While Twitter is problematic, it might be worth pointing out that, unless my understanding of their features is outdated, both Nitter and XCancel are for read-only, account-free viewing of...
While Twitter is problematic, it might be worth pointing out that, unless my understanding of their features is outdated, both Nitter and XCancel are for read-only, account-free viewing of threads, users, and searches. They don't allow posts, or even feeds.
Yes, some people have the privilege of being able to entirely avoid content on Twitter. Others don't. Unfortunately, numerous public institutions, and public officials, have decided that Twitter should be a major, or even the only, means of communication they use for some information. Sometimes this is unofficial, but often it is official. I regularly take trains, for example, where the (public, European) train system often only posts updates about service interruptions on Twitter, officially. If I want to know whether a train I need to take has been cancelled or delayed, I can check Twitter directly, or I can go to their website, and be confronted with an embedded Twitter feed. I am the wrong ethnicity, amongst other things, for the train system to care in the slightest about my views on Twitter.
Nitter and XCancel at least allowed direct access to sources like these without an account, allowing some level of reduced harm to both the user and others.
NJ Transit loves to use Twitter to announce delays, as long as those delays are above 30 minutes, otherwise it's just noise in their perfect execution of schedule!
NJ Transit loves to use Twitter to announce delays, as long as those delays are above 30 minutes, otherwise it's just noise in their perfect execution of schedule!
— zedeus, 25 August 2026 Discussion on GitHub Real shame, what alternatives do tilderinoes know of that haven't been targeted yet?
On 24 August 2026 cease and desist letters have been sent by X Corp. demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project's repository. nitter.net is offline and development has stopped for the time being. I'm seeking legal advice and won't be commenting further on the specifics for now. Thank you to everyone who used, hosted, packaged, donated and contributed to Nitter over the past seven years.
That thread is just a lot of people upset that they can no longer use the Nazi app in the way in which they feel comfortable- why would a site like Twitter allow third-party front-ends? Why would...
That thread is just a lot of people upset that they can no longer use the Nazi app in the way in which they feel comfortable- why would a site like Twitter allow third-party front-ends? Why would any reasonable person still feel comfortable using this platform?
Anybody who has not switched to less problematic services at this point, such as Bluesky (still mildly problematic) or Mastodon is complicit in the nonsense that Elon does. We should not be patronising a fascist.
Who cares? Like literally, who cares about twitters bottom line, their business model, and why they make the decisions they do. They're a privately owned company, and they're free to try to stop...
Exemplary
why would a site like Twitter allow third-party front-ends?
Who cares? Like literally, who cares about twitters bottom line, their business model, and why they make the decisions they do. They're a privately owned company, and they're free to try to stop third parties from scraping content by whatever technical means they have at their disposal.
That clearly hasn't worked out for them, so they're now trying to use the law to do their dirty work, which is the part that I do have an issue with.
Twitter is a telecommunications service, which means they enjoy title 230 protections in the US, where they're based. They can't be sued for the things their users say, because under the law, they're an impartial service provider, not a content publisher.
What that should also mean, is that they have no right to dictate what happens to the content on their platform after it's posted. If someone wants to scrape the site, republish it, open up a twitter competitor that scrapes twitter, what the court should say is: "Tough luck shitheads. You didn't write the content, you don't own the content, and you don't get to decide where the content is republished".
If they want those copyright protections, then they can revoke their section 230 protections, review and publish every tweet, and then stand behind them. That's why the New York Times gets to bring you to court if you reprint their newspaper, but Twitter doesn't.
You can sue the New York Times if they publish a false story that send right wing lunatics to your doorstep. Section 230 says you can't sue Twitter for the same.
Unfortunately it's still the only way to get live updates on public transport issues in some places (official and unofficial). When the digital signs are broken and you need to work out if the...
Unfortunately it's still the only way to get live updates on public transport issues in some places (official and unofficial). When the digital signs are broken and you need to work out if the trams will show up or not I'd rather use nitter than have an account on X. I've tried emailing to get them to shift but they've not.
Artists still use that app unfortunately, high amount of userbase, means more interaction/shares/etc. To me Nitter geting C&D’ed means that I can’t even view fanart without going through a user...
Artists still use that app unfortunately, high amount of userbase, means more interaction/shares/etc.
To me Nitter geting C&D’ed means that I can’t even view fanart without going through a user hostile interface (Or never, on mobile, since it force redirects me to the AppStore on iOS), or the occasional posts I get sent by people that still use it but barely on it, or things that get recirculated.
Bsky’s admins and its backers though… yeah, because of it I switched to blacksky/atproto.
I never tried using Mastodon or other Federated services other than Element/Matrix(And technically Bluesky?).
US politics also have failed to dislodge Twitter's dominance as the default social media site in Japan. Companies and artists don't know or care, so if you want news from musicians and anime...
US politics also have failed to dislodge Twitter's dominance as the default social media site in Japan. Companies and artists don't know or care, so if you want news from musicians and anime projects, it's still the place. We can't even get enough inertia in the US to kill the site, adding a significant language barrier completely stalls that.
Municipalities and even states in the US also refuse to stop using it for important updates. I've had messages come in from the emergency alert system, and the additional info was a Twitter link.
The majority of it artists that I follow have switched at this point, most of them years ago. There is both quantitative and anecdotal evidence than a smaller number of followers on Bsky...
The majority of it artists that I follow have switched at this point, most of them years ago.
There is both quantitative and anecdotal evidence than a smaller number of followers on Bsky consistently results in a higher proportion of interactions-per-follower than on Twitter. This is in part because the userbase isn't mostly bots, but also because the primary feed is based entirely on who you follow, which results in users seeing content that they actually care for instead of having an algorithm shove shite down their throats.
Anybody who is still holding out in that cesspool because they can't bear to part with their online highscore is not the sort of person worth following anyway.
This is completely ignoring network effect and inertia. Yes there are artists that post on both. Yes, Twitter as a whole is a shithole that we can do without. But outright dismissing it as "Stop...
This is completely ignoring network effect and inertia.
Yes there are artists that post on both.
Yes, Twitter as a whole is a shithole that we can do without.
But outright dismissing it as "Stop using it because people there are awful" or because "Mostly bots are using it" completely misses that if it was easy or something you can do on demand, we wouldn't be discussing this.
Plus in case of art, exposure does matter, having a larger audience means more opportunities to get commissions, no, that doesn't mean everyone who you'll encounter is a nazi, yes, that means that due to sheer volume of users, there may be nazis in them.
Best thing you can do is slowly move over elsewhere, instead of just cut off completely, if you're actually financially dependent on Twitter. Even with Grok and "AI remix" for existing pictures, you'd think naturally artist would've moved, elsewhere, but again the inertia and network effect has them by the neck.
I don't use Twitter fwiw, so I hate it with passion when an artist doesn't use bsky or pixiv, but it's not like I can just tell them to fuck off to a better platform, I tried getting a couple of friends to Matrix/Element, the one that did was using both in tandem, and ended up defaulting back to Discord anyway.
Not choosing to use Twitter or Discord is an option, sure, but forming a different circle on a different platform is much easier than to fight the inertia of an already going platform.
While I don't use twitter at all, I've never really understood the perspective where some platform is labeled "X platform" like this. Like, is Discord a Child Grooming chatroom because there are...
the Nazi app
While I don't use twitter at all, I've never really understood the perspective where some platform is labeled "X platform" like this. Like, is Discord a Child Grooming chatroom because there are plenty of that happening on it at some point in time? Does it affect a random server about a niche video game or your voice chat with friends? It's easy these days to filter out whatever you don't want to see anyways.
Not trying to start an argument or anything, just wanted to hear the alternative perspective on this, if you would be willing to share it.
It's personally owned by a powerful Nazi-saluting person with eugenics-related beliefs, who has been involved in a strongly fascist-coded party that's currently mass detaining people in prison...
It's personally owned by a powerful Nazi-saluting person with eugenics-related beliefs, who has been involved in a strongly fascist-coded party that's currently mass detaining people in prison camps and trying to implement widespread censorship and rig the next critical election. His direct actions, through the destruction of USAID, have been estimated to have directly resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and many more will come...plus more spread of infectious diseases.
Since acquisition, the tone of the place has broadly changed due to shifts in users and changes in recommendation systems.
It's not like he came through a revolving door of CEOs at a publicly traded company: he straight up bought a controlling interest in the company and took it private.
That isn't connected to whether someone considers it "The Nazi app" You asked why someone would label a platform, that's separate from your follow up question. (Plus no you can never block all of...
That isn't connected to whether someone considers it "The Nazi app"
You asked why someone would label a platform, that's separate from your follow up question. (Plus no you can never block all of the Nazis.)
To me it is, directly. If it's personally owned by a "nazi adjacent" and "eugenics related" person, but they don't do anything to force nazis into your feed, I don't see how it is relevant. That's...
That isn't connected to whether someone considers it "The Nazi app"
To me it is, directly. If it's personally owned by a "nazi adjacent" and "eugenics related" person, but they don't do anything to force nazis into your feed, I don't see how it is relevant. That's why I asked whether that prevented blocking or simply not following nazis (like on any other website), like the new owner changed those features in such way.
You said you wanted to hear the perspective but now you're saying that the answer doesn't meet your standard so it isn't relevant, even if it's relevant to the other users. That doesn't make...
You said you wanted to hear the perspective but now you're saying that the answer doesn't meet your standard so it isn't relevant, even if it's relevant to the other users. That doesn't make sense. People use the site in ways outside this narrow box you're outlining as well.
The new owner changed what content is permissable on the site, reversing site wide bans for some pretty awful people, including white supremacists like himself and he actively edits the AI for the site to change it's programming to give white supremacist answers. It absolutely affects the user's experience, especially since not everyone only goes to a website to read just the people they're following. And if the people you're following don't have all Nazis blocked then you can't engage in any conversation with them without getting Nazis in your replies. And if the site permits the Nazis you'll never block all of them.
I just explained why the question was a relevant follow-up to the answer. That being said, I somewhat get it. I also dismissed Bluesky as a terrible awful place to be in because the default feed...
I just explained why the question was a relevant follow-up to the answer. That being said, I somewhat get it. I also dismissed Bluesky as a terrible awful place to be in because the default feed gave me people calling for assassinations and war, it was just aimed at CEOs and Israel as opposed to, well, whatever it is that modern day nazis target. I think it's just reality of the situation that any of these sites you have to tailor to your own tastes. Whenever I accidentally went to "Trending" on youtube, I also was shocked at how terrible, albeit much less violent, it was. I guess it's surprising to me then that Twitter gets special mentions in this, as opposed to Bluesky for instance, which I think was supposed to be "the good" replacement.
The power of the platform comes from both the content producers and the consumers. So even if you don't post, you merely being there available to consume adds value to the platform. You contribute...
The power of the platform comes from both the content producers and the consumers. So even if you don't post, you merely being there available to consume adds value to the platform. You contribute to the overall incentive for others to use it. Giving the Nazi more power to shift public opinion through algorithmic manipulation.
If Discord were owned by Epstein or someone equivalent and he was deliberately making it a hospitable space for other child groomers, I think it would be totally reasonable to label it the Child...
Like, is Discord a Child Grooming chatroom because there are plenty of that happening on it at some point in time?
If Discord were owned by Epstein or someone equivalent and he was deliberately making it a hospitable space for other child groomers, I think it would be totally reasonable to label it the Child Grooming chatroom.
I normally would agree with you. My threshold for the amount of terrible people on a platform before I write everyone on the platform off as a terrible person is very, very high. Hell, I was an...
I normally would agree with you. My threshold for the amount of terrible people on a platform before I write everyone on the platform off as a terrible person is very, very high.
Hell, I was an avid 4chan user for a long time, even though I've always held almost diametrically opposed opinions versus the average /pol/ user. (The /tg/ and /mu/ boards were legitimately good places for discussion for a time).
With Twitter though, not only has the site actively cultivated a Nazi adjacent/white supremacist user base by putting policies in place to make sure they're never banned regardless of how disruptive they are, and unbanning users who were banned for very, very good reasons regardless of their political opinions, but the owner is explicitly a white supremacist.
He's made that really clear on many occasions. He's not just a libertarian type "free speech at all costs" type, he's very overtly publicly racist. It's a site for Nazis, by Nazis now. The fact that some people who aren't Nazis are on it doesn't change that, unfortunately.
If I go into a restaurant where a bunch of people at some table are doing nazi salutes, I expect the waitstaff (or ultimately, the owner) to address their behaviour. If they instead tell me to...
If I go into a restaurant where a bunch of people at some table are doing nazi salutes, I expect the waitstaff (or ultimately, the owner) to address their behaviour. If they instead tell me to just look the other way, I'm out of there and won't go back. Why would I go spend money there when I can go to some other place making the world better, not worse? I will also call it a nazi diner any chance I get. Is that not just common sense?
It isn't impossible for online platforms to address these things either, despite their claiming otherwise. It's a solved problem. Letting uncouth behaviour flourish on your platform is a deliberate choice.
I just don't see it as a diner or a bar or whatever. If you really wanted to compare it to service industry, it'd be a hotel or a venue where you can have a private room. I just don't think public...
I just don't see it as a diner or a bar or whatever. If you really wanted to compare it to service industry, it'd be a hotel or a venue where you can have a private room. I just don't think public feed is how these websites should be judged by, when it's pretty clear you're supposed to curate your feed for yourself and you're given tools to do it.
That being said, I do understand where you and others are coming from. However, I think it's just the nature of any website like that. For instance, on Bluesky's default feed among the cat pictures I was bombarded by people calling for assassinations and war, it was just targeted at healthcare CEOs and Israel instead of, well, whatever it is modern nazis are calling for.
I think there's just a threshold level that needs to get hit (whether real or perceived) for this to happen. For example the ratio of negative to legitimate uses on Discord has not reached the...
I think there's just a threshold level that needs to get hit (whether real or perceived) for this to happen.
For example the ratio of negative to legitimate uses on Discord has not reached the threshold where it gets a negative label, but the ratio on X (or, for another example, Kik) did reach that point.
I'm upset the Nazi app seems to be the only way to check for announcements of my town burning down. This is more an inconvenience of my attempt to compromise between getting said news of town...
a lot of people upset that they can no longer use the Nazi app in the way in which they feel comfortable
I'm upset the Nazi app seems to be the only way to check for announcements of my town burning down. This is more an inconvenience of my attempt to compromise between getting said news of town burning down and actually using Nazi app.
I mainly just check for updates from people with no other social media, and artists. I don't even look at the home feeds of any of these sites if I have an account, I just go directly to relevant...
I mainly just check for updates from people with no other social media, and artists. I don't even look at the home feeds of any of these sites if I have an account, I just go directly to relevant profiles.
Unfortunately a lot of creatives still primarily use Twitter. It took YEARS to get one of my friends to ditch Twitter despite it actively wrecking their mental health (I genuinely can't emphasize enough how serious I am, I fantasized about going over to their house to stage an intervention and forcefully log them out during the height of the pandemic) in large part because it was the most viable platform for posting art and networking as an animator. And sadly, it's still one of the top platforms for artists and others to get visibility. I don't think the Bluesky creative scene has reached the levels of Twitter yet, at best a lot of people seem to just use both.
So if we want to see anything by those individuals, it's often Twitter or nothing.
Any other fedi instance. Just stop contributing to technology used to divide people. Stop using technology owned by a murderer. There are lots of alternatives, like mas.to, mastodon.social,...
Any other fedi instance. Just stop contributing to technology used to divide people. Stop using technology owned by a murderer. There are lots of alternatives, like mas.to, mastodon.social, pixelfed.social and many many more.
Or, as I'm slowly convincing my friends - stop using it at all, instead go and meet your friends in real life. Not easy, by doable
It is relevant I think. The site doesn't want you to have a useful way to access content, this fact is relevant. So the only solution I see is to ditch it, the more people leave this nazi site the...
It is relevant I think. The site doesn't want you to have a useful way to access content, this fact is relevant. So the only solution I see is to ditch it, the more people leave this nazi site the better the world will be. Convince people you're following to add another way of reading their content, in some better place.
For many of us, it isn't a matter of following people producing content we enjoy reading, it's a matter of accessing information we need from public institutions that have simply decided to use...
Convince people you're following to add another way of reading their content, in some better place.
For many of us, it isn't a matter of following people producing content we enjoy reading, it's a matter of accessing information we need from public institutions that have simply decided to use Twitter as their only means of disseminating it, especially for public transport. Many of us are also not in circumstances where those institutions would care what we think, at all.
If I do not check official Twitter accounts, I cannot reliably know whether a train route is actually in service or not. That is simply the choice that is given to me. There is no alternative way of getting the information.
I don't think anyone here likes or supports Twitter. You don't need to argue why it's bad and we should stop using it. I for one would be happy for it to shut down, so long as there was prior...
I don't think anyone here likes or supports Twitter. You don't need to argue why it's bad and we should stop using it. I for one would be happy for it to shut down, so long as there was prior warning so accounts could migrate and inform their audience of their new platforms.
I use the word "audience" instead of "follower" here because a lot of people don't want to make accounts to use Twitter and follow people. Many, like myself, go to Twitter not to browse feeds or make posts or use it, but to directly check specific profiles. THAT is the biggest problem.
The fact remains that sometimes, Twitter is, legitimately, the ONLY option to get vital information. Artists are one thing. The linked comment and its reply directly reference Twitter being the primary source for official information about train delays, which is pretty damn critical knowledge. There are plenty of other institutions and individuals who use Twitter as their primary means of communicating information, including time-sensitive information such as public transit issues or website outages.
There is no solution for that particular issue on users' ends. Multiple people in this thread (and elsewhere on the internet over the years) have talked about official institutions and corporations refusing to use other platforms despite requests.
Our options are thus: A) Open the relevant Twitter profile, or B) don't get the information.
Again: the issue here is not about having an account or using Twitter in any normal sense. It's about the fact that it is sometimes the only viable source of information because there are organizations that decided Twitter is the ONLY place they'll share time-sensitive updates. So for some people, they'll HAVE to open Twitter not to browse it, but to view a specific profile once in a while just to get critical news.
(At least Twitter seems to be back to showing posts in chronological order now when viewed without an account...? But the account I checked seems to only show the most recent 4, and I had to go to desktop mode first because of the prompt to use the mobile app. So, if some organization posts a lot in short time frames, that still risks being unable to view, once again, vital time-sensitive information.)
People seem almost to be willfully ignoring this facet of the discussion. I hate Twitter and its owner and despise the place and would never have an account or use it regularly for any purpose. I...
People seem almost to be willfully ignoring this facet of the discussion. I hate Twitter and its owner and despise the place and would never have an account or use it regularly for any purpose. I very much strongly oppose the platform and believe it a force for harm in the world and am the last person politically that you'd ever think would touch anything related to that owner or site with a ten foot pole. I very much consider it a nazi bar at this point
However, there are indeed legitimate reasons people want to access particular accounts' posts and it's even better if people can do so through a third party rather than subject themselves to the first-party experience so it sucks that that is going away and no amount of criticizing people for wanting to be able to see a profile or post without having an account changes that fact. Seems pointless to aim all this energy at people who just want to check their institutions' goddamn train delays
People certainly don't need to defend the platform or its owner in any regard but I would hope we can realize it's more complicated or nuanced than just bumper sticker opinions of "how dare you want to check a post from the outside". Hell, sometimes when I am researching bands or people behind them to "vet" them to make sure i am not recommending a horrible person's project to someone it helps to have access to see what they're posting! Not every use of a platform's content is an endorsement of said platform. I don't get how this is hard to understand
Occasionally i hit a search result or link to something that happens to be something that exists on Twitter. A benign status update or announcement or something else. I want to be able to access that via a third-party. I am not entitled to do so but I do get a benefit out of it and it's quite okay for me to lament when that access is gone and even much more so for people getting vital info there because of institutions' decisions that aren't changing anytime soon
Tried that some decade and a half ago, in the FB era. Turns out I don't actually have that many "friends". I don't know if that speaks more to my character, theirs, or the nature of social...
stop using it at all, instead go and meet your friends in real life. Not easy, by doable
Tried that some decade and a half ago, in the FB era.
Turns out I don't actually have that many "friends". I don't know if that speaks more to my character, theirs, or the nature of social networks. I've grown acquainted with loneliness, but I understand that this isn't a road everyone wants to take.
You choose to walk your own road in a digital age, and you'll be sobered by how few follow. But you also might be uplifted by who you meet along the new road.
QuaX still appears to be up. Not exactly the same thing and requires an account at this point, but it's separate enough to not get caught in the same net. https://github.com/Teskann/QuaX
QuaX still appears to be up. Not exactly the same thing and requires an account at this point, but it's separate enough to not get caught in the same net.
I just downloaded a zip of the project, I'll see how to install that on my VPS. Edit: if you want to get a copy of the project, download it or fork it on another, private forge. Don't just make a...
I just downloaded a zip of the project, I'll see how to install that on my VPS.
Edit: if you want to get a copy of the project, download it or fork it on another, private forge. Don't just make a fork on Github, because they can delete the original repo and all its forks.
My guess would be that Twitter plans to first intimidate the developers behind these projects into stopping, potentially succeed in removing the main repositories to split the conversation and...
My guess would be that Twitter plans to first intimidate the developers behind these projects into stopping, potentially succeed in removing the main repositories to split the conversation and development, then change their API to break the existing code. Everyone might have their clones of the repositories, in that case, but they won't work without more development.
Whether this strategy will be effective in an era of LLM coding is not as clear. Vibecoding the whole project is very different than vibecoding updates to respond to what will likely be vibecoded API changes.
The tech giants doing what they always do: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. They got where they are with malicious interoperability. And then built legal frameworks to ensure that nobody else could...
The tech giants doing what they always do: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
They got where they are with malicious interoperability. And then built legal frameworks to ensure that nobody else could follow in their footsteps (at least not without millions to give to lawyers).
While Twitter didn't do the same level of malicious interoperability like Facebook or Google did while launching (google the chat in particular), the general path being: Embrace 3rd party clients...
While Twitter didn't do the same level of malicious interoperability like Facebook or Google did while launching (google the chat in particular), the general path being:
Embrace 3rd party clients (first iPhone apps were all 3rd party)
Build out your own first party stuff.
Enhance monetization, make interop harder through technical means.
Crush the 3rd party options with a legal hammer to maximize profits (the 3rd party doing the malicious interop at this point).
HiQ lost in the end because they were in violation of LinkedIn's ToS. Seems like that would be pretty easy for twitter to change their terms, if this is even allowed in the first place.
HiQ lost in the end because they were in violation of LinkedIn's ToS. Seems like that would be pretty easy for twitter to change their terms, if this is even allowed in the first place.
I imagine they are(First time I hear of that case), but they are consulting their lawyers to see how to go about it. I.e. turning everything off for now until they get the clear that it is OK to...
I imagine they are(First time I hear of that case), but they are consulting their lawyers to see how to go about it.
I.e. turning everything off for now until they get the clear that it is OK to continue.
It's a case on scraping public profiles on LinkedIn.
The 9th Circuit affirmed the district court's preliminary injunction, preventing LinkedIn from denying the plaintiff, hiQ Labs, from accessing LinkedIn's publicly available LinkedIn member profiles. However, after further appeal in another court, hiQ was found to be in breach of LinkedIn's terms, and there was a settlement.
This isn't the point of Nitter though. It's not about looking for a replacement. It's about being able to view tweets and posts in a privacy preserving and lightweight frontend. Also there's...
This isn't the point of Nitter though. It's not about looking for a replacement.
It's about being able to view tweets and posts in a privacy preserving and lightweight frontend.
Also there's plenty of less dubious looking Twitter alternatives than that...
While Twitter is problematic, it might be worth pointing out that, unless my understanding of their features is outdated, both Nitter and XCancel are for read-only, account-free viewing of threads, users, and searches. They don't allow posts, or even feeds.
Yes, some people have the privilege of being able to entirely avoid content on Twitter. Others don't. Unfortunately, numerous public institutions, and public officials, have decided that Twitter should be a major, or even the only, means of communication they use for some information. Sometimes this is unofficial, but often it is official. I regularly take trains, for example, where the (public, European) train system often only posts updates about service interruptions on Twitter, officially. If I want to know whether a train I need to take has been cancelled or delayed, I can check Twitter directly, or I can go to their website, and be confronted with an embedded Twitter feed. I am the wrong ethnicity, amongst other things, for the train system to care in the slightest about my views on Twitter.
Nitter and XCancel at least allowed direct access to sources like these without an account, allowing some level of reduced harm to both the user and others.
NJ Transit loves to use Twitter to announce delays, as long as those delays are above 30 minutes, otherwise it's just noise in their perfect execution of schedule!
— zedeus, 25 August 2026
Discussion on GitHub
Real shame, what alternatives do tilderinoes know of that haven't been targeted yet?
That thread is just a lot of people upset that they can no longer use the Nazi app in the way in which they feel comfortable- why would a site like Twitter allow third-party front-ends? Why would any reasonable person still feel comfortable using this platform?
Anybody who has not switched to less problematic services at this point, such as Bluesky (still mildly problematic) or Mastodon is complicit in the nonsense that Elon does. We should not be patronising a fascist.
Who cares? Like literally, who cares about twitters bottom line, their business model, and why they make the decisions they do. They're a privately owned company, and they're free to try to stop third parties from scraping content by whatever technical means they have at their disposal.
That clearly hasn't worked out for them, so they're now trying to use the law to do their dirty work, which is the part that I do have an issue with.
Twitter is a telecommunications service, which means they enjoy title 230 protections in the US, where they're based. They can't be sued for the things their users say, because under the law, they're an impartial service provider, not a content publisher.
What that should also mean, is that they have no right to dictate what happens to the content on their platform after it's posted. If someone wants to scrape the site, republish it, open up a twitter competitor that scrapes twitter, what the court should say is: "Tough luck shitheads. You didn't write the content, you don't own the content, and you don't get to decide where the content is republished".
If they want those copyright protections, then they can revoke their section 230 protections, review and publish every tweet, and then stand behind them. That's why the New York Times gets to bring you to court if you reprint their newspaper, but Twitter doesn't.
You can sue the New York Times if they publish a false story that send right wing lunatics to your doorstep. Section 230 says you can't sue Twitter for the same.
You can't have it both ways.
You seriously can't think of a single reason someone might need to open a link that only exists on Twitter without wanting to actually open the site?
Unfortunately it's still the only way to get live updates on public transport issues in some places (official and unofficial). When the digital signs are broken and you need to work out if the trams will show up or not I'd rather use nitter than have an account on X. I've tried emailing to get them to shift but they've not.
Artists still use that app unfortunately, high amount of userbase, means more interaction/shares/etc.
To me Nitter geting C&D’ed means that I can’t even view fanart without going through a user hostile interface (Or never, on mobile, since it force redirects me to the AppStore on iOS), or the occasional posts I get sent by people that still use it but barely on it, or things that get recirculated.
Bsky’s admins and its backers though… yeah, because of it I switched to blacksky/atproto.
I never tried using Mastodon or other Federated services other than Element/Matrix(And technically Bluesky?).
US politics also have failed to dislodge Twitter's dominance as the default social media site in Japan. Companies and artists don't know or care, so if you want news from musicians and anime projects, it's still the place. We can't even get enough inertia in the US to kill the site, adding a significant language barrier completely stalls that.
Municipalities and even states in the US also refuse to stop using it for important updates. I've had messages come in from the emergency alert system, and the additional info was a Twitter link.
The majority of it artists that I follow have switched at this point, most of them years ago.
There is both quantitative and anecdotal evidence than a smaller number of followers on Bsky consistently results in a higher proportion of interactions-per-follower than on Twitter. This is in part because the userbase isn't mostly bots, but also because the primary feed is based entirely on who you follow, which results in users seeing content that they actually care for instead of having an algorithm shove shite down their throats.
Anybody who is still holding out in that cesspool because they can't bear to part with their online highscore is not the sort of person worth following anyway.
This is completely ignoring network effect and inertia.
Yes there are artists that post on both.
Yes, Twitter as a whole is a shithole that we can do without.
But outright dismissing it as "Stop using it because people there are awful" or because "Mostly bots are using it" completely misses that if it was easy or something you can do on demand, we wouldn't be discussing this.
Plus in case of art, exposure does matter, having a larger audience means more opportunities to get commissions, no, that doesn't mean everyone who you'll encounter is a nazi, yes, that means that due to sheer volume of users, there may be nazis in them.
Best thing you can do is slowly move over elsewhere, instead of just cut off completely, if you're actually financially dependent on Twitter. Even with Grok and "AI remix" for existing pictures, you'd think naturally artist would've moved, elsewhere, but again the inertia and network effect has them by the neck.
I don't use Twitter fwiw, so I hate it with passion when an artist doesn't use bsky or pixiv, but it's not like I can just tell them to fuck off to a better platform, I tried getting a couple of friends to Matrix/Element, the one that did was using both in tandem, and ended up defaulting back to Discord anyway.
Not choosing to use Twitter or Discord is an option, sure, but forming a different circle on a different platform is much easier than to fight the inertia of an already going platform.
One can write their favorite artists and ask them to publish somewhere else too, just an idea in between.
While I don't use twitter at all, I've never really understood the perspective where some platform is labeled "X platform" like this. Like, is Discord a Child Grooming chatroom because there are plenty of that happening on it at some point in time? Does it affect a random server about a niche video game or your voice chat with friends? It's easy these days to filter out whatever you don't want to see anyways.
Not trying to start an argument or anything, just wanted to hear the alternative perspective on this, if you would be willing to share it.
It's personally owned by a powerful Nazi-saluting person with eugenics-related beliefs, who has been involved in a strongly fascist-coded party that's currently mass detaining people in prison camps and trying to implement widespread censorship and rig the next critical election. His direct actions, through the destruction of USAID, have been estimated to have directly resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and many more will come...plus more spread of infectious diseases.
Since acquisition, the tone of the place has broadly changed due to shifts in users and changes in recommendation systems.
It's not like he came through a revolving door of CEOs at a publicly traded company: he straight up bought a controlling interest in the company and took it private.
"Is a bar owned by a nazi a 'nazi bar'?"
Well, in my opinion, yes.
But does any of this stop you from not following nazis or blocking them or whatever?
That isn't connected to whether someone considers it "The Nazi app"
You asked why someone would label a platform, that's separate from your follow up question. (Plus no you can never block all of the Nazis.)
To me it is, directly. If it's personally owned by a "nazi adjacent" and "eugenics related" person, but they don't do anything to force nazis into your feed, I don't see how it is relevant. That's why I asked whether that prevented blocking or simply not following nazis (like on any other website), like the new owner changed those features in such way.
You said you wanted to hear the perspective but now you're saying that the answer doesn't meet your standard so it isn't relevant, even if it's relevant to the other users. That doesn't make sense. People use the site in ways outside this narrow box you're outlining as well.
The new owner changed what content is permissable on the site, reversing site wide bans for some pretty awful people, including white supremacists like himself and he actively edits the AI for the site to change it's programming to give white supremacist answers. It absolutely affects the user's experience, especially since not everyone only goes to a website to read just the people they're following. And if the people you're following don't have all Nazis blocked then you can't engage in any conversation with them without getting Nazis in your replies. And if the site permits the Nazis you'll never block all of them.
I just explained why the question was a relevant follow-up to the answer. That being said, I somewhat get it. I also dismissed Bluesky as a terrible awful place to be in because the default feed gave me people calling for assassinations and war, it was just aimed at CEOs and Israel as opposed to, well, whatever it is that modern day nazis target. I think it's just reality of the situation that any of these sites you have to tailor to your own tastes. Whenever I accidentally went to "Trending" on youtube, I also was shocked at how terrible, albeit much less violent, it was. I guess it's surprising to me then that Twitter gets special mentions in this, as opposed to Bluesky for instance, which I think was supposed to be "the good" replacement.
The power of the platform comes from both the content producers and the consumers. So even if you don't post, you merely being there available to consume adds value to the platform. You contribute to the overall incentive for others to use it. Giving the Nazi more power to shift public opinion through algorithmic manipulation.
I'm not even sure if you can fully block Elon Musk these days with the built-in tools.
If Discord were owned by Epstein or someone equivalent and he was deliberately making it a hospitable space for other child groomers, I think it would be totally reasonable to label it the Child Grooming chatroom.
I normally would agree with you. My threshold for the amount of terrible people on a platform before I write everyone on the platform off as a terrible person is very, very high.
Hell, I was an avid 4chan user for a long time, even though I've always held almost diametrically opposed opinions versus the average /pol/ user. (The /tg/ and /mu/ boards were legitimately good places for discussion for a time).
With Twitter though, not only has the site actively cultivated a Nazi adjacent/white supremacist user base by putting policies in place to make sure they're never banned regardless of how disruptive they are, and unbanning users who were banned for very, very good reasons regardless of their political opinions, but the owner is explicitly a white supremacist.
He's made that really clear on many occasions. He's not just a libertarian type "free speech at all costs" type, he's very overtly publicly racist. It's a site for Nazis, by Nazis now. The fact that some people who aren't Nazis are on it doesn't change that, unfortunately.
If I go into a restaurant where a bunch of people at some table are doing nazi salutes, I expect the waitstaff (or ultimately, the owner) to address their behaviour. If they instead tell me to just look the other way, I'm out of there and won't go back. Why would I go spend money there when I can go to some other place making the world better, not worse? I will also call it a nazi diner any chance I get. Is that not just common sense?
It isn't impossible for online platforms to address these things either, despite their claiming otherwise. It's a solved problem. Letting uncouth behaviour flourish on your platform is a deliberate choice.
I just don't see it as a diner or a bar or whatever. If you really wanted to compare it to service industry, it'd be a hotel or a venue where you can have a private room. I just don't think public feed is how these websites should be judged by, when it's pretty clear you're supposed to curate your feed for yourself and you're given tools to do it.
That being said, I do understand where you and others are coming from. However, I think it's just the nature of any website like that. For instance, on Bluesky's default feed among the cat pictures I was bombarded by people calling for assassinations and war, it was just targeted at healthcare CEOs and Israel instead of, well, whatever it is modern nazis are calling for.
I think there's just a threshold level that needs to get hit (whether real or perceived) for this to happen.
For example the ratio of negative to legitimate uses on Discord has not reached the threshold where it gets a negative label, but the ratio on X (or, for another example, Kik) did reach that point.
I'm upset the Nazi app seems to be the only way to check for announcements of my town burning down. This is more an inconvenience of my attempt to compromise between getting said news of town burning down and actually using Nazi app.
I mainly just check for updates from people with no other social media, and artists. I don't even look at the home feeds of any of these sites if I have an account, I just go directly to relevant profiles.
Unfortunately a lot of creatives still primarily use Twitter. It took YEARS to get one of my friends to ditch Twitter despite it actively wrecking their mental health (I genuinely can't emphasize enough how serious I am, I fantasized about going over to their house to stage an intervention and forcefully log them out during the height of the pandemic) in large part because it was the most viable platform for posting art and networking as an animator. And sadly, it's still one of the top platforms for artists and others to get visibility. I don't think the Bluesky creative scene has reached the levels of Twitter yet, at best a lot of people seem to just use both.
So if we want to see anything by those individuals, it's often Twitter or nothing.
Bluesky, of all things, is still too problematic? Isn’t the point of the site that you only see content from people you explicitly follow?
I mean, this is possible on xitter as well, isn't it?
I suppose. So is the issue then that other people, who they never see, are not being banned? Because bluesky is prettttty left wing already.
Any other fedi instance. Just stop contributing to technology used to divide people. Stop using technology owned by a murderer. There are lots of alternatives, like mas.to, mastodon.social, pixelfed.social and many many more.
Or, as I'm slowly convincing my friends - stop using it at all, instead go and meet your friends in real life. Not easy, by doable
This isn't really relevant in my opinion as this was a useful read-only way to access content on the site.
I'll just refer to this great comment.
It is relevant I think. The site doesn't want you to have a useful way to access content, this fact is relevant. So the only solution I see is to ditch it, the more people leave this nazi site the better the world will be. Convince people you're following to add another way of reading their content, in some better place.
For many of us, it isn't a matter of following people producing content we enjoy reading, it's a matter of accessing information we need from public institutions that have simply decided to use Twitter as their only means of disseminating it, especially for public transport. Many of us are also not in circumstances where those institutions would care what we think, at all.
If I do not check official Twitter accounts, I cannot reliably know whether a train route is actually in service or not. That is simply the choice that is given to me. There is no alternative way of getting the information.
I don't think anyone here likes or supports Twitter. You don't need to argue why it's bad and we should stop using it. I for one would be happy for it to shut down, so long as there was prior warning so accounts could migrate and inform their audience of their new platforms.
I use the word "audience" instead of "follower" here because a lot of people don't want to make accounts to use Twitter and follow people. Many, like myself, go to Twitter not to browse feeds or make posts or use it, but to directly check specific profiles. THAT is the biggest problem.
The fact remains that sometimes, Twitter is, legitimately, the ONLY option to get vital information. Artists are one thing. The linked comment and its reply directly reference Twitter being the primary source for official information about train delays, which is pretty damn critical knowledge. There are plenty of other institutions and individuals who use Twitter as their primary means of communicating information, including time-sensitive information such as public transit issues or website outages.
There is no solution for that particular issue on users' ends. Multiple people in this thread (and elsewhere on the internet over the years) have talked about official institutions and corporations refusing to use other platforms despite requests.
Our options are thus: A) Open the relevant Twitter profile, or B) don't get the information.
Again: the issue here is not about having an account or using Twitter in any normal sense. It's about the fact that it is sometimes the only viable source of information because there are organizations that decided Twitter is the ONLY place they'll share time-sensitive updates. So for some people, they'll HAVE to open Twitter not to browse it, but to view a specific profile once in a while just to get critical news.
(At least Twitter seems to be back to showing posts in chronological order now when viewed without an account...? But the account I checked seems to only show the most recent 4, and I had to go to desktop mode first because of the prompt to use the mobile app. So, if some organization posts a lot in short time frames, that still risks being unable to view, once again, vital time-sensitive information.)
People seem almost to be willfully ignoring this facet of the discussion. I hate Twitter and its owner and despise the place and would never have an account or use it regularly for any purpose. I very much strongly oppose the platform and believe it a force for harm in the world and am the last person politically that you'd ever think would touch anything related to that owner or site with a ten foot pole. I very much consider it a nazi bar at this point
However, there are indeed legitimate reasons people want to access particular accounts' posts and it's even better if people can do so through a third party rather than subject themselves to the first-party experience so it sucks that that is going away and no amount of criticizing people for wanting to be able to see a profile or post without having an account changes that fact. Seems pointless to aim all this energy at people who just want to check their institutions' goddamn train delays
People certainly don't need to defend the platform or its owner in any regard but I would hope we can realize it's more complicated or nuanced than just bumper sticker opinions of "how dare you want to check a post from the outside". Hell, sometimes when I am researching bands or people behind them to "vet" them to make sure i am not recommending a horrible person's project to someone it helps to have access to see what they're posting! Not every use of a platform's content is an endorsement of said platform. I don't get how this is hard to understand
Occasionally i hit a search result or link to something that happens to be something that exists on Twitter. A benign status update or announcement or something else. I want to be able to access that via a third-party. I am not entitled to do so but I do get a benefit out of it and it's quite okay for me to lament when that access is gone and even much more so for people getting vital info there because of institutions' decisions that aren't changing anytime soon
I don’t use twitter, but I also don’t use mastodon etc because they are unpopulated wastelands.
Tried that some decade and a half ago, in the FB era.
Turns out I don't actually have that many "friends". I don't know if that speaks more to my character, theirs, or the nature of social networks. I've grown acquainted with loneliness, but I understand that this isn't a road everyone wants to take.
You choose to walk your own road in a digital age, and you'll be sobered by how few follow. But you also might be uplifted by who you meet along the new road.
QuaX still appears to be up. Not exactly the same thing and requires an account at this point, but it's separate enough to not get caught in the same net.
https://github.com/Teskann/QuaX
They also took down https://xcancel.com/. I guess I'm truly done clicking Tweeter links.
I just downloaded a zip of the project, I'll see how to install that on my VPS.
Edit: if you want to get a copy of the project, download it or fork it on another, private forge. Don't just make a fork on Github, because they can delete the original repo and all its forks.
My guess would be that Twitter plans to first intimidate the developers behind these projects into stopping, potentially succeed in removing the main repositories to split the conversation and development, then change their API to break the existing code. Everyone might have their clones of the repositories, in that case, but they won't work without more development.
Whether this strategy will be effective in an era of LLM coding is not as clear. Vibecoding the whole project is very different than vibecoding updates to respond to what will likely be vibecoded API changes.
The tech giants doing what they always do: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
They got where they are with malicious interoperability. And then built legal frameworks to ensure that nobody else could follow in their footsteps (at least not without millions to give to lawyers).
I don't recall any interoperability with twitter, what are you referring to?
While Twitter didn't do the same level of malicious interoperability like Facebook or Google did while launching (google the chat in particular), the general path being:
Why would someone working on a project like this not just point at HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn and tell X Corp to pound sand?
HiQ lost in the end because they were in violation of LinkedIn's ToS. Seems like that would be pretty easy for twitter to change their terms, if this is even allowed in the first place.
I imagine they are(First time I hear of that case), but they are consulting their lawyers to see how to go about it.
I.e. turning everything off for now until they get the clear that it is OK to continue.
Any loremasters?
edit: there's a Wikipedia page :p
It's a case on scraping public profiles on LinkedIn.
https://twitter.now/
I'm not planning to pony up $20 but I wish them well!
This isn't the point of Nitter though. It's not about looking for a replacement.
It's about being able to view tweets and posts in a privacy preserving and lightweight frontend.
Also there's plenty of less dubious looking Twitter alternatives than that...