We need this for Linkdin too!

Sometimes a walled garden can be a good thing, if it functions as a quarantine.

it's brave to look at other companies receiving cease and desist notices and treat it as a market opening

twitterwebviewer.com was registered in Hong Kong

according to https://www.whois.com/whois/twitterwebviewer.com

Looks fine, they don't care about the notices i guess

.com domain zone is managed by Verysign US company. They will just C&D them.

I guess my brain has been cooked by internet libertarianism but what's the basis of a C&D for proxying a website?

Is the legal basis just copyright of the contents?

i dont know the legal basis used, or the validity. i just know that i wouldnt want to have to spend the time or money fighting twitter over it

You don't have to fight a C&D, you can ignore it. But they may sue you and you have to fight that. But they can also sue you without a C&D or even after you comply with one. The C&D itself has no effect, but it's the equivalent of a gangster pointing at his own eyeballs and then yours, "I'm watching you."

Well yeah the copyright violation is pretty clear cut here.

My understanding is that copyright of what's posted is retained by the poster. The Nitter C&D was around a ToS violation for scraping.

I ignored Twitter before Musk bought it and oddly I still have no problem ignoring it.

It doesn't even have good cat pictures.

Literally every time I decide to stop ignoring X, I log in and am greeted with overt racism and religious hatred. Always a good reminder to just ignore that cesspit.

I guess other people have more tolerance than I do for the constant stream of hatred that floats to the top of the algorithm like scum over there.

I built dailycat.app and it has good cat pictures!

Yay for daily cat apps! I run daily.cat

It's disappointing that this is even necessary given earlier promises of opening up the Twitter algorithm.

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

It would be nice if URL schema was compatibile with X. In case of Nitter, I could’ve just replaced x.com with xcancel.com with a web extension and URL still works.

The site is very fast even though it should be overloaded now. Registered in Hong Kong (good), handled by Cloudflare and claims to be in California:

https://github.com/peters-lab/twitter-viewer

Repo is fake, only a README and a LICENSE. I guess we'll take what we can get now.

Prepping for another C&D I see. The only way something like this can survive is through Tor or similar, fully anonymous and decentralized.

What ever happened to IPFS? Wasn't it built for just this kind of thing? I remember trying it years ago and it was absolutely unusable, but was kinda hoping it had made a turnaround by now.

To this day I am still calling the website Twitter and access it every single time typing twitter.com. That rename was so dumb. So, I really love the name

paypal should have never ever given back Musk the x domain

and ICANN should have nuked it long ago

but all that aside, wtf is anyone still on it

Musk is a mass murderer

apparently the nazis would still be in power today if they just had a web service people were too freaking lazy and addicted to ever quit

and Tesla "FSD" is still trying to murder passengers a decade later but that's also definitely a choice

Based on the downvotes, there's a lot of folks who just can't stand to be reminded who and what they're associating with by continuing to use Twitter.

Folks, you don't have to give the nazi bar your business. You will live without Twitter.

I think you’re talking to bots. Anything that doesn’t align with Trump/Elon’s perceived worldview gets downvoted here.

No, he's downvoted because he's saying objectively false things like "Musk is a mass murderer", and subjective but unproductive things like "he's a Nazi". You can dislike Elon Musk and make that point in a mature way that actually leads to a good discussion. People do that all the time and don't get flak for it. This poster has chosen to be incendiary, and people dislike flamebait so it got downvoted.

'everyone who disagrees with me is a nazi'

I used Twitter for over 10 years without an account then suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted and no longer an option. Reddit is now this way too.

But I find it ridiculous that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable without being logged in (and in some cases requiring an app instead of the site). Even Bluesky has this problem!

Sometimes this information is really important! And I even if I did have an account I may not have access to log in on every device (or even want to).

It’s absurd that social media can become this like critical communications platform for severe weather alerts or business hours or anything but the sites hosting it are completely hostile to allowing you to see it.

Sites like this are a bandaid on a gangrenous foot. Thanks for allowing me to see links from twitter but it isn’t a sustainable solution clearly.

Increasingly access is hidden behind mobile apps too, which in turn requires succumbing to app stores and handing over the keys to 2 giant US companies. For slopware and social media, fine. Some would even argue it is a blessing in disguise. However on the government level it is totally unacceptable. E.g. why should anyone and especially non US citizens accept the Google/Apple TOS in order to file their taxes, access their health recds or schedule a gov appointment?

suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted

To some decision-makers their idea of "disruption" is limited to enshittification more than anything else.

The governments go where the people are. If they post on their own sites it’s the equivalent of “on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’”.

But government information should definitely be first source on their site with federation elsewhere.

Yeah, "first source" is the key here. The information should be available openly and independently of any 3rd-party platform.

In a broader sense, I believe that every person who publishes on the internet should have a standard way to keep their profile data (accounts, posts, etc.) in a secure, user-owned vault that is independent of any company or institution and platforms should have to pull data from that place (in a restricted, user-controlled way) instead of from their own servers. Platforms should be exchangeable, profiles should be entirely user-owned. But of course, this is just a dream and hard to realise technically and economically (incentive-wise) with our current systems. Decentralised protocols are a step in this direction, but unfortunately still too technical/complicated for most people to really "own" or host their data themselves.

ATProto attempted to do this with their PDS based structure but it isn’t fully decentralized yet. The vision is similar to what you describe though.

Thats entirely how atproto works now!

Except for the part where bluesky maintains a central registry and also the part where the protocol is really complicated with its authenticity stuff.

https://atproto.com/blog/plc-directory-org

As the next step of maturing governance of the PLC identity system, Bluesky Social PBC is supporting the creation of an independent organization to operate the directory.

someone related to bluesky maintains a central registry*

If the US government sanctions you, your PLC will get deleted. Only the US government will have this power.

Similarly, society decided at some point that linkedin, a completely private and constantly hacked social network, is a must-have when looking for work (not any work, but for a lot of jobs it applies). Just give them all your private data and we'll have a look.

Makes one miss the days when Craigslist or Monster (and its clones) were legitimately the best places to find employment.

I've always loathed LinkedIn due to their poor security and their data mining practices, starting from day 1. I haven't used LinkedIn in over 10 years and only used it briefly to connect with old colleagues. I never had a problem getting work without it. Due to AI, scammers, and infiltration by countries like North Korea, LinkedIn seems to be the only other source outside of "networking" to get hired these days though, unfortunately.

At this point nothing would make me happier than to see Meta, X, LinkedIn, and their friends collapse. They are a cancer and only amplify the enshittification of everything.

It's frustrating, but we need to accept that we are not the kind of user that these platforms want. I stopped using Reddit for the same reason, and I accepted that I'm not the best user for them. For my luck, Reddit is not used as the main communication channel for government agencies

We actually don't need to accept that. When they become big enough for network effects to become inescapable they need to be treated as utilities more than random private companies.

Are you saying that they should be regulated or controlled by the government in some ways?

They already are. For example they're not allowed to kill people or publish child porn

Even worse, it's hard or impossible to even have an account with any shred of privacy.

I've tried to create pseudoanonymous accounts on both Bluesky and Twitter and then had them be instantly banned before I ever used them. Not even doing anything real privacy like TOR or a VPN, just trying to create an account without revealing my personal phone number.

Ironically, their attempts to crack down on bots means real people like me can't access the sites, while the scammers, propagandists and shills will put in the work to register accounts.

Just to clarify, what do you mean by "without revealing my personal phone number"?

Did you use a voip number (e.g., Google Voice/Twilio/etc.) instead? Or somehow no number at all? Or a secondary (real) phone number, and Twitter somehow determined it wasn't your primary personal phone number?

Not pushing back against what you said, just trying to understand what factually happened.

It's been years since I tried making a Twitter account, I believe at the time it sometimes required a phone number to sign up but other times it was optional (some A/B test).

I think Bluesky didn't require a phone number to sign up, just an email. Maybe I'm misremembering though and it forced a phone number so I had to provide a fake one or a voip one.

Bluesky didn't require phone numbers back when it was invite only, and then there was a period of time after they allowed everyone to create accounts where users need a phone number to verify. That requirement might have been replaced by a captcha according to:

https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/2762

But I didn't try to create an account recently, maybe they went back to requiring phone numbers.

Lots of services demand your phone number after the fact now, hoping to use the sunk cost fallacy to extort it out of you when you're in a hurry.

Walmart recently deleted my phone number from my account for vague reasons but most likely because another account had the same number. That other account is my wife and the number is our VoIP line. I have no desire to interact with walmart through my cell phone so I didn't give it to them. So I used a google voice number, which is not my number, to get back in. Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company and autopopulated the field. Jokes on me!

But I don't think that's the case for Bluesky

It's because of spam. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Ironically AI could fix this when trivial spam detection inference becomes cheap enough to throw away on every upload.

AI would classify anything disagreeing with the government as spam. For example right now it would classify anything opposing Israel as spam.

Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company

Holy moly, don't you have any law at all to protect people's privacy ?

I don't remember giving my phone to bluesky

From Musk in Dec 2022 (right after purchasing Twitter):

we should not be prohibiting read-only scroll

Seems Musk agreed Twitter shouldn't require an account just to view the site. Wonder why the change of mind.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=50m47s

I learned from experience at least a decade ago that you should not take anything he says seriously or as an assertion of fact. Countless examples[0] prove that this is the case.

[0] https://elonmusk.today

Musk is aggressively optimistic on what can be achieved and by when, but rational on product decisions.

Musk stating that read-only scroll should be allowed seems very sensible (I think we all agree on that). But he (or someone he delegated to) clearly changed their mind. Intrigued to know why. Occam's razor would probably suggest that allowing scrapers to host twitter posts elsewhere costs them ad revenue, so they make it difficult.

He thinks Twitter data is valuable for AI training. He also blocks archive.org.

Grok 4.0, before it deteriorated, had a phase when it was good at writing tweets. The feature was used by Musk sycophants but it becomes boring soon.

Since Grok is closed now too and Cursor is pivoting to octocnt (GitHub clone), nobody knows where things are heading.

I think buying Twitter for data was a blunder big as expecting self driving to be solved by 2015 or whenever it originally was.

It is only clear with hindsight, but now everyone knows that tweets are literally detrimental for LLM style AI for whatever reason. Personally I think it's because tweets are responses without CoT or prompts, or could be also because all its meat is in the shape incompatible with en-US culture, even when it's in English, though all that matters is it's actively useless.

Maybe for training, but how about look up? I often use claude voice and grok voice (both on iOS) and reasonably frequently claude simply cannot find any info about a breaking topic, whereas grok always can.

I wonder if "no one says no" culture is practically the same thing as instructing LLMs to always hallucinate.

You know, LLM hallucination is a phenomenon where the AI would generate syntactically bulletproof chunks of text that are not grounded in reality. Lots of efforts by frontier LLM labs had been made in past few years to solve this by enabling AIs to refute premises in the prompt.

Ordinary people still need to be instructed to google stuffs. They don't go to a niche de facto non-American social media to be disappointed by its notoriously bad search to then conclude its notoriously dumb AI can be abused as a makeshift search tool. People are simply unable.

Twitter has been doing so much things backwards lately. That's reminiscent of how hallucination hurts whatever you do with AIs.

He didn't buy twitter for data, he bought it to shut down criticism of himself and it worked

He bought twitter because he was forced to. He got it at twice any valuation (based on fake usage stats) and at least 4x what it was worth. Criticism of him was not "shut down" either off or on twitter.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/12/elon-musk-admits-he-only-b...

Musk is aggressively optimistic on what can be achieved and by when

That’s putting it quite charitably, IMO.

but rational on product decisions

Hard disagree. You only need to look to his entire tenure at DOGE for literally hundreds (thousands?) of counterexamples.

Or, if you don’t count that work as “product decisions,” there are other highly questionable product decisions that he is responsible for: the rear doors on the Model X; the lack of instruments/gauges of any kind in front of the driver on the Model 3 and Y; the lack of proper safety sensors/protection for the hood of the Cybertruck, leading to mangled fingers; that stupid yoke steering wheel; and the entirety of Neuralink (just to name a handful).

I am certifiably not a fan of Musk but the yoke in the cybertruck when combined with the drive by wire steering is an absolute engineering masterpiece and a masterclass in systems calibration. The yoke itself has a relatively narrow range of motion of .94 turns lock-to-lock and at slow parking lot speeds that means you can do a 3 point turn, park, parallel park, navigate around, without making large movements of the steering input and you never have to (because you physically cannot) go hand-over-hand. Then at highway speeds the steering ratio is vastly different and the vehicle feels solid as a rock. It's absolutely effortless.

Now, on the flipside, the yoke also exists in the Tesla Model S Plaid, which has a traditional manual rack. In here it is the worst god-damned thing to ever curse a vehicle. The width is roughly the diameter of a school bus steering wheel and going hand over hand with it is annoying at best and the whole experience feels like utter garbage.

This should be your prior for any public figure.

Reddit is now this way too.

Which is why OpenAI formed a partnership with reddit, in exchange for access to OpenAI's models, OpenAI gets access to reddit's data, and access to reddits live feed.

The reason X and Reddit started forcing accounts is to prevent or add barrier for web scraping, and forcing companies to pay for access to the data.

Notably this was called a “temporary emergency measure” by Elon Musk — yet another promise he couldn’t keep

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-now-needs-users-s...

I'm fine with the criticism, but what's the solution? And what makes this a uniquely Elon problem when the rest of the social media industry does the same? There was backlash when the models learned computer programming from open source repositories, so I wonder if the same applies to casual speech.

Because it worked without an account before Elon came to Twitter and changed it?

Would've happened either way. Data is more valuable and also trivial to scrape now.

Should governments not have posted announcements in newspapers back when they were widely read, even though they require paying to read them?

Newspapers never required logging in to buy a copy.

You had to pay for a copy though and that's worse

The Reddit thing is disappointing. I stopped being a user a long time ago, but their links often show up in search results. I started noticing I couldn't see the page without logging in. I ended up blocking Reddit in my search results. It's not worth it.

At least for now Reddit doesn't require neither phone number nor email address (I think)

It requires email now. It used to not. And if you don't want to be shadowbanned you also need phone, and if you want to view NSFW you need government ID.

In the EU, EU-Alert exists. They can push alarms to any phone with that system.

They have Amber Alert here and the other day I noticed it linked to twitter for more information...which I couldn't actually but for a split-second when a pop-up loaded. This is silly. Perhaps govt can reach more people by posting a message to twitter vs their website. But if you're sending a link out, there is no excuse not to link to your website or any number of other open, stable hosts.

Even Bluesky has this problem!

Bluesky is totally accessible for me without an account. What do you see ?

Plenty of people restrict their account to require that you too have an account to see their posts. A link to Bluesky often feels like roulette on whether I can see a post or not.

It isn’t as egregious as other sites but it’s still restrictive.

I don't understand why they have this option. Why would anyone toggle this on?

Maybe to minimize bots scraping your info.

If bluesky ever becomes popular boots will just scrape the firehose directly.

Here in the Netherlands, WhatsApp has the defacto communication tool. Everyone is expected to have it installed, not just by friends but also municipals and companies. Same level as having an e-mail address.

It's a missed opportunity for the digital soverignty the EU says it so badly needs. The code for a government backed WhatsApp competitor is there, in multiple instances even. Launch a WhatsApp clone and put all governement communication through it so everyone has to have it installed, and you have an instant EU-wide userbase. From there, people will naturally start to use it between themselves.

Do you think if government accounts were on Signal, people would install it?

Signal requires a mobile phone for an account; so it's not entirely web-friendly. Plus, can you read what's posted to signal without an account?

I think my main communication is probably the last tool that I want to be government backed tbh.

Even if it's communication/announcements from the government?

I too am constantly frustrated that official communications from governments happen on Twitter or Facebook.

Communications/announcements from the government can easily be posted on the government's website or, if really needed, sent as an SMS

Too expensive, bad idea.

SMS are virtually free for every carrier. The prices for the customers exist to partially offset the fixed costs of the infrastructure (which already exists).

what country are you from that you trust US corps more than your own government?

That bar is low. Less than 8% of the world population lives in a full democracy (Economist Democracy Index).

I think the lessons of 2026 must be:

- the dangers of fascism are very real

- technological choices won't save you from the snatch squads, although grassroots use of tech by communities can help

- fascism is extensively promoted by some corporations and their owners

- a non-captured government that is willing to push back is much better than relying on corporations

- anything headquartered in America is potentially subject to arbitrary sanctions against non-US users

- just because we don't like the solution doesn't mean the problem isn't real (see age verification debate)

Fascinating! Where I live, fascism is not the threat, it is rampant socialism. It is spreading like cancer and destroying lives and economies.

Where do you live? Because I’m guessing you’re wrong.

Eurocrats could never in a million years make it happen. For starters, every country would insist on having its own ChatsApp, with roll out taking years. Then, to satisfy strict security and compliance regulations it would be restricted to devices passing Google & Apple hardware attestation checks. And once everyone is finally forced to be on board, any confidentiality guarantees can go out the window to catch pedos and terrorists.

It's for the best.

Mastodon instances would be a drop-in replacement, no? Federated instances and as a bonus, it solves the biggest problem of new users not knowing which server to join. Just join your local government's if you don't know of another.

There is a carrier neutral WhatsApp, called SMS.

Not even remotely close.

For natural disaster emergency annoucememt it is more reliable than whatsapp.

Cell Broadcast yes, SMS no.

Isnt the one just "mass usage" of the other?

Like Cell Broadcast just duplicates the SMS on carrier level?

Nah, Cell Broadcast has a lot less overhead since it does not have to do any routing or delivery confirmation and such. The load does not scale based on recipients which makes it far more reliable during an emergency.

Why, because it can't be monetized by Facebook?

Yes, no, try to have group chat with SMS, and tell me how that went...

RTS is the SMS replacement and is quite old. And as evidence it works, I direct your attention to the ubiquitous iMessage, which only "couldn't" interop with Android because Apple was trying the vendor lock-in approach and actively enshittifying its own users' experience and blaming it on Android users.

Whatsapp etc. only took off because SMS is so limited, and the mobile companies are so profit-focused they can't make a decent competitor.

(how is whatsapp paid for again?)

SMS made you pay by character. RCS is the current free alternative.

so instead using Meta product you suggest using Google product, great alternative for Europe independence

it's like when they wanna get rid of Visa/MC by switching to EU apps, which will require Google/Apple verification, what an improvement...

RCS is an international standard. Google only adds their client (and running the service if your mobile provider doesn't).

Don't know what EU apps are you talking about, but yes, mobile apps need Google services. Web interfaces don't.

please tell me ONE app for Android other than Google Messages I can use to send and receive RCS, it surely won't be problem since it's international standard same as SMS, so there must be plenty apps available...

Pretty much all banking apps for Android won't work without Google Play Services, so once again if you are using Lineage or Graphene, you are still stuck with US company to use your European banking services on the phone.

please tell me ONE app for Android other than Google Messages I can use to send and receive RCS, it surely won't be problem since it's international standard same as SMS, so there must be plenty apps available...

Nice red herring. The number of implementations is irrelevant here, although Wikipedia says Samsung had one too.

Here's the standard, try Ctrl+F "Google": https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/technologies/netwo...

Cell towers failed in my region after a hurricane. SMS is pointless in that situation.

Which is one of the many many reasons Zuckerberg needs to be investigated the hell out of for every single thing he does

I grant you 2014 is 12 years ago now and you could plausibly argue it was their doing to grow network effects but I'm pretty sure WA had that infrastructure already in place - Acton, Koum et al already did the ground work to get carriers to... whatever it is

Zuckerberg stole it like he steals everything

People insisted then that paying tens of Instagram for WhatsApp was too much.

Why not just a website?

Hard to keep up with lots of sites. At least provide a common interface, like an atom feed.

Are you supposed to keep up with lots of sites? Which ones would you want to keep up with?

The problem is that an EU-mandated digital communicating tool would look like the Minitel.

Anyone remembering the French minitel?

I think it was quite good for the 1980s, it just got stuck there.

The EU should rather embrace open standards rather than building a closed competitor here. We already have XMPP and Matrix, all that's required is for public institutions to use them.

Blame boundless AI scraping. X would like very much to be more open.

You don't think he has the resources to sue the scrapers?

There is a browser addon https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect to view Old Reddit without an account.

Create an account then? Not sure why that's an issue.

You can't make new accounts on twitter. You can only use existing apple or google accounts.

I think you can, if you install their app.

I don't have a smartphone.

Then use one of the other options. It's not really that difficult.

are completely hostile to allowing you to see it.

You say like this like it doesn't literally take like 10 seconds to make an account to see it.

It doesn't. Have you actually tried? Recently?

A couple years ago was the last time.

That's why we really need some kind of non profit or maybe two "social media" sites made with the public good in mind. One could be officially government sanctioned and funded (sort of like Voice of America but internal to the US more so) and have a strict organisation verification policy for local police / government and other quasi public entities (say like transportation systems and energy companies - etc)

So HTTP and IP

I think if you think that technologies which were around for decades before social media took off are equivalent to social media, then it's actually on you for missing what the difference is.

See HN classics of "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame" and "you can replicate dropbox with webdav"; at some point you have to stop thinking that it's everyone else who is wrong and work out what they want which you're missing, which is convenience.

Yeah but you have to think about what that convenience actually is. You can't just say "twitter is convenient". Visiting someone's website is actually much easier than visiting their Twitter, so what happened?

This is Mastodon, and there are instances such as https://ec.social-network.europa.eu.

I wholeheartedly agree on every point. I've felt this way for years. It's scandalous.

Many companies also rely on socials as their only effective means of customer service. If you have a problem or want to provide feedback but you don't use social media then you are SOL.

Or you sue them and (if they did something wrong) they're SOL.

But you won't. And they know you won't. Not even small claims.

...because the overhead of even small claims is bigger than what you can possibly recover in most regular disputes. There needs to be something like a class action for small claims - government regulators where you can submit complaints with evidence to and if enough people complain about a company the government has to look into it.

I'm sympathetic, as I also don't have an account, but honestly I don't think requiring a free account that takes 10 seconds to make and needs no personal info constitutes "completely hostile to allowing you to see it."

Reddit is now this way too.

You can still use https://old.reddit.com with no login. It's cleaner and snappier.

Is this a cruel joke?

Why ?

Old Reddit now requires login and ID verification

Not in the US thankfully.

They're starting to block that and are starting to require logins for old reddit

I would support a law requiring official government messages to be promulgated only via channels that do not require an account to view. It's not the most important thing to spend political capital on, but it would have the positive effect of directly interfering with government officials publishing their messages on proprietary login-only social media because it's the most expedient thing to do or it's the only thing they know how to do.

My 81 year-old mother has never owned a computer. So yes it's not good to have critical government services only on apps or websites that require log in or subscriptions. Although to her it doesn't matter since she has no clue of these sites.

We went through a hurricane in 2022 and that was an eye opener too. Most "land lines" are no longer a line to anywhere it's just a phone connected to the Internet. Anyone with that type phone had no service after 24 hours without power. My 85 uncle still (even now) had an actual land line and it worked no issues.

After the hurricane no citizen had any way to communicate. Cell towers failed when generators ran out of fuel. No fuel because gas stations couldn't pump gas without power.

My dad passed away just a year earlier he had been on an oxygen generator that needed power 24/7. I don't think he would have survived. I'm not sure if I could even have reached 911.

For awareness radio is the best solution but even emergency services radio stations are being decommissioned here in Canada in favour of Internet services.

Re the "land lines", I think the answer to that is not "keep 100+ year old copper infrastructure running" but "make our modern infrastructure as reliable as Ma Bell made it 100 years ago".

Of course, neither will happen, so there's that.

"make our modern infrastructure as reliable as Ma Bell made it 100 years ago"

Sadly, I don't think that makes sense. Switches have a lot more to do a lot faster when it comes to the internet as compared to a phone. 100 years ago, calls were completed by a person physically moving one or more wires from one plug to another.

Better to have an emergency system that will always work - and maybe the only way to keep an emergency system maintained is to use it during non-emergencies. Hard phone lines and radio.

The solution is clearly one that isn't controlled by any company:

Nostr.

API works great, for now

https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/user/[username]

https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/user/[username]&uid=[id...

Beware the website is jam-packed with ads and tracking

Correction:

https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/tweets/[username]?uid=[...

What is the uid parameter for? It looks to me it's ignored.

Listen I know this comment is off topic, flag this if you want but I think it’s an important discussion

Speaking of twitter, are there any posts here about the ycombinator discourse?

Given a high level member of ycombinator blocked the chairman of the FTC after an argument over immigration, I foresee issues in the future.

I don’t think it’s an issue. Their site, their rules.

Politics aside, Twitter/X has become a bad place to share information on and to link to. It's a bad option from a technical point of view.

We can't read a multi-part tweet (or follow-ups from the author) or check the latest updates from an official account without an account, which requires a mobile phone number and sometimes extra verifications. A digital "town square" can't require an account and a phone number to read what's said there.

Same with Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Linkdin, etc.

I wish I understood why the majority of the AI discussions happen on Twitter/X.

Network effect. Most people worth discussing with are already there, so more people join the discussion there, and so on.

but it's a really shallow form of discussion, as most tweets are the equivalent of short-form videos of tiktoks.

I think Pareto principle applies here: most discussions will be shallow, only occasionally diving deep — and Twitter acknowledges that reality, and builds around it.

The real problem is that places like HN and Reddit allow downvotes / reports to drown people out. Someone on Twitter will post on their page. They control it. It can be slop. It can be low quality. It can be their random thoughts but all that is irrelevant while you slowly build up your audience and the stuff you wanna work on. This generally takes time and is something that grows organically. Meanwhile on HN I will regularly see posts "flagged" where the account didn't actually say anything bad or against the rules. It just goes against the group think and it doesn't even take that much. It can be 1 or 2 people flagging your post and then suddenly it's hidden. This simply does not happen on Twitter.

So eventually people stop posting. I stopped posting on Reddit entirely for example even though I had dozens of very highly upvoted technical posts mainly because I would regularly see highly inaccurate information get upvoted while the real accurate information is downvoted.

HN has the same problem with Elon Musk overall and SpaceX / Twitter.

On Twitter there is a highly active community of space enthusiasts. Absolutely none of them would post slop like "Elon is not an engineer" but on HN that is what passes for discourse.

I mean at least they tell on themselves but I would prefer a technical forum have actually smart people in it. Not just larpers.

I just can't take this discourse seriously.

On Twitter there is a highly active community of space enthusiasts. Absolutely none of them would post slop like "Elon is not an engineer"

You live in an algo bubble!

TONS of intelligent people with backgrounds in space, defense and technology say it all the time on Twitter.

And all of them are wrong.

why not?

Anyone know the specifics of how this works under the hood? I assumed the people over at Twitter/X would aggressively block systems like this from working. Are they doing something creative to get around that?

sad that i come here for technical information and yours is the first lonely comment asking about how this works

No, and nitter the software still works too. Apparently the only barrier he could create was a cease and desist letter.

Burner accounts are dirt, dirt cheap. I have several hundred I rotate out. I’m afraid to mention the library I’m using in case it’s not in their cross hairs, but it makes scraping trivial. At least at the scale I’m scraping I don’t even need a proxy. My residential up is enough to keep the blocks away.

Only had a handful of accounts banned.

Thanks Peter! Now do the same for the 'gram!

https://www.autistici.org offer great services with very strong effort to protect privacy, for more then 20 years, now... and all is done by volunteers.

Very proud of their work, and kudos for affecting how the world is handling information and their will to do good

Now designated a terror organization by the current US administration.

What is Twitter?

How does this work, does it use the twitter api?

Are there any Instagram equivalents that don't suck?

People love to virtue signal by linking to Twitter proxies, but Instagram is still a walled garden that all sorts of useful information (event details, restaurant menus, etc.) is locked inside. I occasionally have luck with whatever the top Google results are, but they're all encrusted with dodgy ads.

Depends if you want an alternate front-end and you can self-host, or you're looking for a third party.

For the former, I generally look at what LibRedirect has as options: https://libredirect.manerakai.com/

Proxigram seems unmaintained, but kittygram seems to be actively developed: https://codeberg.org/irelephant/kittygram

I've never had an Instagram account, and I'm trying to keep it that way.

Something to use with a normal web browser that requires no login would be nice. Like Libreddit or Nitter.

Well the description for Kittygram is: "Kittygram is an anonymous, privacy-friendly, lightweight, and open-source Instagram frontend inspired by Nitter."

I've had people send me reels as links to ddinstagram.com and kkinstagram.com, which at least in Telegram, get transformed into a video that can be played inline from the link preview and downloaded.

These "embed fixers" aren't hated by platforms nearly as much as alternative front-ends are.

Cease and desist in 3... 2... 1...

Is this referring to the new Twitter company that recently launched (https://twitter.now)?

If not, then this is just going to lead to confusion.

there is no chance that people would assume this is about a startup that's about to get nuked by copyright cease and desists

I don’t think there will be any confusion. Clearly this is not referring to this random new Twitter thing you’ve linked to that most people have never heard of, it is referring to Twitter the previously global piece of software with hundreds of millions of former users.

Who in their right mind would take that site seriously?