It's quite unfortunate, a lot of people or organisations I am interested in - AI for example - only post on X, and perhaps it's only a matter of time until services like bird.makeup also get taken down. Also, accessibility wise it's sad too, X's web interface is not the best out there and without login you cannot do really much.
Ex-x account holder here. Even if the world is going to fall and details about this even will be accessible exclusively behind X login wall, I am not setting up the account there again, NO WAY.
I wholeheartedly recommend you do the same - remove your account and forget about it. Almost certainly you won't miss it, as I didn't miss it. And there is a big chance you will get a big sight of relief, as I did.
Fortunately it is almost impossible to set up a new account. The sign-up process is totally broken, links in the docs are stale and everything looks vibe coded. And they want a phone number and possibly an ID.
Nitter is good software, I have no idea how Twitter users put up with this garbage fire.
Sir, you are controlling the buttons you push. I.e. it's up to you who you follow and what exactly you read on Twitter - just like any other social network.
There are news that are circulating much faster on Twitter than anywhere else (for example about war in Ukraine). There are people and companies that post only on Twitter and nowhere else (especially in tech).
> it's up to you who you follow and what exactly you read on Twitter
The Twitter experience is a highly algorithmic feed where tweets from the people you follow are not guaranteed to be in chronological order, or even shown to you at all. The default experience also mixes it other tweets "you might be interested in", that is, things they want you to see.
There's also the fact people could freely see tweets and follow discussion threads, that's now locked behind an account requirement.
A half of Twitter's point for me was the trending section, that you don't have any control on now (you used to be able to disable the personalization of that section but since X you cannot, if you want the actual trends you need to go in a subsection). The whole section is full personalized ragebaits (because at some point I used to reply to those), now it just makes the experience of trends quite unbearable and I can't change that.
Sir, you are voluntarily using a website owned by an unstable Nazi, who purchased it because his feelings were hurt and people were making fun of him there. Now his brain droppings make it into everyone’s feed by default, from what I understand.
> There are news that are circulating much faster on Twitter than anywhere else (for example about war in Ukraine).
I am certain that Twitter is not the only place where you can find these updates, if you really care for up-to-the-minute news. But I don’t.
> There are people and companies that post only on Twitter and nowhere else (especially in tech).
These people and companies are (knowingly or unknowingly) supporting a Nazi billionaire and they are not worth paying any attention to until they change their behavior.
Option A: You occasionally encounter power tripping mods on a site where you are free to create your own community and become the mod yourself.
Option B: a power tripping drug-addled Nazi billionaire owns the entire site and can change the site behavior for every user on a whim, with no recourse.
There’s likely some information on there that some people must want to share if services like Xcancel and Nitter exist and allow you to share it without being on X itself.
If someone thinks Twitter is an echo chamber to the extent they can’t fathom how people tolerate it (and it isn’t just an appeal for easy upvotes), but they happily post on HN, they’ll be able to clear up their initial confusion with a bit of self reflection.
General sentiment might be this, but every social network (even Instagram and Facebook) can be good and productive if you change how you use them.
If you follow specific profiles/channels/pages and just read the feeds from them as if they were news, you are removing the toxic part (mostly infinite scrolling) and getting a resourceful feature.
If for some reason someone you need to follow is on X (twitter) only, you have to choose between losing a source or compromise with the platform.
I personally belong to the former group (and possibly you do, too), leaving behind sources, but not everyone likes it that way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The platform compromise is a new thing. One of the reasons people used Twitter was its open nature, enabling its use as a bulletin board where anyone could post a message and being sure that the message link was free for anyone to see. This isn't the case anymore, as X forces people to make accounts to see messages.
Allowing more voices on the platform might've made it more toxic (who knows - you're not the judge of toxic) but at least we have left- and right-wing toxicity, instead of only left-wing. And we get a lot of additional non-toxic voices, which was the actual point.
I wholeheartedly recommend you do the same - remove your account and forget about it. Almost certainly you won't miss it, as I didn't miss it. And there is a big chance you will get a big sight of relief, as I did.
If you really must, use https://twitterwebviewer.com/ which imo has better interface than Nitter.
Nitter is good software, I have no idea how Twitter users put up with this garbage fire.
There are news that are circulating much faster on Twitter than anywhere else (for example about war in Ukraine). There are people and companies that post only on Twitter and nowhere else (especially in tech).
The Twitter experience is a highly algorithmic feed where tweets from the people you follow are not guaranteed to be in chronological order, or even shown to you at all. The default experience also mixes it other tweets "you might be interested in", that is, things they want you to see.
There's also the fact people could freely see tweets and follow discussion threads, that's now locked behind an account requirement.
> There are news that are circulating much faster on Twitter than anywhere else (for example about war in Ukraine).
I am certain that Twitter is not the only place where you can find these updates, if you really care for up-to-the-minute news. But I don’t.
> There are people and companies that post only on Twitter and nowhere else (especially in tech).
These people and companies are (knowingly or unknowingly) supporting a Nazi billionaire and they are not worth paying any attention to until they change their behavior.
It's certainly more diverse than Bluesky, if this is an echo chamber-measuring contest.
Option B: a power tripping drug-addled Nazi billionaire owns the entire site and can change the site behavior for every user on a whim, with no recourse.
This doesn’t seem like a hard choice to make.
Also the Asian community (Korea, Japan etc) is incredibly strong on Twitter. They don't really care about the whole politics around the platform.
If you follow specific profiles/channels/pages and just read the feeds from them as if they were news, you are removing the toxic part (mostly infinite scrolling) and getting a resourceful feature.
If for some reason someone you need to follow is on X (twitter) only, you have to choose between losing a source or compromise with the platform.
I personally belong to the former group (and possibly you do, too), leaving behind sources, but not everyone likes it that way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I thought so too. But after leaving 3 years ago it turns out: Not a single source is that important.
Also, as the importance increases, the likelihood of seeing the same information outside that hellhole increases linearly.
And then I avoid them.
Hacker News and basically everyone from YC have an official profile on Twitter: https://x.com/hackernews
Although, I don't see how this will hold up in court as they're pretty much an archive-like site hosting UGC.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49449576