I used Twitter for over 10 years without an account then suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted and no longer an option. Reddit is now this way too.
But I find it ridiculous that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable without being logged in (and in some cases requiring an app instead of the site). Even Bluesky has this problem!
Sometimes this information is really important! And I even if I did have an account I may not have access to log in on every device (or even want to).
It’s absurd that social media can become this like critical communications platform for severe weather alerts or business hours or anything but the sites hosting it are completely hostile to allowing you to see it.
Sites like this are a bandaid on a gangrenous foot. Thanks for allowing me to see links from twitter but it isn’t a sustainable solution clearly.
Here in the Netherlands, WhatsApp has the defacto communication tool. Everyone is expected to have it installed, not just by friends but also municipals and companies. Same level as having an e-mail address.
It's a missed opportunity for the digital soverignty the EU says it so badly needs. The code for a government backed WhatsApp competitor is there, in multiple instances even. Launch a WhatsApp clone and put all governement communication through it so everyone has to have it installed, and you have an instant EU-wide userbase. From there, people will naturally start to use it between themselves.
Eurocrats could never in a million years make it happen. For starters, every country would insist on having its own ChatsApp, with roll out taking years. Then, to satisfy strict security and compliance regulations it would be restricted to devices passing Google & Apple hardware attestation checks. And once everyone is finally forced to be on board, any confidentiality guarantees can go out the window to catch pedos and terrorists.
Mastodon instances would be a drop-in replacement, no? Federated instances and as a bonus, it solves the biggest problem of new users not knowing which server to join. Just join your local government's if you don't know of another.
The EU should rather embrace open standards rather than building a closed competitor here. We already have XMPP and Matrix, all that's required is for public institutions to use them.
For what purpose? All this discussion about open alternatives to closed systems always leaves out what the purpose is. For broadcasting public information that is not time critical, I think they should use HTTP and HTML.
It's not all about profit as European SMS is now free. It is however about decentralisation stifling feature development - a trap we run into again and again, from email to IRC to SMS to Fediverse/ATProto.
WhatsApp is one company so if they want to enable sending images they can just do it, and they don't have to coordinate with anyone else. MMS was a failure because you couldn't be sure if your recipient would actually get it, or if your carrier would actually let you send it.
please tell me ONE app for Android other than Google Messages I can use to send and receive RCS, it surely won't be problem since it's international standard same as SMS, so there must be plenty apps available...
Pretty much all banking apps for Android won't work without Google Play Services, so once again if you are using Lineage or Graphene, you are still stuck with US company to use your European banking services on the phone.
> please tell me ONE app for Android other than Google Messages I can use to send and receive RCS, it surely won't be problem since it's international standard same as SMS, so there must be plenty apps available...
Nice red herring. The number of implementations is irrelevant here, although Wikipedia says Samsung had one too.
Cell broadcast, depending on the emergency level set by the sender, also makes your phone vibrate until you read the message, and may also cause it to play a loud siren noise. Which is the sort of thing you want in a real emergency.
Nah, Cell Broadcast has a lot less overhead since it does not have to do any routing or delivery confirmation and such. The load does not scale based on recipients which makes it far more reliable during an emergency.
Sorry, maybe I did "carrier replication" wrong - I used the word in a sense of "it is duplicated at the local cell by the towers", instead of getting "fed with 1mio receivers in region X by the telco servercentral HQ"
Because it doesn't do the job well. It's difficult to send any media, group chats are a pain, international messages often incur fees, it doesn't work on wifi-only, and so on.
RTS is the SMS replacement and is quite old. And as evidence it works, I direct your attention to the ubiquitous iMessage, which only "couldn't" interop with Android because Apple was trying the vendor lock-in approach and actively enshittifying its own users' experience and blaming it on Android users.
Assuming you mean RCS, to which Google built a proprietary E2EE extension, remains the only client with no API to build off of and if I recall requires play attestation.
Hardly a complete solution, it devolved into a Google power grab, in my opinion.
For once I half agree with apple when they say its less secure, as apple-to-google comms are not E2EE like they are for google-to-google. While that is fixable with a hack its still a hack, not part of the protocol.
SMS are virtually free for every carrier. The prices for the customers exist to partially offset the fixed costs of the infrastructure (which already exists).
I agree that I don't trust governments today to provide the necessary confidentiality guarantees but remember that both physical mail and the phone network are government backed - in the sense that they set the rules even if they are operated by private entities in some countries.
I hear this sentiment a lot from people in the USA. They deeply distrust their government and can't imagine it being different anyway else in the world.
> It's a missed opportunity for the digital soverignty the EU says it so badly needs. The code for a government backed WhatsApp competitor is there, in multiple instances even. Launch a WhatsApp clone and put all governement communication through it so everyone has to have it installed, and you have an instant EU-wide userbase. From there, people will naturally start to use it between themselves.
I think you have completely misjudged how much the majority of people would not want to use an EU-controlled chat app.
That's the fate of all government-backed systems as well as all decentralised systems. The former can't evolve because of extreme bureaucracy and the latter can't evolve because of incompatibility trauma and fragmentation.
But in either case we do have the ability to make a new system every 10 years.
Touché. Getting stuck with an obsolete service/protocol for decades is a nightmare, even if it is just ye olde user inertia. If it is mandated by law or pushed by the government, it becomes nearly impossible to update.
In this, I trust the government way less than either the open source movement or the actual Silicon Valley. Both of the latter are much better at iterating of their designs when a new idea comes along.
Which is one of the many many reasons Zuckerberg needs to be investigated the hell out of for every single thing he does
I grant you 2014 is 12 years ago now and you could plausibly argue it was their doing to grow network effects but I'm pretty sure WA had that infrastructure already in place - Acton, Koum et al already did the ground work to get carriers to... whatever it is
Increasingly access is hidden behind mobile apps too, which in turn requires succumbing to app stores and handing over the keys to 2 giant US companies. For slopware and social media, fine. Some would even argue it is a blessing in disguise. However on the government level it is totally unacceptable. E.g. why should anyone and especially non US citizens accept the Google/Apple TOS in order to file their taxes, access their health recds or schedule a gov appointment?
It's all by design to. People call for social media regulation without realizing that it is by no coincidence these companies have been able to grow so large. The security state has been outsourced to private industry.
Even worse, it's hard or impossible to even have an account with any shred of privacy.
I've tried to create pseudoanonymous accounts on both Bluesky and Twitter and then had them be instantly banned before I ever used them. Not even doing anything real privacy like TOR or a VPN, just trying to create an account without revealing my personal phone number.
Ironically, their attempts to crack down on bots means real people like me can't access the sites, while the scammers, propagandists and shills will put in the work to register accounts.
Just to clarify, what do you mean by "without revealing my personal phone number"?
Did you use a voip number (e.g., Google Voice/Twilio/etc.) instead? Or somehow no number at all? Or a secondary (real) phone number, and Twitter somehow determined it wasn't your primary personal phone number?
Not pushing back against what you said, just trying to understand what factually happened.
Bluesky didn't require phone numbers back when it was invite only, and then there was a period of time after they allowed everyone to create accounts where users need a phone number to verify. That requirement might have been replaced by a captcha according to:
Lots of services demand your phone number after the fact now, hoping to use the sunk cost fallacy to extort it out of you when you're in a hurry.
Walmart recently deleted my phone number from my account for vague reasons but most likely because another account had the same number. That other account is my wife and the number is our VoIP line. I have no desire to interact with walmart through my cell phone so I didn't give it to them. So I used a google voice number, which is not my number, to get back in. Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company and autopopulated the field. Jokes on me!
It's been years since I tried making a Twitter account, I believe at the time it sometimes required a phone number to sign up but other times it was optional (some A/B test).
I think Bluesky didn't require a phone number to sign up, just an email. Maybe I'm misremembering though and it forced a phone number so I had to provide a fake one or a voip one.
I wouldn't even care if they blocked my anonymous account from posting or really interacting besides reading things. But of course, preventing bot actions isn't actually why I need an account so they aren't going to let you do that.
Which is why OpenAI formed a partnership with reddit, in exchange for access to OpenAI's models, OpenAI gets access to reddit's data, and access to reddits live feed.
The reason X and Reddit started forcing accounts is to prevent or add barrier for web scraping, and forcing companies to pay for access to the data.
I'm fine with the criticism, but what's the solution? And what makes this a uniquely Elon problem when the rest of the social media industry does the same? There was backlash when the models learned computer programming from open source repositories, so I wonder if the same applies to casual speech.
That's when the LLM labs emerged and started collecting the data en masse. Likewise, virtually all other major social media players added barriers to unfettered anonymous access. Reddit worked without an account, and with multiple alternative client apps, until spez changed it, right?
Similarly, society decided at some point that linkedin, a completely private and constantly hacked social network, is a must-have when looking for work (not any work, but for a lot of jobs it applies). Just give them all your private data and we'll have a look.
Makes one miss the days when Craigslist or Monster (and its clones) were legitimately the best places to find employment.
I've always loathed LinkedIn due to their poor security and their data mining practices, starting from day 1. I haven't used LinkedIn in over 10 years and only used it briefly to connect with old colleagues. I never had a problem getting work without it. Due to AI, scammers, and infiltration by countries like North Korea, LinkedIn seems to be the only other source outside of "networking" to get hired these days though, unfortunately.
At this point nothing would make me happier than to see Meta, X, LinkedIn, and their friends collapse. They are a cancer and only amplify the enshittification of everything.
totally agree, businesses that only have Facebook or Instagram are basically hidden from me. I can not see their opening hours, nor the menue, if it is a restaurant. I understand why the businesses use facebook, its easy, but its also a bit sad.
The governments go where the people are. If they post on their own sites it’s the equivalent of “on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’”.
But government information should definitely be first source on their site with federation elsewhere.
Yeah, "first source" is the key here. The information should be available openly and independently of any 3rd-party platform.
In a broader sense, I believe that every person who publishes on the internet should have a standard way to keep their profile data (accounts, posts, etc.) in a secure, user-owned vault that is independent of any company or institution and platforms should have to pull data from that place (in a restricted, user-controlled way) instead of from their own servers. Platforms should be exchangeable, profiles should be entirely user-owned. But of course, this is just a dream and hard to realise technically and economically (incentive-wise) with our current systems. Decentralised protocols are a step in this direction, but unfortunately still too technical/complicated for most people to really "own" or host their data themselves.
> As the next step of maturing governance of the PLC identity system, Bluesky Social PBC is supporting the creation of an independent organization to operate the directory.
PLC's board composition and country of residence are designed to shield from that. At best it will only ever be as effective at this as ICANN, which is roughly our target.
My 81 year-old mother has never owned a computer. So yes it's not good to have critical government services only on apps or websites that require log in or subscriptions. Although to her it doesn't matter since she has no clue of these sites.
We went through a hurricane in 2022 and that was an eye opener too. Most "land lines" are no longer a line to anywhere it's just a phone connected to the Internet. Anyone with that type phone had no service after 24 hours without power. My 85 uncle still (even now) had an actual land line and it worked no issues.
After the hurricane no citizen had any way to communicate. Cell towers failed when generators ran out of fuel. No fuel because gas stations couldn't pump gas without power.
My dad passed away just a year earlier he had been on an oxygen generator that needed power 24/7. I don't think he would have survived. I'm not sure if I could even have reached 911.
For awareness radio is the best solution but even emergency services radio stations are being decommissioned here in Canada in favour of Internet services.
Re the "land lines", I think the answer to that is not "keep 100+ year old copper infrastructure running" but "make our modern infrastructure as reliable as Ma Bell made it 100 years ago".
> "make our modern infrastructure as reliable as Ma Bell made it 100 years ago"
Sadly, I don't think that makes sense. Switches have a lot more to do a lot faster when it comes to the internet as compared to a phone. 100 years ago, calls were completed by a person physically moving one or more wires from one plug to another.
Better to have an emergency system that will always work - and maybe the only way to keep an emergency system maintained is to use it during non-emergencies. Hard phone lines and radio.
They also have better, more ubiquitous technology. Is an off-the-shelf managed Ethernet switch on a UPS really less reliable per user than a 5ESS? I don't know, but surely only marginally because both are pretty close to 100%, and the main cause of failures is human errors on both systems.
The actual problem people have with VoIP landlines is that they require power at the customer end. A traditional analog POTS line supplies power from the central office so it doesn't need any from the customer, unless they want to use a cordless phone, which takes more power than the central office provides. A fiber VoIP line requires power at both ends no matter what.
Note the original phones actually didn't have "central battery" as they call it. Instead each phone had its own battery, designed for about 6 months of usage, and every 6 months the phone company sent a wagon around to replace everyone's phone batteries.
It's frustrating, but we need to accept that we are not the kind of user that these platforms want. I stopped using Reddit for the same reason, and I accepted that I'm not the best user for them. For my luck, Reddit is not used as the main communication channel for government agencies
We actually don't need to accept that. When they become big enough for network effects to become inescapable they need to be treated as utilities more than random private companies.
Plenty of people restrict their account to require that you too have an account to see their posts. A link to Bluesky often feels like roulette on whether I can see a post or not.
It isn’t as egregious as other sites but it’s still restrictive.
I wholeheartedly agree on every point. I've felt this way for years. It's scandalous.
Many companies also rely on socials as their only effective means of customer service. If you have a problem or want to provide feedback but you don't use social media then you are SOL.
...because the overhead of even small claims is bigger than what you can possibly recover in most regular disputes. There needs to be something like a class action for small claims - government regulators where you can submit complaints with evidence to and if enough people complain about a company the government has to look into it.
Isn't small claims designed for, well, small claims and therefore low overhead? That's why you can't bring a lawyer. Which is super annoying for a company, because a company has no physical embodiment and has to send a lawyer or other representative just by virtue of being a company.
I would support a law requiring official government messages to be promulgated only via channels that do not require an account to view. It's not the most important thing to spend political capital on, but it would have the positive effect of directly interfering with government officials publishing their messages on proprietary login-only social media because it's the most expedient thing to do or it's the only thing they know how to do.
The reason these sites require login is because they also want to control the resulting conversations, whether for moderation (generous) or selling your data (more likely).
Announcements/political campaigning doesn't require feedback in the same way so no reason for them to use X, FB or anything else.
Seeing the state of most conversations on X or FB, I'm quite happy with limiting the general public's ability to broadcast to the world.
That's why we really need some kind of non profit or maybe two "social media" sites made with the public good in mind. One could be officially government sanctioned and funded (sort of like Voice of America but internal to the US more so) and have a strict organisation verification policy for local police / government and other quasi public entities (say like transportation systems and energy companies - etc)
I think if you think that technologies which were around for decades before social media took off are equivalent to social media, then it's actually on you for missing what the difference is.
See HN classics of "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame" and "you can replicate dropbox with webdav"; at some point you have to stop thinking that it's everyone else who is wrong and work out what they want which you're missing, which is convenience.
Yeah but you have to think about what that convenience actually is. You can't just say "twitter is convenient". Visiting someone's website is actually much easier than visiting their Twitter, so what happened?
Scrolling Twitter is a lot easier than visiting a thousand websites, and it auto suggests new content. In its case, the power of suggestion is used for bad, but it's important.
The Reddit thing is disappointing. I stopped being a user a long time ago, but their links often show up in search results. I started noticing I couldn't see the page without logging in. I ended up blocking Reddit in my search results. It's not worth it.
I just don't want to be logged in. I used to be an active user. It sucks up too much time and there's a lot of toxicity. I finally got off when they blocked third party apps. Their official app is horrible and the website has enough annoyances that I don't want to use it. I was content to click on the occasional search result though. Now that they finally took that away I'm done.
It requires email now. It used to not. And if you don't want to be shadowbanned you also need phone, and if you want to view NSFW you need government ID.
I'm sympathetic, as I also don't have an account, but honestly I don't think requiring a free account that takes 10 seconds to make and needs no personal info constitutes "completely hostile to allowing you to see it."
I learned from experience at least a decade ago that you should not take anything he says seriously or as an assertion of fact. Countless examples[0] prove that this is the case.
Agreed for sure. I think part of the problem is that at least for a while, he was good at selling the lie that he was an intelligent engineer, which caused a lot of people (especially tech-savvy ones) to trust him more than the average random public figure. Unfortunately it seems like some people never realized he was a fraud and still view him this way.
Musk is aggressively optimistic on what can be achieved and by when, but rational on product decisions.
Musk stating that read-only scroll should be allowed seems very sensible (I think we all agree on that). But he (or someone he delegated to) clearly changed their mind. Intrigued to know why. Occam's razor would probably suggest that allowing scrapers to host twitter posts elsewhere costs them ad revenue, so they make it difficult.
I think buying Twitter for data was a blunder big as expecting self driving to be solved by 2015 or whenever it originally was.
It is only clear with hindsight, but now everyone knows that tweets are literally detrimental for LLM style AI for whatever reason. Personally I think it's because tweets are responses without CoT or prompts, or could be also because all its meat is in the shape incompatible with en-US culture, even when it's in English, though all that matters is it's actively useless.
He bought twitter because he was forced to. He got it at twice any valuation (based on fake usage stats) and at least 4x what it was worth. Criticism of him was not "shut down" either off or on twitter.
You are both correct. He originally wanted to buy it because his feelings were hurt by lots of Twitter users (like the Elon Jet guy), and I can only speculate that he thought it’d fill the emotional void in his soul to own it and do what he wanted with it.
Later, when he realized that this was a stupid idea and that his amazing business acumen resulted in him drastically overpaying, he tried to back out of the sale by giving the excuse that the number of bots/spam posts/etc were more than he thought. According to the agreement that he had signed, this was not a valid reason to back out of the deal. His lawyers advised him that he’d probably lose in court, hence he was “forced to” buy the site as your article states.
Maybe for training, but how about look up? I often use claude voice and grok voice (both on iOS) and reasonably frequently claude simply cannot find any info about a breaking topic, whereas grok always can.
I wonder if "no one says no" culture is practically the same thing as instructing LLMs to always hallucinate.
You know, LLM hallucination is a phenomenon where the AI would generate syntactically bulletproof chunks of text that are not grounded in reality. Lots of efforts by frontier LLM labs had been made in past few years to solve this by enabling AIs to refute premises in the prompt.
Ordinary people still need to be instructed to google stuffs. They don't go to a niche de facto non-American social media to be disappointed by its notoriously bad search to then conclude its notoriously dumb AI can be abused as a makeshift search tool. People are simply unable.
Twitter has been doing so much things backwards lately. That's reminiscent of how hallucination hurts whatever you do with AIs.
Hallucination is not something specific to LLM by any means.
Remember when you were a kid, your teacher probably told you "At an exam, leave no question unanswered, even if you don't know what to write. Nobody is penalised for wrong answers, but even total gibberish might sometimes add a half-point to your score".
Yes, but LLMs are hallucination machines by design. What I mean by this is that everything the LLM generates is a hallucination, untethered from truth or reality, since the data is generated purely based on statistics around what word is most likely to come next. This type of algorithm can never model "truth" or "fact."
To the extent that an LLM generates something factual or realistic, it's doing so either accidentally, or because of the various band-aids that the grandparent post describes which will never fully solve the problem.
> Musk is aggressively optimistic on what can be achieved and by when
That’s putting it quite charitably, IMO.
> but rational on product decisions
Hard disagree. You only need to look to his entire tenure at DOGE for literally hundreds (thousands?) of counterexamples.
Or, if you don’t count that work as “product decisions,” there are other highly questionable product decisions that he is responsible for: the rear doors on the Model X; the lack of instruments/gauges of any kind in front of the driver on the Model 3 and Y; the lack of proper safety sensors/protection for the hood of the Cybertruck, leading to mangled fingers; that stupid yoke steering wheel; and the entirety of Neuralink (just to name a handful).
I am certifiably not a fan of Musk but the yoke in the cybertruck when combined with the drive by wire steering is an absolute engineering masterpiece and a masterclass in systems calibration. The yoke itself has a relatively narrow range of motion of .94 turns lock-to-lock and at slow parking lot speeds that means you can do a 3 point turn, park, parallel park, navigate around, without making large movements of the steering input and you never have to (because you physically cannot) go hand-over-hand. Then at highway speeds the steering ratio is vastly different and the vehicle feels solid as a rock. It's absolutely effortless.
Now, on the flipside, the yoke also exists in the Tesla Model S Plaid, which has a traditional manual rack. In here it is the worst god-damned thing to ever curse a vehicle. The width is roughly the diameter of a school bus steering wheel and going hand over hand with it is annoying at best and the whole experience feels like utter garbage.
> Now, on the flipside, the yoke also exists in the Tesla Model S Plaid, which has a traditional manual rack. In here it is the worst god-damned thing to ever curse a vehicle.
> get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable
The US House of Representatives posts their live hearings exclusively on YouTube. This is information that should be ungated and freely available, yet is a pain to acquire or archive because YouTube absolutely does not want you getting to the raw video.
And you have to have a phone number to login to these sites (Authenticate). Even On-line Banking, you need a phone number to log in. And in my country Mobile contracts are hideously expensive.
Its all part of the plan: the Digital Control Grid.
Just wait till the Genius Act kicks in with Stable Coins. Programmable money is coming.
I agree. I run a small community organisation and we've come off all social media and created a single website. You want information about us? That's where it is - the website.
Nobody should be relying on any social media company to share information widely, and citizens shouldn't be required to sign up for Facebook, X, or anything, to get that information.
They have Amber Alert here and the other day I noticed it linked to twitter for more information...which I couldn't actually but for a split-second when a pop-up loaded. This is silly. Perhaps govt can reach more people by posting a message to twitter vs their website. But if you're sending a link out, there is no excuse not to link to your website or any number of other open, stable hosts.
That's a false premise - scraping itself isn't illegal, and reasonable also it should not be. But having most of the traffic be scrapers that don't behave well and brute force constantly refetch pages unnecessarily and unintelligently is the issue.
So it's just bad behavior requiring reduction of the openness. Like with any open things when people can't behave anymore :(
The options are: install the app or register using a google or apple account. Since the former is the same as the latter it all collapses down to: register using a google or apple account.
Anyone know the specifics of how this works under the hood? I assumed the people over at Twitter/X would aggressively block systems like this from working. Are they doing something creative to get around that?
Burner accounts are dirt, dirt cheap. I have several hundred I rotate out. I’m afraid to mention the library I’m using in case it’s not in their cross hairs, but it makes scraping trivial. At least at the scale I’m scraping I don’t even need a proxy. My residential up is enough to keep the blocks away.
On most of these sites you can just copy the requests the browser makes. There's a walls and ladders game going on, but all the easy to implement walls aren't very high so most sites don't bother building the tallest one possible.
You can start by making a burner account and viewing some pages in a browser and watching the developer network tab. Either you'll see some dynamic JSON request that fetches the main page content, or it'll be in the initial page request. In either case you can copy that request and parse it. If it's in the initial page then it's in HTML so parse it with BeautifulSoup or similar. A minority of sites are using TLS fingerprinting, so try curl-impersonate if plain curl doesn't work.
At least in Firefox I suggest right click "copy as cURL [command]" and then delete parts of the command to see what's actually needed to get the data, or copy the whole exact thing if you're worried about getting fingerprinted based on the parts you deleted.
There's certainly some kind of auth cookie or token. How long does it last? Maybe 15 minutes, an hour, a day, forever? If it's not forever there's a way to refresh it so look through the network requests again, or maybe the network requests when you log in.
If you get rate limited it's probably by IP address and you can try a few things. Rebooting your router to change IP? If you have IPv6 you can change your address arbitrarily within a /64 and if the site is really dumb it will consider that a new IP, but most know about that. If your ISP gives you a /48 or /56 you can change subnet. You can try running on cloudflare workers or Amazon lambda, which have big IP pools that continually churn. Some sites that use cloudflare may exempt all of cloudflare from rate limiting and you may greatly benefit from running on a cloudflare worker. You can try a mobile connection that may use CGNAT, forcing the site to choose between unblocking you or blocking your carrier. If all else fails, residential proxy access is either very cheap or very expensive to buy, depending on how much data you need to move.
As of August 28, 2026, this website has been permanently discontinued, following a request from X Corp. Profile browsing, search, tweet viewing and video download have all been permanently disabled, and all cached content has been deleted.
It would be nice if URL schema was compatibile with X. In case of Nitter, I could’ve just replaced x.com with xcancel.com with a web extension and URL still works.
C&D has zero legal weight. They're just relying on developers being conflict-averse. At my local hacker space, at least five members are in some kinds of protracted legal battles (five different ones)
You don't have to fight a C&D, you can ignore it. But they may sue you and you have to fight that. But they can also sue you without a C&D or even after you comply with one. The C&D itself has no effect, but it's the equivalent of a gangster pointing at his own eyeballs and then yours, "I'm watching you."
you've replied here several times, i understand your position on C&Ds.
a C&D is reasonably understood as an intent to sue if you continue whatever they want you to cease.
my comment can be read as "i just know that i wouldnt want to have to spend the time or money fighting twitter over it (where "it" = ignoring their C&D and being sued)"
Politics aside, Twitter/X has become a bad place to share information on and to link to. It's a bad option from a technical point of view.
We can't read a multi-part tweet (or follow-ups from the author) or check the latest updates from an official account without an account, which requires a mobile phone number and sometimes extra verifications. A digital "town square" can't require an account and a phone number to read what's said there.
Same with Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Linkdin, etc.
I think Pareto principle applies here: most discussions will be shallow, only occasionally diving deep — and Twitter acknowledges that reality, and builds around it.
The real problem is that places like HN and Reddit allow downvotes / reports to drown people out. Someone on Twitter will post on their page. They control it. It can be slop. It can be low quality. It can be their random thoughts but all that is irrelevant while you slowly build up your audience and the stuff you wanna work on. This generally takes time and is something that grows organically. Meanwhile on HN I will regularly see posts "flagged" where the account didn't actually say anything bad or against the rules. It just goes against the group think and it doesn't even take that much. It can be 1 or 2 people flagging your post and then suddenly it's hidden. This simply does not happen on Twitter.
So eventually people stop posting. I stopped posting on Reddit entirely for example even though I had dozens of very highly upvoted technical posts mainly because I would regularly see highly inaccurate information get upvoted while the real accurate information is downvoted.
HN has the same problem with Elon Musk overall and SpaceX / Twitter.
On Twitter there is a highly active community of space enthusiasts. Absolutely none of them would post slop like "Elon is not an engineer" but on HN that is what passes for discourse.
I mean at least they tell on themselves but I would prefer a technical forum have actually smart people in it. Not just larpers.
Because obviously everyone who participates in a discussion has an account, so they don't feel this annoyance other than maybe when sharing a link to someone else.
Inertia. Twitter has basically no value, it's just a bad app and bad website. It was never actually "good" for information communication, but it was tolerable.
When it comes down to 99% of these "why are people using sucky thing?" questions, the answer is inertia. Never confuse popularity for quality, they're completely orthogonal.
I recently tried the X API to fetch the latest tweets about a given topic, and I spent ~1$ in one go just to retrieve them and some additional info about the users. This is ridiculously expensive.
So I can only be happy that such service exists (though if there was a better support for an API would be 10x better)
Hmm, on the one hand Elon begs for new users with animated ads on the x.com front page, on the other hand one of his (likely) alt accounts claims that "Every $1 [of advertising on X] spent delivered an average return of $5.42":
I am kind of addicted to studying propaganda and reading about baseball stadiums on the moon to drive up the SpaceX stock price. For this I need the Twitter gateways.
Literally every time I decide to stop ignoring X, I log in and am greeted with overt racism and religious hatred. Always a good reminder to just ignore that cesspit.
I guess other people have more tolerance than I do for the constant stream of hatred that floats to the top of the algorithm like scum over there.
https://www.autistici.org offer great services with very strong effort to protect privacy, for more then 20 years, now... and all is done by volunteers.
Very proud of their work, and kudos for affecting how the world is handling information and their will to do good
I've been on Mastodon for a few years, and though it has less drama than Twitter/X, it does seem to have reached critical mass of users and does cover most of my needs for random gossip. I am surprised that that nobody has mentioned it here.
Not sure how this is even possible but the trending box for Taiwan just shows the Thailand trending searches in a different order... And worldwide trending searches are predominantly... in Greek?
And compared to Twitter or others discussed here no government agency or similar uses Hacker News as their primary channel for news updates. However Twitter, Instagram and auch are used for such official purpose from different agencies worldwide. Thus access for the respective citizens is relevant.
It's legal though. See SerpAPI for precedent. Google was really bummed about losing that one.
It's also legal for X to pressure you in many ways to stop doing a legal thing, to take technical measures to prevent you from doing it, and to ban your account on X.
Musk's takeover of Twitter was in fact a net win for free speech, in large part because it encouraged large numbers of people to actually abandon the platform and post on somewhat-more-censorship-resistent platforms instead, which those people would not have done if the previous management of Twitter had continued to operate it.
Are there any Instagram equivalents that don't suck?
People love to virtue signal by linking to Twitter proxies, but Instagram is still a walled garden that all sorts of useful information (event details, restaurant menus, etc.) is locked inside. I occasionally have luck with whatever the top Google results are, but they're all encrusted with dodgy ads.
Well the description for Kittygram is: "Kittygram is an anonymous, privacy-friendly, lightweight, and open-source Instagram frontend inspired by Nitter."
Most of these front ends need to be stocked with login cookies, that's how they bypass the login wall. If you want to self host a bypass you need to create at least one dummy account on that service.
It's impossible to build a foobar equivalent unless it's literally foobar, because the value of foobar isn't the software, but the fact that other people post stuff there. There's no point having a restaurant menu platform unless you have restaurant menus on it. Have you considered going around your city and taking pictures of restaurant menus, then attaching them to a map?
I've had people send me reels as links to ddinstagram.com and kkinstagram.com, which at least in Telegram, get transformed into a video that can be played inline from the link preview and downloaded.
Don't care. The occasional human who might see the comment still makes it worth it. Even if they don't change their behavior, they've been reminded that they are hanging out at the nazi bar.
It's important to remind people of what they're doing, when they're doing something like that.
No, he's downvoted because he's saying objectively false things like "Musk is a mass murderer", and subjective but unproductive things like "he's a Nazi". You can dislike Elon Musk and make that point in a mature way that actually leads to a good discussion. People do that all the time and don't get flak for it. This poster has chosen to be incendiary, and people dislike flamebait so it got downvoted.
My point is still valid. The richest man in the world cares so much about public perception that he pays to influence public discussions and elections.
He is petty enough to buy bots to downvote valid criticisms and interject AI-generated logical fallacies to derail discussion attempts.
To this day I am still calling the website Twitter and access it every single time typing twitter.com. That rename was so dumb. So, I really love the name
The number of people who do this is the number of reasons Elon can give to the trademark judge that he is actually using the trademark Twitter and it shouldn't be invalidated for non-use.
What ever happened to IPFS? Wasn't it built for just this kind of thing? I remember trying it years ago and it was absolutely unusable, but was kinda hoping it had made a turnaround by now.
IPFS might be in trouble. Haven't really followed the tech so I have no idea how much of an effect there will be with Shipyard dropping it, but from the number of things I see named in their exit post I'd guess the blast radius is sizable.
As of August 28, 2026, this website has been permanently discontinued, following a request from X Corp. Profile browsing, search, tweet viewing and video download have all been permanently disabled, and all cached content has been deleted.
Honest question: Why don't we have a UN-operated global social media that is used by all officials worldwide, instead of them using privately owned social media?
The EU has their own Mastodon instance, but unless you want to have responses (even if the official instance doesn't show them), it's cheaper to run a static news aggregator.
It would be nice, but it seems most people don't care about this.
Because whatever you think of how Musk is running Twitter it's still the most pro freedom of speech platform out there. You can hear ideas(propaganda) from almost all major players, while a UN-operated global social media would be even more censored than reddit.
You've been told for years not to use X, (twitter is now clearly the pre Musk era), but Elon knows you crave his dopamine so he can keep imposing harsher conditions.
I don't understand the issue. Am I the only person with a fake account, using a throw away email and fake information? It doesn't have to be this complicated. It's the internet. You can lie.
You have to either run their garbage app, have their tracking cookies in your browser, use a Firefox container or log in every time in incognito mode. None of it is convenient.
This burndown of the Brand Twitter by renaming it to X will make it to digital marketing textbooks for Universities across the world, I promise:
The word Twitter itself became a mega/global brand throughout the years, and Musk detroyed it completely. The verb "to tweet" made it also into dictionaries around the world. You could speak the name in more or less every language, and the bird was widely known just by its iconic styling.
Sure. Totally agree, but it's confusing. For example, Wordpress still has Twitter-block. And when I try to explain new authors that they should use Twitter-block for X.com integration, they think that I'm stupid. But not me, right?
As a compromise, I call it xitter. The main benefit is apparently in some languages x has a "sh" sound so really i'm just calling it exactly what it is (and always has been.)
To be fair: after a certain billionaire who keeps on raising his right arm and talks about enslaving mankind took over, I lost all interest in twitter. I also think the platform is dead. What we need is a de-centralised system that also works.
We don't need a twitter replacement for any purpose other than pointless dopamine, and we already have tiktok for that. What we actually need is a good discussion about what we actually need, which is not a carbon copy of yestertwodecade's platform.
I don’t think there will be any confusion. Clearly this is not referring to this random new Twitter thing you’ve linked to that most people have never heard of, it is referring to Twitter the previously global piece of software with hundreds of millions of former users.
First off I think you mean trademark, secondly you're allowed to just ignore a C&D, thirdly your trademark is invalid if you don't use it so Elon might not actually have a trademark on Twitter any more
It's Twitter. It legally owns the trademark "Twitter", the bird logo and the color blue. Musk really screwed up that one huh? Under UDRP rules it'll be pretty hard for them to seize their rightful domain name twitter.com, but maybe they'll manage.
But I find it ridiculous that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable without being logged in (and in some cases requiring an app instead of the site). Even Bluesky has this problem!
Sometimes this information is really important! And I even if I did have an account I may not have access to log in on every device (or even want to).
It’s absurd that social media can become this like critical communications platform for severe weather alerts or business hours or anything but the sites hosting it are completely hostile to allowing you to see it.
Sites like this are a bandaid on a gangrenous foot. Thanks for allowing me to see links from twitter but it isn’t a sustainable solution clearly.
reply