The not needing an account is obviously not minor, but honestly, the UI is just better, by a lot. I made a twitter account a while ago using one of those throw away email address sites, so I have an account that I don't care about that I can use for twitter....but the experience just sucks. I don't know how any stands it, even if they don't mind needing an account.
Haven’t had that luxury in Russia. Though being a script kiddie I’ve set up a shortcode just for myself (there were these “paid content SMS as a Service” thingies that forwarded SMS text to an HTTP endpoint you provide).
I think it's great. My feed is people posting tech/AI news, scientific publications, videos of rockets and self-driving cars, things made with coding agents etc. It's full of people who do meaningful work as well and you can see who they are.
Dark mode, ability to easily copy images, link to posts, see posts of interesting people by going to their profile. On top of that the feed algorithm is open source and actually sane. What else would I want?
It's by far the best designed social media site out there. I know it's a low bar but still.
The UI/UX is the main thing. I technically have an X-Twitter account that I rarely use, but loading plain HTML with a bit of JS beats loading a whole SPA experience just to read a post.
Yeah, but most of these will fall. I used to use one or two of these to scrape my friends' posts because I stopped using Twitter and they'd inevitably all disappear in time. It's like chasing the latest TPB. In the end, I just logged in a headless browser and told an agent to fetch daily.
Sadly, the music selection has fallen off a cliff, and the rest is in a sharply downward spiral... in one sense this is because the music industry finally settled on a streaming model that most people are willing to rent, and it's also because the new generation has been brainwashed or trained out of storing their own files.
It's also because torrents are a bad fit for music. The whole protocol is designed for throughput and reliability on big downloads like movies and games, not fast start on 2MB files you don't need to split with today's broadband.
A lot of uploaders still zip everything so you can't download one song out of some album. And the discoverability is shit because DHT doesn't let you ask peers for all their torrents so you need to run a server that index multiple trackers or look things up manually.
The only alternative is Soulseek where it's a direct connection model instead of hash based. That means there are no stable IDs to get a file if the original uploader is down and users can send you anything they want like troll audio or malware.
If we want people to start pirating music again we need to make the UX as good as Spotify. That means no explicit downloads, when you click play the app gets the file from a peer, saves it to a cache then starts playing and seeding automatically. Songs and albums should be content addressed in a global namespace instead of living on trackers, and there should probably be a reputation system. I think something based on iroh blobs for content and atproto for discovery can work.
> Isn't 1337x and others better and offer a complete alternative?
The best way is always private trackers. They're easy to get into, easy to keep (if you're a serious and honest person), malware free, high quality content, great community, etc.
They're all perfect substitutes. When one is down you can use another. They can't stop us all. I just wish there was a way to automatically redirect to a working instance.
Like some other things reddit tells visitors, they're basically lying, or at best, being inconsistent. I've tried old reddit here and there in the past month or so and sometimes it says I need an account for "safety", other times, it doesn't.
The LibRedirect browser extensions lets you configure a list and quickly hot between, but it doesn't check whether they are up before redirecting you to one of them iirc
Elon has bought immunity to that. Streisand's flaw was that she gave a shit. Elon has unlocked the kinda reverse-Streisand that Trump has, where their popularity actually feeds on the effect.
The internet peanut gallery will whine about literally everything under the sun. At a certain point I can see why some people would want to harness that energy for their advantage. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em and all that.
> This way, you relay the account register process to the seller. These tokens are sold in the format username|password|2fa_code|cookies (including auth token, id and ct0), which makes it very easy and convenient for us to use.
is this legit? this sounds extremely shady. maybe an ad?
I know the guy and it does work, and it's not an ad. Accounts from that website are used on shitter.thepixora.com. The website is extremely sketchy though, he recommends that you don't give it more than a dollar at a time.
No way to know if that particular site is legit without trying it, but account buying and selling on internet gray markets is very normal and the prices quoted are reasonable.
Yes, you have to give up all your personal data and submit to anal probing to get an account on a sillycon valley service, but a bad actor just has to pay $10 in bitcoin to get a thousand of them.
Will this list automatically update as instances hit rate limits or break for other reasons? Some public instances only have one account to log in with, some have thousands and use residential proxies.
We could stop thinking of them as walled gardens we're trying to get into and start thinking of them as quarantines for the Eternal September population.
> quarantines for the Eternal September population
Hacker News actually has a way to do this quarantine, a version that only counts votes from accounts created before 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/classic. About a decade after Eternal September started, but not bad.
It's what the frontpage would look like if only the votes of users who joined in the first year counted. I made it to check if the site is declining. In practice it's usually just a slower-changing version of the frontpage.
~ pg
Wow that's very interesting but it only works for the front page (and also only changes the order not the numbers), not for each comment page.
Maybe we should have a setting "count only votes before date yyyy-mm-dd" but this would probably make the site too dynamic (?) and consume a lot of resources.
What do we want the web to look like? Lock everything down behind logins, in the name of 'security' when the real goal is nyeh nyeh nyeh you can't see anything, sign up so we get more user metrics
The not needing an account is obviously not minor, but honestly, the UI is just better, by a lot. I made a twitter account a while ago using one of those throw away email address sites, so I have an account that I don't care about that I can use for twitter....but the experience just sucks. I don't know how any stands it, even if they don't mind needing an account.
Seriously. The UX/UI on Twitter has always been a dumpster fire.
Eh. It was pretty great in 2008, when I used my spotty cell service to tweet road trip updates by texting 40404. O tempora, o mores, etc. etc.
Haven’t had that luxury in Russia. Though being a script kiddie I’ve set up a shortcode just for myself (there were these “paid content SMS as a Service” thingies that forwarded SMS text to an HTTP endpoint you provide).
I think it's great. My feed is people posting tech/AI news, scientific publications, videos of rockets and self-driving cars, things made with coding agents etc. It's full of people who do meaningful work as well and you can see who they are. Dark mode, ability to easily copy images, link to posts, see posts of interesting people by going to their profile. On top of that the feed algorithm is open source and actually sane. What else would I want?
It's by far the best designed social media site out there. I know it's a low bar but still.
Yes well if your taste in content is “elon musk” then I imagine that your experience is fantastic.
The UI/UX is the main thing. I technically have an X-Twitter account that I rarely use, but loading plain HTML with a bit of JS beats loading a whole SPA experience just to read a post.
1:1 the same thing with Github
Yeah, the UI is the real and only reason to use Nitter. It's a very similar situation with old reddit.
Since a couple of weeks they force you to login to use old.reddit.
My visits have dropped by about 95%
It can't suck all that much if you're not willing to give it up.
It sounds to me like they did give up on using the builtin UI.
The X app loads posts much faster than these sites, so I find the app has a better UI.
Shows the true cost of surveillance capitalism.
Yeah, but most of these will fall. I used to use one or two of these to scrape my friends' posts because I stopped using Twitter and they'd inevitably all disappear in time. It's like chasing the latest TPB. In the end, I just logged in a headless browser and told an agent to fetch daily.
What is TPB?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay
That's true, but TBP has been going pretty strong for over 2 decades. It can be hard to totally shut something down, if people want it.
Sadly, the music selection has fallen off a cliff, and the rest is in a sharply downward spiral... in one sense this is because the music industry finally settled on a streaming model that most people are willing to rent, and it's also because the new generation has been brainwashed or trained out of storing their own files.
It's also because it's difficult to add your own magnet links.
It's also because torrents are a bad fit for music. The whole protocol is designed for throughput and reliability on big downloads like movies and games, not fast start on 2MB files you don't need to split with today's broadband.
A lot of uploaders still zip everything so you can't download one song out of some album. And the discoverability is shit because DHT doesn't let you ask peers for all their torrents so you need to run a server that index multiple trackers or look things up manually.
The only alternative is Soulseek where it's a direct connection model instead of hash based. That means there are no stable IDs to get a file if the original uploader is down and users can send you anything they want like troll audio or malware.
If we want people to start pirating music again we need to make the UX as good as Spotify. That means no explicit downloads, when you click play the app gets the file from a peer, saves it to a cache then starts playing and seeding automatically. Songs and albums should be content addressed in a global namespace instead of living on trackers, and there should probably be a reputation system. I think something based on iroh blobs for content and atproto for discovery can work.
Soulseek is working fine.
But to be honest I never found TPB (or rarbg etc.) really useful for music.
Wdym "chasing the latest TPB"? Isn't 1337x and others better and offer a complete alternative?
Twitter is different there's many stories that are only there.
Switching torrent sites every time one gets taken down.
But why wouldn't you?
> Isn't 1337x and others better and offer a complete alternative?
The best way is always private trackers. They're easy to get into, easy to keep (if you're a serious and honest person), malware free, high quality content, great community, etc.
> The best way is always private trackers. They're easy to get into
If they were easy to get into, they wouldn't be good
It's as easy as buying 1 month of seedbox for around 10 bucks.
Buying a seedbox doesn't get you into a private tracker. It's a download client.
mid tier trackers partner with seedbox providers who give them kickbacks for referrals, in exchange for an account
So. Easy to get into is: "some unspecified mid-tier trackers may or may not give out accounts to some unspecified seedbox providers".
It's probably easier to lurk in r/trackerinvites (or whatever it's called) hoping to snatch an invite
Yep it's not easy. Easy was a lie. The best are actually curated public trackers. TPB is not curated.
Sadly, curated public ones are also harder and harder to find (for obvious reasons) :(
They're all perfect substitutes. When one is down you can use another. They can't stop us all. I just wish there was a way to automatically redirect to a working instance.
LibRedirect kind of does so, it's not 100% there yet
https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
Did TPB ever change a domain? I've been using the .org domain listed on Wikipedia for as long as I can remember.
Then you are not in a country where it is blocked. (Or you VPN into one.)
I don't think .org is still official. Look for an orange isometric K
a what?
oh, that's great. i thought the project is dead.
how would you (EDIT: publicly) host such a nitter instance while avoiding the risk of legal consequences?
since old.reddit (EDIT: on mobile) is closed for visitors without an account it would be great if there was also a neddit project.
Redlib exists - https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
It has a few public instances - https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/ins...
Seems to work decently well, I've seen it being linked to on HN.
for personal use you can just host one on your internal network
Like some other things reddit tells visitors, they're basically lying, or at best, being inconsistent. I've tried old reddit here and there in the past month or so and sometimes it says I need an account for "safety", other times, it doesn't.
old.reddit still works anonymously for me. maybe an a/b test?
possible that they just changed it for mobile.
You just host it and if you're not big they don't notice you. Nitter is legal btw.
Is there something like a balancer that redirects me to an instance that is not down?
The LibRedirect browser extensions lets you configure a list and quickly hot between, but it doesn't check whether they are up before redirecting you to one of them iirc
https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
I mean, I was just thinking of writing one in a few lines, so there will be one in a few minutes.
xxcancel.com (just add an x to xcancel.com) will redirect you to a working instance!
I guess X never heard of the Streisand effect...
Elon has bought immunity to that. Streisand's flaw was that she gave a shit. Elon has unlocked the kinda reverse-Streisand that Trump has, where their popularity actually feeds on the effect.
The internet peanut gallery will whine about literally everything under the sun. At a certain point I can see why some people would want to harness that energy for their advantage. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em and all that.
we do a lil magic and just add another x to xcancel.com => xxcancel.com
points to a working nitter instance.
> How to obtain many sessions easily (public instances) The easiest way is to buy them here: https://hstockplus.com/accounts/twitter-x-accounts?sortBy=pr...
> This way, you relay the account register process to the seller. These tokens are sold in the format username|password|2fa_code|cookies (including auth token, id and ct0), which makes it very easy and convenient for us to use.
is this legit? this sounds extremely shady. maybe an ad?
I know the guy and it does work, and it's not an ad. Accounts from that website are used on shitter.thepixora.com. The website is extremely sketchy though, he recommends that you don't give it more than a dollar at a time.
No way to know if that particular site is legit without trying it, but account buying and selling on internet gray markets is very normal and the prices quoted are reasonable.
Yes, you have to give up all your personal data and submit to anal probing to get an account on a sillycon valley service, but a bad actor just has to pay $10 in bitcoin to get a thousand of them.
Any user scripts that automatically redirect to a working instance?
https://github.com/libredirect/browser_extension
I've got a simple redirect made in the redirector add-on for Firefox and Chrome. X.com -> random nitter instance
Not a user script, but the LibRedirect extension does most of that already
https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
I think it doesn't check whether the chosen instance is up before redirecting, but switching to another one if that one is down is a single click.
Will this list automatically update as instances hit rate limits or break for other reasons? Some public instances only have one account to log in with, some have thousands and use residential proxies.
With or without the original interface, twitter is still a dumpster fire
We could stop thinking of them as walled gardens we're trying to get into and start thinking of them as quarantines for the Eternal September population.
> quarantines for the Eternal September population
Hacker News actually has a way to do this quarantine, a version that only counts votes from accounts created before 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/classic. About a decade after Eternal September started, but not bad.
FWiW as an aside, it appears to count votes from December 2008 accounts (as just tested using this 2008-12-26 account).
So that's at least strictly before 2009.
The vote count is just the normal vote count, so I guess only the ordering is different?
It is, isn't it .. serves me right for breezing through that too quickly.
If there's something magical going on, the ordering would be the only real distinction possible.
Apparently the original (still the same?) dates back to the OG PG days:
Ask HN: who knows about this - "http://News.YCombinator.com/classic"? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1832884
Decade and a half, really. Eternal September was 1993 or 1994, right?
Wow that's very interesting but it only works for the front page (and also only changes the order not the numbers), not for each comment page.
Maybe we should have a setting "count only votes before date yyyy-mm-dd" but this would probably make the site too dynamic (?) and consume a lot of resources.
What do we want the web to look like? Lock everything down behind logins, in the name of 'security' when the real goal is nyeh nyeh nyeh you can't see anything, sign up so we get more user metrics
Awesome. Let's all start using this on HN so we end up with a bunch of broken links in a few years
They would become links with only a wrong domain, so I am not very worried about that personally.
It would be cool if libredirect could redirect a broken frontend instance to a working one.
> a bunch of broken links in a few years
Who cares, by that time the originals and their copies would be a lot less worthy of viewing.