I love how the content belongs to them when someone else reposts it but it belongs to the user if the content is illegal. Such a double standard with these social media and AI companies. Why do we put up with it?
That is what all LLMs could do in 2023, verbatim, before they trained it out of them in order to keep up the pretense that there is no plagiarism. Now they all obfuscate the original or refuse to cite.
You have to admit, the “free speech” shield-wielding megalomaniac working so hard to keep people from freely accessing info isn’t exactly great optics.
I'm very much on the side of xcancel and nitter on this one, but I do think it's fair to point out that Twitter is free of monetary charge. It's not free in the sense that you do have to provide some personal information and data to them in exchange for that free account, but it isn't a huge roadblock for most people, however annoying it may be.
Now that said, I sure hope Elon will pivot this and make these services unnecessary. I'm not holding my breath though.
Twitter is heavily login-gated, to the point that I can't see Twitter threads at all unless I have an account. I do not wish to make an account. Services like Nitter/XCancel allow me to read those threads, making that speech more free.
This may be a situation where revealing a solution may end up harming it. For those who use iOS and other Apple OSes, I learned of this recently released free Safari extension called Litterbox that allows looking at one post on x.com.
People really need to just not visit it. You don’t need to browse Twitter to be on top of current events. Anything posted there will be available elsewhere within minutes (and hopefully it will have been vetted somewhat)
For years Twitter stood out among major platforms for having an actually-usable mobile web interface that seemed to be a first-class citizen / wasn’t intentionally degraded to force you into the app, and didn’t even nag you about it. Unsurprising they’ve since ruined it.
The whole point of butchered websites is to direct people to install their more invasive app. It's not like all companies just got bad at making websites somehow. There are conflicting incentives.
So they can try to nag you into signing up and installing the app? Which doesn't work in 99.9% of cases, but try telling that to your boss if his name is Elon Musk...
Maybe instead of trying to get rid of services that provide a more convenient access to X to non-logged-in users, they should realize that there is a real market behind these services - users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content without the incessant nagging and limitations that X subjects non-logged-in users to?
> users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content
They probably don't want their echo chamber leaking to the wider internet, because external discussion of the content would reveal it for the siloed thought bubble that it is.
Consider X now requires personal information to sign up, and after handing that info over, signups are often still rejected with no explanation given. Yet another tell they're very interested in maintaining that echo chamber.
They clearly realize it and are doing something to stop it. I understand the idea of imagining this as an underserved market they could do something about. Twitter worked that way. X intentionally doesn't want to, and wants to guard its monopoly over the information is controls.
It's like paywalls. Some news companies share free news as a sort of loss leader. Others say, "if you aren't going to pay we simply don't want you here."
There's plenty of other instances running on nitter, some secret/invite only (and as such more chance to fly under the radar). The code is open source: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter albeit X DMCA'd the repo.
No they didn't, or you'd see the text "Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown." and wouldn't have access to the repo at all. Instead you have full access to it, its author having merely archived it out of caution.
Seems you're right. They have done this in the past though, so wouldn't exactly be a surprise.
Here is what the "free speech" platform have censored previously on GitHub:
> X Corp. employs various technical protection measures to control access to its copyrighted works, including those at issue here (API schemas and platform content): e.g., official X Corp. API key/OAuth authentication, rate-limiting mechanisms, proprietary behavioral pattern detection, TLS fingerprint validation, and x-clienttransaction-id checks. The repository referenced above appears specifically designed to circumvent these measures using browser cookies, curl_cffi TLS impersonation, fake headers, request jitter, and reverse-engineered GraphQL queries.
This to me is a big issue. You have politicians, government entities and other public institutions posting to twitter, but to access we need to log in.
There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.
This comment also applies to facebook too, which I think is even worse than twitter.
Indeed, the Nitter authors recommended you buy a bundle of Twitter accounts with 2FA details when setting up your own instance, to avoid getting rate-limited.
There are millions of accounts for sale, roughly $0.10 per account.
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
UPDATE: Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.
Why do you say it’s permanent? Unarchiving a GitHub repository is reversible, and just as easy as archiving it.
Now that said, I sure hope Elon will pivot this and make these services unnecessary. I'm not holding my breath though.
[1]: https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox
They probably don't want their echo chamber leaking to the wider internet, because external discussion of the content would reveal it for the siloed thought bubble that it is.
Consider X now requires personal information to sign up, and after handing that info over, signups are often still rejected with no explanation given. Yet another tell they're very interested in maintaining that echo chamber.
It's like paywalls. Some news companies share free news as a sort of loss leader. Others say, "if you aren't going to pay we simply don't want you here."
I wish legal issues wouldn’t exist for this project and X would stop attacking projects that provide information for free.
Privacy is important more than ever as many of us don't want to login into X.
No they didn't, or you'd see the text "Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown." and wouldn't have access to the repo at all. Instead you have full access to it, its author having merely archived it out of caution.
No reference to nitter in https://github.com/github/dmca/
Here is what the "free speech" platform have censored previously on GitHub:
> X Corp. employs various technical protection measures to control access to its copyrighted works, including those at issue here (API schemas and platform content): e.g., official X Corp. API key/OAuth authentication, rate-limiting mechanisms, proprietary behavioral pattern detection, TLS fingerprint validation, and x-clienttransaction-id checks. The repository referenced above appears specifically designed to circumvent these measures using browser cookies, curl_cffi TLS impersonation, fake headers, request jitter, and reverse-engineered GraphQL queries.
https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/b2c88bad7dd771dc7d1842ff...
*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.
Either you cancel X. Meaning: NOT consuming X content.
Or you just visit X.com.
Right? Right?
A bit like your comment.
It's possible that other people you want to read, are using a platform you don't want to use. Have this perhaps never happened to you, even once?
There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.
This comment also applies to facebook too, which I think is even worse than twitter.
There are millions of accounts for sale, roughly $0.10 per account.
https://hstockplus.com/accounts/twitter-x-accounts?sortBy=pr...