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raphman 42 minutes ago [-]
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]
mnls 1 minutes ago [-]
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.
NoboruWataya 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
dwedge 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
janejeon 4 minutes ago [-]
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)
tokioyoyo 27 minutes ago [-]
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.
gdulli 27 minutes ago [-]
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.
bluecalm 3 minutes ago [-]
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.
vaylian 10 minutes ago [-]
There is a lot of Ukraine war reporting on twitter.
q8zd3 33 minutes ago [-]
It's a social experiment about [variable] universal basic income
rogerrogerr 27 minutes ago [-]
Can you expand on this? I'm not tracking.
nemomarx 21 minutes ago [-]
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
23asfdnb 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
naasking 20 minutes ago [-]
Linking to X is less useful than it used to be.
g-b-r 7 minutes ago [-]
It's actively harmful to many people, copy and paste the text if there's no other source
anonzzzies 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
cdrnsf 25 minutes ago [-]
Racism, bigotry, a right-wing echo chamber and a vehicle for the generation of non-consensual deep fakes of women.
abawany 18 minutes ago [-]
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.
cdrnsf 13 minutes ago [-]
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.
dwedge 6 minutes ago [-]
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
shevy-java 8 minutes ago [-]
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.
TitaRusell 17 minutes ago [-]
Breaking news. If a bomb goes off or a plane goes down people post it to X.
giancarlostoro 27 minutes ago [-]
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.
nobleach 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
anonzzzies 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
hypfer 14 minutes ago [-]
From what I head, bluesky (unsurprisingly) has the exact same toxicity problems as twitter.
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.
nemomarx 22 minutes ago [-]
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
tuesdaynight 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
numpad0 5 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
smith7018 24 minutes ago [-]
I genuinely can't take this comment seriously if you think BlueSky has a CSAM and bullying problem while staying on X.
golf1052 20 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, there were numerous news reports about the AI CSAM problem on X
Bluesky has a weed problem, but eventually you can tune the algorithm to only show you thirty or forty posts about weed every day.
devmor 19 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
utopiah 24 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
hypfer 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
tolerance 21 minutes ago [-]
I would love to see a visual representation of what you think those sort of people look like.
davidw 15 minutes ago [-]
Probably pretty ... banal, like Hannah Arendt pointed out.
solarkraft 8 minutes ago [-]
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.
kelvinjps10 21 minutes ago [-]
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)
metalcrow 11 minutes ago [-]
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
zedeus 9 minutes ago [-]
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).
metalcrow 4 minutes ago [-]
Ah, TOS violations. I believe those may not hold up in court well from the limited amount I recall in previous cases, but IANAL
hollow-moe 4 minutes ago [-]
That's a lot of unknowns, I doubt this text can actually hold in a court of law
tolerance 23 minutes ago [-]
In the grand scheme of things I think that this is good.
ActorNightly 19 minutes ago [-]
Its bad, but in the end nobody really cares that much about what is good or bad.
tolerance 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
utopiah 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
suddenlybananas 34 minutes ago [-]
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.
duskwuff 30 minutes ago [-]
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.)
dylan604 24 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
kelvinjps10 20 minutes ago [-]
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
micromacrofoot 22 minutes ago [-]
It's tracking and data harvesting, always is
Banditoz 1 hours ago [-]
A lot of instances are showing rate limited too.
numpad0 33 minutes ago [-]
xcancel.com still works. Isn't that sus?
dawnerd 27 minutes ago [-]
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"
erulabs 17 minutes ago [-]
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.
_ink_ 10 minutes ago [-]
They still work just fine, people need to use them instead of the drugs they get force fed by mega corps.
alde 2 minutes ago [-]
> Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed
What does the even mean if you can host your own
teekert 24 minutes ago [-]
Now I have no more ways to read Twitter... So, good?
shevy-java 10 minutes ago [-]
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.
spiderfarmer 38 minutes ago [-]
Let a thousand Nitters bloom.
tamimio 30 minutes ago [-]
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.
bbg2401 36 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
gempir 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
robin_reala 12 minutes ago [-]
Have you thought about complaining to your public transport provider?
bbg2401 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
rererereferred 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
MeetingsBrowser 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
seanw444 3 minutes ago [-]
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.
bbg2401 21 minutes ago [-]
Is this the case where you are?
If so, that’s appalling.
MeetingsBrowser 18 minutes ago [-]
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.
bdangubic 34 minutes ago [-]
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)
bbg2401 19 minutes ago [-]
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.
suddenlybananas 34 minutes ago [-]
You can want to read something someone else has posted without giving your data to the owner of Twitter.
bbg2401 22 minutes ago [-]
So, it’s a nazi app that you can’t help but continue to read.
I don’t get it.
suddenlybananas 12 minutes ago [-]
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)
Narretz 27 minutes ago [-]
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.
HumblyTossed 25 minutes ago [-]
what's so special about twitter anyway. I could write one in a weekend.
> 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]
Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
So whatever else they do, they take money to knowingly promote malware.
1. Japanese community 2. Porn (good god, so much porn)
NA tuned account has more of what you said.
>>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 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.
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
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.
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.
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've got no idea if they're somehow making money off it or what's up
- 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...
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.
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.
If at all, people should only fully quote content or post screenshots now.
> 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).
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.
Edit: I see it's not working either "Instance has been rate limited"
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.
What does the even mean if you can host your own
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.
We should have prevented Twitter/X and other platforms becoming quasi-official communications channels for public institutions.
> 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.
If so, that’s appalling.
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 don’t get it.
IYKYK