Few details but glad to see the project will continue. Given how much crucial information is posted exclusively to X, having an alternative frontend is important.
Interesting that they were inspired by Invidious (alternative YouTube frontend). That’s another project that could use some love. Hopefully AI coding tools can do some good and make it easier for these projects to find ways into the walled gardens and work around the counter measures.
Waiting for the day all the social networks allow api access and become usable again. Maybe we can call it “agent first” to help move things along.
If someboy posts something on X...I just assume its a performative act, you dont want to reach an audience and I just ignore. Never creating an account to hear an opinion ....
Aren't most opinions locked behind an account, usually with a pay wall in front?
I don't mean new tech, speaking of traditional ones.
Politicians or whomever, interview with a journalist locked behind a cable subscription or a newspaper or magasine? Someone sharing their thoughts in their latest book bought at one of 3 places with one of the 2 available transactions companies that link you to the final "content".
there is a couple good arguments that alternative front ends open up competition. the first is that since people only see the front end, then augmenting that with additional backends is lower friction. the other is that since network effects are so important (people only go to the busy clubs), that providing a bridge to the existing users and content is kind of mandatory for someone trying to promote an alternative.
No way API access to current socials, they are all doomed. Bluesky/ATProto developments seems to be the best hope and basis today to rebuild and get back to users what is and always was theirs.
Paris' subway and local train lines each have a Twitter account, and they are the only reliable source of information regarding outages. Phone apps (at least three official ones with different data sources!) and websites can be outdated. Displays in station too (though less often), have outages of their own, and (rarely) even incorrect updates.
It almost seems like we need laws that information about public services have to be available on a public website (as opposed to a third-party website that requires registration).
I personally do not know anyone in real life with a twitter account (although I have one, I have not used it in over 15 years), I wonder how many people just go without this information and are angry that it's (seemingly) not available.
There's no way France have no clause in its law everywhere that can be creatively interpreted to be used for that purpose. But that won't get enforced unless there will be a better option than Twitter that average Paris Metro employees understand; they would not be dumb, but they would not care. Average people today can barely grasp the concept of a password.
> some kind of admin panel where employees can easily CRUD some updates
In my experience this is usually the crux. That software always rots, and needs whatever (minimal) on-ramping for employees, as well as access management.
If I could wave a wand at those solutions I'd stop fighting the user and let them post to Twitter or wherever, and just have a public facing page pull those posts as updates for consumers outside of whatever walled garden they originate from.
Access management is already a problem - just maybe they haven’t run into it. What happens when the employee who has the twitter password leaves? (This is France so the only way is probably retirement).
A bespoke system with an interface similar to twitter sounds like it’d be a suitable solution. And I bet it can be vibe coded in 5 minutes.
I'm in the UK and tired of basic public services like the railway company posting service updates to X first. I keep a bookmark to the local train company (Northern in my case) on XCancel but while it was down, I was a bit under-informed. The stuff is on their own website, but it seems to appear there after it appears on X, the layout is crap, and there's no way to contact the company other than via X.
A lot of private companies do the same thing - no way to effectively contact them privately, but as soon as you whinge publicly on X they're "on it". Octopus Energy is one of the worst for that.
More or less the same over here in Germany, except with WhatsApp, which is only slightly better than X, but at least you are likely to already have it installed because of all your contacts that refuse to use a more secure messaging app...
I don't think it's even about being in anyones pocket. They want the publicity. And unless they are all forced to stop using it, everyone has to use it.
> And unless they are all forced to stop using it...
I was talking about the political will to mandate "forcing them to stop using it".
The UK doesn't actually have the economic and political will to put together a national Mastodon or Bluesky instance and mandate that all public agencies use it for their announcements. I'm sure there are three fact-finding committees about it at the moment though.
Partially true. We can make better front ends just for this information. Imagine traindelays.com or whatever. If it's better than Twitter then people will go there, and then we can get a direct feed from the train company, and then they can abandon Twitter.
We need to stop focusing on the specific protocol when it's not relevant and focus more on the patterns. Wanting RSS, specifically, made sense back when everyone had an RSS reader, the same way it makes sense to have an HTML website today because everyone has a web browser. But since very few people have RSS readers now, there's infinite flexibility in the format you use to provide your feed. The most useful is probably a phone app that vibrates your phone with a notification when your train is delayed. RSS can be provided as an option.
I don't disagree and I'm not a mastodon user but, as far as I know, if you local gov hosted an instance and your state gov did too, you could, essentially, join both and see them together?
RSS aggregation seems like the solution to me but I think we've got to admit defeat on that one because it's been around forever and people don't use it.
Pretty much every podcast in the world and all of their listeners are using RSS. WordPress powers something like 30% of the Web, and most of the operators behind those sites are publishing RSS whether they know it or not.
I thought I was more clear than I was being about rss in the context of the conversation about text based news.
How many people consuming text via rss the same way people consume audio via podcasts?
We're talking about text here. We all know how this sentence ends, "You should start a ..." and it isn't rss feed. Everyone used to have a blog and nobody really cared. Now everyone has a podcast and (more) people do. People don't know what an rss feed is.
> We all know how this sentence ends, "You should start a ..." and it isn't rss feed.
I don't know what this means. I'm guessing the correct answer is supposed to be "podcast"? Even so, weird false dichotomy.
That looking at tweets and listening to podcasts is more popular than reading long-form blog posts via RSS has a lot more to do with people's revealed preference for looking at tweets and listening to podcasts versus reading long-form blogs than it has to do with RSS.
(The actual context was delivery of notices by public services through non-Twitter feeds, anyway. Not blogging.)
> People don't know what an rss feed is.
I don't know why you think this is relevant here. It seems that when you're referring to using "RSS", what you mean is for people to care about RSS—in the way that Gemini, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc. have always been about caring about (and almost exclusively using them to talk about) Gemini, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc. than they ever were actually expected to be used organically and non-self-referentially.
The fact is that people (already/still) use RSS today. It hasn't been defeated. And Twitter could turn into an RSS-based feed reader tomorrow that works basically the same as it works today, and then suddenly everyone would be using RSS but no one would drop out because of it. Because people don't know (read: care) what an RSS feed is.
You can follow them both from your own mastodon account on a third server.
It's a technically bad solution though, because mastodon is push. The government server has to maintain a list of everyone who's subscribed and make an HTTP request to all of those random domains, and have some timeout and removal policy because sites die all the time. Pull-based, like RSS, is way cleaner.
A more practical consideration for most people, though, is that the app is full of shit. I mean really full of shit. You open the app and it just spews a torrent of shit at your eyeballs until you close it, mixed with the occasional nugget of gold.
Governments should also be worried about sovereignty.
It's the one I use the most, but in my experience it's lagging behind the Twitter accounts. It's also noisy because it puts last-minute outages at the same level as minor month-long schedule change (which can't be dismissed), so some lines (eg. line R) are almost always displayed as having issues.
But who is publishing the outage information to X/Twitter if not the utility itself? I'd be surprised if they do that more timely and reliably on a third-party platform than their own app. That's not the case for any European or US transit authorities I know.
Can any other user of public transport in Paris comment?
1. the service may not be - every small provider has downtime, perhaps proportionally to their size.
2. the tools to update Twitter are well understood, and you can get software that does scheduling of posts across multiple platforms, previews of what posts will look like, etc etc, and said preview works well on the many platforms that people are already using. People doing the updating may prefer to use those tools over what the internal tool gives them.
It's been a while since I've used Twitter, but I thought the tweet ordering was never chronological. Has this changed? You just have to trust that the algorithm will always surface relevant information to the top of the feed?
Twitter was in a great space for those kind of things. They had a big user base, a simple format and a working API, which was free for those kinds of things. Toolbuilders integrated it. No platform took over as clear successor.
Of course such information should be on the operator's website as primary source ...
They changed terms against their captive users and forced policy changes to end open publishing and firehose APIs—which the organization had once championed and enshrined.
Usability for announcers, I meant. Seems it's easier for them to just post on twitter instead of having to deal with whatever interface their internal systems provide
The funny thing is that one reason that cities, utilities etc. keep posting on Twitter is that it's integrated into their internal systems (or at least to something like Hootsuite that handles multiple social platforms). I'd be very surprised if they're sharing a Twitter password.
It’s still the go-to platform for public figures to broadcast unfortunately, so if you want to verify the original comments you need an alternate frontend or an X account.
Looking at these examples, I can't really see how this information was exclusive to X really:
the currency intervention took place on July 31, during active market hours. It was immediately detected by global trading desks and reported by major news wires like Reuters and Bloomberg as it happened.
When CENTCOM issued the statement regarding the strikes on IRGC targets, the text went live on the official U.S. Central Command Media Portal at the exact same second the automated post hit their X account.
Before anything was posted online, Lightcap sent an official farewell note to the OpenAI team. Once an email is sent to hundreds of tech employees, it was immediately leaked to tech journalists.
It seems, for all three examples, the platform was used merely as a broadcasting service for information that was either already occurring in the public eye or was simultaneously distributed through formal channels.
Easy to see why Twitter wins, even when information isn't exclusive, which it often is (I would've suggested video involved in news events, which is often impossible to find elsewhere but easily gathered on Twitter).
Last time my city had a water cutoff due to a broken main, the city hall posted on Twitter (and I think Facebook?) where and when to queue for drinking water sooner and much more often than on any other channels, their own website included.
The NYC subway system now writes, on X, "Customer care has moved to the MTA app, chat with us there 24/7. Get service status, arrival times and more all in one place. Visit MTA.info/apps". The web page with similar data is "MTA.info".
There are MTA data feeds, in General Transit Feed Specification format, for program use. Those are for systems that update maps.
The MTA dumped Twitter/X in 2023 because Twitter/X wanted to charge them for using their API, and the MTA refused. [1] The MTA also said that Twitter/X had too much downtime.
When the MTA first got into social media, the person who took the job demanded a desk in the rail control center, so she could see all the displays and immediately hear about problems. If someone mentioned a problem on Twitter, she'd reply immediately. That was the right idea. Few organizations have the guts to put the control room on social media.
They don't use Twitter, but my university exclusively uses Facebook for news and relevant announcements like scholarships, days off due to weather, etc. they won't even use their official webpage but for posting the official calendar...
Any big information fan out is pretty useful for JP twitter. Like yes, we’ll get notifications for flooding / earthquake and etc., but if you want up to date, on the ground videos and etc. it’s pretty useful. Not even talking about the train line scenarios as other commentators mentioned.
There’s a system that is not replicable unless you have majority of the population on the same social media.
I don't know about crucial, but a recent amber alert went out last week. It contained a bit.ly link to the CHP's Twitter page and I couldn't see the information. I clicked on it because the alert was from my town, but light on the details.
Surely a public post on a CHP website would have gotten the job done better.
The local emergency services uses it as a duplicate method because it's mostly more reliable than any service they can afford to offer... and historically a lot of people were using the site, so sharing helps get things noticed.
100% agreed, auth-walling the broadcasting service which is de-facto used as a public infrastructure by so many parties around the world is just straight an a-hole move, even though it's a private company and they can do whatever they want about it. Who knows maybe at some point in the future they will decide twitter will only be available with a paid subscription.
I don't know if it is still the case, but when I was writing some Wikipedia articles I discovered the British monarchy seemed to use Twitter exclusively for some purposes.
>Agent First’s supercluster of real, well-behaved browsers bypasses or solves reCAPTCHA, Cloudflare Turnstile, hCaptcha, & other captchas
Can you share how you prevent spammers from simply using this to do what they usually do, or, if not, how you will stop Cloudflare et al. from marking your browsers as bots and hammering them with captchas? Easy access to the plain web for bots is a pretty tough cat and mouse game and I have been playing it with very short term success at best myself.
The API is default rate-limited, so spamming page requests shouldn’t be possible; not behaving like a bot is the relatively easy part – doing so cost-effectively is harder and what I spend more time optimizing for.
Somebody needs to figure out how to move millions of people from one platform to other. Otherwise we will never get better platforms and our current techlords will keep getting richer.
Anyone remember back in the day when every platform had RSS feeds, and you could aggregate your Facebook and Twitter on sites like FriendFeed? “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”
The internet we had in the 90's and early 00's was amazing. Everything felt free, indie, hackable, composable, ingestible. You didn't worry about platforms because most platforms exposed their data via friendly APIs (remember when Reddit and Twitter had an API and that they encouraged people to actually use them?)
RSS everywhere, websites with honest to god Bittorrent links. Software you could download and own without a subscription. Forums, Geocities, personal websites, IRC (no Discord ads, server caps, rules against scripting), RPG Maker 2000.
Google and Facebook and Twitter fucked us. The 2010's - 2020's were cellphone incrementalism and walled garden overgrowth.
Hell, even Flash was awesome pre-Adobe. It was buggy, full of zero day vulns, and was inefficient for mobile, but children as young as 8 could build games and animations -- and they were! We got left with a pile of "standards" CSS, Javascript transpilers, competing standards, nodegrunts, and library churn and it was never the same.
Thankfully, I'm starting to feel that AI models are going to let us tear down the walls. We can easily spin up indie experiments again in our spare hours after work and do a lot of neat stuff. It feels like the late 90's / early 00's again.
I think the biggest mistake Google made was developing AI, which seem to be the seeds of big tech's undoing. We can totally overrun them now.
AI = actually a threat to big tech, not a moat. They're going to kill themselves with their own product.
We'll probably build distributed protocols that can finally get the product and UX love that compel people to start using them.
And it feels so awesome to just build things I love - games on the weekend, custom audio players, file organizers, SRS software. I'm loving software again for the first time in a long time. Robotics...
I'd say advertising has fucked up the Internet. Everything they (and plenty of others) have done has been to collect and sell personal data to advertising brokers.
Nothing wrong with honest advertising per se..... back in the day we bought computer magazines mainly for the adverts.
Rather, the problem is the SV AdTech industry which seeks to track me, invade my privacy at every opportunity and is busy sniffing my knickers trying to work out if I'm pregnant so they can sell me more shite.
One observes the FUD those employed by AdTEch are spreading on here about the GDPR; a bunch of people whose very salaries are dependent on abusing our privacy.
The problem was that the Internet allowed for the "innovation" of tracking users to send specific ads to them. And it wasn't made promptly illegal. That's all it took
That Google failed to turn Google Reader into a giant open blogging social network and instead created G+ is something we will still be wondering after Google itself has stopped existing.
Institutional misincentives at Google. People are promoted for launching a product, and they're promoted away from the product they launched, and nobody wants to maintain it since you don't get promoted for maintaining a product someone else launched.
There are a lot of possible futures for Google. Here are a couple that I see:
1. Google de-ossifies and starts shipping. They have all the AI talent and infra necessary to "own" AI and get people and industry using its models and products. They don't have the same costs that OpenAI and Anthropic do and have a much healthier income stream. They can productively put Gemini in front of more people and embed deep into people's lives. Google leapfrogs Apple, Amazon, Meta, and its other peers because of its incumbent advantages in AI, data, and distribution.
2. Google bleeds out all Google Search ad revenue. People switch away from Chrome to browser agents that have adblock and remove ads. Gemini languishes. Once unassailable Android comes under attack from vibe coded upstarts that no longer require a trillion dollars to compete. Google still sells a lot of enterprise B2B infra (cloud, workspace) and YouTube continues to thrive. Everything else about Google becomes IBM while YouTube becomes Comcast. Still a giant, but a shell of its former self.
I'm sure there are other possible futures as well, but these are the two I see for Google.
I keep oscillating between predictions #1 and #2. Right now I'm feeling #2.
While I remain anxious about the dystopian future AI may ultimately deliver to us, this has been a clear silver lining in my eyes.
I have an old Wyze Scale that restricts advanced features behind a proprietary mega-app, forcing users to swipe past their other services. I've now been able to reverse engineer their Bluetooth protocol which can be used with tools like OpenScale.
In an older world, this would have been a prolonged endeavor for juice that ultimately isn't worth the squeeze. Now it can now takes place in an afternoon.
I really want them both atomised. Not sold for parts. Not reconstituted into smaller monopolies. Not state owned. Just like, delete both businesses and push their physical assets into a dry lakebed and blow them up.
And then remove all copyright law and patents pertaining to software. So the subsequent players are forced to play nice with everyone.
For a while after the acquisition you could syndicate your external blog's RSS feed into your Facebook profile. Didn't take long for that to get the axe.
What are incentives for the average person? Their logic seems straightforward: they want to be where their friends are at. And all they want to do there is cycle through their base emotions at a whim's pace.
Whatever politics or technologies that make alternative platforms "better" to some people doesn't matter to most. The idea that new platforms should even have the "millions" (read: the masses) in mind comes across as being antithetical to the trend toward decentralized tech.
> What are incentives for the average person? Their logic seems straightforward: they want to be where their friends are at
This is some sort of absolute, fundamental difference between the early web and now, at least how I experienced it as a teen in the late 90s in Hungary. Back then I made a site, because you wanted to make something of my own, in my style, as I wanted. There was nobody else online from my friends, and I made new friends online. I actually found my age people on ICQ, within the same subculture.
This "oh my friends are there" approach is what destroys everything. More precisely the people who can't decide for themselves.
Then do you think that the average person's disinterest in moving to different platforms is a bad thing? How does this affect the ideal version of the web it seems like you're advocating for?
Those users indeed don't matter. The problem is the cool kids are on Twitter & co as well these days. Because that's where they have the most reach. Almost everyone on social media cares about reach, there isn't much of a point to posting things that no one reads.
The old web was a very different place, it wasn't as centralized and there were significantly fewer people around. There were specific forums that you'd go to for specific topics. Say you were interested in West African dances - there was usually the one forum where all the West African dance nerds hung out. At most a couple of different ones. And they were very small communities. If there were issues with the admins or moderation users could and did do mass walk-outs and create a new place.
That's kind of the same thing though - the people you wanted to interact with were there. They just were a different cohort than what you might find on something like Instagram today.
I made a site, I put it out there, because as a 14 year old, it was fantastic I could make completely mine and nobody else's at all. That was the drive.
What is the average person losing now on closed platforms?
Think about why they should care about your answer and if there's any proof that it bothers them to the degree that they may view your alternative platforms as actual solutions.
atproto is very promising here, being able to separate personal data from social platforms will make it far easier for people to mass migrate to other services. Unfortunately this selling point is more focused towards tech savvy people but with personal data and privacy becoming more of a concern to the average user online, and social platforms which are working towards keeping bots away its possible.
I don't see that at all personally. Maybe 10% of the posts I see are political/drama, and almost none of them are insulting posts from other platforms.
Migration in Mastodon works quite well. You're still confined to the one ActivityPub platform but you can easily move to a new server with a new community and different policies.
In the early days of social media it was a standard that you could get your lists of friends, etc out and then use them to bootstrap your social network on new social media. All the big players like Twitter and Facebook took advantage of that and then locked down their own platforms to make it hard for you to move your social network out of them.
In the early days of the internet it was a standard that people had different accounts on different sites and there wasn't any federation. We're doing it right now - my hacker news account doesn't work on mastodon or on reddit.
Perhaps part of the reason we don't do that any more is that signup is so high friction? It used to be just username, password, confirm password, captcha, submit. But now it's username, password, confirm password, email, phone number, captcha, submit, go to phone, open email app, wait for slow loading, refresh, wait for slow refresh, click email, see long link, click link, "this must be opened on the device you signed up with", back, retype 100 random characters on the computer with perfect accuracy, "email verified", next step, go to phone, open SMS app, wait for slow loading, no new SMS, back to computer, "send code again (wait 60 seconds)", wait 60 seconds, click it, go to phone, finally get a 6-digit code, back to computer, type it in, submit.
Signing up for things is a massive chore now. Because they want so much personal identification data, that they don't actually need for the function because they never send an email or an SMS.
And if you're signing up on the same device you're checking your email and SMS on, it's straight up impossible because every time you switch to the email app, it unloads the browser app and forgets its state so the verification is invalid. You have to keep trying 6-7 times and hope maybe one time you'll do it quick enough that the browser will stay resident in memory.
I actually have at least two phone apps that are social-adjacent that do signup secretly in the background. You just install the app, and it generates a random identifier and uses that as your account ID. Nothing is visible to the user. In the settings is an import/export option for device migration. If you want signups, this is how to get them.
Adversarial interoperability works well for this. Facebook did it in its early days — it let you connect your account on then-popular competing social media website (MySpace, probably, I don't remember for sure) and would import your social graph and crosspost on your behalf.
I think something that could help is moving together rather than one-by-one. We could have a website where you can register as "ready to move from X to Y when N other people are", when the goal is reached everybody gets a notice it's time to move.
Only through regulations mandating interoperability and enforced at national level. This is social problem, not technological one. So technology won't solve it
"Move," like these platforms are places... I think that were going to have to kick that mental habit before we have social protocols that are not susceptible to walledgardenification. Technology aside, the notion of a way of communicating being a place is fundamentally susceptible to bad behavior on the part of whoever controls that place.
We need social media which are actually media. Speech, dance, watercolor... these are media and nobody has had to abandon them because of a poorly behaving owner.
Twitter, whatever it is, is not a medium, nor is it a place.
We could mandate that any platform beyond a certain (huge) size must provide open interoperability APIs.
Less radically, we can demand that any entity that takes any public money (and of course public entities themselves) avoid communicating solely through closed platforms.
It's insane that the primary public communication channel for e.g. certain UK government institutions and the Norwegian police, was Twitter at one point!
This is the correct approach. If these American companies want to operate in our countries, and maintain their positions as our primary information channels, then they need to obey laws.
We need open APIs, transparent algorithms, and above all, accountability.
This is more or less the approach that the EU is taking with the DMA. As with most EU regulatory projects, it proceeds, ah, _slowly_ (Twitter isn't yet subject to it, for instance, apparently largely because historically it didn't have a high enough market cap, though the new entity where it's been tacked onto a rocket launch company and a racist LLM presumably now qualifies...)
The network is the people, the platform is the tech. Which do you need?
If you're engaging in discussions you need the network. If you're reading municipal weather warnings you don't really, it's just a data source that can be copied anywhere.
People want to be on platforms where their friends already are. Its a hard problem to solve because how do you get their friends to move onto your platform when they're people too and have the same desire?
The average person, on either end of political or cultural spectrum, or anywhere on anything for that matter, is fine with wherever they are. Also, the last thing they want is an overtly opinionated and often increasingly hostile population on alternative platforms and apps, sometimes actually moderated by, spearheaded by, benevolent admin overlords. They are less worried about migrating their data, or preserve it, than the hn crowd, criting cron jobs and backup and migration scripts, whenever the need comes. That’s why they won’t migrate, they will just start using the next service and then the next and next. Until then they are not interested and it shows. Serves right for the economic and governance models we as a collective society chose — it applied in everything, there’s no picking. Not that this is how it should be or should not be, but this is how it is.
>Somebody needs to figure out how to move millions of people from one platform to other
it's been solved, ban the platform. This is a collective action problem. Even if every single user on platform X wants to move to platform Y, as long as they can't coordinate the movement individual cost exceeds the benefit they'd all get.
So the most straight forward way is to get rid of the platform , and everyone will move out of necessity.
I suppose if we could standardize on some kind of federation protocol and have locally-stored (and synced between devices) identities we could use for accounts everywhere, that would solve a lot of problems, but I don't see it happening.
And in the context of twitter-style platforms, federation to me has always seemed like a "which wind would you like to piss into?" situation where you have no idea what servers/people can even see what you're posting, especially when many (even large) servers not only share centralized error-prone block/ban lists but also keep defederating from each other.
Yes but on the scale of traditional social media sites' account populations, AT users are currently a rounding error. And sites aren't required to provide federation.
There's always the big bad scary word, "decentralization".
But of course, even among HNers, there's amazing cognitive dissonance among "decentralization is hard and takes effort" and "omg, of course the next centralized platform won't be bought by an insecure dictator-wannabe".
I'm not that old, it's played out over and over. I shouldn't even comment here. Decentralization or bust.
Wikipedia has a whole lot of problems, you just don't notice them, because the media isn't interested in shining a spotlight on it like they do with other platforms and the drama that happens there is fairly well hidden, despite being openly accessible for the most part.
People have also been conditioned to mostly trust whatever is on Wikipedia despite years of efforts to hammer it into people that this is not an okay assumption.
It would be better for there to be a bunch of Wikis that are competing with each other evenly. Having only Wikipedia is not a healthy thing.
> It would be better for there to be a bunch of Wikis that are competing with each other evenly. Having only Wikipedia is not a healthy thing.
... I mean, there _are_ (Conservapedia, Ruwiki, Metapedia, etc). It's just that the non-wikipedia generalist ones are so poorly run that no sensible person would ever use them, and usually have a fairly extreme ideological bent (there's a spectrum; Metapedia originally showed up because Conservapedia was insufficiently delusional for some peoples' liking) which requires them to wholesale make shit up (as the old joke goes, reality has a liberal bias). However, if Wikipedia ever goes all evil, I would assume it'll just be forked (there've been a number of prior forks, but except for Ruwiki they've generally died due to lack of interest).
There are, honestly, serious economies of scale here. Unless Wikipedia actually has gone evil, well, no-one actually wants to maintain 66 million articles (No-one, say, wants to maintain 14,000 articles about bridges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Bridges_...). Specialist wikis work, but it'll take something fairly dramatic to break Wikipedia's dominance.
(In an ideal world, I think this _would_ be more decentralised, but it's just very difficult for that to happen in practice. I think much more difficult than social media, which has never really _fully_ centralised in the first place.)
Other Wikis nobody knows or uses aren't really alternatives. Just like Odyssee isn't an alternative to Youtube.
Unfortunately Wikipedia exists within a collective blind spot, so I am not expecting the situation to change. At most people will drop Wikipedia in favor of LLMs, which is even worse.
I would like decentralization (mostly for resilience in case of natural and human made disasters if anything), but for the control I am not sure it is better. Someone has to make a choice of what is shown. Someone has to moderate things. And I am not even sure who is the best to do that - am I capable to decide a good balance between in-bubble and out-of-bubble content; or decide about the difference between hate-speech and free-speech ? Who can I trust to do that? Would a communist/libertarian/etc. be better than an insecure wannabe dictator?
A common pattern I see is to build a competitor to a platform people are outraged at and then completely fumble the step of acquiring the hate site's userbase by gating your new one behind an invite only system for months.
We have better platforms, most people are just too passive to switch. The masses should stay where they are so as not to invade and pollute the newer and better communities with the same problems that inevitably come with high scale.
The billionaires make using their products quite simple. It was easy to sign up for twitter back when it was still usable. Even before Elon took over, it basically died.
The first step is to actually make a better platform.
The problem with all the decentralized alternatives is that they sacrifice usability for decentralization and then almost nobody cares about decentralization so for most people it's only downsides.
The CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice. This may seem crazy to the hyper-political crowd but most people really do not see themselves as being part of this war where every single decision they make in their lives has to prioritize their side.
When choosing a social network, probably the top priority for most people is where the people they want to talk to are.
If CEO antics were the thing that mattered, I would certainly choose Bluesky over X. But the reality is the tech community -- at least, the part of it I want to interact with -- is mostly on X. Many of us tried to switch to Bluesky for a bit but ironically got pushed back to X due to Bluesky culture being hostile to tech and especially hostile to AI. I'd post the same non-political tech thing on X and Bluesky and get lots of interesting feedback on X while getting screamed at on Bluesky, so I stopped posting on Bluesky.
Would love for this to change but it's a hard problem.
When it comes to CEO actions I'd unfortunately still choose Elon over Jackoff if the question is which site to use because the latter has shown when he ran Twitter that he will happily manipulate and censor discourse to appease the current mob mentality/political climate.
Two evils, but one has a better (still not amazing) track history of supporting free speech and ideas, so that's the what I would use. I don't have to follow the CEO on their platform.
AFAIK Jack Dorsey has not been affiliated with Bluesky for quite some time. I was thinking of Jay Graber, but actually she's not CEO anymore either. I don't know anything about the new guy TBH.
EDIT: Oops, I think I misinterpreted, you meant to compare Jack vs. Elon as CEOs of Twitter itself.
> because the latter has shown when he ran Twitter that he will happily manipulate and censor discourse to appease the current mob mentality/political climate
Could you expand a bit on what you are referring to here?
There were many examples of Twitter censoring and suppressing people and subjects. Some of the best reporting of the time was from Matt Taibbi, who won awards for his reporting, sometimes called the "Twitter Files." These are some of the worst examples:
1. Internal records released in the Twitter Files showed employees used tools like “Search Blacklist”, “Trends Blacklist” and “Do Not Amplify” against users. Verified examples included lockdown critic Dr Jay Bhattacharya, conservative commentator Dan Bongino, and political activist Charlie Kirk.
2. Twitter’s ranking systems could make replies much harder to see, collapse them beneath conversations, exclude posts from search/home feeds, and reduce distribution. Twitter itself admitted to hiding “questionable content” from replies, search and timelines as part of its enforcement system.
3. Twitter labelled and reduced the reach of claims it considered "misleading" about elections. Between 27 October and 11 November 2020 it classified around 300,000 tweets as "misleading". 456 users received warnings that also prevented normal liking, replying, or retweeting. Twitter estimated its interventions cut "quote-tweets" of "labelled" posts by about 29%.
4. In October 2020, less than three weeks before the presidential election, Twitter prevented users from sharing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden through both tweets and direct messages, and locked the Post's account. Twitter initially cited its "hacked-materials/private-information" rules even though it had not established that the material had been hacked. Jack Dorsey later acknowledged that blocking distribution publicly and privately had been a mistake.
5. Twitter adopted COVID-related rules under which staff would label users or tweets so they could be suppressed. By March 2021 Twitter said it had removed more than 8,400 tweets and “challenged” 11.5 million accounts under its COVID policies. Twitter explicitly stated that labelled COVID material could receive reduced visibility. This meant that legitimate political and scientific arguments about lockdowns, vaccines, and public-health policy could become moderation questions if Twitter classified them as "misinformation."
6. From 2018, Twitter's "hateful-conduct" rules explicitly prohibited "misgendering" or "deadnaming" of transgender people. Scores of users were permanently banned under these rules. In 2022, Twitter locked the Babylon Bee's account after it called transgender Biden administration official Rachel Levine its “Man of the Year”. Twitter required deletion of the tweet before normal access would resume.
7. Twitter permanently banned Trump in January 2021 after stating that two tweets "created a risk of further incitement of violence." These were the Tweets:
> “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
> “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
8. They maintained regular contact with US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. Yoel Roth stated formally that from 2018 he had regular meetings with the FBI, DHS, and ODNI, including weekly discussions concerning anticipated 2020 election “hack-and-leak” operations. Internal records showed government agencies forwarding individual social-media posts to Twitter for review.
I will end by telling you of my personal experience during the worst years of Twitter. As someone who disagrees with San Francisco social orthodoxy on a few issues, I received an account warning for writing a rather milquetoast tweet about how I thought children should be allowed to grow up normally without medical intervention. For a few years, it was one of the most censorious places on the internet.
It's laughable to claim Elon supports free speech: he's the guy who will ban anyone for calling him out or challenging him (Google it if you don't believe me)
If you keep your feed on "following" instead of "for you", then the algorithm is irrelevant.
TBH I'm pretty confused why anyone uses "for you". For me at least, any time I accidentally wander over to that feed, the stuff it shows me is just dumb... not even political necessarily, just dumb clickbaity shit that insults my intelligence.
The only time I ever see hyper-political stuff is if I peek into the replies to a prominent politician. Highly recommend never doing that.
> The CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice.
These people need to realize that what you see is what shapes your thinking and the social network's algorithm decides what you see and what you don't see. In the case of X, it's grok aka Mechahitler.
It's true that every now and then they do some sort of prompt engineering on Grok that turns it into mechahitler for a few hours, and it's quite weird and disturbing.
Most of the time though, it's actually pretty reasonable. Many times I've seen right-wingers try to ask grok to confirm their beliefs, only to have it shoot them down. Pretty funny honestly. Elon will often claim it's a bug in Grok when he doesn't like the answer.
Wish we could find out what's actually going on there. Are they trying to bias Grok, but finding it's actually very hard to introduce subtle bias (as opposed to extreme, "mechahitler" bias)? That would be a fascinating and very positive result for LLMs in general.
Or is it that, like, the Grok team is resisting Elon's attempts to introduce bias, and when they can't resist any more, they intentionally overdo it, which gives them an excuse to roll it back?
Or is Elon's whole public persona a cynical performance intended to win power and political favors from Republican leadership while in private he actually isn't right-leaning at all and actually wants Grok to be a balanced truth machine for the good of humanity? lol, probably not, but it would explain a few things.
He made the "my heart goes out to you" motion (thump your hand over your heart, then fling it out towards the audience), people took a static image of the last part of it, and left out the context to create outrage bait for clicks.
Someone disagreeing with you on the interpretation of that event does not make him a Nazi. You need to take many steps back from the polarized thinking you are engaging in, because it ultimately harms you to lash out at people in this way.
One thing that's a occasionally annoying (because I deleted my account) but understandable is that a lot of the non-English speakers have stayed on X because it's easy for them to ignore the Nazis.
No. They don't have eyes, because its quite clear to anyone with half a brain that it's not a nazi salute, and is no different to the same hand gesture that democrats use. It's sad the loud minority still believe calling everyone a nazi or fascist bears any weight.
The comment is a lie. I live in a major US city. They marched through the city in 2025 (minimally) with white face masks, red armbands with the Nazi symbol, doing Nazi salutes. Saw with my own eyes or I would have also not believed it. Absolutely shameful.
> iirc your comments weren't even making any big statements, just giving out your simple opinions without even invoking any political beliefs
Initially I did type out more, but I didn't want to turn it into an argument, so I kept its simple.
I just don't like that the left keep spouting out that elon did a nazi salute when he didn't, and his gesture is no different to anything the democrats have done. But HN is frustrating like this. You try to keep it simple and neutral. Downvoted/flagged. You voice your opinion. Downvoted/flagged.
downvoting is expected, like on Reddit, but flagging comments like yours, that's a first for me
if people are so convinced that you and Elon are both super Nazis or something then why not show everyone what vile things you've typed here (iirc it was just "it was not a nazi salute." or something like that)
- Mamdani, who in contrast to Musk does mingle quite a lot in anti-Semite cirles
- Bernie Sanders, a Jew himself but that has never kept anyone from being called a nazi
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also often seen in anti-Semite circles
- Kamala Harris
- Elizabeth Warren, who later also supported nazi-tattoo candidate Graham Platner whom she called 'my type of man'
- Hillary Clinton
- ...and many others
Of course the legacy press has excuses for all these nazi-saluting individuals except for Musk, calling these photo's 'coincidental' or 'taken out of context'. The truth is that none of these individuals, Musk included, made nazi salutes but that is not what the narrative pushes and with that unfortunately also not what this here site - HN - accepts.
I think it's also that Elon is such an easy target as he's terminally online and always replies/retweets weird and controversial stuff
so all these social justice warriors pick the easiest target and point to some tweet/image and say "Nazi!" thinking they've done some great servitude to humanity and can now feel great about themselves.
kind of like using paper straws and patting yourself in the back
1. "you have said the actual truth" reply to some guy about the great replacement thing or mass migration? which was then followed up with an apology and he said it was one of the most foolish things he's ever done.
2. said George soros hates humanity
3. compared Trudeau to a Adolf Hitler
4. some WW2 photo with a Wehrmaht soldier with a caption as a meme
5. mocking those who called him a nazi by saying stuff like "bet you did Nazi that coming"
considering all the other kinds of things he's done and posted on Twitter, I'm not convinced he's an evil nazi yet
It is a fact that Musk is a Nazi. If someone publicly gives a Nazi salute and publicly endorses trash like the great replacement theory, I’m going to call them a Nazi, because that’s what they are.
If other CEOs say similar stuff in private, that’s really sad. If they ever say it publicly, I’ll call them Nazis as well.
You're not going to get many volunteers to move from a free-speech platform to a censored one. Everyone who wants the censorship is already on BlueSky or Mastodon. Part of sharing a society with people is being okay with their being able to say things you don't like.
This is true. Why would anyone not establishment liberal go to BlueSky? I'm playing with Nostr but these decentralized social media platforms are a no go for 90% of people. Now I'm wondering why we're talking about Twitter or political social media in general in 2026. That's long over with. Move on.
There are instances full of actual Nazis on Mastodon - that we can choose to refuse to interact with those instances (yes, I've blocked a nazi instance on my instance) does not prevent them from talking amongst themselves or to people who want to talk to them.
Censorship is not refusing to listen to people we find abusive. People are not entitled to force me to listen.
A federated platform is far more resistant to censorship than X is.
How is it not censorship if you are making the decision for not only yourself, but others, too? It sounds like saying bleeping swear words on TV isn't censorship because you just don't want to hear bad language.
People are choosing to be on instances which block certain things. That's their choice. I want to be able to have a conversation without filling it with racist screaming. Choosing to be in places that don't allow that is my choice.
If I refuse Nazis access to my house and other people chose to visit my house knowing I won't let Nazis in, I'm not censoring Nazis as I have no influence on their freedom of speech - they remain entirely free to speak elsewhere, to people who are willing to listen. I have no power to stop them from speaking, just to offer those who don't want to listen somewhere where they won't have to.
Nobody is forced to join a Mastodon instance that censors Nazis - there are many that don't, or you can run your own.
I never used either Twitter or Mastodon and don't quite understand what people use these platforms for. But I hear folks saying they are there because other people they know are there.
How would it work on Mastodon if you want to communicate with two people that happen to have each others instances blocked? Is it like having to use both Twitter and BlueSky or does it solve the problem more elegantly?
If that matters to you, you pick an instance that rarely blocks, and then you can talk to both of them seamlessly.
Occasionally some people are affected because they've picked a major-ish but somewhat block-happy instance, in which case they can either move their account (the experience for a move on Mastodon isn't great but it does work) or create a second one if it really matters to them.
Usually people will find out pretty early on if they're on an instance whose policies they agree with or not, so even if the account migration is jankier than it should be, it's rarely a major problem (in that instance - if instances shut down it's more problematic)
The "free speech" on X made it so that I had to self-censor, though. Any post about wanting cycle infrastructure in my city was met with death threats and abuse from right wing bluecheckmarked lunatics. Is that really what free speech is about?
I don't know, it sounds like there's some very good reasons to move away from a centralized platform where the owner can randomly decide he doesn't like you and ban you.
I don't know what all that's about, but the day-to-day experience is that you can find a wide range of opinions on X and a much narrower range on alternatives. I don't think a lot of people who aren't already on these alternatives are in favor of restricting the range of expressed opinions.
"I don't know what all those sources that describe specific instances of Twitter restricting free speech are about, but my vibes tell me that the other platforms restrict free speech."
It would be unfortunate for xAI, which abused the TOS of OpenAI for distilling via user accounts, to get a ruling that forbids scraping via user accounts.
The entire business model of the AI industry, who resell and launder the scraped data, would collapse.
Nitter just makes it visible to a human and has anti-scraper measures necessitated by the thieves like xAI.
Additionally, a GoFundMe would reach astronomical proportions given how unpopular Musk is.
While true, parent comment's first point (that the plaintiff would be unwilling to make the winning argument) would have an impact on their ability to spend the defendent to death. Judges do notice when you don't have an actual argument.
Serious comment: I wonder how this dynamic will change when AI has some real legal chops. One could spin up agents that could sift through all the BS discovery docs and correspondence they send to waste time and money. The agents could presumably even file the necessary paperwork on your behalf. Obviously not a lawyer, just food for thought.
Unserious comment: The big company will spin up swarms of agents whose job is to overwhelm your AI agents with legal requests / correspondence, still with the goal of making you run out of money (but now via AI spend).
Plot twist they'll be running Claude Bible or GPT-Galaxy with max reasoning on, against my dumb local Qwen-0.8b and they'll run out of money before I do.
Second: the US justice system is also a joke. I could fight Google in justice and win in my country (France) and in pretty much any other developed country because a working system doesn't let big actor DoS smaller player out of justice. You obviously can't fix a corrupt syatem with technology.
but clearly there is diminishing returns on spend here right? Assuming that tokens will get cheap enough then once we both spend 10,000$ no one's is getting more advantage because both LLMs exhaust all effective paths hitting high rates of diminishing returns making further attack investments mostly void.
Genuine question - isn't legal stuff one of the things AI should in theory be very good at? Legalese is like code, in that every word is very strictly defined and there to do a specific job in the text. I feel like that's one of the things AI would be good at writing and interpreting.
It's far from trivial to set up anything more formalised than a loose taxonomy. People have been trying for a few decades now. AI will help automate this formalisation with graphs etc but it's not good enough yet for you to give a judge 13m LOC of mathlic proving your client isn't guilty.
And yet all the lawyers are dripping in AI. I got a near final doc from one the other day with a bunch of perplexity bullshit in it. How is this real life…
Probably the first time I've read a headline of some kind where good news followed something like "Due to legal advice". I hope the best for any service using Nitter, because the split between X and Bluesky is becoming another red vs. blue making life difficult for everyone else.
Maybe there could be a joining path: an ActivityPub joining ATProto and Nitter/X or something so no need to miss out on anything by being on "the other".
It's a split between user expirences that do and don't optimize for rage and culture wars and engagement bait. If there's also a de facto red vs. blue split, it's due to which community gravitates to which model of what a social network should be.
Look I wanted to like bsky but the fact is that their userbase has been doing as much rage and culture wars and engagement bait as any other. I mean look at what just happened the other day with the paint.net guy
It seems the paint.net situation was more about anti-AI folks vs a pro AI dev. Not very red or blue coded, nor engagement bait, as far as I can tell. I suppose it is something of a culture war. Albeit without the CEO's thumb on the scales.
Eh, honestly, "entity gets nasty legal letter, entity stops doing thing, entity resumes doing thing after its own lawyers say, 'yeah, nah'" is a fairly common pattern.
Glad they were able to get legal help and are back. It’s frustrating to me how it’s so hard to access so many websites nowadays without being logged in. Ridiculous that so much of the web nowadays is just a handful of websites almost all of which seem to have so many restrictions.
It's the ability to reply, I think. Like this one. Makes you feel like you're doing something even though you're just shouting into a black hole where some other people are also shouting and you might even hear each other sometimes.
Way too much, obviously. It’s an Android app that exposes the underlying Android OS cli, and bolts on a Linux user space. Unsure why it’s relevant to this discussion
Reading between the lines it appears that the only argument twitter had is that they could not enforce content moderation due to the archival nature of nitter. Pretty cool to see that archival sites cannot get C&D'd that easily!
Correct me if I am wrong, but I'm pretty sure they could get away with this because nitter is not an archival software, but rather a frontend or alternative twitter proxy.
When I got my first cease and desist my lawyer basically asked me if this is a hill you are willing to die on (i.e. spend enormous amounts of time and money on). I with them luck. I suspect a Go Fund Me announcement coming soon.
Anna's Archive has huge data stores behind it, Nitter doesn't and is easy to replicate. You, yes you, can and should set one up right now. They can't get all of us. If you post it to #nitter:matrix.org it might even get included on the public instance lists.
You're thinking of pre-LLM times. Nowadays GPT-6 can probably advise them better than all the worlds law firms combined. And probably win too, considering the incompetence (and tech illiteracy) of human lawyers.
What's even crazier is that those brokers typically won't sell to members of the general public; there exists basically no reasonable ability to obtain most case law in most states.
LLMs have been making so many mistakes that the big firms have slowed or even paused their LLM spend. And that was before CA passed a law relating legal AI use.
Have citations of case law that doesn't exist been addressed? It seemed like that kind of outcome being punished might make people less likely to try relying on LLM output for legal situations without an expert human performing a review.
A problem right now is that GPT-6 is just a chatbot, and wouldn't be able to file any counterclaims (which involve human lawyers and billable hours) when fElon decides to wage a battle of attrition in the courtrooms.
Optimistically assuming you can do a lot of stuff well with GPT-6 in the legal space, its still going to be a lot of money -
1. Various court fees may still be thousands
2. You still will likely need to have at least _some_ legal representation. Not as much as before, but still thousands of dollars worth
3. You need to pray that your non-legal brain can catch any issues, both strategic & tactical, that GPT-6 produces because X's lawyers will be happy to pounce.
Cool to see such a notable Nim based project continue! It's unfortunate that X tries to block Nitter so often, but zedeus always seems to find a path around technical or now legal issues.
Nitter's author has suggested at least once that due to problems with Nim, a rewrite in Go is in the works:
"The long-term plan is to rewrite the source code in Go, as I'm no longer interested in using Nim. This isn't a small task, but building more features with the current state of things is painful. Before doing that I'll fix some feature parity issues, and work on some conveniences for instance operators. Stay tuned."
Interesting, well too bad. Personally I find Nim more useful and productive than ever with LLMs.
Nitter uses Jester which seems dead for sure, but doing static binaries is easy. Personally I just forked Mummy to continue as MummyNG since I prefer threaded servers so things like JSON parsing doesn’t cause latency issues.
Though that being written over a year ago it’s either not a high priority or harder than it seems. I’ll be curious to see which. LLMs make it easier than ever for others to contribute or to fix up deps.
More stable, commonly supported platform I presume. You don't want to be on a snowflake platform for a long running project, it only causes endless problems.
> Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue.
The word "project" doesn't make a clear distinction between the repo and the instances. Nitter is on good ground with respect to the repo. The instances will be much harder to defend. From that one sentence it isn't clear if this is what the legal advice says or not.
Nitter changed their design such that it now requires an X account to scrape through. This was to stay functional after X removed guest accounts. This exposes them to a legal attack through the terms of service that must be accepted for the account, and to technical attack by blocking the scraping accounts.
Maybe we should define and spec what is an Open Platform, say RSS, Mastodon, grandma cookies recipe in a txt in an Apache, etc. Then paint a beautiful "open platform" logo and start making some collective noises, some pinky flower good-guy psiops. If reply is it alrady exists, it ain't rather working. Currently civil life is being shaped for the algos and the money, that is ok in business terms, we civilians are not coaxed to post or follow Twitter or Facebook as in an Orwellian bad dream. We rather opt-in, yet the politic process is not more illustrated despite all factual discussions at a chat distance of resolution, rational debate is penalized for being boring and much we are offered is as gamified as the Aliexpress user experience. Let's convince ourselves first that the parallel non-profit internet is a grand place to find the full spectrum of human rant in all its glory and gore. Hail the guy in his basement that made and documented a COTS parts scanning tunnel microscope. That is open platform content. Heck, remember webrings? Megacorps are not the problem, it is us being lazy even as spectators.
People don't gravitate to open or closed platforms, or platforms at all. They gravitate to something else. I think it's the ability to reply to a global conversation and feel like you're doing something, like I am right now.
Making services better isn't the goal of the company, I'm sure they could make it better in a month if they wanted to but they'd lose money (which is what's important).
I never bothered with nitter until elon made the site unusable for people not signed in. If he undid the changes and then sold the company I’d probably a bother to update the url the next time my nitter redirects stopped working.
How much does he even care about the details of X these days?
I suspect the original C&Ds were just their legal team wanting to "do something" upon hearing about Nitter somehow, and not Elon personally commanding them.
...and I noticed that X did bring back a (quite) limited JS-free "lite version" recently, so maybe they are changing for the better.
Keep in mind that trademarks are registered independently in different jurisdictions, so IP offices and courts are likely to not align in different countries on that point.
It seems like it would be a trivial statistical exercise to find all the nitter instance X accounts and just ban them, it's actually embarrassing they got lawyers involved instead of just doing that if they didn't want nitter to function.
I wonder if instead of an alternative frontend, coordinated scrappers was investigated as the solution, the benefit being partial access still available when the defense step up.
I'll be surprised if there was actually any legal advice at all. And if there was it was probably pertaining only to the legality of the software project itself, not actually hosting and running an instance with the explicit goal of facilitating the unauthorized access of Twitter's website.
Some government bodies and officials post "official" public communications on x/facebook which may not be mirrored or oreserved anywhere else in same format.
There has to be a reasonable way to preserve these comms for public benefit.
The software project itself is probably fine, but the legal risk is always going to be with the person that hosts it with the intention of facilitating the unauthorized access of Twitter's website. Seems like that could run afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Explain to me why that matters at all in an ethical sense. Especially given the scraping / pirating that's gone on by all of these companies in the last number of years.
Host the infra in countries unfriendly to the US and its legal framework apparatus. Continually package the archive as torrents for distribution globally.
Of course. xAI can also run gas generators to power its data centers and pump toxins into the air around local communities. Grok can generate non-consensual nude images of women (and CSAM). Their owner can make nazi salutes and demolish agencies millions depend on. Rules, laws and ethics are for poor people.
Everyone does what's best for their own interests. We should not sit down and obey Elon's interests - we should support our own by running more Nitters.
And DOGE can get everyone's personal data but nobody can see crash data from his cars or full reports from government agencies about crashes, or where he's flying in his jet, or where he buys and owns properties...
It's getting to the point where his private security are harassing people for walking down the street in their own neighborhood that runs alongside one of his "compounds."
Presumably there’s a future where your ai agent posts all your videos / pictures / comments on every platform you have so we get around the idea of X, for example, being the only one to receive posts?
Anybody still think Elon Musk is a great guy who wants nothing but the best for humanity?
I mostly wonder how far he'll fall, but to say I'm disappointed would be a gross understatement. What surprises me is that people keep working for him.
I feel like setting up the social media is a solved problem. And while getting users is hard, if you hook up to the fediverse, you can piggy back off other
Platforms. I think the harder problem is making it profitable
No this is the hard problem. HN people live in a bubble. Anything else than signup with oauth and then having access to everyone and its too hard and 99% of people will click away.
I think the friction is higher than that. With few exceptions I basically won't use any new service that requires me to create an account. I do all my online shopping on sites that offer guest checkout. Zero chance I'm creating any new social accounts at this point.
You using the word oauth means you're in the same bubble. People want signup with Google or Apple or even better, username/password signup or zero signup
Keep in mind that those front-ends are, in general, much more friendly towards noscript/basic HTML browsers than the official front-ends broke a few year ago.
(well, nitter was at the time)
Don't think the 'whatwg cartel' will let some web not require their web engines.
Expect shadowpaid hackers to ruin their infrastructure. Don't be a fool, expect the worst (more so when the whatwg cartel is involved).
And if you, yeah you! If you are running an "AI scrapper", have the decency to preserve those front-ends (or get the code and run it yourself).
Real BOTs are more and more using whatwg cartel web engines, namely this has an end. If not all, namely the end was already reached. The ones not using them are more likely to be shadowpaid hackers by the whatwg cartel to ruin anything noscript/basic HTML (or they could be beyond idiotic hackers, unlikely).
Not to mention, many "maths challenges" out there are nothing more than a 'wait loop' in the end. Namely, you could replace them with a HTTP hard refresh timer with human scale wait times in order to get the same pertinent result. Those are actually even worse because they are pleasing the whatwg cartel since those are made to work only in their web engines.
The least they could do is to standardize those 'maths challenges' and make them HTTP header friendly.
Human scale wait timers aren't a big issue for bots. More parallel requests. Or more websites being scraped in parallel, if the website doesn't allow multiple timers going at once.
Whereas number crunching actually ties up some CPU time.
Ofc a timer will be set per connection and has to be only one part of a whole global and probably fine-grained connection policy !
Their only purpose compared to such timer, is, in their current state to create a hard dependency on exactly the web engines of the whatwg cartel and do exclude low end hardware (this does create a barrier of entry for new hardware or small hardware).
At least, they could have had the decency to design some "HTTP" specs to de-couple those maths challenges from those abominations which are the web engines of the whatwg cartel (maybe that's the case).
Yep, I could bet that a lot of BOTs are now based on those abominations (and probably using neural nets). You also have click farms with real humans.
Looking at their crypto addresses, they are sitting on many thousands of dollars that haven't moved in a very long time. What's the point of donating if they aren't going to use the funds?
Same reason at least one person in your company has a windows machine with a copy of excel, even though its a locked in platform which is paid and opaque: its what everyone else uses.
That doesn't really explain why people went there, only why they stay. I remember back in 2006 when Twitter was new and I still couldn't figure out why anyone wanted to use it. So I never did, to this day.
Nitter doesn't let you post to X. It only lets you read when someone else posted something on X and then it hits a place like Hacker News. It's an adversarial interoperability tool.
Because important information or information I care about is at times exclusively posted on Twitter, like news from my local municipality. I am not a Twitter/X user, so having Nitter as an option is important to me.
Because unfortunately people still post things on X that I find relevant, even if I don't use the platform much, and pragmatism wins over pure principles.
A surprising number of official bodies use it (and only it) for realtime updates. e.g. for a very long time the only way to get the latest updates on the NYC subway was to follow their account on there.
More broadly, it’s a platform where prominent people say noteworthy things. I don’t think it’s surprising people want to read it.
One small service provider I use updates its X/Facebook status much faster than its official status page during outages. There can be a gap of a few hours.
> they are control freaks over speech - they don’t let people share their opinions and they are too ban happy.
I constantly shit on capital interests here, and am thrilled they tolerate it considering what YC does as a company. This place has extremely fair moderation compared to basically all other platforms, including X (don't forget about rampant dark patterns).
> A guy like Dang will never make anything people want because he gets off too much on shutting people down.
I don't know him, but that seems absurd based on all posts I've seen by him. Also, if you want something so bad, build it yourself or stfu.
How is it superior when viewing w/o an account is impossible? From my POV this was the moment X/Twitter completely rejected its stated mission of being a town square.
Because despite the fact that they're both free and cost nothing to use, a lot of government agencies, companies, and press refuse to use or crosspost to Mastodon or Bluesky.
Literally the only cost is setting up an IFTTT workflow or a script, or having an AI agent do it for you, etc.
People will complain, in the same sentence, that bsky/mastodon will dilute their follower count and interactions, and "nobody uses it."
Nostr is like a decentralized message queue/key-value store with cryptographic identities. It has been funded by Jack Dorsey. Its most common usages are a decentralized Twitter clone, a tailscale clone without any registration needed called NostrVPN, and diVine, a revival of the classic Vine service. But there's also very interesting stuff like this, a completely decentralized git that uses public relays and cryptographic identities to control ownership.
I'm so here for an age where some of this IP protectionism felony anti-circumvention nonsense gets absolutely bulldozed. Please please please.
It's entirely unacceptable, is suicidal corporatism to riff off the bad man, to have humanity's "public" messaging system be off limits to researchers, academics, observers. To trust a network at their word that they and they alone have a right to defend and protect us from propaganda, from malicious & shadow influence. This is not an ok basis that our information driven civilization can rest on.
Lawsuits and cease and desists should never exist for software. I've just seen 10 more instances go live, you can't just go and sue everyone in the world.
It makes no sense to do this to an OSS community project just trying to provide information for free.
I hope as a society we stop censoring projects by using shallow and evil tactics like this.
I find it hilarious that the world's richest man, who:
- refuses to speak to the press and lies about having a PR department, but still expects the press to cover everything his companies do
- is ignoring environmental regulations wholesale and literally poisoning tens to hundreds of thousands of people with very high NOx emissions, for which there is a great deal of high quality evidence showing causes significant health issues
- knew his giant rocket test would send debris miles, which caused extensive damage to wildlife near the launchpad and substantial private property damage...but he wanted to launch on 4/20
- runs a car company which was caught speeding up the odometers on cars nearing their end of warranty, purposefully either erases logs from its cars involved in crashes or lies to investigators and in court about whether logs exist/are retrievable, and has blamed its customers for car windows randomly shattering, drive units being destroyed by water ingress due to faulty seals (literally telling people they drove in too heavy a rainstorm)...not to mention currently have a significant problem with their suspensions failing, something that is wildly dangerous and just generally does not happen...not to mention being top per vehicle in deaths, fires, crashes...
- felt entitled to get his hands on nearly every kind of personal data the government has
- produces AI tools that have been repeatedly found to have some of the worst safety limitations on deepfake porn, and also sexual imagery involving minors
- set records for the largest number of complaints at numerous federal regulators and at one point his companies combined were under investigation by ~30 different federal regulatory agencies
- literally paid people to vote for his preferred candidate, because....see prior point
...throws such a major wobbly over nearly anyone doing anything he doesn't like "to" him.
Interesting that they were inspired by Invidious (alternative YouTube frontend). That’s another project that could use some love. Hopefully AI coding tools can do some good and make it easier for these projects to find ways into the walled gardens and work around the counter measures.
Waiting for the day all the social networks allow api access and become usable again. Maybe we can call it “agent first” to help move things along.
"Agent First" API access for social networks. What could possibly go wrong.
I am not on Twitter/X.
Well ... perhaps without the project people would get fed up with X much faster and move on to something better.
So perhaps these websites only help X to exist.
I personally do not know anyone in real life with a twitter account (although I have one, I have not used it in over 15 years), I wonder how many people just go without this information and are angry that it's (seemingly) not available.
Simply embed the 'update' feed on a page in the existing website and have some kind of admin panel where employees can easily CRUD some updates.
I guess because even this would not be 'free', twitter ends up winning.
In my experience this is usually the crux. That software always rots, and needs whatever (minimal) on-ramping for employees, as well as access management.
If I could wave a wand at those solutions I'd stop fighting the user and let them post to Twitter or wherever, and just have a public facing page pull those posts as updates for consumers outside of whatever walled garden they originate from.
A bespoke system with an interface similar to twitter sounds like it’d be a suitable solution. And I bet it can be vibe coded in 5 minutes.
Won't happen in the US/UK because the governments are in Elon's pockets. Won't happen in the EU because they are incapable of getting anything done.
So unless you're in a jurisdiction other than the above three I wouldn't hold your breath about any laws being passed about this.
A lot of private companies do the same thing - no way to effectively contact them privately, but as soon as you whinge publicly on X they're "on it". Octopus Energy is one of the worst for that.
I was talking about the political will to mandate "forcing them to stop using it".
The UK doesn't actually have the economic and political will to put together a national Mastodon or Bluesky instance and mandate that all public agencies use it for their announcements. I'm sure there are three fact-finding committees about it at the moment though.
That said, RSS seems way simpler.
RSS aggregation seems like the solution to me but I think we've got to admit defeat on that one because it's been around forever and people don't use it.
How many people consuming text via rss the same way people consume audio via podcasts?
We're talking about text here. We all know how this sentence ends, "You should start a ..." and it isn't rss feed. Everyone used to have a blog and nobody really cared. Now everyone has a podcast and (more) people do. People don't know what an rss feed is.
I don't know what this means. I'm guessing the correct answer is supposed to be "podcast"? Even so, weird false dichotomy.
That looking at tweets and listening to podcasts is more popular than reading long-form blog posts via RSS has a lot more to do with people's revealed preference for looking at tweets and listening to podcasts versus reading long-form blogs than it has to do with RSS.
(The actual context was delivery of notices by public services through non-Twitter feeds, anyway. Not blogging.)
> People don't know what an rss feed is.
I don't know why you think this is relevant here. It seems that when you're referring to using "RSS", what you mean is for people to care about RSS—in the way that Gemini, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc. have always been about caring about (and almost exclusively using them to talk about) Gemini, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc. than they ever were actually expected to be used organically and non-self-referentially.
The fact is that people (already/still) use RSS today. It hasn't been defeated. And Twitter could turn into an RSS-based feed reader tomorrow that works basically the same as it works today, and then suddenly everyone would be using RSS but no one would drop out because of it. Because people don't know (read: care) what an RSS feed is.
It's a technically bad solution though, because mastodon is push. The government server has to maintain a list of everyone who's subscribed and make an HTTP request to all of those random domains, and have some timeout and removal policy because sites die all the time. Pull-based, like RSS, is way cleaner.
(I'm not a mastodon user either. But I've read the docs.)
Governments should also be worried about sovereignty.
Can any other user of public transport in Paris comment?
1. the service may not be - every small provider has downtime, perhaps proportionally to their size.
2. the tools to update Twitter are well understood, and you can get software that does scheduling of posts across multiple platforms, previews of what posts will look like, etc etc, and said preview works well on the many platforms that people are already using. People doing the updating may prefer to use those tools over what the internal tool gives them.
Of course such information should be on the operator's website as primary source ...
They changed terms against their captive users and forced policy changes to end open publishing and firehose APIs—which the organization had once championed and enshrined.
It’s still the go-to platform for public figures to broadcast unfortunately, so if you want to verify the original comments you need an alternate frontend or an X account.
the currency intervention took place on July 31, during active market hours. It was immediately detected by global trading desks and reported by major news wires like Reuters and Bloomberg as it happened.
When CENTCOM issued the statement regarding the strikes on IRGC targets, the text went live on the official U.S. Central Command Media Portal at the exact same second the automated post hit their X account.
Before anything was posted online, Lightcap sent an official farewell note to the OpenAI team. Once an email is sent to hundreds of tech employees, it was immediately leaked to tech journalists.
It seems, for all three examples, the platform was used merely as a broadcasting service for information that was either already occurring in the public eye or was simultaneously distributed through formal channels.
- needing to look in several places
- looking in one place
Easy to see why Twitter wins, even when information isn't exclusive, which it often is (I would've suggested video involved in news events, which is often impossible to find elsewhere but easily gathered on Twitter).
There are MTA data feeds, in General Transit Feed Specification format, for program use. Those are for systems that update maps.
The MTA dumped Twitter/X in 2023 because Twitter/X wanted to charge them for using their API, and the MTA refused. [1] The MTA also said that Twitter/X had too much downtime.
When the MTA first got into social media, the person who took the job demanded a desk in the rail control center, so she could see all the displays and immediately hear about problems. If someone mentioned a problem on Twitter, she'd reply immediately. That was the right idea. Few organizations have the guts to put the control room on social media.
[1] https://www.mta.info/press-release/statement-mta-acting-chie...
There’s a system that is not replicable unless you have majority of the population on the same social media.
Surely a public post on a CHP website would have gotten the job done better.
Can you share how you prevent spammers from simply using this to do what they usually do, or, if not, how you will stop Cloudflare et al. from marking your browsers as bots and hammering them with captchas? Easy access to the plain web for bots is a pretty tough cat and mouse game and I have been playing it with very short term success at best myself.
The internet we had in the 90's and early 00's was amazing. Everything felt free, indie, hackable, composable, ingestible. You didn't worry about platforms because most platforms exposed their data via friendly APIs (remember when Reddit and Twitter had an API and that they encouraged people to actually use them?)
RSS everywhere, websites with honest to god Bittorrent links. Software you could download and own without a subscription. Forums, Geocities, personal websites, IRC (no Discord ads, server caps, rules against scripting), RPG Maker 2000.
Google and Facebook and Twitter fucked us. The 2010's - 2020's were cellphone incrementalism and walled garden overgrowth.
Hell, even Flash was awesome pre-Adobe. It was buggy, full of zero day vulns, and was inefficient for mobile, but children as young as 8 could build games and animations -- and they were! We got left with a pile of "standards" CSS, Javascript transpilers, competing standards, nodegrunts, and library churn and it was never the same.
Thankfully, I'm starting to feel that AI models are going to let us tear down the walls. We can easily spin up indie experiments again in our spare hours after work and do a lot of neat stuff. It feels like the late 90's / early 00's again.
I think the biggest mistake Google made was developing AI, which seem to be the seeds of big tech's undoing. We can totally overrun them now.
AI = actually a threat to big tech, not a moat. They're going to kill themselves with their own product.
We'll probably build distributed protocols that can finally get the product and UX love that compel people to start using them.
And it feels so awesome to just build things I love - games on the weekend, custom audio players, file organizers, SRS software. I'm loving software again for the first time in a long time. Robotics...
I'd say advertising has fucked up the Internet. Everything they (and plenty of others) have done has been to collect and sell personal data to advertising brokers.
Nothing wrong with honest advertising per se..... back in the day we bought computer magazines mainly for the adverts.
Rather, the problem is the SV AdTech industry which seeks to track me, invade my privacy at every opportunity and is busy sniffing my knickers trying to work out if I'm pregnant so they can sell me more shite.
One observes the FUD those employed by AdTEch are spreading on here about the GDPR; a bunch of people whose very salaries are dependent on abusing our privacy.
I agree that shadowbans are an underhanded measure that doesn't belong in a site like HN. I always vouch [dead] comments made in good faith
1. Google de-ossifies and starts shipping. They have all the AI talent and infra necessary to "own" AI and get people and industry using its models and products. They don't have the same costs that OpenAI and Anthropic do and have a much healthier income stream. They can productively put Gemini in front of more people and embed deep into people's lives. Google leapfrogs Apple, Amazon, Meta, and its other peers because of its incumbent advantages in AI, data, and distribution.
2. Google bleeds out all Google Search ad revenue. People switch away from Chrome to browser agents that have adblock and remove ads. Gemini languishes. Once unassailable Android comes under attack from vibe coded upstarts that no longer require a trillion dollars to compete. Google still sells a lot of enterprise B2B infra (cloud, workspace) and YouTube continues to thrive. Everything else about Google becomes IBM while YouTube becomes Comcast. Still a giant, but a shell of its former self.
I'm sure there are other possible futures as well, but these are the two I see for Google.
I keep oscillating between predictions #1 and #2. Right now I'm feeling #2.
I have an old Wyze Scale that restricts advanced features behind a proprietary mega-app, forcing users to swipe past their other services. I've now been able to reverse engineer their Bluetooth protocol which can be used with tools like OpenScale.
In an older world, this would have been a prolonged endeavor for juice that ultimately isn't worth the squeeze. Now it can now takes place in an afternoon.
And then remove all copyright law and patents pertaining to software. So the subsequent players are forced to play nice with everyone.
Whatever politics or technologies that make alternative platforms "better" to some people doesn't matter to most. The idea that new platforms should even have the "millions" (read: the masses) in mind comes across as being antithetical to the trend toward decentralized tech.
This is some sort of absolute, fundamental difference between the early web and now, at least how I experienced it as a teen in the late 90s in Hungary. Back then I made a site, because you wanted to make something of my own, in my style, as I wanted. There was nobody else online from my friends, and I made new friends online. I actually found my age people on ICQ, within the same subculture.
This "oh my friends are there" approach is what destroys everything. More precisely the people who can't decide for themselves.
The old web was a very different place, it wasn't as centralized and there were significantly fewer people around. There were specific forums that you'd go to for specific topics. Say you were interested in West African dances - there was usually the one forum where all the West African dance nerds hung out. At most a couple of different ones. And they were very small communities. If there were issues with the admins or moderation users could and did do mass walk-outs and create a new place.
I made a site, I put it out there, because as a 14 year old, it was fantastic I could make completely mine and nobody else's at all. That was the drive.
Think about why they should care about your answer and if there's any proof that it bothers them to the degree that they may view your alternative platforms as actual solutions.
most people in bluesky moved to bluesky driven by hate and fear instead of love and curiosity
i notice they talk bad a lot about other people's posts in other platforms
My personal experience has been a lot more balanced. But, I don't want to say that there is no hate and fear on ATProto...
In the early days of social media it was a standard that you could get your lists of friends, etc out and then use them to bootstrap your social network on new social media. All the big players like Twitter and Facebook took advantage of that and then locked down their own platforms to make it hard for you to move your social network out of them.
Perhaps part of the reason we don't do that any more is that signup is so high friction? It used to be just username, password, confirm password, captcha, submit. But now it's username, password, confirm password, email, phone number, captcha, submit, go to phone, open email app, wait for slow loading, refresh, wait for slow refresh, click email, see long link, click link, "this must be opened on the device you signed up with", back, retype 100 random characters on the computer with perfect accuracy, "email verified", next step, go to phone, open SMS app, wait for slow loading, no new SMS, back to computer, "send code again (wait 60 seconds)", wait 60 seconds, click it, go to phone, finally get a 6-digit code, back to computer, type it in, submit.
Signing up for things is a massive chore now. Because they want so much personal identification data, that they don't actually need for the function because they never send an email or an SMS.
And if you're signing up on the same device you're checking your email and SMS on, it's straight up impossible because every time you switch to the email app, it unloads the browser app and forgets its state so the verification is invalid. You have to keep trying 6-7 times and hope maybe one time you'll do it quick enough that the browser will stay resident in memory.
I actually have at least two phone apps that are social-adjacent that do signup secretly in the background. You just install the app, and it generates a random identifier and uses that as your account ID. Nothing is visible to the user. In the settings is an import/export option for device migration. If you want signups, this is how to get them.
You may very well be building a whole new intraweb
We need social media which are actually media. Speech, dance, watercolor... these are media and nobody has had to abandon them because of a poorly behaving owner.
Twitter, whatever it is, is not a medium, nor is it a place.
the "better" that will win will be what's more engaging and addictive
Less radically, we can demand that any entity that takes any public money (and of course public entities themselves) avoid communicating solely through closed platforms.
It's insane that the primary public communication channel for e.g. certain UK government institutions and the Norwegian police, was Twitter at one point!
We need open APIs, transparent algorithms, and above all, accountability.
If you're engaging in discussions you need the network. If you're reading municipal weather warnings you don't really, it's just a data source that can be copied anywhere.
Move people over slowly as you add new features the old platform doesn't porvide.
it's been solved, ban the platform. This is a collective action problem. Even if every single user on platform X wants to move to platform Y, as long as they can't coordinate the movement individual cost exceeds the benefit they'd all get.
So the most straight forward way is to get rid of the platform , and everyone will move out of necessity.
And in the context of twitter-style platforms, federation to me has always seemed like a "which wind would you like to piss into?" situation where you have no idea what servers/people can even see what you're posting, especially when many (even large) servers not only share centralized error-prone block/ban lists but also keep defederating from each other.
But of course, even among HNers, there's amazing cognitive dissonance among "decentralization is hard and takes effort" and "omg, of course the next centralized platform won't be bought by an insecure dictator-wannabe".
I'm not that old, it's played out over and over. I shouldn't even comment here. Decentralization or bust.
Mass social networks are influencer territory.
You do want the reach —otherwise you'd just make a group on Session with your friends or whatever.
The centralized platforms are a dictatorship of sorts but they make the often insufficient effort to include groups that hate each other.
If a Mastodon instance can become that centralized platform, I'll be the first to sign up.
People have also been conditioned to mostly trust whatever is on Wikipedia despite years of efforts to hammer it into people that this is not an okay assumption.
It would be better for there to be a bunch of Wikis that are competing with each other evenly. Having only Wikipedia is not a healthy thing.
... I mean, there _are_ (Conservapedia, Ruwiki, Metapedia, etc). It's just that the non-wikipedia generalist ones are so poorly run that no sensible person would ever use them, and usually have a fairly extreme ideological bent (there's a spectrum; Metapedia originally showed up because Conservapedia was insufficiently delusional for some peoples' liking) which requires them to wholesale make shit up (as the old joke goes, reality has a liberal bias). However, if Wikipedia ever goes all evil, I would assume it'll just be forked (there've been a number of prior forks, but except for Ruwiki they've generally died due to lack of interest).
There are, honestly, serious economies of scale here. Unless Wikipedia actually has gone evil, well, no-one actually wants to maintain 66 million articles (No-one, say, wants to maintain 14,000 articles about bridges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Bridges_...). Specialist wikis work, but it'll take something fairly dramatic to break Wikipedia's dominance.
(In an ideal world, I think this _would_ be more decentralised, but it's just very difficult for that to happen in practice. I think much more difficult than social media, which has never really _fully_ centralised in the first place.)
Unfortunately Wikipedia exists within a collective blind spot, so I am not expecting the situation to change. At most people will drop Wikipedia in favor of LLMs, which is even worse.
The billionaires make using their products quite simple. It was easy to sign up for twitter back when it was still usable. Even before Elon took over, it basically died.
The problem with all the decentralized alternatives is that they sacrifice usability for decentralization and then almost nobody cares about decentralization so for most people it's only downsides.
When choosing a social network, probably the top priority for most people is where the people they want to talk to are.
If CEO antics were the thing that mattered, I would certainly choose Bluesky over X. But the reality is the tech community -- at least, the part of it I want to interact with -- is mostly on X. Many of us tried to switch to Bluesky for a bit but ironically got pushed back to X due to Bluesky culture being hostile to tech and especially hostile to AI. I'd post the same non-political tech thing on X and Bluesky and get lots of interesting feedback on X while getting screamed at on Bluesky, so I stopped posting on Bluesky.
Would love for this to change but it's a hard problem.
Two evils, but one has a better (still not amazing) track history of supporting free speech and ideas, so that's the what I would use. I don't have to follow the CEO on their platform.
EDIT: Oops, I think I misinterpreted, you meant to compare Jack vs. Elon as CEOs of Twitter itself.
Could you expand a bit on what you are referring to here?
1. Internal records released in the Twitter Files showed employees used tools like “Search Blacklist”, “Trends Blacklist” and “Do Not Amplify” against users. Verified examples included lockdown critic Dr Jay Bhattacharya, conservative commentator Dan Bongino, and political activist Charlie Kirk.
2. Twitter’s ranking systems could make replies much harder to see, collapse them beneath conversations, exclude posts from search/home feeds, and reduce distribution. Twitter itself admitted to hiding “questionable content” from replies, search and timelines as part of its enforcement system.
3. Twitter labelled and reduced the reach of claims it considered "misleading" about elections. Between 27 October and 11 November 2020 it classified around 300,000 tweets as "misleading". 456 users received warnings that also prevented normal liking, replying, or retweeting. Twitter estimated its interventions cut "quote-tweets" of "labelled" posts by about 29%.
4. In October 2020, less than three weeks before the presidential election, Twitter prevented users from sharing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden through both tweets and direct messages, and locked the Post's account. Twitter initially cited its "hacked-materials/private-information" rules even though it had not established that the material had been hacked. Jack Dorsey later acknowledged that blocking distribution publicly and privately had been a mistake.
5. Twitter adopted COVID-related rules under which staff would label users or tweets so they could be suppressed. By March 2021 Twitter said it had removed more than 8,400 tweets and “challenged” 11.5 million accounts under its COVID policies. Twitter explicitly stated that labelled COVID material could receive reduced visibility. This meant that legitimate political and scientific arguments about lockdowns, vaccines, and public-health policy could become moderation questions if Twitter classified them as "misinformation."
6. From 2018, Twitter's "hateful-conduct" rules explicitly prohibited "misgendering" or "deadnaming" of transgender people. Scores of users were permanently banned under these rules. In 2022, Twitter locked the Babylon Bee's account after it called transgender Biden administration official Rachel Levine its “Man of the Year”. Twitter required deletion of the tweet before normal access would resume.
7. Twitter permanently banned Trump in January 2021 after stating that two tweets "created a risk of further incitement of violence." These were the Tweets:
> “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
> “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
8. They maintained regular contact with US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. Yoel Roth stated formally that from 2018 he had regular meetings with the FBI, DHS, and ODNI, including weekly discussions concerning anticipated 2020 election “hack-and-leak” operations. Internal records showed government agencies forwarding individual social-media posts to Twitter for review.
I will end by telling you of my personal experience during the worst years of Twitter. As someone who disagrees with San Francisco social orthodoxy on a few issues, I received an account warning for writing a rather milquetoast tweet about how I thought children should be allowed to grow up normally without medical intervention. For a few years, it was one of the most censorious places on the internet.
TBH I'm pretty confused why anyone uses "for you". For me at least, any time I accidentally wander over to that feed, the stuff it shows me is just dumb... not even political necessarily, just dumb clickbaity shit that insults my intelligence.
The only time I ever see hyper-political stuff is if I peek into the replies to a prominent politician. Highly recommend never doing that.
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/these-report...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0589g0dqq7o
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/04/x-twitter...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/15/elon-musk...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-elon-musk-uses-his...
https://apnews.com/article/musk-europe-politicians-influence...
These people need to realize that what you see is what shapes your thinking and the social network's algorithm decides what you see and what you don't see. In the case of X, it's grok aka Mechahitler.
Most of the time though, it's actually pretty reasonable. Many times I've seen right-wingers try to ask grok to confirm their beliefs, only to have it shoot them down. Pretty funny honestly. Elon will often claim it's a bug in Grok when he doesn't like the answer.
Wish we could find out what's actually going on there. Are they trying to bias Grok, but finding it's actually very hard to introduce subtle bias (as opposed to extreme, "mechahitler" bias)? That would be a fascinating and very positive result for LLMs in general.
Or is it that, like, the Grok team is resisting Elon's attempts to introduce bias, and when they can't resist any more, they intentionally overdo it, which gives them an excuse to roll it back?
Or is Elon's whole public persona a cynical performance intended to win power and political favors from Republican leadership while in private he actually isn't right-leaning at all and actually wants Grok to be a balanced truth machine for the good of humanity? lol, probably not, but it would explain a few things.
Exactly. This means he will change the model to fit his world view.
Here's a study: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
Figuring out how to make people actually care, and also figuring out how to make migration easier would both be a big deal.
Maybe forcing the platforms to make it possible to make followers/following portable would be worth it though.
He made the "my heart goes out to you" motion (thump your hand over your heart, then fling it out towards the audience), people took a static image of the last part of it, and left out the context to create outrage bait for clicks.
“No ones [sic] doing nazi salutes.”
So I didn’t read it as Elon Musk specifically. I would suggest you’re adding that in your mind and should reevaluate your fascination with him.
but I'm pretty sure he was referencing Elon there, as in there's no such thing as him doing such a salute
but hey, I can't even see the original post because it was flagged, like mine is now. so that's great.
You heard “Nazi” and immediately thought “Elon”. Curious.
how did you conclude that Elon wasn't mentioned?
Curious.
and censoring others by painting them as nazis/Hitler
iirc your comments weren't even making any big statements, just giving out your simple opinions without even invoking any political beliefs
IMO whoever is doing that should get their flagging abilities taken away.
Initially I did type out more, but I didn't want to turn it into an argument, so I kept its simple.
I just don't like that the left keep spouting out that elon did a nazi salute when he didn't, and his gesture is no different to anything the democrats have done. But HN is frustrating like this. You try to keep it simple and neutral. Downvoted/flagged. You voice your opinion. Downvoted/flagged.
if people are so convinced that you and Elon are both super Nazis or something then why not show everyone what vile things you've typed here (iirc it was just "it was not a nazi salute." or something like that)
- Mamdani, who in contrast to Musk does mingle quite a lot in anti-Semite cirles
- Bernie Sanders, a Jew himself but that has never kept anyone from being called a nazi
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also often seen in anti-Semite circles
- Kamala Harris
- Elizabeth Warren, who later also supported nazi-tattoo candidate Graham Platner whom she called 'my type of man'
- Hillary Clinton
- ...and many others
Of course the legacy press has excuses for all these nazi-saluting individuals except for Musk, calling these photo's 'coincidental' or 'taken out of context'. The truth is that none of these individuals, Musk included, made nazi salutes but that is not what the narrative pushes and with that unfortunately also not what this here site - HN - accepts.
https://imgur.com/a/C2JsMfg (the others)
https://c7.alamy.com/comp/2PANC6Y/democratic-presidential-ho... (clinton)
so all these social justice warriors pick the easiest target and point to some tweet/image and say "Nazi!" thinking they've done some great servitude to humanity and can now feel great about themselves.
kind of like using paper straws and patting yourself in the back
1. "you have said the actual truth" reply to some guy about the great replacement thing or mass migration? which was then followed up with an apology and he said it was one of the most foolish things he's ever done.
2. said George soros hates humanity
3. compared Trudeau to a Adolf Hitler
4. some WW2 photo with a Wehrmaht soldier with a caption as a meme
5. mocking those who called him a nazi by saying stuff like "bet you did Nazi that coming"
considering all the other kinds of things he's done and posted on Twitter, I'm not convinced he's an evil nazi yet
It is a fact that Musk is a Nazi. If someone publicly gives a Nazi salute and publicly endorses trash like the great replacement theory, I’m going to call them a Nazi, because that’s what they are.
If other CEOs say similar stuff in private, that’s really sad. If they ever say it publicly, I’ll call them Nazis as well.
He has shown time and again that the underlying philosophy is “free speech for me, but not for thee”…
…or more specifically “don’t tell me (and people who agree with me) what we can or can’t say”, while actively censoring opposition.
He does this without believing he is abandoning a “free speech absolutist” stance.
Blind hypocrisy? Unrestrained privilege? Both? Something else? Not sure.
Censorship is not refusing to listen to people we find abusive. People are not entitled to force me to listen.
A federated platform is far more resistant to censorship than X is.
Nobody is forced to join a Mastodon instance that censors Nazis - there are many that don't, or you can run your own.
How would it work on Mastodon if you want to communicate with two people that happen to have each others instances blocked? Is it like having to use both Twitter and BlueSky or does it solve the problem more elegantly?
Occasionally some people are affected because they've picked a major-ish but somewhat block-happy instance, in which case they can either move their account (the experience for a move on Mastodon isn't great but it does work) or create a second one if it really matters to them.
Usually people will find out pretty early on if they're on an instance whose policies they agree with or not, so even if the account migration is jankier than it should be, it's rarely a major problem (in that instance - if instances shut down it's more problematic)
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/14/on-elons-whim-x-now-treats...
The platform that randomly banned journalists for using Substack?
https://newrepublic.com/post/179067/twitter-files-matt-taibb...
The same platform that banned left-wing journalists because they were criticizing Musk?
https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-journalists-f...
I don't know, it sounds like there's some very good reasons to move away from a centralized platform where the owner can randomly decide he doesn't like you and ban you.
His response was - they've got a team of lawyers on payroll whose job it is to make you run out of money...
The entire business model of the AI industry, who resell and launder the scraped data, would collapse.
Nitter just makes it visible to a human and has anti-scraper measures necessitated by the thieves like xAI.
Additionally, a GoFundMe would reach astronomical proportions given how unpopular Musk is.
Second: the US justice system is also a joke. I could fight Google in justice and win in my country (France) and in pretty much any other developed country because a working system doesn't let big actor DoS smaller player out of justice. You obviously can't fix a corrupt syatem with technology.
This may be a plot point in a William Gibson novel.
Someone's name needs to be at the bottom of the paperwork, and those court filing costs would also add up.
Maybe selfhost on an old phone? Just guessing what the OP meant.
Then they stopped it, because "eNgaGeMEnT" or w/e
https://annas-archive.gd for reference.
Regardless of advice quality, legal proceedings aren't free-to-play, and the adversary in question here has bottomless pockets.
FFS, we're already at the edge of having to pay to know what the laws even are. [0]
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/pro-codes-act-wolf-she...
Here's an article from this Congress: https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewleahey/2025/06/26/pro-cod...
Imagine having to buy a subscription to the laws you must follow or potentially be imprisoned for violating.
The best legal professionals, just like the best software engineers, have wholly embraced LLM assistance.
"Gee, we bill $700/hr but just can't figure out how to put a prompt into a chat interface." Please.
LLMs have been making so many mistakes that the big firms have slowed or even paused their LLM spend. And that was before CA passed a law relating legal AI use.
The code looks surprisingly easy to hack on: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/src/nitter.nim
"The long-term plan is to rewrite the source code in Go, as I'm no longer interested in using Nim. This isn't a small task, but building more features with the current state of things is painful. Before doing that I'll fix some feature parity issues, and work on some conveniences for instance operators. Stay tuned."
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/discussions/1212
Nitter uses Jester which seems dead for sure, but doing static binaries is easy. Personally I just forked Mummy to continue as MummyNG since I prefer threaded servers so things like JSON parsing doesn’t cause latency issues.
Though that being written over a year ago it’s either not a high priority or harder than it seems. I’ll be curious to see which. LLMs make it easier than ever for others to contribute or to fix up deps.
It's a research project of its BDFL and he is alienating the most senior developers and contributors to Nim's ecosystems (ie Zedeus).
Is there sth like this but for old reddit
The word "project" doesn't make a clear distinction between the repo and the instances. Nitter is on good ground with respect to the repo. The instances will be much harder to defend. From that one sentence it isn't clear if this is what the legal advice says or not.
Nitter changed their design such that it now requires an X account to scrape through. This was to stay functional after X removed guest accounts. This exposes them to a legal attack through the terms of service that must be accepted for the account, and to technical attack by blocking the scraping accounts.
https://theintercept.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-leaks-twitter/
Nitter might want to make sure that their scrapes are bit-identical to other accounts to defeat this.
Door 2: improve x.com to be better than third-party sites.
Which is, Elon?
I suspect the original C&Ds were just their legal team wanting to "do something" upon hearing about Nitter somehow, and not Elon personally commanding them.
...and I noticed that X did bring back a (quite) limited JS-free "lite version" recently, so maybe they are changing for the better.
There has to be a reasonable way to preserve these comms for public benefit.
Those people should seek their own legal advice.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49567595
Put a tip jar out, let’s get archiving. “You can just do things.”
It's getting to the point where his private security are harassing people for walking down the street in their own neighborhood that runs alongside one of his "compounds."
It's actually sad to see how deeply do we depend on monopolies.
Other solutions might not have the exact same functionality, but in this context of mere availability... it really doesn't matter.
I mostly wonder how far he'll fall, but to say I'm disappointed would be a gross understatement. What surprises me is that people keep working for him.
No this is the hard problem. HN people live in a bubble. Anything else than signup with oauth and then having access to everyone and its too hard and 99% of people will click away.
Don't think the 'whatwg cartel' will let some web not require their web engines.
Expect shadowpaid hackers to ruin their infrastructure. Don't be a fool, expect the worst (more so when the whatwg cartel is involved).
And if you, yeah you! If you are running an "AI scrapper", have the decency to preserve those front-ends (or get the code and run it yourself).
Not to mention, many "maths challenges" out there are nothing more than a 'wait loop' in the end. Namely, you could replace them with a HTTP hard refresh timer with human scale wait times in order to get the same pertinent result. Those are actually even worse because they are pleasing the whatwg cartel since those are made to work only in their web engines.
The least they could do is to standardize those 'maths challenges' and make them HTTP header friendly.
Whereas number crunching actually ties up some CPU time.
Their only purpose compared to such timer, is, in their current state to create a hard dependency on exactly the web engines of the whatwg cartel and do exclude low end hardware (this does create a barrier of entry for new hardware or small hardware).
At least, they could have had the decency to design some "HTTP" specs to de-couple those maths challenges from those abominations which are the web engines of the whatwg cartel (maybe that's the case).
Yep, I could bet that a lot of BOTs are now based on those abominations (and probably using neural nets). You also have click farms with real humans.
There is so much wrong there... well Big Tech...
https://twit.0r.cx
https://xxcancel.com
Do you have any suggestions for xxcancel.com?
Same reason at least one person in your company has a windows machine with a copy of excel, even though its a locked in platform which is paid and opaque: its what everyone else uses.
More broadly, it’s a platform where prominent people say noteworthy things. I don’t think it’s surprising people want to read it.
One small service provider I use updates its X/Facebook status much faster than its official status page during outages. There can be a gap of a few hours.
Turns out only one of the major platforms banned this account…
That's a feature I'm thankful for.
> they are control freaks over speech - they don’t let people share their opinions and they are too ban happy.
I constantly shit on capital interests here, and am thrilled they tolerate it considering what YC does as a company. This place has extremely fair moderation compared to basically all other platforms, including X (don't forget about rampant dark patterns).
> A guy like Dang will never make anything people want because he gets off too much on shutting people down.
I don't know him, but that seems absurd based on all posts I've seen by him. Also, if you want something so bad, build it yourself or stfu.
Literally the only cost is setting up an IFTTT workflow or a script, or having an AI agent do it for you, etc.
People will complain, in the same sentence, that bsky/mastodon will dilute their follower count and interactions, and "nobody uses it."
Now we need an alternative that works well and is de-centralized from the get go.
It's called Nostr. I post on it every day.
It's entirely unacceptable, is suicidal corporatism to riff off the bad man, to have humanity's "public" messaging system be off limits to researchers, academics, observers. To trust a network at their word that they and they alone have a right to defend and protect us from propaganda, from malicious & shadow influence. This is not an ok basis that our information driven civilization can rest on.
I look forward to getting out of this trap. https://bsky.app/profile/jauntywunderkind.bsky.social/post/3...
Lawsuits and cease and desists should never exist for software. I've just seen 10 more instances go live, you can't just go and sue everyone in the world.
It makes no sense to do this to an OSS community project just trying to provide information for free.
I hope as a society we stop censoring projects by using shallow and evil tactics like this.
- refuses to speak to the press and lies about having a PR department, but still expects the press to cover everything his companies do
- is ignoring environmental regulations wholesale and literally poisoning tens to hundreds of thousands of people with very high NOx emissions, for which there is a great deal of high quality evidence showing causes significant health issues
- knew his giant rocket test would send debris miles, which caused extensive damage to wildlife near the launchpad and substantial private property damage...but he wanted to launch on 4/20
- runs a car company which was caught speeding up the odometers on cars nearing their end of warranty, purposefully either erases logs from its cars involved in crashes or lies to investigators and in court about whether logs exist/are retrievable, and has blamed its customers for car windows randomly shattering, drive units being destroyed by water ingress due to faulty seals (literally telling people they drove in too heavy a rainstorm)...not to mention currently have a significant problem with their suspensions failing, something that is wildly dangerous and just generally does not happen...not to mention being top per vehicle in deaths, fires, crashes...
- felt entitled to get his hands on nearly every kind of personal data the government has
- produces AI tools that have been repeatedly found to have some of the worst safety limitations on deepfake porn, and also sexual imagery involving minors
- set records for the largest number of complaints at numerous federal regulators and at one point his companies combined were under investigation by ~30 different federal regulatory agencies
- literally paid people to vote for his preferred candidate, because....see prior point
...throws such a major wobbly over nearly anyone doing anything he doesn't like "to" him.