Most of the HN crowd is the long tail. The vast majority will continue to use whatever mass surveillance/monetization platform their friends use and so news outlets, government bodies, etc. will continue to post on that platform. You can either throw in the towel and join the masses or continue to use technical means of circumvention to access information there when necessary.
I do the latter yes. I use SearXNG to shield my searches, I use matrix bridges to keep the privacy invading chat apps off my phone. I use a local LLM and home assistant to shield from datamining IoT. I run DNS based and in browser adblockers.
It's a lot of work but I still consider it very viable. It's also very educational.
The problem is just that it doesn't scale. Google will block SearXNG if it becomes more than a fringe phenomenon used by some geeks. WhatsApp will start fighting bridges again if significant amounts of people start using it.
I don't really care about fixing society as a whole to be honest, but it's important to realise that this can never be a solution for everyone, even when talking the technical difficulty level out of the loop. These things work because they are niche.
Twitter is used by about 5% of online people. They're an obnoxious 5% but they're really not that big of a group. I mean, Microsoft has about 25% of online users. Facebook has bout 35% of online people and Google has almost 60% of online users. Twitter is tiny.
I applaud people who do whatever is possible to work around an issue. But it just gives me tremendous anxiety to imagine trying to run a product using hacks like “proxy thousands of guest accounts”
This feels like those hilarious and fascinating projects to glue together free tier services or use YouTube or email for data storage or whatnot.
I tried using nitter the other day to view my utility company's tweets and got that message on three different instances before finally giving up.
Twitter doesn't work any more without an account, and it's high time we in the tech world led out in refusing to participate in a platform that deliberately locks its content up behind an auth wall. Twitter links don't belong on HN, convoluted sometimes-functional workarounds notwithstanding.
Have you asked your utility to post status updates on Mastodon? Explain the challenges of consuming their updates on X, and why their customer base would be better served elsewhere. If not, you should do so. If they need someone to manage the instance for them, we can find them a commercial provider. Failing that, have them create a Threads account with federation enabled. Default to action, be the change.
The eyeballs go where the content is; tell the content where to go.
Edit: @edflsafoiewq Why are we ignoring their uses cases? If they feel the need (outages, relevant customer information) and have the desire to have the mechanism in addition to or in lieu of email, paper mail, and/or SMS, enable them. The cost is very low to do so.
I've been using nitter.poast.org for the last 3-4 months at least.
It works fine 90% of the time, but sometimes there are too many people trying to use it and the connection gets timed out. If you refresh 5-6 times, it usually becomes fine.
Readit News
It's significants was always massively overstated in tech circles and various echo chambers.
It's a lot of work but I still consider it very viable. It's also very educational.
The problem is just that it doesn't scale. Google will block SearXNG if it becomes more than a fringe phenomenon used by some geeks. WhatsApp will start fighting bridges again if significant amounts of people start using it.
I don't really care about fixing society as a whole to be honest, but it's important to realise that this can never be a solution for everyone, even when talking the technical difficulty level out of the loop. These things work because they are niche.
Dead Comment
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983#issuecomment-168...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38970676
This feels like those hilarious and fascinating projects to glue together free tier services or use YouTube or email for data storage or whatnot.
Twitter doesn't work any more without an account, and it's high time we in the tech world led out in refusing to participate in a platform that deliberately locks its content up behind an auth wall. Twitter links don't belong on HN, convoluted sometimes-functional workarounds notwithstanding.
The eyeballs go where the content is; tell the content where to go.
Edit: @edflsafoiewq Why are we ignoring their uses cases? If they feel the need (outages, relevant customer information) and have the desire to have the mechanism in addition to or in lieu of email, paper mail, and/or SMS, enable them. The cost is very low to do so.
HN rightly complains about proprietary closed platforms, and enshittification.
Here is an open source alternative to Twitter and Facebook: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Maybe the tech world should stop using bots to rape and pillage user-generated content without payment to feed their AI models no one asked for.
Which is what caused X to install the auth wall in the first place.
It works fine 90% of the time, but sometimes there are too many people trying to use it and the connection gets timed out. If you refresh 5-6 times, it usually becomes fine.
Posting them on the frontpage may not contribute to their longevity.
I'm guessing it was working an hour ago when this was first posted?
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EDIT: I dunno what happened. I tried again right now and it looks like it's working. Maybe the first page cache had issues or something on my phone?