I generally agree but I'm still frequently linked to X and I'm either unable to view the content because I don't have an account or I don't click because I don't want to visit the site. These services allow me to access the user content without having to go through X, itself. I wish hackers/the tech industry moved off of X like most users but here we are.
Those services are available, however, people would not stop using Twitter and will continue to do so until we stop consuming their content, then maybe they will finally get off Twitter...
It's companies. Corporate PR accounts never migrate off to Mastodon/Bluesky/Threads. Many neglects update of updates pages, announcing everything on Twitter.
Some of them would move to Instagram if it makes sense to do so, but Twitter apparently makes the best ad ROI figures among Twitter-like services.
I mean, lots of local and/or small services announce disruptions on Twitter only. Many of those have separate news/service status pages on WWW, and yet neglects updates of those. Possibly because users without access to Twitter aren't worth informing.
IOW, Twitter still is a social data infrastructure, like road or tap water. Something that the society depends on, that also ain't nobody paying for it, something that only makes sense at-cost max or at a loss.
I think that was always a fundamental problem with Twitter as a for-profit company. Surely it handles a large amounts of important communications, that are also not so exploitable or monetizable, ethically or not, just fundamentally.
I question your definition of 'need', mainly because my only interactions are interest-related, not work/life related, and whenever I capitulate and follow the link, it's not as interesting/useful as it was purported to be.
As such, I find it easier and easier to just not visit. This is, however, entirely my own anecdotal.
It's not the fault of the users when there's no viable alternative
Bluesky is founded by the same founders of Twitter and is not open and has ridiculous policies, Mastodon is the same, even less popular and even more tyrannical
So the choice for most users, including myself, is tightly moderated spaces run by awful people, or a website run by a literal Nazi, but that at least doesn't ban me on sight
The Musk twitter acquisition (and the sieg heil at the inauguration) were pivotal moments where a good alternative could've surfaced but instead we got twitter 2.0 (and moving from Twitter to Twitter 2 seems entirely pointless even if it wasn't badly moderated on top of that)
IMO the reason why BS just ended up being Twitter 2.0, or 1.2 even, or why Twitter went down its path in the first place, is that the US and EU are no longer producing enough content to justify ownership or continuous iterations of such a system.
Otherwise it wouldn't have been forced upon who begrudgingly got funding secured. Any of then-GAFA could have bought it and none wanted to touch it.
The bad moderation on those platforms, I think, is a desperate attempt to align platform cultures to the moderating entities' standards that are no longer comprehensible to users, if known at all, like a kid on a push car moving away from the park trying to steer it back.
It seemed fine until 2015 or so, streaming hundreds of novel tweets per second per user, many with novel images. Then things went downhill. Musk can't be the sole villain in it.
Mastodon devs have said many times that the mainstream fediverse, the original community that federates among itself, has a distinct culture and values that they wish to maintain in perpetuity. That is "policies". Yes, the tech allows parallel ecosystems of servers that don't federate with that original community, but when people talk about "Mastodon" like the OP did, they aren't talking about offshoot ecosystems.
They can say whatever they want but they have no control over it. That's the benefit of a truly decentralised network and free open source software.
It's like Microsoft saying they want a distinct culture among the users of their software. They can want it but it's not gonna happen. Within the mastodon community there's also a lot of servers that won't federate, for example the Germans always have very strict rules that they try to impose on everyone else. So most of the world does not federate with them anymore. *)
I mean there's even stuff like gab and truth social that run on fediverse tech. Not sure if it's mastodon itself or another implementation but that doesn't really matter. They certainly don't meet those culture and values.
And there is no 'mainstream fediverse'. Nothing about fediverse is mainstream to begin with. Unfortunately.
*) Don't get me wrong, I'm very progessive myself but the way the German fediverse community goes about it is wrong. "Follow exactly our rules otherwise you are defederated". That doesn't fly even if I agree with most of those rules.
App distribution platforms threatened Mastodon client apps with a universal Mastodon ban unless the app publicly condemn and denounce Gab(proto Truth Social) with hardcoded connection refusal and every single servers would implement effective moderation.
Gargron also decided that laws in his home country considers even linking to certain images illegal and various forms of labelings and voluntary policing from abroad tangential to legality and useless.
They packaged those standards and decisions as something along necessary measures to curb terrorism or whatever, and took the measures to effectively cut off said 2/3 plus some off of the "main Mastodon network", so to speak. Those measures lasted for years, until I think less than a year ago(you'll know what I'm talking about from my immediate comment history).
I don't think you're supposed to have a Mastodon app, it's a web app. The gatekeepers don't allow apps that connect to arbitrary servers just like they don't allow new browsers, you could use them to bypass the 30% tax.
You could have a kolektiva app but they obviously don't want to.
Sound logic doesn't matter to App Store review policies. The browser argument was made, and ignored. They were told to do what they were told or have the entire Mastodon compatible apps internally blacklisted.
Gab/Truth was easy and not that controversial, but content moderation was a lot more problematic, so they introduced a published instance blocklist system and had operators join the condemnation while also throwing wrenches at instance chooser interfaces online and/or hardcoded, because otherwise the "main" part will become a permanent minority.
I think any modern LLMs would see/know what I mean. Ask your agent if you need more information along this lore.
This is the first time I've ever read a commentator tell me to just ask an LLM to write their comment for them. But for "just send me the prompt" to work, I still have to know the prompt you planned to use?
There's several apps for the fediverse though? I always use Voyager for Lemmy (I don't really like the short-form Twitter style socials so I use Lemmy not Mastodon).
It's fucking annoying however to stay in touch with people. It used to be that everyone was on Twitter and that's it. Now it's AT LEAST Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, Instagram, Mastodon and a ton of other stuff and everyone is somewhere else and no one interoperates with each other.
Well in many cases this is justified. You can't expect them to federate with something like gab (for obvious reasons), or with threads from meta. That would just aid their obvious Embrace, Extend Extinguish play here.
And there are some groups like the German fediverse that stipulate a really long and very specific list of rules and block any instance that doesn't take these over 100% verbatim, no discussion allowed. Also a good reason most of them are blocked. We've had this issue before at the progressive instance I was on.
But besides that most of them get along well. Mastodon is strong on bubble forming anyway but I personally like that. I hate seeing a post from a trans friend on e.g. instagram and then see hundreds of Americans falling over themselves to spew trans hate. Even though the post had nothing to do with that. I think bubbles are necessary in today's online world because many people are just not worth talking to anymore.
> And there are some groups like the German fediverse that stipulate a really long and very specific list of rules and block any instance that doesn't take these over 100% verbatim, no discussion allowed.
Yeah guess what, I'm German LOL that's why I wrote this post
> Also a good reason most of them are blocked.
Well the problem is, it's still annoying from a user perspective - I don't care about the problems other instance admins have with the admins of my instance. And no, I don't want to maintain a dozen accounts just to make sure I can interact with everyone I want to.
> I hate seeing a post from a trans friend on e.g. instagram and then see hundreds of Americans falling over themselves to spew trans hate.
yeah the commercial social networks are just another level of shittiness, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of these "Americans" are just Russians in disguise.
They're just scared of getting fastroped and tear gassed and shot on the spot in their workplace to be then posthumously humiliated on TV as a hostile religious radicalist sympathizer engaging in trafficking of encrypted blasphemous drawings.
So they constantly engage in those ostentatious acts as almost a cultish rituals of its own to distance themselves from whatever it is.
Which is, frankly understandable. Behaviors of some of European counterterrorist units and NGOs/NPOs are rather unhinged. I would do the same if I were them. I'd even put up some religious symbols or donation receipts in the login page just to avoid giving them wrong ideas.
That is emphatically the weakness as well. I too loved the idea of "they all have their own policies," until it came to be that those policies ended up being utterly childish "I'm taking my ball and going home the second anyone says any little thing I don't like."
Bluesky has the same moderation issues as Twitter. There are people complaining their recommendation feeds are full of macho men nudity and/or furry images, or flooded by far left infights(not like relative to self-proclaimed centrism but FAR left), or straight up getting banned after they've specifically chosen the most appropriate contents, things like that.
Weird thing is that my feed is largely fine other than those gotten banned went back to Twitter. Only politics topics I get are neutral, concerns in global economy, some US and more often Ukraine. No dick pics or furries or antisemetism, just cats, more cats, food pics, infosec stuffs, all as I were back on Twitter in 2009 or so.
But there are enough reports of negative experience, so moderatuon is likely still a bit problematic. Or that compounding with lack of passionate users.
There is a VERY GOOD reason to do this, and this is because they are still very powerful and prevalent.
Closing your eyes and ears and going NAAH NAAH NAAH I'M GOING TO PRETEND IT DOESNT EXIST is a wildly stupid way to approach things like twitter when they are still so influential.
I appreciate experimenting with "boycotting," but when the dust settles and the thing is still very much there, you have to engage with that fact.
Depends if you thought Twitter ever had any value at all ever. I once made an account, hung around for 2 weeks,then never opened it again. So since musk owns it, it has no more or less than relevance than before.
It doesn't matter "what I think of its value" at this stage. It has observable effects that go beyond just me. Choosing to just ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist -- or perhaps worse -- pretending that your non-participation is meaningful, is irresponsible.
I'd say you couldn't be more wrong. Maybe you're doing fine. But both of those places have likely had extreme effects on the world that perhaps could have been mitigated with MORE, not fewer, eyeballs paying attention to what was and is happening there.
The big picture is that the vast majority of people are not on Twitter. It is a social network for extremists and the signal to noise ratio is extremely low.
So no, you "have to" do nothing of the sort. If something happens there that's worth reporting on, reputable journalists will write about it.
This is exactly as intelligent as "if you don't like America, leave."
I neither love nor hate the place; in fact -- yes -- today I dislike it more than I like it.
But again, my like or dislike doesn't matter. It exists and has influence. And for that reason, there are very moral reasons to engage with it even if you think it is evil.
Stormfront also has influence, but I still stay the fuck away.
And even if Twitter is influential, you, Joe Random, will have no effect on anything by engaging with people there. All you are is fuel for the (attention) fire.
It's just a gorgeous free lunch tavern if you didn't even understand English through LLM and American right wing politics was just the cash pile for patrons to shovel into the fireplace.
There's some likely made up charts online[1] for country stats of Twitter right now, and Twitter is allegedly 2.5x more popular than it is in the US in the top two countries, which are incidentally known for strong-ish purchasing power and near-nonexistent English literacy.
Musk's ongoing massive self humiliation is largely contained to the US/English speaking space. Other parts of the world with no strong cultural understandings and pathways from the US and its politics, which is quite substantial still, are fine, ish. Things like LLM auto translation haven't made a change to that situation; it only strengthened the reverse of that pathway.
Of course there is, don't be silly. There's also no alternative at the moment, or for the foreseeable future. Sure, there's some knockoffs that try hard, but they're still jokes.
For someone who's been on Twitter for a long time, these alternatives function as a good off-ramp that's easier than quitting entirely and abruptly. I deleted my account a few years ago knowing I'd still be able to see some of the content without viewing their ads or contributing my own content.
There's a huge cohort of people who are convinced they're somehow immune to right wing propaganda and continue posting information exclusively to sites owned by reactionary oligarchs. Sometimes that information is useful or important, which is why nitter and its ilk are sorely needed.
In the same vein there is no reason to bother with social networks owned by literal far left supporters, i.e. nearly all the others. Combined these two statements lead to the conclusion that hardly any social networks are worth bothering which is something I can get behind.
If you think Musk is far right you will have a really bad time in coming years.
Musk holds very few far right views in comparison to parties very close to power in many EU countries for example.
He is against mass immigration, especially from Islamic countries. That is a very mainstream view though. There is nothing 'far' about it.
Everyone is against "mass" immigration as in "let's go to country X and gather a million people and bring them to country Y", that's not controversial
It is controversial when you start pointing to individual immigrants already in country Y and saying "hey you, get the fuck out".
Which is of course why people like Musk always try to frame things as the first one. They always say things like "the president is importing one million illegals" and never say things like "one million different people decided to come here, all for different reasons"
The very fact 'they' refer to immigration as "mass immigration" means they're already pretty right heavy.
That kind of attempt to redefine what migration is, is classic manipulation of the narrative to try and appear more centrist.
Looks like it works pretty well too.
Migration levels are controlled by government and are generally based on the needs of the society being governed. I thought the rules had always been pretty strict on getting into most western countries.
>>Migration levels are controlled by government and are generally based on the needs of the society being governed. I thought the rules had always been pretty strict on getting into most western countries.
In theory, not in practice.
If they are "controlled by the government" then illegal immigrants should be deported.
What is happening is that a lot of people come illegally, often against wishes of local population. That's why it's "mass".
Speaking of EU (as Musk is often criticized for expressing his views on EU countries): majority of people support some level of remigration. Vast majority supports stopping illegal migration. Big majority is against migration from Islamic countries. Instead we get all of it at mass scale against wishes of the people. Musk is with the majority here but against ruling elite. His view is well in the middle of what people in EU support.
Yeah, well, it's illegal, so even the establishment is against it. From the, admittedly minimal, sources I hear from it's way overblown by politicians and their supportive media outlets as an easy vote capturing exercise playing on basic human tribalism and fear.
He aligns with AfD on issues where AfD is with majority of the population (stopping mass migration, some remigration) but not on all policies which make them far right.
Also more than 30% of Germans support AfD these days. Hard to call that "far" anything.
Would love to redirect more often to shitter instances with https://xxcancel.com.
But there seems to be a bug loading images (e.g. profile pictures or attached pictures to tweets) in Firefox.
I made a thing that uses Nitter to have a revchron timeline of people in the tech space. No algorithm, every post shows up (unless you filter out an account). Feedback is appreciated: https://techtwitter-lime.vercel.app
Rarely am I so envious of another’s idea. This makes me jealous. I wish I’d thought of it, even though I’ve never used the original and I’d never use it after it became what it has become.
tnx to carry on. How is the legal shitstorm going? Any foreseeable continuity mid-term of the fork? Something for Firefox to follow links to a private instance? Love rss support.
What do you mean by "how"? The code is freely available, you can spin it up at will too in just a few minutes. When they disappear, sometimes it's because the maintainer doesn't want the headache, and sometimes it's because a they're threatened to remove it.
I guess I never bothered reading the code so for whatever reason I assumed it required some extraordinary circumvention to host it that isn't very accessible
what you're saying, if I understand correctly, is that self-hosting this is trivial then
so does that mean I could run my own local instance and never get it taken down since traffic would be negligible? why do people opt to host these for others over teaching how to run your own for example?
> what you're saying, if I understand correctly, is that self-hosting this is trivial then
Yes. It comes encouraged.
> so does that mean I could run my own local instance and never get it taken down since traffic would be negligible?
Yes, unless the other end forbids it and really cares about controlling clients. If they do and manage to detect that you are using alternative client they could block based on that. In times where that happens and there are client devs who care, it becomes a cat-and-mouse.
We need a multiplexer in front of all these instances. One that works like a load balancer, health checking the individual instances and adding/removing them from the pool automatically. That would allow people to create new accounts, serve their own instance and attach them to the muxer.
No, neither of those do what I said. These are just redirectors but you need an extra step and once you've been redirected you're on that site for the remainder of your session. Furthermore, I've been redirected to unhealthy instances frequently from them.
I assume the source code repo is still up somewhere, so I assume it's the domains that are being taken offline, not the code, and anyone can then trivially spin up their own instance.
The fact that there is not even a sentence explaining why it's a fork, i.e., how it differs from the original, suggests this was only on the front page because of the name. Kinda dumb!
see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49571634 "Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns"
many working instances right now: https://codeberg.org/shitter/shitter/wiki/Instances
also https://status.d420.de/
also useful, "LibRedirect": https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
> "A web extension that redirects YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok and other websites to alternative privacy-friendly frontends."
There’s really no reason to bother with social networks owned by literal far right supporters
I generally agree but I'm still frequently linked to X and I'm either unable to view the content because I don't have an account or I don't click because I don't want to visit the site. These services allow me to access the user content without having to go through X, itself. I wish hackers/the tech industry moved off of X like most users but here we are.
I've reached the point where I go "If it's on Twitter I don't need to know". We'll all reach that point eventually.
Problem is, sometimes I do need to see the content.
If only someone would "just" fucking build a viable replacement for Twitter. It's a weekend's work with the tools now available. C'mon. (pokes stick)
You mean like Bluesky, Threads, or Mastodon?
Those services are available, however, people would not stop using Twitter and will continue to do so until we stop consuming their content, then maybe they will finally get off Twitter...
It's companies. Corporate PR accounts never migrate off to Mastodon/Bluesky/Threads. Many neglects update of updates pages, announcing everything on Twitter.
Some of them would move to Instagram if it makes sense to do so, but Twitter apparently makes the best ad ROI figures among Twitter-like services.
a few companies (mainly those in the open-source space) run their own Mastodon instances, though this is more common for FOSS organisations
As far as I'm concerned, Corporate PR can stay nicely fenced off over on Xitter.
Keep all the bullshit in one far corner, over there, in the distance, behind the big wall, topped with razor wire.
I mean, lots of local and/or small services announce disruptions on Twitter only. Many of those have separate news/service status pages on WWW, and yet neglects updates of those. Possibly because users without access to Twitter aren't worth informing.
IOW, Twitter still is a social data infrastructure, like road or tap water. Something that the society depends on, that also ain't nobody paying for it, something that only makes sense at-cost max or at a loss.
I think that was always a fundamental problem with Twitter as a for-profit company. Surely it handles a large amounts of important communications, that are also not so exploitable or monetizable, ethically or not, just fundamentally.
I question your definition of 'need', mainly because my only interactions are interest-related, not work/life related, and whenever I capitulate and follow the link, it's not as interesting/useful as it was purported to be.
As such, I find it easier and easier to just not visit. This is, however, entirely my own anecdotal.
It's not the fault of the users when there's no viable alternative
Bluesky is founded by the same founders of Twitter and is not open and has ridiculous policies, Mastodon is the same, even less popular and even more tyrannical
So the choice for most users, including myself, is tightly moderated spaces run by awful people, or a website run by a literal Nazi, but that at least doesn't ban me on sight
The Musk twitter acquisition (and the sieg heil at the inauguration) were pivotal moments where a good alternative could've surfaced but instead we got twitter 2.0 (and moving from Twitter to Twitter 2 seems entirely pointless even if it wasn't badly moderated on top of that)
IMO the reason why BS just ended up being Twitter 2.0, or 1.2 even, or why Twitter went down its path in the first place, is that the US and EU are no longer producing enough content to justify ownership or continuous iterations of such a system.
Otherwise it wouldn't have been forced upon who begrudgingly got funding secured. Any of then-GAFA could have bought it and none wanted to touch it.
The bad moderation on those platforms, I think, is a desperate attempt to align platform cultures to the moderating entities' standards that are no longer comprehensible to users, if known at all, like a kid on a push car moving away from the park trying to steer it back.
It seemed fine until 2015 or so, streaming hundreds of novel tweets per second per user, many with novel images. Then things went downhill. Musk can't be the sole villain in it.
Mastodon doesn't have policies. Every instance has their own policies. That's the strength of mastodon.
Mastodon devs have said many times that the mainstream fediverse, the original community that federates among itself, has a distinct culture and values that they wish to maintain in perpetuity. That is "policies". Yes, the tech allows parallel ecosystems of servers that don't federate with that original community, but when people talk about "Mastodon" like the OP did, they aren't talking about offshoot ecosystems.
They can say whatever they want but they have no control over it. That's the benefit of a truly decentralised network and free open source software.
It's like Microsoft saying they want a distinct culture among the users of their software. They can want it but it's not gonna happen. Within the mastodon community there's also a lot of servers that won't federate, for example the Germans always have very strict rules that they try to impose on everyone else. So most of the world does not federate with them anymore. *)
I mean there's even stuff like gab and truth social that run on fediverse tech. Not sure if it's mastodon itself or another implementation but that doesn't really matter. They certainly don't meet those culture and values.
And there is no 'mainstream fediverse'. Nothing about fediverse is mainstream to begin with. Unfortunately.
*) Don't get me wrong, I'm very progessive myself but the way the German fediverse community goes about it is wrong. "Follow exactly our rules otherwise you are defederated". That doesn't fly even if I agree with most of those rules.
Gargron, Apple, Google, all has/had policies for Mastodon, which were incompatible with more than 2/3 of its users(at peak).
I don't know how to understand this. Google owns Mastodon?
App distribution platforms threatened Mastodon client apps with a universal Mastodon ban unless the app publicly condemn and denounce Gab(proto Truth Social) with hardcoded connection refusal and every single servers would implement effective moderation.
Gargron also decided that laws in his home country considers even linking to certain images illegal and various forms of labelings and voluntary policing from abroad tangential to legality and useless.
They packaged those standards and decisions as something along necessary measures to curb terrorism or whatever, and took the measures to effectively cut off said 2/3 plus some off of the "main Mastodon network", so to speak. Those measures lasted for years, until I think less than a year ago(you'll know what I'm talking about from my immediate comment history).
I don't think you're supposed to have a Mastodon app, it's a web app. The gatekeepers don't allow apps that connect to arbitrary servers just like they don't allow new browsers, you could use them to bypass the 30% tax.
You could have a kolektiva app but they obviously don't want to.
What's the ""main Mastodon network""?
Sound logic doesn't matter to App Store review policies. The browser argument was made, and ignored. They were told to do what they were told or have the entire Mastodon compatible apps internally blacklisted.
Gab/Truth was easy and not that controversial, but content moderation was a lot more problematic, so they introduced a published instance blocklist system and had operators join the condemnation while also throwing wrenches at instance chooser interfaces online and/or hardcoded, because otherwise the "main" part will become a permanent minority.
I think any modern LLMs would see/know what I mean. Ask your agent if you need more information along this lore.
This is the first time I've ever read a commentator tell me to just ask an LLM to write their comment for them. But for "just send me the prompt" to work, I still have to know the prompt you planned to use?
Just paste the whole tree and hit enter?
There's several apps for the fediverse though? I always use Voyager for Lemmy (I don't really like the short-form Twitter style socials so I use Lemmy not Mastodon).
This is in the google play store too: https://github.com/aeharding/voyager Though I get it from F-Droid obviously.
I don't know about Apple, its ecosystem is way too closed for me. But Google offers fediverse apps.
> Every instance has their own policies. That's the strength of mastodon.
And its biggest weakness because instance admins keep bitchfighting with each other, holding their users hostage.
Just like HN and Reddit refuse to interoperate. But it's okay because you can just make a user account on HN, and one on Reddit.
It's fucking annoying however to stay in touch with people. It used to be that everyone was on Twitter and that's it. Now it's AT LEAST Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, Instagram, Mastodon and a ton of other stuff and everyone is somewhere else and no one interoperates with each other.
Speak for yourself. I never had friends on Twitter.
Meh I managed to get laid multiple times on there.
Times used to be better, before the stonerhead took over...
Well in many cases this is justified. You can't expect them to federate with something like gab (for obvious reasons), or with threads from meta. That would just aid their obvious Embrace, Extend Extinguish play here.
And there are some groups like the German fediverse that stipulate a really long and very specific list of rules and block any instance that doesn't take these over 100% verbatim, no discussion allowed. Also a good reason most of them are blocked. We've had this issue before at the progressive instance I was on.
But besides that most of them get along well. Mastodon is strong on bubble forming anyway but I personally like that. I hate seeing a post from a trans friend on e.g. instagram and then see hundreds of Americans falling over themselves to spew trans hate. Even though the post had nothing to do with that. I think bubbles are necessary in today's online world because many people are just not worth talking to anymore.
> And there are some groups like the German fediverse that stipulate a really long and very specific list of rules and block any instance that doesn't take these over 100% verbatim, no discussion allowed.
Yeah guess what, I'm German LOL that's why I wrote this post
> Also a good reason most of them are blocked.
Well the problem is, it's still annoying from a user perspective - I don't care about the problems other instance admins have with the admins of my instance. And no, I don't want to maintain a dozen accounts just to make sure I can interact with everyone I want to.
> I hate seeing a post from a trans friend on e.g. instagram and then see hundreds of Americans falling over themselves to spew trans hate.
yeah the commercial social networks are just another level of shittiness, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of these "Americans" are just Russians in disguise.
They're just scared of getting fastroped and tear gassed and shot on the spot in their workplace to be then posthumously humiliated on TV as a hostile religious radicalist sympathizer engaging in trafficking of encrypted blasphemous drawings.
So they constantly engage in those ostentatious acts as almost a cultish rituals of its own to distance themselves from whatever it is.
Which is, frankly understandable. Behaviors of some of European counterterrorist units and NGOs/NPOs are rather unhinged. I would do the same if I were them. I'd even put up some religious symbols or donation receipts in the login page just to avoid giving them wrong ideas.
That is emphatically the weakness as well. I too loved the idea of "they all have their own policies," until it came to be that those policies ended up being utterly childish "I'm taking my ball and going home the second anyone says any little thing I don't like."
> Bluesky is founded by the same founders of Twitter and is not open and has ridiculous policies
Huh? It is remarkably open and the policies are not really an issue.
Bluesky has the same moderation issues as Twitter. There are people complaining their recommendation feeds are full of macho men nudity and/or furry images, or flooded by far left infights(not like relative to self-proclaimed centrism but FAR left), or straight up getting banned after they've specifically chosen the most appropriate contents, things like that.
Weird thing is that my feed is largely fine other than those gotten banned went back to Twitter. Only politics topics I get are neutral, concerns in global economy, some US and more often Ukraine. No dick pics or furries or antisemetism, just cats, more cats, food pics, infosec stuffs, all as I were back on Twitter in 2009 or so.
But there are enough reports of negative experience, so moderatuon is likely still a bit problematic. Or that compounding with lack of passionate users.
I've gotten banned from Blue Sky for absolutely no discernible reason, and the main feeds are basically centrist slop
tl;dr you're OK with hanging out on Stormfront Social because some people on Bluesky and Mastodon are a little bit mean.
I wish we wouldn't mince words about this because that's really the long and short of it.
(The third option, of course, is to not use social networks run by Nazis as a basic matter of principle.)
>I generally agree but I'm still frequently linked to X...
... so? Being linked to it is not an obligation to bother with it, neither is FOMO.
There is a VERY GOOD reason to do this, and this is because they are still very powerful and prevalent.
Closing your eyes and ears and going NAAH NAAH NAAH I'M GOING TO PRETEND IT DOESNT EXIST is a wildly stupid way to approach things like twitter when they are still so influential.
I appreciate experimenting with "boycotting," but when the dust settles and the thing is still very much there, you have to engage with that fact.
Depends if you thought Twitter ever had any value at all ever. I once made an account, hung around for 2 weeks,then never opened it again. So since musk owns it, it has no more or less than relevance than before.
It doesn't matter "what I think of its value" at this stage. It has observable effects that go beyond just me. Choosing to just ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist -- or perhaps worse -- pretending that your non-participation is meaningful, is irresponsible.
> pretending that your non-participation is meaningful, is irresponsible
What's the difference, considering X is riddled with silencing dark patterns?
How is your participation on that network in any way meaningful?
"know thy enemy"
"If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
Engaging with facts is not exactly the leftist strong suit here.
I pretend 4chan doesn't exist and everything's been fine. Now I do the same with twitter and everything is fine just the same.
I'd say you couldn't be more wrong. Maybe you're doing fine. But both of those places have likely had extreme effects on the world that perhaps could have been mitigated with MORE, not fewer, eyeballs paying attention to what was and is happening there.
The big picture is that the vast majority of people are not on Twitter. It is a social network for extremists and the signal to noise ratio is extremely low.
So no, you "have to" do nothing of the sort. If something happens there that's worth reporting on, reputable journalists will write about it.
"reputable journalists"
oh how I wish that were a thing that carried the weight it once did
You're just objectively wrong. There is no reason to entertain a Nazi website. You sound hurt as if you work for X.
This is exactly as intelligent as "if you don't like America, leave."
I neither love nor hate the place; in fact -- yes -- today I dislike it more than I like it.
But again, my like or dislike doesn't matter. It exists and has influence. And for that reason, there are very moral reasons to engage with it even if you think it is evil.
Stormfront also has influence, but I still stay the fuck away.
And even if Twitter is influential, you, Joe Random, will have no effect on anything by engaging with people there. All you are is fuel for the (attention) fire.
As a black person, if I thought Stormfront had considerable dangerous influence, I would quite literally try to join immediately.
Not a very helpful comment for someone not in the know. I couldn't find anything political on their landing page.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-musk/elon-musk-boosting-fa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_Elon_M...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/17/opinion/elon-musk-republi...
https://ecfr.eu/article/musks-war-on-european-democracy-how-...
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-x-influence-uk-us-polit...
Hope that helps.
This tool is for accessing Twitter/X, owned by Elon Musk, a far right billionaire.
oh the parent comment sounded like a criticism of shitter, not x
I haven't consumed social media or any news for like two years. You normies will figure it all out like you always do
It's just a gorgeous free lunch tavern if you didn't even understand English through LLM and American right wing politics was just the cash pile for patrons to shovel into the fireplace.
There's some likely made up charts online[1] for country stats of Twitter right now, and Twitter is allegedly 2.5x more popular than it is in the US in the top two countries, which are incidentally known for strong-ish purchasing power and near-nonexistent English literacy.
Musk's ongoing massive self humiliation is largely contained to the US/English speaking space. Other parts of the world with no strong cultural understandings and pathways from the US and its politics, which is quite substantial still, are fine, ish. Things like LLM auto translation haven't made a change to that situation; it only strengthened the reverse of that pathway.
1: https://soax.com/research/twitter-active-users
Of course there is, don't be silly. There's also no alternative at the moment, or for the foreseeable future. Sure, there's some knockoffs that try hard, but they're still jokes.
You forget that Twitter is just a joke.
What's the reason?
You are the reason Bioware is now dead and scattered to the winds.
Yes, me pointing out that Elon Musk supports far right parties is the reason why EA execs decided to shut down BioWare to pay themselves more
I'll take a far right supporter over a communist supporter.
What if i am part of the far right?
Then reasons no longer matter to you.
You mean just being normal? Yep no issues then.
For someone who's been on Twitter for a long time, these alternatives function as a good off-ramp that's easier than quitting entirely and abruptly. I deleted my account a few years ago knowing I'd still be able to see some of the content without viewing their ads or contributing my own content.
There's a huge cohort of people who are convinced they're somehow immune to right wing propaganda and continue posting information exclusively to sites owned by reactionary oligarchs. Sometimes that information is useful or important, which is why nitter and its ilk are sorely needed.
Except when tons of gov owned services (police, firemen, emergency services) are using it to communicate with citizens...
In the same vein there is no reason to bother with social networks owned by literal far left supporters, i.e. nearly all the others. Combined these two statements lead to the conclusion that hardly any social networks are worth bothering which is something I can get behind.
> In the same vein there is no reason to bother with social networks owned by literal far left supporters
Name one
If you think Musk is far right you will have a really bad time in coming years. Musk holds very few far right views in comparison to parties very close to power in many EU countries for example.
He is against mass immigration, especially from Islamic countries. That is a very mainstream view though. There is nothing 'far' about it.
Everyone is against "mass" immigration as in "let's go to country X and gather a million people and bring them to country Y", that's not controversial
It is controversial when you start pointing to individual immigrants already in country Y and saying "hey you, get the fuck out".
Which is of course why people like Musk always try to frame things as the first one. They always say things like "the president is importing one million illegals" and never say things like "one million different people decided to come here, all for different reasons"
And all had to go through pretty strict processes with lots of paperwork and proof and background checks.
The very fact 'they' refer to immigration as "mass immigration" means they're already pretty right heavy.
That kind of attempt to redefine what migration is, is classic manipulation of the narrative to try and appear more centrist.
Looks like it works pretty well too.
Migration levels are controlled by government and are generally based on the needs of the society being governed. I thought the rules had always been pretty strict on getting into most western countries.
>>Migration levels are controlled by government and are generally based on the needs of the society being governed. I thought the rules had always been pretty strict on getting into most western countries.
In theory, not in practice. If they are "controlled by the government" then illegal immigrants should be deported. What is happening is that a lot of people come illegally, often against wishes of local population. That's why it's "mass".
Speaking of EU (as Musk is often criticized for expressing his views on EU countries): majority of people support some level of remigration. Vast majority supports stopping illegal migration. Big majority is against migration from Islamic countries. Instead we get all of it at mass scale against wishes of the people. Musk is with the majority here but against ruling elite. His view is well in the middle of what people in EU support.
> Instead we get all of it at mass scale
I believe that this is a false narrative that's being pushed as vote attractant.
> Vast majority supports stopping illegal migration
Yeah, well, it's illegal, so even the establishment is against it. From the, admittedly minimal, sources I hear from it's way overblown by politicians and their supportive media outlets as an easy vote capturing exercise playing on basic human tribalism and fear.
His nazi salute looked pretty far up and to the right. Twice, btw.
He aligns with people like the AfD.
Or as we say: It it sieg heils like a duck...
He aligns with AfD on issues where AfD is with majority of the population (stopping mass migration, some remigration) but not on all policies which make them far right. Also more than 30% of Germans support AfD these days. Hard to call that "far" anything.
Would love to redirect more often to shitter instances with https://xxcancel.com. But there seems to be a bug loading images (e.g. profile pictures or attached pictures to tweets) in Firefox.
Example: https://shitter.thepixora.com/search?f=tweets&q=elon+musk
Wont show any pictures in Firefox for me. Works in Chrome. Can this be fixed? Thank you!
It doesn't proxy the images, so they won't load with enhanced tracking protection enabled.
I wonder if a bridge could be built that would bridge the few accounts that still matter on X to something like mastodon or blue sky
I thought it should be called Xitter, but pronounced Shitter.
Xittier, a better Xwitter alternative
What the hell is this Xit
Exit Twitter
Out, damnéd xit! out, I say!
I made a thing that uses Nitter to have a revchron timeline of people in the tech space. No algorithm, every post shows up (unless you filter out an account). Feedback is appreciated: https://techtwitter-lime.vercel.app
somehow i feel this reflects if not also enhances the cultural position of x.com.
Rarely am I so envious of another’s idea. This makes me jealous. I wish I’d thought of it, even though I’ve never used the original and I’d never use it after it became what it has become.
Creator of Shitter here. Thank you for featuring my fork!
The readme doesn't even say anything about why the fork is created and its difference from Nitter.
Creator of Shitter here. The original Nitter project has been discontinued, this fork hasn't.
tnx to carry on. How is the legal shitstorm going? Any foreseeable continuity mid-term of the fork? Something for Firefox to follow links to a private instance? Love rss support.
can someone explain to me how these things keep popping up and disappearing and how are they able to just spin them up at will somehow?
What do you mean by "how"? The code is freely available, you can spin it up at will too in just a few minutes. When they disappear, sometimes it's because the maintainer doesn't want the headache, and sometimes it's because a they're threatened to remove it.
I guess I never bothered reading the code so for whatever reason I assumed it required some extraordinary circumvention to host it that isn't very accessible
what you're saying, if I understand correctly, is that self-hosting this is trivial then
so does that mean I could run my own local instance and never get it taken down since traffic would be negligible? why do people opt to host these for others over teaching how to run your own for example?
> what you're saying, if I understand correctly, is that self-hosting this is trivial then
Yes. It comes encouraged.
> so does that mean I could run my own local instance and never get it taken down since traffic would be negligible?
Yes, unless the other end forbids it and really cares about controlling clients. If they do and manage to detect that you are using alternative client they could block based on that. In times where that happens and there are client devs who care, it becomes a cat-and-mouse.
Because it isn’t magic, there’s still Twitter auth required https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/src/auth.nim
Every individual running their own instance would be the equivalent of every individual having their own Twitter account, which defeats the purpose.
Well, not totally. It's read only, which changes how people engage. It also lets you control ordering and presentation. It also lets you hide ads.
We need a multiplexer in front of all these instances. One that works like a load balancer, health checking the individual instances and adding/removing them from the pool automatically. That would allow people to create new accounts, serve their own instance and attach them to the muxer.
That's https://xxcancel.com/
And https://twiiit.com/
No, neither of those do what I said. These are just redirectors but you need an extra step and once you've been redirected you're on that site for the remainder of your session. Furthermore, I've been redirected to unhealthy instances frequently from them.
Yes all of that. I think it's unwise to share details here, because X's anticircumvention team are reading HN.
I assume the source code repo is still up somewhere, so I assume it's the domains that are being taken offline, not the code, and anyone can then trivially spin up their own instance.
The fact that there is not even a sentence explaining why it's a fork, i.e., how it differs from the original, suggests this was only on the front page because of the name. Kinda dumb!
Is the code crap? Is it optimized for shitposting? Is it called so to show disdain towards the service formerly known as Twitter?
I am begging these things to use a normal fucking name for once
What would you consider a normal name, though? Alternative Twitter Front-End? It'd be taken down for trademark infringement.
LOL
Stop using platforms that are clearly operated by fascists. Then we won't need such tools anymore.