13 comments

  • pamcake 34 minutes ago
    Of more concern, the Nitter github repository was permanently archived a couple of days ago.

    https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

    • Leonard_of_Q 7 minutes ago
      On that same page:

      UPDATE: Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.

    • zImPatrick 24 minutes ago
      Zedeus said "it's hopefully temporary, but it'll remain that way until further notice." in the matrix room
    • latexr 25 minutes ago
      > permanently archived

      Why do you say it’s permanent? Unarchiving a GitHub repository is reversible, and just as easy as archiving it.

  • zqwt3k 23 minutes ago
    Thanks Elon, now we know that scraping is illegal! Very good to clarify that for future proceedings against the AI thieves.
    • blitzar 10 minutes ago
      Thats "Billionaire Use" -- its like a "Fair Use" exemption but for billionaires.
    • wahnfrieden 20 minutes ago
      It’s the reposting of the content not the scraping
      • jm4 8 minutes ago
        I love how the content belongs to them when someone else reposts it but it belongs to the user if the content is illegal. Such a double standard with these social media and AI companies. Why do we put up with it?
      • zqwt3k 18 minutes ago
        That is what all LLMs could do in 2023, verbatim, before they trained it out of them in order to keep up the pretense that there is no plagiarism. Now they all obfuscate the original or refuse to cite.
      • echelon 12 minutes ago
        Grok can do that if you give it an HN thread or other websites.
  • p-o 28 minutes ago
    Free speech absolutist, btw.
    • arrowsmith 11 minutes ago
      What does proxying someone else's content have to do with free speech?
      • Forgeties79 7 minutes ago
        You have to admit, the “free speech” shield-wielding megalomaniac working so hard to keep people from freely accessing info isn’t exactly great optics.
      • angoragoats 3 minutes ago
        Twitter is heavily login-gated, to the point that I can't see Twitter threads at all unless I have an account. I do not wish to make an account. Services like Nitter/XCancel allow me to read those threads, making that speech more free.
    • mbmbn 9 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • newscracker 19 minutes ago
    This may be a situation where revealing a solution may end up harming it. For those who use iOS and other Apple OSes, I learned of this recently released free Safari extension called Litterbox that allows looking at one post on x.com.

    [1]: https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox

    • Forgeties79 10 minutes ago
      People really need to just not visit it. You don’t need to browse Twitter to be on top of current events. Anything posted there will be available elsewhere within minutes (and hopefully it will have been vetted somewhat)
  • yoz-y 35 minutes ago
    Web version of Twitter has become unusable now. So much so that I wonder why they still keep it.
    • macNchz 27 minutes ago
      For years Twitter stood out among major platforms for having an actually-usable mobile web interface that seemed to be a first-class citizen / wasn’t intentionally degraded to force you into the app, and didn’t even nag you about it. Unsurprising they’ve since ruined it.
    • Zambyte 13 minutes ago
      The whole point of butchered websites is to direct people to install their more invasive app. It's not like all companies just got bad at making websites somehow. There are conflicting incentives.
    • uurrnn 30 minutes ago
      So that you can be linked to it and told to make an account.
    • rob74 30 minutes ago
      So they can try to nag you into signing up and installing the app? Which doesn't work in 99.9% of cases, but try telling that to your boss if his name is Elon Musk...
  • rob74 32 minutes ago
    Maybe instead of trying to get rid of services that provide a more convenient access to X to non-logged-in users, they should realize that there is a real market behind these services - users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content without the incessant nagging and limitations that X subjects non-logged-in users to?
    • swed420 11 minutes ago
      > users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content

      They probably don't want their echo chamber leaking to the wider internet, because external discussion of the content would reveal it for the siloed thought bubble that it is.

      Consider X now requires personal information to sign up, and after handing that info over, signups are often still rejected with no explanation given. Yet another tell they're very interested in maintaining that echo chamber.

    • pluc 29 minutes ago
      Reddit says hello
    • Waterluvian 23 minutes ago
      They clearly realize it and are doing something to stop it. I understand the idea of imagining this as an underserved market they could do something about. Twitter worked that way. X intentionally doesn't want to, and wants to guard its monopoly over the information is controls.

      It's like paywalls. Some news companies share free news as a sort of loss leader. Others say, "if you aren't going to pay we simply don't want you here."

  • pino83 5 minutes ago
    There is no reason for xcancel to exist.

    Either you cancel X. Meaning: NOT consuming X content.

    Or you just visit X.com.

    Right? Right?

    • embedding-shape 4 minutes ago
      > There is no reason for xcancel to exist

      A bit like your comment.

      It's possible that other people you want to read, are using a platform you don't want to use. Have this perhaps never happened to you, even once?

    • bananaflag 5 minutes ago
      I want to know what intelligent people say on X.
  • dpmartinez 38 minutes ago
    Are there other instances available? X can't ban them all.

    I wish legal issues wouldn’t exist for this project and X would stop attacking projects that provide information for free.

    Privacy is important more than ever as many of us don't want to login into X.

    • unfocso 30 minutes ago
      There's plenty of other instances running on nitter, some secret/invite only (and as such more chance to fly under the radar). The code is open source: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter albeit X DMCA'd the repo.
      • amiga386 17 minutes ago
        > X DMCA'd the repo.

        No they didn't, or you'd see the text "Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown." and wouldn't have access to the repo at all. Instead you have full access to it, its author having merely archived it out of caution.

        No reference to nitter in https://github.com/github/dmca/

  • goda90 36 minutes ago
    > You can find the content you were looking for on the original website

    *if you log in to an account

    A big reason many people use Nitter instances is that X has become very locked down for unauthenticated users.

  • jmclnx 34 minutes ago
    This to me is a big issue. You have politicians, government entities and other public institutions posting to twitter, but to access we need to log in.

    There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.

    This comment also applies to facebook too, which I think is even worse than twitter.

    • DaedalusII 32 minutes ago
      but how to do that without protecting the content from enemy LLM companies scraping?
      • jasonlotito 18 minutes ago
        On the off chance someone thinks this is serious, being locked behind a login doesn't prevent your site from being scraped.
        • amiga386 12 minutes ago
          Indeed, the Nitter authors recommended you buy a bundle of Twitter accounts with 2FA details when setting up your own instance, to avoid getting rate-limited.

          There are millions of accounts for sale, roughly $0.10 per account.

          https://hstockplus.com/accounts/twitter-x-accounts?sortBy=pr...

          • zImPatrick 1 minute ago
            This wasn‘t recommended officially by the authors, right? I saw it on someone‘s codeberg fork but not on the official repo
  • esarbe 37 minutes ago
  • accountrequired 33 minutes ago
    i just want to unmute the video and full screen it without logging in. i click twitter link and it is muted.