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  • trompetenaccoun 2 hours

    The X account of the person running this has been suspended.

    https://x.com/PeterAndersonE

  • HelloUsername 14 hours

    Show HN some months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46513823

  • SoKamil 14 hours

    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.

  • 13 hours

  • thallavajhula 6 hours

    not going to be long before they cut access to this app.

  • xg15 9 hours

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

  • 9 hours

  • Jtarii 14 hours

    The search is somehow faster than twitter's own search.

  • tlvbaf 14 hours

    Hmm, on the one hand Elon begs for new users with animated ads on the x.com front page, on the other hand one of his (likely) alt accounts claims that "Every $1 [of advertising on X] spent delivered an average return of $5.42":

    https://twitterwebviewer.com/?tweet=2092490213121761787

    I am kind of addicted to studying propaganda and reading about baseball stadiums on the moon to drive up the SpaceX stock price. For this I need the Twitter gateways.

  • DivingForGold 14 hours

    It does not work for me like xcancel did

  • dhiraj113 11 hours

    Nice, how do you make this freely available?

  • jacobgorm 6 hours

    I've been on Mastodon for a few years, and though it has less drama than Twitter/X, it does seem to have reached critical mass of users and does cover most of my needs for random gossip. I am surprised that that nobody has mentioned it here.

    inigyou 29 minutes

    Because it's not a real platform, it's a series of tiny microplatforms

  • amazingamazing 6 hours

    Why are people so obsessed about twitter

  • 10 hours

  • bsimpson 9 hours

    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.

    inigyou 28 minutes

    It's impossible to build a foobar equivalent unless it's literally foobar, because the value of foobar isn't the software, but the fact that other people post stuff there. There's no point having a restaurant menu platform unless you have restaurant menus on it. Have you considered going around your city and taking pictures of restaurant menus, then attaching them to a map?

    grishka 3 hours

    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.

    Marsymars 8 hours

    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

    bsimpson 7 hours

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

    inigyou 27 minutes

    Most of these front ends need to be stocked with login cookies, that's how they bypass the login wall. If you want to self host a bypass you need to create at least one dummy account on that service.

  • jp_sc 11 hours

    I don't think the worldwide trendings are right. The ones I see (with personalization disabled) are not all in arabic (?)

  • ChrisArchitect 15 hours

    Related:

    Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283

  • xacky 12 hours

    You've been told for years not to use X, (twitter is now clearly the pre Musk era), but Elon knows you crave his dopamine so he can keep imposing harsher conditions.

  • vlod 10 hours

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

    inigyou 24 minutes

    Probably just fetches the page with a login cookie, like Nitter.

  • ThouYS 12 hours

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

    inigyou 24 minutes

    Why don't you do it?

  • charles_f 14 hours

    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

    inigyou 23 minutes

    The number of people who do this is the number of reasons Elon can give to the trademark judge that he is actually using the trademark Twitter and it shouldn't be invalidated for non-use.

  • 121kahG 14 hours

    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.

    gruez 6 hours

    >handled by Cloudflare and claims to be in California

    Where? are you just pulling cloudflare's ip info?

  • twilo 10 hours

    What is Twitter?

    nancyminusone 10 hours

    the enduring result of the stupidest brand name change ever

  • bigbadfeline 14 hours

    whackamole is the only way for now, unfortunately.

  • chr15m 5 hours

    The general rule: any social media owned by a corporation will eventually lock posts behind a login.

    grishka 3 hours

    And stuff their UX full of dark patterns, and get very angry whenever someone tries building a third-party client without the bullshit.

    itomato 3 hours

    Any social media product will be acquired and co-opted.

  • LightBug1 12 hours

    How about ... fuck shitter ... I don't even want to view via proxy anymore.

    PSA: I'm not interested in your shitter-specific content. Hit me up elsewhere. Thanks

  • andrewmutz 12 hours

    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?

    swyx 3 hours

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

    inigyou 35 minutes

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

  • randyrand 8 hours

    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.

    urbandw311er 8 hours

    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.

    randyrand 5 hours

    Well, I was confused. New Twitter got big coverage today [1] and then more Twitter related news on HN today too.

    [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/new-twitter-laun...

    orsorna 7 hours

    Who in their right mind would take that site seriously?

    nozzlegear 48 minutes

    Are you talking about Twitter or X?

    tyre 8 hours

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

    inigyou 31 minutes

    First off I think you mean trademark, secondly you're allowed to just ignore a C&D, thirdly your trademark is invalid if you don't use it so Elon might not actually have a trademark on Twitter any more

  • skeledrew 14 hours

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

    HDBaseT 5 hours

    I2P Nitter instances exist: va7j3ssqh7e26twc2sflrwjrn7uxryuenatcmfp7njnr5hmvtuiq.b32.i2p

    inigyou 30 minutes

    You can just ignore a C&D if you have the balls to enrage Elon

    jjordan 14 hours

    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.

    pfraze 6 hours

    That dev community continued into iroh and atproto. We built atproto with whyrusleeping as a very active consultant

    physicalecon 14 hours

    Dead, approximately. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421489

    skeledrew 14 hours

    IPFS might be in trouble. Haven't really followed the tech so I have no idea how much of an effect there will be with Shipyard dropping it, but from the number of things I see named in their exit post I'd guess the blast radius is sizable.

    - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421489

    - https://ipshipyard.com/blog/2026-the-end-of-ipfs-at-shipyard...

  • benjaminclauss 14 hours

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

    aeyes 14 hours

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

    inigyou 23 minutes

    A fig leaf

    warkdarrior 9 hours

    The algorithm is free, it's the data that matters.

  • oriettaxx 10 hours

    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

    unethical_ban 8 hours

    Now designated a terror organization by the current US administration.

    oriettaxx 8 hours

    yes, I've answered in the wrong post, sorry

  • newsomix9xl 14 hours

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

    It doesn't even have good cat pictures.

    RIMR 14 hours

    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.

    newsomix9xl 10 hours

    Totes. I searched for cat pics and within a few results I was being given racially charged fights.

    baggachipz 14 hours

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

    abraham 12 hours

    Yay for daily cat apps! I run daily.cat

    drop_star 11 hours

    you guys are doing the important work. Keep it up!

  • daedrdev 13 hours

    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.

    alexthedigger 12 hours

    [dead]

    MiscCompFacts 12 hours

    Is there a link to this argument?

    iAMkenough 12 hours

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

    johannes1234321 12 hours

    And compared to Twitter or others discussed here no government agency or similar uses Hacker News as their primary channel for news updates. However Twitter, Instagram and auch are used for such official purpose from different agencies worldwide. Thus access for the respective citizens is relevant.

  • john_strinlai 14 hours

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

    inigyou 34 minutes

    C&D has zero legal weight. They're just relying on developers being conflict-averse. At my local hacker space, at least five members are in some kinds of protracted legal battles (five different ones)

    zerop 12 hours

    the maker - https://peterslab.co/products/twitter-web-viewer

    doublepg23 14 hours

    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?

    john_strinlai 13 hours

    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

    xmprt 13 hours

    Bigger "guns" diplomacy. They don't need any legal basis for a C&D. Just depends on whether you have enough money to fight it in court.

    paxys 12 hours

    Well yeah the copyright violation is pretty clear cut here.

    itintheory 12 hours

    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.

    inigyou 32 minutes

    Violating ToS is legal, but so is sending a C&D for anything you like

    thehamkercat 14 hours

    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

    SXX 14 hours

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

    14 hours

    14 hours

    pibaker 8 hours

    "Check our Wikipedia page for our latest domain. Next stop the Central African Republic!"

  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 13 hours

    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

    jwilk 10 hours

    The latter URL looks wrong.

    1vuio0pswjnm7 10 hours

    Correction:

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

    7 hours

    1vuio0pswjnm7 7 hours

    uid optional

    jwilk 8 hours

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

    f0e4c2f7 7 hours

    Having the same issue. I think they might have turned it off. Was looking forward to using this.

  • celsoazevedo 12 hours

    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.

    seahorseemoji 10 hours

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

    nlitened 9 hours

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

    redox99 7 hours

    Because obviously everyone who participates in a discussion has an account, so they don't feel this annoyance other than maybe when sharing a link to someone else.

    anigbrowl 6 hours

    Read Social and Economic Networks by Michael O Jackson.

    jesse_dot_id 10 hours

    A lot of crypto bro grifter crossover in AI.

    itomato 3 hours

    Tells me how valuable they actually are.

    moomoo11 9 hours

    why not?

    anigbrowl 6 hours

    Don't be obtuse. the reasons why not were spelled out in the GP.

    moomoo11 6 hours

    vague and useless reply

    why are AI researchers and everyone else on X

    preg_match 3 hours

    Inertia. Twitter has basically no value, it's just a bad app and bad website. It was never actually "good" for information communication, but it was tolerable.

    When it comes down to 99% of these "why are people using sucky thing?" questions, the answer is inertia. Never confuse popularity for quality, they're completely orthogonal.

  • ck2 14 hours

    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

    inigyou 22 minutes

    I mean, that basically is how the Nazis had power

    kijashdkujdfhas 12 hours

    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.

    uygiugiu 7 hours

    'everyone who disagrees with me is a nazi'

    inigyou 21 minutes

    When what they said is that Nazis are bad... literally yes? Literally everyone who disagrees with "Nazis are bad" is literally a nazi.

    iAMkenough 12 hours

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

    kijashdkujdfhas 12 hours

    Don't care. The occasional human who might see the comment still makes it worth it. Even if they don't change their behavior, they've been reminded that they are hanging out at the nazi bar.

    It's important to remind people of what they're doing, when they're doing something like that.

    bigstrat2003 5 hours

    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.

    inigyou 18 minutes

    DOGE killing a few million people is no secret.

    kijashdkujdfhas 4 hours

    Yeah we get it, you like to hang out at the nazi bar.

  • seebeegeebee 15 hours

    We need this for Linkdin too!

    add-sub-mul-div 14 hours

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

    tantalor 13 hours

    More like a tall fence around a superfund site.

    uygiugiu 7 hours

    indeed, bluesky is a great example of self-quarantine

    pfraze 6 hours

    New account, 4 comments, one includes “Musk’s takeover of Twitter was a net win for free speech”

    3 hours

    seebeegeebee 45 minutes

    Oh, is this supposed to be a liberal echo-chamber?

    Are you mad other users have their own opinions?

    inigyou 26 minutes

    New account, -2 karma, mostly posts about how evil immigrants are

    fuzzfactor 5 hours

    Bless his heart, babies don't know any better.

    seebeegeebee 44 minutes

    Yes, burn the witch!!!

    How dare someone disagree with our MSM opinions!

  • kemotep 14 hours

    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.

    anotherpaul 13 hours

    totally agree, businesses that only have Facebook or Instagram are basically hidden from me. I can not see their opening hours, nor the menue, if it is a restaurant. I understand why the businesses use facebook, its easy, but its also a bit sad.

    rplnt 13 hours

    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.

    y-c-o-m-b 11 hours

    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.

    a_imho 13 hours

    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?

    CTDOCodebases 8 hours

    It's all by design to. People call for social media regulation without realizing that it is by no coincidence these companies have been able to grow so large. The security state has been outsourced to private industry.

    GPerson 11 hours

    My phone can’t even open most of the apps since it’s so old. Reddit does not load (this actually helped me a lot).

    Meneth 8 hours

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

    tuesdaynight 12 hours

    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

    tmp10423288442 11 hours

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

    jm4 11 hours

    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.

    7 hours

    tharmas 13 hours

    And you have to have a phone number to login to these sites (Authenticate). Even On-line Banking, you need a phone number to log in. And in my country Mobile contracts are hideously expensive.

    Its all part of the plan: the Digital Control Grid.

    Just wait till the Genius Act kicks in with Stable Coins. Programmable money is coming.

    wackget 5 hours

    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.

    inigyou 41 minutes

    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.

    maxlin 8 hours

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

    inigyou 37 minutes

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

    eudamoniac 2 hours

    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."

    inigyou 40 minutes

    Twitter requires your phone number to sign up

    cassepipe 10 hours

    > Even Bluesky has this problem!

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

    kemotep 2 hours

    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.

    charcircuit 6 hours

    >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.

    inigyou 39 minutes

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

    Melatonic 5 hours

    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)

    inigyou 41 minutes

    So HTTP and IP

    zoul 9 minutes

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

    mxschll 10 hours

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

    jasonfarnon 5 hours

    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.

    inigyou 39 minutes

    Amber alerts accomplish nothing, with or without twitter links

    baggy_trough 8 hours

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

    Am4TIfIsER0ppos 7 hours

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

    baggy_trough 7 hours

    I think you can, if you install their app.

    giancarlostoro 11 hours

    > 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.

    ModernMech 11 hours

    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...

    sailfast 11 hours

    “Temporary emergency” should always be considered skeptically - especially when it comes to government. They almost always stay permanent.

    11 hours

    ibejoeb 10 hours

    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.

    kelvinjps10 9 hours

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

    Pedro_Ribeiro 9 hours

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

    fuzzfactor 13 hours

    >suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted

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

    Exoristos 10 hours

    Disruption was never an unblemished positive for society.

    uygiugiu 7 hours

    Musk’s takeover of Twitter was a net win for free speech

    inigyou 36 minutes

    Thanks, new account that only posts to support Musk

    alyeska2 12 hours

    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.

    inigyou 46 minutes

    You might try attacking the problem from the other direction. If your country allows buying a SIM card without KYC, then do that.

    deltoidmaximus 10 hours

    I wouldn't even care if they blocked my anonymous account from posting or really interacting besides reading things. But of course, preventing bot actions isn't actually why I need an account so they aren't going to let you do that.

    cassepipe 10 hours

    I don't remember giving my phone to bluesky

    alexfortin 1 hours

    I didn't

    filoleg 12 hours

    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.

    alyeska2 11 hours

    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.

    inigyou 44 minutes

    Right now X requires either a phone number, or email + phone hardware ID.

    omoikane 11 hours

    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.

    deltoidmaximus 10 hours

    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!

    aucisson_masque 8 hours

    > 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 ?

    fcarraldo 7 hours

    in the US? no.

    cassepipe 10 hours

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

    hparadiz 6 hours

    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.

    inigyou 45 minutes

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

    arjie 13 hours

    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.

    andrepd 12 hours

    The problem is not governments or people posting there. The problem is platforms/utilities not being treated as such.

    phforms 8 hours

    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.

    arjie 8 hours

    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.

    pfraze 6 hours

    Thats entirely how atproto works now!

    inigyou 42 minutes

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

    ghusto 9 hours

    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.

    wldcordeiro 8 hours

    Reminds me of what Brasil did with Pix which of course the outside payment processors have been trying to undo.

    veeti 5 hours

    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.

    inigyou 48 minutes

    There is a carrier neutral WhatsApp, called SMS.

    nujabe 18 minutes

    Not even remotely close.

    toomuchtodo 8 hours

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

    Fnoord 1 hours

    Signal is an improvement, but not federated.

    baxtr 7 hours

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

    2 hours

    valleyer 7 hours

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

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

    r_lee 7 hours

    are those your "main communication" tools?

    thevinter 7 hours

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

    iamnothere 3 hours

    My local government still lets you sign up for email notifications about services and local alerts. It’s great!

    vasco 1 hours

    Too expensive, bad idea.

    inigyou 47 minutes

    What do you mean? They'll just pass a law saying carriers have to deliver them for free

    nomilk 12 hours

    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

    angoragoats 11 hours

    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

    nomilk 11 hours

    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.

    11 hours

    angoragoats 11 hours

    > 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).

    100percentjake 10 hours

    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.

    angoragoats 10 hours

    > 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.

    Yes, as I said, bad product decisions.

    assagr 11 hours

    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.

    numpad0 6 hours

    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.

    inigyou 38 minutes

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

    nomilk 6 hours

    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.

    numpad0 5 hours

    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.