Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
github.com755 points by zImPatrick 17 hours ago
755 points by zImPatrick 17 hours ago
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
https://xcancel.com/
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. "Maybe we can call it “agent first” to help move things along." "Agent First" API access for social networks. What could possibly go wrong. And the irony is that we don’t even need APIs for social networks to drown in botspam. I mean... It'd change nothing for the worse. It's regular users that are getting screwed by lack of API. Agent First is the name of my startup (https://agentfirst.dev/), which mostly does what you described. :-) >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. Whats a credit? In general, a successful web request costs 1 credit: https://doc.agentfirst.dev/endpoints/pricing If you dont mind, could you share an example of information posted exclusively on twitter which was crucial to you? Just curious;) 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 and websites can be outdated.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. Surely it shouldn't be to difficult to come up with a sort of plugin-type approach like I've seen in various 'comments' sections on existing websites: 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. > 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. Or they already have that, but it's badly designed, bloated, or doesn't have employees assigned to it. > It almost seems like we need laws that information about public services have to be available on a public website 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. 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 think at best you could propose that public information be available without login. as much as I dislike when people proselytize mastodon, it seems like a very tidy solution to this problem. As long as the service provider runs an instance in their infrastructure and allows everybody to read. That said, RSS seems way simpler. A mastodon account provides an rss feed by default so both solutions coexist without duplicating the work. RSS and IRC need new apps and new means to self host. To do that, there probably has to be new DNS. 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. X is a public site. Anyone is free to make an account. I strongly reject that I should be required to create an account in order to read updates about local train service. 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? Doesn't their own Île-de-France Mobilités app have reliable information on outages? Surely it's more reliable than their Twitter account? 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. For me a website is much more accessible than a phone app in many situations. Ok but can you answer my question about reliability? I don't have a horse in this race but I would question the idea that a municipal service has a better reliability record than x/twitter. 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? The information may be as reliable, but: 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. Wow, this is kind of a mess, seems twitter won from usability standpoint here 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 ... Twitter won by pulling the rug! 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. Except that it doesn't because you need an account to see virtually anything on that N#*i site. 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. A few recent examples:
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/currencies/articles/bessen...
https://theprint.in/world/us-military-says-it-completed-late...
https://www.reuters.com/technology/brad-lightcap-leaving-ope... 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. The competition is between: - 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). 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. [1] https://www.mta.info/press-release/statement-mta-acting-chie... 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... Both FB and WhatsApp have serious lockin with this sort of thing, far more than X does. WhatsApp is currently not enshittified enough to be a problem, although they do put an entry in my conversation list to talk to their AI. 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. In this case it seems that linking to the CHP website would likely crash their web servers. Understandable:) So allowing projects like Nitter and XCancel must also be understandable, in order for recipients to be able to actually read these messages. 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. Irish rail posts about train delays exclusively on Twitter Good one, and a heavily criticised one it seems;) Shame on Irish rail for doing this! 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” Google and Facebook fucked up the internet. 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... > Google and Facebook fucked up the internet. 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. Facebook and Google are probably two of the biggest players when it comes to how online advertising has been shaped. > I'd say advertising has fucked up the Internet 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. 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. I had to 'vouch' this comment. It was [dead]. Why? Who sits here lurking this site flagging every single thing they disagree with? It was [dead] but not [flagged] [dead], which means it was killed by automatic filter. We can only speculate on what that filter might be. I've seen several strangely dead comments today, perhaps the automated filter has been updated and has some gremlins? 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. They'll start server side rendering sites onto a canvas. I suspect that's what Stadia will be reborn as. 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. We stopped having APIs because of Cambridge Analytica. They were already heavily limited and essentially useless by then, definitely not enough access to sync your profile to another network. 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. I was so sad when they’re acquired by the FB. It was a great platform 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. 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. 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. What would an average person lose if everybody used more open platforms? 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. atrpoto is great technology but disappointing communities 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 Echo chamber strikes again, because I see none of that, just love for knowledge, history, and science. Try posting anything even mildly positive about AI on Bluesky and you’ll experience instant hate. 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. That’s why I think atproto is cool. It’s the only thing I’m aware of that provides for actually forking a public social network. 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. Only through regulations mandating interoperability and enforced at national level. This is social problem, not technological one. So technology won't solve it Pay celebrities (and now influencers I guess) like the Twitter early days This was tried with clubhouse and that kind of failed miserably. I think those days are likely over. in the current climate the definition of "better" might not be one you like the "better" that will win will be what's more engaging and addictive 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. The platform is the people, not the tech. 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. Probably where twitter is going honestly. Not unlike MySpace pivot to music and Facebook being used exclusively for Messenger 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. I really enjoy the "federated platforms are too difficult to use" voices on HN. Quite the hackers these guys! Not sure about hackers but the lack of search is a killer for anyone normal. Also, threads or rather the lack thereof in Mastodon is not great either. If no normie can use them, what's the point? 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. I feel your pain, but what about "centralized but under control of a non-profit"? Could Wikipedia/Wikimedia serve as an example of such a model? 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? I think adversarial compatibility is the way to go. Move people over slowly as you add new features the old platform doesn't porvide. 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? Well that's the exact premise of adversarial compatibility. You just scrape the platform their friends are on and cross-post. >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. 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 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...) 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. All you need is to mandate real-time API access for users... Unfortunately even the EU doesn't seem prepared to do that though. 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. What you're describing exists: Its called AT-Protocol and runs Bluesky. See more: https://overreacted.io/open-social/ Having a protocol is not enough. You need also to be in a position to mandate that all the social media company over a certain size adopt it 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. 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. Yes - that is indeed a problem. 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. [flagged] I find it hilarious that folks still consider Musk to be pro free speech. 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. 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? 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? We're talking about the "free-speech platform" that bans words like "cis" and "cisgender"? 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. 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. they came with verifiable sources and you come with your own "day-to-day experience", quite myopic "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." [flagged] 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. [flagged] 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. Elon was proven to manipulate and censor Twitter. So you should prefer neither. > 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. Nothing in that comment mentions force? 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. Well, considering that never actually happened... 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. Ah that makes sense. I didn’t realize Sieg Heil was German for “my heart goes out to you” [flagged] 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. [flagged] I think it’s just literally anyone who sees your post and also has eyes. 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. [flagged] 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. Elon did? As in Elon Musk? Specifically? No idea, wouldn’t be surprised, but I have no evidence that he did. But the post I’m responding to said “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.
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