Posted by gaganyaan 9 hours ago
*if you log in to an account
A big reason many people use Nitter instances is that X has become very locked down for unauthenticated users.
If it's public, people can link to it and promote the site. If it's not, then either info there doesn't get free publicity or people just screenshot the tweets instead.
You can all walk away. You don’t need it.
Now that said, I sure hope Elon will pivot this and make these services unnecessary. I'm not holding my breath though.
The fact that Twitter is login-gated makes it objectively less free as in freedom.
It is not the same kind of "free" as in "no cost". Twitter is a paid service. To access Twitter, you have to pay for it. Either by purchasing a subscription or viewing ads.
Think of it as having to buy a newspaper before being able to read it. That doesn't stop the paper's editors from being able to criticize the government.
This is one way to define it, yes, but Musk is a self-described “free speech absolutist” which I would argue means that he feels speech should be maximally free.
> It is not the same kind of "free" as in "no cost".
I have never meant it in that way, and I’m not sure why you thought I did.
> To access Twitter, you have to pay for it. Either by purchasing a subscription or viewing ads.
This is possibly pedantic but this statement as written is false. I can view single tweets just fine, and I don’t see ads.
> Think of it as having to buy a newspaper before being able to read it. That doesn't stop the paper's editors from being able to criticize the government.
That analogy doesn’t really work here, IMO. My only point is that it’s objectively true that speech behind a login wall is less free (as in freedom) than speech not behind a login wall, and so a (non-hypocritical) “free speech absolutist” should always prefer the latter.
Nobody is being censored by the inability of a third party to act as a parallel distribution channel. Nor does freedom of speech have anything to do with entitlement to an audience. No website infringes upon freedom of speech by having a paywall on UGC, as neither the contributors nor readers are worse off than if the site didn't exist.
We're talking about the quolloquial "free speech", here.
He speaks out both sides of his mouth.
Unfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings, we are required to suspend this service again until further notice. We can't share more details.
You can find the content you were looking for on the original website:
Continue to X
Thank you for your understanding. And the trust you have put into the XCancel project.
“Does the other side need to show any good faith?”
“No, in fact the judge is more likely to side either then the more angry and aggressive they are”
“….great”
If they post something on Twitter, or worse, Facebook, they must also provide a copy of the post on their own website. Some kind of online government gazette, if you will.
People here overthink so much about this topic.
As the state or a representative thereof, yes; that's why public service is either run by itself or contracts to operators who must then abide by requirements (like no discrimination, unconditional access to information, social pricing, or similar provisions depending on your jurisdiction), that they would scrape the very day their activity became free market.
In France, even banks, a sector without a public actor in most countries, are legally required to open accounts ("droit au compte"). I don't mean _any_ kind of account, but at least one. On which banks naturally don't make a profit...
Google or Apple on the other hand, have no legal duty to let you in, which means in practice that they can lock you out of public services that they gate access to.
BTW: overthinking is how society moves forward :)
A nice UI around such API probably can be one-shotted with modern LLM-coding models and tools.
Or, you can go the hard way and vibecode something around buying twitter accounts (just several bucks per each) and proxies.
What I'm trying to say, that with modern tools it is incredibly easy to bypass the restrictions on reading twitter without an account, even if they manage to take down all the nitter instances, try to make finding nitter source code harder etc.
Set up a mastodon account that mirrors your (or someone elses) X account.
This way people who want can continue using X, and other people can read & refer to their posts without needing to log into X.
I ditched xcancel for redirectors like https://twit.0r.cx/
or
Bluesky is here anyway.
Hell, you’re arguably on a Twitter alternative right now.
regardless, no matter how hard elon turns the screws on their customers, people will continue to use twitter/X because "that's where everyone is" and places like HN will continue to allow these links because "that's where the news is" despite healthier alternatives like the Mastodon network and Bluesky existing.
whatever. i've redirected x to 0.0.0.0 when the first warning shot was fired and called it a day. rocks are looking like a great place to live under right about now anyway.