big instances are pretty much the same shlock you get on Twitter/Bluesky but there's a lot of cool people in the margins (tip: look for instances that aren't running Mastodon).
Never had issues with bluesky, but i'm a lurker and I have a llm filtering (here on HN, X, bluesky, reddit etc) which removes political stuff and boosts stuff I likely will like.
From what I head, bluesky (unsurprisingly) has the exact same toxicity problems as twitter.
There was I think this piece of writing in 2024 (just googled it, don't quote me on that) https://www.thefp.com/p/jesse-singal-bluesky-has-a-death-thr...
iirc there were newer instances too, but why bother reading on that, when you can just look at how the system is built.
Twitter and Twitter-ish systems are just fundamentally anti-human. The same can be said about most of social media, actually, but Twitter is high up on the worst offender list, and Bluesky just cloned it. Again.
I found this[0] to be an interesting perspective:
"Bluesky Isn't a Bubble. It's a Containment Dome.
Pray that Bluesky doesn't die entirely — we need it so the worst liberal posts are kept in a place where the broader public won't ever see them."
[0] https://www.joshbarro.com/p/bluesky-isnt-a-bubble-its-a-cont...
If you look at the replies to basically any big post, you'll see all the blue checkmark bots in there. Usually just copying posts, sometimes doing a weird ai summary of the original post in a way that isn't actually replying to it.
I've got no idea if they're somehow making money off it or what's up
Followed by the porn bots, the racist bots, the "American" bot, etc. I'm really surprised how someone can use X and say that it is not full of bots. It's the same on Reddit.
> I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem.
There really isn't, unless you mean anime content(of both SFW and NSFW alike) by "CSAM". In case you mean by that, then there is, otherwise no. It also appears to be highly locale dependent - some say they see timeline filled to the brim with fetish furry images and male gay nudity dressed with right wing politics, but my timeline is like just Twitter 2014 stuck at 3AM without any of those. I don't use any filters or blocklists, the place seem naturally nice-ish.
> about how X was full of bots
They appear to have largely given up and scaled back efforts to replace existing social graphs by funding African/Middle Eastern/Indian/South Asian content farms under the guise of revenue sharing programs, burning out talents west to east, likely with the conclusion that they're all equally incapable of understanding contents posted on Twitter even without the language barrier, let alone gaining popularity and even with literal algorithmic manipulations. Or they just burned through quite a deep talent pool globally.
That effort started after Twitter was bought, beginning around South Africa or Nigeria. So it's not an improvement, unless you count someone ceasing hostility as an improvement.
> There's people from all walks of life and all corners of the internet on there still, good and bad.
No, not really, it's only people who are fine or apathetic about the CEO of that platform doing a Nazi salute in front of cameras, twice. It is a very specific kind of people.
I would love to see a visual representation of what you think those sort of people look like.
Probably pretty ... banal, like Hannah Arendt pointed out.
Not really.
I mean you'd wish that that was the case, but the reality is even bleaker. The "specific kind" is not all that specific.
Like yeah, of course, the crypto, AI and business grifters are a lot louder on Twitter now, but.. wouldn't say that they're not on HN as well, so.
I mean I understand that you would want to shame people into leaving that platform, but to feel shame you first need to be present in the room and conversation. Apathic people on autopilot are not even taking part in the conversation you'd like to have. They just scroll.
Bluesky has a weed problem, but eventually you can tune the algorithm to only show you thirty or forty posts about weed every day.
I think those are ultimately a locale dependent content bandwidth problem. Unwanted content has to be recommended if there were nothing else to show. Discovery feed on bsky.app gives me game news, local news, cat pics, some center-left politics, manga panels, food pics, random personal updates, cat pics, all warm and fuzzy stuffs.
I don't get any CSAM, alt-right, nazism, weed, ragebaits, unwanted gay contents. Simply none of those. But I don't normally set the language to English, and I suspect that might have to do with not getting those stuffs.
Bluesky is shrinking.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/11/blueskys-active-user-base-...
I genuinely can't take this comment seriously if you think BlueSky has a CSAM and bullying problem while staying on X.
Yeah, there were numerous news reports about the AI CSAM problem on X
- June 2025: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/x-accounts-peddle-chi...
- Jan 2026: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/02/musk-grok-ai-bot-safeguard-s...
- Mar 2026: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/17/x-csam-ch...
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> I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem.
I left X permanently because the unfathomable amount of CSAM being generated by Grok, without seeing it myself, sickened me to the point of no return.
I don’t use Bluesky but it seems to me that if this is a real concern to you, then you should have left X as well.
I only log in to X a couple times a month, but the only type of Grok post I've ever seen is somebody retweeting a post and adding something like "grok, is this true?".
The biggest social networks can only die slowly. They have too much momentum for the the type of sudden exodus that was possible when the internet had not yet absorbed the entire population.
Unless they're shut down.
G+ comes to mind.
(Several billion profiles, tens of millions active. Shut down 1 Apr 2019. Yes, April Fools' Day.)
There's lots of US sports content. That's all I use it for.
A lot of interesting people who do interesting things post on X. You can follow them and have interesting feed. You don't get it on FB/Insta or Tiktok.
>>Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
Yeah just a big tech CEOs posting (or an author of a big project, or an engineer working for a top lab), nothing to see here. On to another dancing teenager on TikTok. Let's watch some pranks or a "beauty influencer" on Insta where we are at it instead.
It's a social experiment about [variable] universal basic income
Can you expand on this? I'm not tracking.
They have those payouts for check marks? A lot of people post click bait for views to bring in small amounts of money, usually from a poorer country I think
All journalists and politicians are there, including left wing. If you want to know e.g. what the Prime Minister of Pakistan really said instead of some news spin, you have to read his tweets.
It is an elite club, and Musk wants you to pay for it.
I don't know why it is legal for EU politicians to use this walled garden for important messages.
Someone outside of the US jurisdiction (China?) has to keep xcancel.com running.
Linking to X is less useful than it used to be.
IIRC you can’t even read a single post without an account, it is equivalent to posting a link to a private Facebook group or whatever from an outsider point of view.
It's actively harmful to many people, copy and paste the text if there's no other source
Racism, bigotry, a right-wing echo chamber and a vehicle for the generation of non-consensual deep fakes of women.
I made the mistake of searching it yesterday via a proxy while trying to search for local police news (why do our govts use these mechanisms to publish first) and ran into threads calling for ethnic cleansing of south asians from Texas. Not a great read.
Where else do you suggest they post? Publishing to the socials casts the widest net form them. If they operate their own website and post there, a number approaching zero would see the posts.
Do you expect a new app per municipality to be a solution? Or one app to become a new platform just to interact with gov't agencies that the other platforms already provide? You have the question, but have you spent any time coming up with answers/suggestions?
Multi-publish is a thing that is managed by numerous publishers. Right now, most govt sites ime no longer publish at all on their sites or rss but instead update one of facebook or twitter, depending on their preference. If they can afford to buy 70k usd suvs at taxpayer expense, they should also be able to figure out how to publish on mechanisms without walls, such as rss or their own site.
In Norway most withdrew from X. Norwegian police made a webpage, an rss feed, some push system and an API. So others have made bots that repost on various social media, but the source is no longer in a walled garden.
A municipal website? A text file on a file server? Not a login-gated social media platform owned by the world's richest edgelord.
I'd love to see public agencies or anyone making any sort of significant public announcements use any other platform. FTP a text file to a server for all I care, but I'm not risking a search of a platform that openly encourages extremism and discourages moderation.
Like all social media, your feed depends partly on who you follow and partly on behavioural cues their algorithms can determine about you (such as who you interact with, sites you visit).
It may be skewed one way or another more than other social networks, but even so, you should be careful saying a social media is a racist bigoted right wing echo chamber because it can sound not like a recital of popular media but more personal experience
Given who controls the algorithm, I don't think there's anything inaccurate about the statement.
White supremacist circle jerking and narcissistic "influencing." (Along with some international communities that, admittedly, don’t overlap with this muck at all.)
Recent choice words from Musk:
* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"
* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)
* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."
* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)
Per Nate Silver, Musk's is the most engaged-with account on Twitter by far, followed by his far-right allies: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...
So, yeah: open sewer.
Incredibly unpopular opinion on Hacker News, but X remains the center of many circles, including tech. There is almost nothing posted on Hacker News that I haven't seen on X first, with better commentary.
Actually I retired from twitter before Musk, because twitter started to censor me. But of course once Musk took over, constantly raising his right arm, I knew twitter was dead. Here in Europe nobody wants to see selfish and ruthless right-wing nuts control ecosystems. Billionaires pulling the strings does not work; the USA need to learn this lesson first.
Are you gonna tell us how Twitter started censoring you, or is this a "which opinions, mf-er" goose meme situation?
Nitter is a great project, way lighter than using Twitter and gets the job done if you want to check few accounts. I have a list of 30 accounts that I'm checking with Nitter and it's absolutely fantastic for this. Oh well, I guess I'll live without following those accounts.
This is ultimately X’s problem. Remove the ways to consume its content, remove its relevance.
If at all, people should only fully quote content or post screenshots now.
"The public town square" where you need an account to lurk
I would literally stop opening twitter links, for me the utility of twitter is not having an account, but sometimes certain projects or governments and businesses use it for announcements. Before Musk put the login only for seeing tweets and comments, I would use regular twitter and when they did that I switched to nitter. (I had an account for some time but it was a complete was of time)
It was only a matter of time before they got in the way of someone committing a crime under the pretense of power.
In the grand scheme of things I think that this is good.
Its bad, but in the end nobody really cares that much about what is good or bad.
From a legal perspective, I can guess why you think it's bad. But aside from some legitimate use cases (apparently some towns and cities only issue announcements on X, really?) if you hate the platform itself so much but still feel compelled to check out content there then this may be a great opportunity for freedom and growth.
Remember, corporations may scrap you but you cannot scrap them.
Explains why the various links were suggesting to use different instances today. Surprised it lasted this long.
Anyone familiar with the legal reasons Twitter might be able to prevent sites like nitter from working? I believe scraping is legal but I'm sure there are details that make this different
From the letter(s):
> X has documentary evidence that you are scraping X Data, circumventing X’s API access controls and rate limits, accessing X using X accounts and session tokens in violation of X’s rules, and republishing X Data to the public. X’s Terms of Service, Developer Agreement, and Developer Policy strictly forbid such conduct. See https://x.com/en/tos (“[C]rawling or scraping the Services in any form . . . is expressly prohibited.”). By your own description, Nitter “uses Twitter’s unofficial API” and routes all requests through your servers, and requires operators to supply real X accounts to function.
> Your actions constitute a flagrant breach of the contractual and legal obligations you agreed to when accessing the X services. Your actions also violate various state and federal laws, including, but not limited to, the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act (§ 143.001 and § 33.02) and the Lanham Act (15 U.S.C. §§ 1114, 1125).
I wonder how xAI steals its AI training material! Of course no scraping is involved!1!!
They stole the Nitter code too of course without attribution. Does SpaceX really want to go into this?
Is this comparable to LinkedIn scraping?
Ah, TOS violations. I believe those may not hold up in court well from the limited amount I recall in previous cases, but IANAL
That's a lot of unknowns, I doubt this text can actually hold in a court of law
A similar case Musk filed against an Israeli data scraping firm already got laughed out of court.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/musks-x-corp-loses-lawsuit-aga...
But I guess the nitter owner doesn't want to take any chances until he actually gets a court ruling in his favor.
if i understand correctly, in Meta v. Bright Data, the court ruled that brightdata was allowed to scrape public profiles because the user is unauthenticated. thus I do not believe that precedent is in favor of nitter currently
The open web is dead. The open web remains dead. And we have killed it.
I'm actually much less anti-Musk than the average HN commentator but it should be universally agreed here that a small handful of mega-corp websites dominating the majority of content on the web is a bad thing. Nitter was hardly a solution. Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed, and "free speech" platforms like X are "technically" closed.
IMO we all need to start vibe coding PHP bulletin boards again. 'RETVRN' etc.
If we reflect on the debate from years ago about whether to nationalize Twitter, all the downsides we were warned about have come true. They censor / promote whoever the state wants anyways, the CEOs was literally in the cabinet for a time, but now they also have to enshittify and degrade the experience for the benefit of an also-ran AI lab.
They still work just fine, people need to use them instead of the drugs they get force fed by mega corps.
> Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed
What does the even mean if you can host your own
Hosting your own doesn't really matter if it just means you're on a social network with one user.
What does it even mean, period? MAGA losers are free to establish a community on Bluesky, the only difference between that and Twitter is that Bluesky isn't built to optimize for ragebait and culture war fighting. But they can still socialize among themselves on Bluesky even if no one else wants anything to do with them.
Maybe they're referring to defederation? It's quite common on Mastodon as I understand it, due to disagreements on things like moderation between server operators.
> "free speech" platforms like X are "technically" closed.
Musk boots off and/or limits distribution of people he disagrees with. I can't fathom how you think that's 'free speech' - it's the opposite.
> Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed
I've heard that - what is your experience? Downvotes and exclusion? Are there more 'open' servers?
Note that the frequently-used workaround for regwalled Twitter content posted to G+, xcancel.com, is itself a Nitter instance.
HN mods may wish to take notice.
It's hardly unique to Twitter but it's so frustrating how much "content" online requires an account. Whenever my friends send me something on Instagram or TikTok or a restaurant puts their menu on Instagram, I'm barraged with a thousand dark patterns forcing me to log in. Even Reddit is doing it now. I do wonder how much of this is to boost engagement versus another "wonderful" side effect from LLMs since they need training data.
The other day someone on here gave me a useful framing. Non-publicly accessible sites are the dark web. If a project told you they were moving all their docs and support to the dark web they would sound crazy, but if they say they're moving it to discord (the same thing) then it's fine.
I think we will see the internet closed off more and more as AI usage grows.
libredirect is very good for these kinda of things. But the platforms keep trying to make it stop working so is a constant battle of the frontents to build workarounds
Twitter was doing stupid growth hacks, like requiring login to view replies, even before AI scrapers were a concern. (And I suspect many of the scrapers are just using logged-in accounts.)
> before AI scrapers were a concern
didn't the scrapers scrape everything well before concerns were raised. were the concerns raised after the LLMs were released and then people realized what happened? so, forcing logins just closed the barn door after the horses got out.
It's tracking and data harvesting, always is
I am sitting down on Twitter with a leftist quitter... known to be alive.
Guitar solo
I am sitting down on LinkedIn with a former Kingpin, only fearing for his liiife.
Lalalalaaa
Sitting down at Facebook, watching for the craze hooks and starring just with fright.
Shaking at my head now, gotta go to bed now, my kids are actually alive...but down on tiktok they tell me how run my life.
Lalalalalaaa
Guitar solo exit
A lot of instances are showing rate limited too.
Sad for the project but unsurprising knowing how much SpaceX (sigh) relies on xAI which it mostly a shelf for a neocloud bootstrapped precisely from Twitter/X as a dataset. I imagine they will legally fight to close as much as possible in order to make it look like a valuable dataset that is exclusive.
xcancel.com still works. Isn't that sus?
xcancel worked even when nitter had problems before. I imagine they're running a fairly custom version of nitter now with their own workarounds.
Edit: I see it's not working either "Instance has been rate limited"
Might help that XCancel hotlinks media (pbs.twimg[.]com), should be a huge bandwidth reduction.
Right now, I can do about two searches on xcancel before it gives me the "instances have been rate limited" message. Then if I completely close out of my web browser, clear my web history from the last hour, and go back into my web browser, I can do another one or two searches, before xcancel again gives me that message about ""instances have been rate limited".
In theory I can still read the same things I could read before on xcancel by doing an endless cycle of doing one or two searches, then closing out of my web browser and clearing history, and then going back to xcancel and doing another search or two. But certainly that process is very annoying.
Now, I'm not 100% sure if this is related to Musk's cease and desist letter. I've run into this problem or similar technical problems about twice a month before when using XCancel. Usually the technical problem is resolved within 2 or 3 hours and I can use xcancel normally again. So I guess I'll check back in a few hours and see if I can use xcancel normally again.
Make it easy on yourself and just use Tor. Clearing everything is a matter of clicking on "new tor circuit for site".
Some sites throw annoying captchas your way though.
As long as people are using X and linking to it this pain will just go on. If you have an account there you will not notice how unusable it is for others. And that's by design.
This means that you need to stop posting links to it anywhere, unless you attach to the link everything you find interesting about it (so the discussion too, if it's interesting).
Doing otherwise should be banned here.
lol I'd say something about X, but man this place fooking loves X and it didn't go well last time. So, "oh nooooo".
Now I have no more ways to read Twitter... So, good?
This is sad. The government, in doing so, awards e. g. twitter/Musk a de-facto total control over the communication space. I think ALL protocols need to be made fully open, and everyone should be able to write clients adhering these protocols. Any "cease and desist" also must be instantly made public. Right now there is a rogue government running the USA, run by a corrupt orange clown king. All oligarchs who supported this system need to pay compensation money to the other taxpayers.
Reminder that hosting your own won’t last long either if it got popular, as long as you don’t control your domain, you are always under the mercy of being shutdown.
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> You've gotta be kidding me. Unfortunately everyone still uses the Nazi app so this is actually a big problem.
If the commenter truly believes it’s a Nazi app, why are they the slightest bit upset to lose access to any version of it?
It’s astonishingly easy to not use toxic social media platforms.
I can't even read specific public transport updates in my city because they only post those to Twitter, only vague messages on their own website.
Have you thought about complaining to your public transport provider?
That’s a rather poor state of affairs but is surely an issue to take up with our local authorities. Is that their only communication channel? There’s no website, RSS feed or at least mirror feed on an alternative platform?
We should have prevented Twitter/X and other platforms becoming quasi-official communications channels for public institutions.
You answered your own question.
> Unfortunately everyone still uses the Nazi app
If your local town government for example only posts city updates to twitter, your options are to make a twitter account, use something like nitter, or miss out on updates.
There's that, and the fact that the "town square" for my city ended up being a city citizens page on Facebook. So we've got the city government and the sheriff's office posting updates to X and/or Facebook, and anything coming from the residents can only really be seen on Facebook. I don't want an X or Facebook account. I guess I'm just supposed to remain in the dark if I don't submit to corpos. The merger of corporation and state is very real, and I guess it often arrives unintentionally rather than intentionally.
Is this the case where you are?
If so, that’s appalling.
yes. Lots of smaller city governments are barely capable of running a functioning website.
Twitter used to be an easy and free way to distribute updates publicly. That has changed, but the inertia is still there and there isn't a good low friction alternative.
I do not use Twitter but some people who do interesting things somehow still do and only post about them there. It's all so tiring.
I would not say astonishingly as most people are full-on addicted to these platform and addictions are hard to kick, but definitely doable (9 years for me)
I suppose my bemusement comes from the fact that the commenter describes it in the most extreme terms (a nazi app!), and yet cannot kick the habit.
You can want to read something someone else has posted without giving your data to the owner of Twitter.
So, it’s a nazi app that you can’t help but continue to read.
I don’t get it.
- it’s a nazi app
- some important non nazi information exists only on this app
- the nazi app is being harmed by nitter
Seems like using nitter would align with their worldview. Curious how you’ve failed to make this connection?
Well, when heads of state, important ministers, politicians etc post things there, it's an unfortunate reality that you sometimes have to read it to stay in the loop. (I think Nazi app is a bit of an overstatement myself)
Rather than calling it a Nazi app, it's more apt to say it's a Corporate Oligarchy app.
my guess is many people use nitter to do automatic scraping of Twitter for various projects, i.e. they can't believe they "have" to do it because so many people still use Twitter.
Let a thousand Nitters bloom.