I'm totally clueless, but aren't there rules requiring accessibility of public-facing government communications, to the extent that they shouldn't be allowed to use a gated platform when making official statements that are a matter of public interest?

Can't you submit written/oral comments on this? Write letters to your local paper etc. You might need to be That Guy for a few months but sooner or later you're going to connect with other people who feel the same way.

Web enshittification should be disallowed in public offices. It's so easy to create a news entry in Facebook or Twitter/X but they are always walling you from it unless you subscribe. This is unacceptable in public service sector.

Brazil is trying that and getting a bad look from the USA. Can you imagine a smaller nation doing the same? What would the USA do?

All due respect, but how would anyone survive, no less find a way to make anything like the average income of any of us on HN, in a world that made not just some 'patents' free but removed property and invention such as the extremities Doctorow's fiction often espouses? America is sorta known for pretense of mutual benefit. We sorta fumbled things after we, to put it bluntly, nuked the Japanese twice. Don't get me wrong, if you read my comments elsewhere you will see how I feel about people/companies claiming swathes of things for themselves too.

Everyone seems to think they either deserve more or they fall for believing people are inherently willing to remunerate fairly for what they use... Def. not my experience, at all... like what if people were all just assuming since your ideas exist, they were for sale or free, or 'offering' things you dont want or arent getting in return...? what if you dont want what they do with it in the first place? what if (heh) you just don't like the end user and you know they will irk you with it?

Doctorow is the furthest from a fair or good example, imho.

They should respond with a poop emoji, which is what Musk sends to people he doesn't care about.

From Nitter matrix group:

basically, it demands that I:

1. Permanently take down nitter.net and the GitHub repository, and delete all "X Data" in both 2. Stop all use of the "Twitter" and "X" marks 3. Cease all access to X data, including copies 4. Delete all X account credentials and session tokens 5. Confirm compliance in writing within three business days

The claims asserted are breach of X's Terms of Service, Developer Agreement and Developer Policy; the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act; and the Lanham Act. It threatens litigation against me personally. X states it has also sent notice to GitHub and to my domain registrar.

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.

"For the forseeable future" doesn't sound very good. It's a vague phrase, but it usually isn't used to describe something that will change next week or even next month.

"For the time being" would have sounded like less bad wording than "for the forseeable future."

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.

It's deplorable, but our president in Mexico recently was asked about some current affairs a d her answer was "ive written about it in X , go see it there" ...

As if X was an official government publishing channel . WTH, they should publish it on they official government pages.

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.

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).

Companies and celebrities are a major use case here. Lots of them (especially ones from non-English speaking countries) still use the site as their primary means of communication. For example, Nintendo doesn't have an official presence on Bluesky, Threads or Mastodon, just Twitter.

There's a decent number of old school companies and creatives who either don't know/care about alternatives, or who tried them and went back to Twitter/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.

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.

>> What is the main use case for X these days?

More of a political echo chamber than anything else. I mothballed my original account when things were getting spicy which was primarily focused on dev, UI/UX, and InfoSec news. I finally went back and have had some great interactions with people about technical stuff that interests me. Right now, the data center and AI discussions are getting intense along with Omarchy, lol. If you steer clear of the political stuff, you can find some good stuff still.

>> Is it still as popular as it used to be?

Probably not but it still ranks ahead of sites like Reddit. Its like the 13th, 14th most popular platform right now. I log on mainly just to see if I'm missing anything. Other than that, most of the engagement I have is curiosity and just fun stuff like seeing people posting retro games, stuff like that.

>> Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.

X is now kind of the social media cul-de-sac . It used to be one of the go to places for breaking tech, popular cultural and political stuff. Now its usually two or three days late to the party on anything worthwhile. So the posts from the CEO probably made the rounds before you finally saw it on X. lol

It’s still fairly popular, but the statistics show that X usage is gradually declining. Elon claims that X is more popular than ever, but the platform doesn’t publicly release its own stats, and publicly available stats say otherwise.

If you like AI and tech, there are some pretty thriving sub-communities. AI stuff, and a lot of tech stuff happens on X first. Claudebot/OpenClaw/Hermes all began on X months before I commonly saw them appear on other platforms.

If you want alpha on things x is the place to be, aside from some discord servers. I've recently leaned off hn and onto twitter.

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)

AI research, computer vision/machine learning academic projects and papers, conferences.

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.

> What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be?

No idea comparatively, but an artist friend of mine tried out Bluesky and then complained about how there's way more of a limited reach and engagement there compared to Twitter.

Its main use for myself was that posts were public by default so lots of government orgs and whatnot posted real time status updates. I never really used it except for occasionally checking those.

Now that more and more are going "walled garden" I don't get it at all

Breaking news. If a bomb goes off or a plane goes down people post it to X.

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.

There is a lot of Ukraine war reporting on twitter.

> What is the main use case for X these days?

The same as it ever was. Short-form gossip. News, discussion, jokes.

My feed is mostly people petting rabbits

> 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.

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.

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.

> What is the main use case for X these days?

twitter/x remains the domain of intelligence agencies worldwide. It is a semi-open (the world first virtual leader, the ayatollah affirms he exists from there ..) psychological operations platform that permits the avatars of "world leaders" to speak to masses and also hosts a parasitical community of grifters ("opinion makers" and "influencers") that feed off of the festering fetid matter served up by the Spook International.

a secondary purpose of the twitter/x is a reverse doomsday clock, based on above. As long as the ghost of this unprofitable "business entity" is kept alive by funny money and funny deals, we can sleep soundly at night knowing there won't be ww3 or any other such extreme negotiating tactics by global elite, since they are all 'playing their role' on twitter currently known as x.

There's lots of US sports content. That's all I use it for.

It's mostly a porn site these days

I see many, many Twitter posts here. I flag every single one. Many of them are AI-related, and not something from a big tech CEO. It seems that many fans of AI don’t have any moral quandaries with using it. I will let you be the judge of whether that says anything about their moral compass in general.

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.

I rarely use it (you need an account, so I need to add cancel to the url) but last time I had a "guest" account was two years ago and it was pretty much all bots. That being said, some (important) people or companies still use it for announcement but these are usually linked and xcancel works just fine.

I honestly have no idea if there are real people who actually use it daily. Who can read that stuff?

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.

Linking to X is less useful than it used to be.

What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be?

Yes, because influential, non-evil people who should know better just will not fucking leave. The vast majority of public-minded ML developers and researchers, including people who compete with xAI, being an obvious example.

And because skilled, knowledgeable people who could create a replacement service just will not do so. At least not without finding new and innovative forehead-slapping ways to fail at it.

Incredibly frustrating that Xitter is still as popular as it is.

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.

It's a social experiment about [variable] universal basic income

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 don't mean to discourage you, and it's great that you've gotten that support; but I don't understand what purpose this serves. I had understood that Nitter exists exactly because of the forces that would make X leadership tend not to like its existence. HN is already not trying to sell things or make the interface obnoxious for logged-out users, and it makes very responsible use of JavaScript; what is there to filter out?

This makes sense for HN as a marketing project for YC.

This doesn't make sense for ad supported platforms where the value is the eyeballs on their site.

Then again HN doesn't have ad revenue to protect, and you can only spend Karma at a limited number of retailers.

I would like for things to be so, but these platforms relief on you being on their platform, hooked on their algorithms, delivering them data. They need this in order to make money. HN is not monetized like this, so of course they're more lax. But I don't expect this to be possible for many other social media sites.

Is it available? Would like to peek around, I also made a clone. There are lots of little details about the HN ui that were difficult to get just right.

you're infringing HN users' copyright (and possible other rights as well), as they haven't granted you a license to copy, store and republish their content

On related note I really like serializer.io to read HN (I disable other sites it supports) in chronological order and have it synced across multiple devices under unique URL

If piracy sites are a good indicator of locales that let you hide from American lawyers, then probably Russia

nitter.rdrama.net is still up

I was part way through setting up both redlib and bitter on my homelab when this hit. Every app I have used, every plugin, they all get stopped. Was hoping a web proxy would be the final solution.

Also add newpipe/YouTube proxies to the list. I miss the free and open internet

Nitter permitted perusing of twitter (x-cremente) without being tracked by whoever has the keys to the backdoors to twitter. This is why nitter is being killed - it destroys the surveillance capability provided by twitter/x/musk to interested parties.

You bring up a lot of good points, so just some general tips for other readers.

> Political stuff notwithstanding

Don't follow people who post about politics and use muting and mute words liberally.

> consume a non-algorithmic feed

New-ish: Following -> Latest. As an aside, the supposed algorithm is on GitHub[1].

> disable videos and photos in the feed

uBlock or Control Panel for Twitter.

1. https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm

It's a feature not a bug ..

> does „well”

> art

Small pushback here: it (and bluesky too) is absolutely atrocious for art, at least as a consumer. Once in a while I stumble upon an artist who only posts their drawings on twitter/bsky, and it’s pretty much impossible to browse their historical works because the „media” tab is just an infinite scroll without any organization; and that’s assuming they don’t also post 10 photos of their cat or other life updates in between their art.

It’s obviously still popular for posting art for many other reasons (I just dislike putting „X”, „art” and „does well” in the same sentence). So IMO the replacements - and lots of these use cases already gave replacements! - struggle simply because of network effects, not their inherent quality.

Everyone seems to be these days. Reddit has gotten much more militant over the last month or two

You forgot the /sarcasm

Objectively untrue, unfortunately.

You can’t move to “the fediverse”, only a specific instance.

> Twitter has been irrelevant for nearly a decade now.

False.

X was supposed to die by now, its never been more alive.

In fact "Which instance?" is the reason why the fediverse died.

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).

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 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.

> Whenever my friends send me something on Instagram or TikTok

Reply with a screenshot showing that you can’t view the content.

> a restaurant puts their menu on Instagram

Don’t go there. Plenty of other restaurants to choose from. They just lost a customer due to their hostility.

I think we will see the internet closed off more and more as AI usage grows.

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.)

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

It's tracking and data harvesting, always is

Its bad, but in the end nobody really cares that much about what is good or bad.

Same, nitter never worked for me.

> Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed

What does the even mean if you can host your own

> IMO we all need to start vibe coding PHP bulletin boards again. 'RETVRN' etc.

The most recent release of phpbb was 2 months ago

They still work just fine, people need to use them instead of the drugs they get force fed by mega corps.

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 a site stealing content has to do with open web?

> "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?

What changed about old reddit?

XCancel is a different website, but they just put up a notice literally a few minutes ago saying that they're also shutting down until they get legal advice. For the past few hours, xcancel had been marginally functional (constantly giving you an error message if you tried more than 2 or 3 searches at a time), but now the website is down altogether.

Twitterwebviewer is still up, but I always preferred nitter and xcancel. And I wouldn't be surprised if twitterwebviewer also goes offline in the next day or two.

It is a fork of Nitter, they've also shut down due to the C&D[1]

[1]:https://xcancel.com

Not anymore. Here's what shows on their page:

> On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel. The service XCancel is stopped until further notice. We are seeking legal advice and won't share more details for now. Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel.

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"

Seems that xcancel.com is down now as well. Maybe they got C&D'd a bit later, or maybe they just took a bit longer to respond to the same notice.

It's fair. But I'm not going to visit Twitter anymore because the website is laggy and glitchy, even with an account.

You really are the owner of all the posts who make online. When you post on X, you grant X a license to display your posts, but you still have the copyright to your posts. Same thing if you post on Reddit or Facebook or YCombinator or whatever.

This really is an absurd case, but nitter apparently really wants to err on the side of caution until a judge rules in their favor.

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.

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)

When fighting Nazis, it's quite valuable to be able to hear what they're saying and know where they're going.

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.