XCancel service is suspended until further notice
xcancel.com562 points by gaganyaan 20 hours ago
562 points by gaganyaan 20 hours ago
Regardless of the legality of the service:
I always use xcancel instead of X. I don't have a twitter account and I don't want to sign in. I just occasionally want to read what some people had to say about something. Even this is usually a mistake. It's probably better taken as entertainment.
My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
These browser extensions still work:
For Chrome: https://github.com/tsvb/post-peek
For Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dumpster-fire...
For Safari: https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox
X should provide an option to make youor posts public. And govt reps should be required to use it.
^ this and the entire drama is just an ad campaign to make the rebranding stick. what is really going to work is to keep calling it Twitter, as it identifies itself, and slowly move over the scene to Bluesky/Mastodon.
What demoralize them the most is to show whoever pays for it doesn't matter.
X doesn’t suck. It has one of the most functional web client and uncucked moderation.
Well, I do not have an account and when I open any profile on it right now, I cannot read it properly. I cannot click on posts. I cannot read replies. I cannot open images.
In my opinion, that is quite far from "functional".
Such a behavior alone is a sufficient justification, in my opinion, for the services like xcancel to exist.
And if the X social network does not want their content to be publicly available, fine. They are free to gate it behind a login.
??? Have you never tried to visit X on a mobile device? Functional is far from what I'd call it, given that you can't see replies to the tweet or indeed do much else on the site
I hate when companies do this. Instagram is a black box for me. Whenever someone sends me a link the web app is completely nonfunctional; clicking links just reload the page, it constantly tries opening the app, etc
The last time I signed up for an Instagram account (2016) it got immediately flagged as a bot account. I think I was supposed to appeal it to have it reinstanted, but why bother if this is how badly they treat users?
Can you imagine going to work as Instagram's web developer, spending your day finding new ways that the app accidentally works and disabling them?
Imginn.com/whateverrouteoninstagram
So instagram.com/foo becomes Imginn.com/foo
Hope this helps!
I know there are like 5 trillion Instagram viewers. But I've never actually needed to use any of them because there is absolutely nothing so important on Instagram that I must see it. The entire site is optional.
did you sign up with your actual details? or were you using a throwaway email and/or phone?
as for using it without an account, try https://codeberg.org/irelephant/kittygram
I have a shitter account, I don't use the app but just the web app on safari iOS.
recently with videos I can't change playback speed. so I have to use xCancel.
before I just used to use Tweetdeck. but that went away or went pro.
The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".
The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads, or if it does have ads/tracking, that you are trivially capable of blocking them while still totally enjoying the service/product.
xcancel, archive, whatever are all tools almost solely meant to access monetized content without having to contribute to the monetize part. Then those companies are told they "suck" when they don't like it.
Most importantly, the competitors that the internet endlessly cries for to show up to dethrone these giants, see what is going on and say "lol, nope".
> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".
There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still serving ads.
> The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free
Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable.
This vision is ripe for the picking:
>Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable.
What rubs me the wrong way about statements like this, is that it is almost always said by people who totally miss that they are advocating for things that are personally profitable for them.
A website that allows you to skirt paywalls, is immensely profitable to the end user. That same end user, who detests the idea of having to spend money, then complains loudly that corporations just want their money. And it is completely lost on them they are playing the exact same game as corporations.
The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all. But that overwhelming is not what we see. Instead it is just two entities fighting over money, because they both have the same root motivation to maximize money.
I do not "immensely" benefit from free access to servers that will relay public microposts. I don't think my accesses even cost X a dollar per year. I would happily step in with my own server to replace 10x or even 100x the server resources I consume if it was possible. And if it was actually expensive they should be jumping at a way to make it possible.
I remember when you paid your ISP for internet access and in that cost they also provided you with an e-mail address, they ran a Usenet server for their customers, and gave you space for web hosting. Now all of that is expected to be paid for with ads instead.
Im too young to remember this but it would be an interesting idea if ISPs paid website hosts (kinda like cable companies pay networks based on viewership)
The privacy implications of this are many, but the idea itself could be interesting.
>The actual break from "corporate profits" is to not engage with the corporations products at all.
This is difficult to do when corporations control elements of the public sphere and the proceed to run them in such a way as to maximize profits but to the disadvantage of the public.
In its infancy, I recall frequent descriptions of Twitter as the "new public square". A company doesn't get to have its cake and eat it, too. If something that is a public good is operated to maximize private profits instead of the public good, there's going to be conflict with the public.
Perhaps what we need is a broader classification of utilities, and then run them for public benefit rather than private profit, so the citizenry truly can choose to live their lives as something other than rural hermits without engaging with for-profit corporations.
How does one not engage with the corporate product at all?
Im typing a comment on a website of a corporation whose goal is to grow companies into corporations, via a computer manufactured by a corporation on a keyboard produced by a corporation, staring at a screen produced by a corporation, while connecting to an internet service offered by a corporation. Never mind that im also employed by a corporation, dressed by a corporation, drive a car manufactured by a corporation that takes fuel from a corporate gas station that is extracted and proccessed by a corporation.
What is the alternative exactly
It's basically impossible to not engage with any corporate products at all. It's trivially-easy to not engage with specific corporate products. I don't engage with Twitter, because I won't sign up and that makes it useless to me. I'm not missing out on anything I care about.
> How does one not engage with the corporate product at all?
By not using it. Which is exactly why I don't use X or Facebook, and minimize my use of Google (I use DuckDuckGo for search, and as Maps continues to suck more I use it less).
On some level there is local/small businesses. They are less efficient and hence you usually have to pay more for less, but it avoids the a lot of the "power structure" that people have strong distaste for.
On a deeper level there is none. Overwhelmingly peoples complaint is that they need to do something to get something, which is just how life is, a shared annoyance that is just a fact of reality.
> they need to do something to get something, which is just how life is
FLOSS invalidates that statement.
Many people are happy to contribute to something greater than themselves. They also happily acknowledge they're standing on the shoulders of giants.
I'm not totally dismissive of FLOSS, but it's kind of a unique situation so you can't really extrapolate broad generalities about society from it.
Software basically has zero marginal cost, and is pretty unique in that regard. If baking 1 loaf of bread was identical to baking 10,000,000 loafs, we would have solved hunger centuries ago...
There also is the fact that a large amount of FLOSS is an exercise in resume building (FLOSS contributions is SWE resume building 101), and one rung lower, an exercise in ego building ("my design runs on millions of computers daily" is definitely something a human would value). So I wouldn't call it completely selfless (we are now also at the boundary of the philosophy of "selfless acts").
But in short, there is a reason software is pretty much the only field with a vibrant "free/open source" scene. It falls off a cliff once more than pressing keys on a keyboard a few hours a week/month is involved.
> There also is the fact that a large amount of FLOSS is an exercise in resume building (FLOSS contributions is SWE resume building 101)
Not all of it. Plus, we could say the same thing about the typical worker at the average modern company. Google's product graveyard is a popular example of this. Resume padding, job hopping and ladder climbing are the norm now. In that respect, I can see why you're so pessimistic about the average human.
Much of the dedication often found in modern FLOSS is reminiscent of how companies used to operate: valued employees actually believed in the shared mission they were all striving for, and they took pride in their work as a result.