Yet another Hacker News

122 points mobilio 3 hours ago 46 comments

https://xcancel.com "On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel. The service XCancel is stopped until further notice. We are seeking legal advice and won't share more details for now. Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel."

https://nitter.net "On 24 August 2026 cease and desist letters have been sent by X Corp. demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project's repository.

nitter.net is offline and development has stopped for the time being. I'm seeking legal advice and won't be commenting further on the specifics for now.

Thank you to everyone who used, hosted, packaged, donated and contributed to Nitter over the past seven years."

expedited123 2 hours ago | parent

Twitter has gone from relatively open to instagram / facebook level of closedness where I can't even share a video with my friends because it asks them to log in. I had to rely on nitter and xcancel for that... Now that no longer works either

I have one niche that I use twitter for. If it wasn't for that - would have deleted my account long time ago. Things like this push me towards that direction, though.

Razengan 1 hour ago | parent

Someone should be putting AI to the test and make it walk the talk by making a viable alternative to Facebook/Twitter etc :)

mannycalavera42 1 hour ago | parent

this one :thumb-up

llm_nerd 1 hour ago | parent

There are many already. The code is not why people use those sites. In the case of Meta specifically, it's basically in spite of the user-hostile, garbage code.

The network effect / entrenchment means that any replacement has to be massively better in every dimension to have a chance. Otherwise people just stick to what they know, and then other people stick to it because the other people do. And so on.

I personally think Musk is a garbage-tier human who represents everything wrong with culture wars, and his brain is long blasted into a mush of worthless racist noise and stupidity by drug abuse, so I deleted my X account. Loads of others are too cowardly/selfish to do so.

jamesnorden 1 hour ago | parent

I think people try alternatives, turns out to be a ghost town, then they just go back.

smelendez 48 minutes ago | parent

People really do not want to give up the reach once they have tasted it.

It’s a shame: I remember when people would be so excited to get 100 strangers visiting their blogs but in a month, but now someone blogging for an audience like that would seem a little crazy, maybe paradoxically even overly grandiose.

Also, the harm from using X is complex. It basically comes from endorsing the site and encouraging other people to come there where they’ll be exposed to a cesspit of bigotry and right-wing ideas. It’s easy to tell yourself that what you’re doing there outweighs the cons, and that other sites are just as bad, etc.

phoghed 1 hour ago | parent

It’s a trivial project, it’s babbys first crud app. Getting everyone to use it is the hard part. There are already great alternatives that show this.

Then scaling and paying for it is the hard part.

spacechild1 1 hour ago | parent

Just go ahead and quit! I had a niche use case for FB, but I decided to quit nevertheless because I didn't want to support the platform anymore. Today I don't miss it a single bit. (I never had a Twitter account in the first place.)

kevin_thibedeau 55 minutes ago | parent

It's glorious. We no longer have to stumble into a blog post split into dozens of tweets.

lousken 1 hour ago | parent

who cares about c&d? just host it outside of us

iamnothere 1 hour ago | parent

An anonymous group of devs should host the source on Radicle (over Tor) and the app itself on an onion site. Bonus, it may discourage some scrapers who can’t be bothered with setting up a Tor gateway.

duskdozer 1 hour ago | parent

If the operators are in the US, they probably don't want to risk it if they were anything less than very careful in not having their personal info attached to any of the data.

CM30 13 minutes ago | parent

I've always found it baffling that more projects by folks that disagree with copyright, access controls, etc aren't hosted in places where the cease and desist won't work.

It's like, you're doing something to annoy a large company with lots of legal resources, and you host everything in the US? Why?

imrehg 55 minutes ago | parent

Ripping off the plaster moment? One can only hope.

delegate 49 minutes ago | parent

Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ?

Why do the users agree to the limits imposed by them and let the platform decide who gets to see the content they posted ?

Because they're offering the infrastructure. The tech for such a network is now within reach of many, but these apps are heavily dominated by network effects and that makes it impossible for competing apps to take hold.

This is negative for society.

Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.

People who don't have an account are not getting vital information because the company decided to restrict access to the entire network.

This needs to be regulated somehow. At least for public services and major news outlets - as a tax for the network effect these apps benefit from.

vaylian 38 minutes ago | parent

> are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.

The fediverse is a viable alternative. But most non-tech people don't know about it.

carlos22 36 minutes ago | parent

And it has much less users, I would say its max 1-5% of X users.

vaylian 34 minutes ago | parent

That doesn't mean that it's not viable for posting public announcements

threetonesun 32 minutes ago | parent

Did websites and RSS stop working and I missed it? With more people doing AI searches a website is even more viable now, it's better for AI scraping than x.com.

echelon 28 minutes ago | parent

> The fediverse is a viable alternative

Bluesky attracted socialist progressives, furries, and kink-positive folks early on.

I'm not making any value statements, and there's nothing wrong with the userbase, but this is what dominates the feed for new users.

A lot of people are turned off by that when they see it as their first experience with the platform. Or they're actively turned away upon interaction. That's not how you build a big social network.

Mastodon is the exact same.

These platforms are also not winning people over by calling them "toots" and "skeets".

It's like Gimp refusing to adopt a Photoshop style UI for years and not changing their name.

Despite stated intentions, I think these platforms want to stay small and niche and non mainstream. If they wanted to grow big, they'd behave much differently. They'd try to get the Kardashians and would welcome posts about handbags and guns and sports.

ageitgey 15 minutes ago | parent

> Despite stated intentions, I think these platforms want to stay small and niche and non mainstream.

I think that's essentially it, whether they are doing it intentionally or not.

Running a social network is like curating a party or conference. Who you do and don't let participate, and who you do and don't promote above others, is essentially the product. And that is a lot of work.

Open protocols don't solve any of these problems, and people who care about open protocols don't tend to be the same people interested in curating giant parties and conferences for a mass audience.

shakna 9 minutes ago | parent

Is that not precisely how Twitter built their original social network...?

raverbashing 8 minutes ago | parent

You're right

I'd say Mastodon at this point is mostly people talking in a vacuum (even more than BlueSky)

No mainstream discussion or debate comes from Mastodon, you don't see screenshots around (and you do see skeets around)

As much as SpaceXAi lost audience, there's a lot of discussion still going around there

xnorswap 31 minutes ago | parent

Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation.

Even FINGER had .plan files, where you could get status updates from people.

But how are you going to query whose plans you want to read, and who is going to moderate without centralisation?

It's the moderation in particular that dooms most federalised efforts. The web itself is only really moderated through the relative lack of discoverability, with Google and hosting providers having become a form of gatekeeper to remove the very worst of the web.

Twitter in the early days took off because it did solve a technological problem of the time. You only had your SMS enabled phone, no WAP or smartphone, and wanted to provide updates. They gave you a number you could text, which would post updates. Hence the character limit ( less than the SMS limit, to leave space for your credentials ).

Plenty of alternatives exist for getting information out, people just don't know where to look for it.

That technical problem disappeared, but it had by then grown to provide a service to rapidly get updates from people, one that had a sense of authority and the moderating effect and discoverability of centralisation is impossible to ignore.

bigfishrunning 20 minutes ago | parent

The requirement for strong moderation only exists *because* of centralization. If I'm looking at a linear feed of content, it has to be curated by someone. In the old days, content on the internet was mostly links between webpages -- the "web" if you will. If i like the content on a page, it'll link to other pages i may like, and I'm free to follow those links at will, and no third party moderation is required.

Contrast with modern social media, where everything is condensed into a single list of algorithmically curated content, and we've implicitly eroded a lot of freedom (and handed control to Big Tech)

All this to say: bring back webrings.

akoboldfrying 6 minutes ago | parent

Well, replies to a post also require moderation. In general, if you want people to ever see something created by people outside of their explicitly chosen friends: moderation.

(Plenty of people don't want that, or would at least prefer interacting only with their explicitly chosen friends if they were forced to choose between that and unmoderated public access. For them, group chats on Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram suffice.)

anal_reactor 3 minutes ago | parent

Open protocols always end up with a "backend engineer doing frontend" situation. Which is okay if end users are other engineers, but not okay when end user is my mom.

arrowsmith 10 minutes ago | parent

Whatever happened to "Twitter can do what it wants, it's a private platform"?

thinkingtoilet 5 minutes ago | parent

>Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ?

Because it is a private enterprise that you signed up for. You don't have a right to Twitter. You don't have a right to Facebook. If you don't like it, leave. The entitlement is massive here. These sites are poison in so many ways. Stop feeding the beast.

esarbe 46 minutes ago | parent

That's it for me. No more twitter.

Elmo really has ruined it.

khalic 46 minutes ago | parent

Any ideas for a decentralized version of these services? Maybe something tied into the fediverse?

the_interloper 37 minutes ago | parent

that is what bsky and other twitter-like platforms purport to be

how well they hold up under stress of bad actors/govts remains to be seen

khalic 36 minutes ago | parent

no i mean a replacement for nitter and xcancel

there's still a lot of info you can only find on twitter

insomniacity 31 minutes ago | parent

https://sr.ht/~cloutier/dotmakeup/

khalic 28 minutes ago | parent

thank you kind stranger

icy 36 minutes ago | parent

Bluesky?

pohl 42 minutes ago | parent

Nitter and Xcancel should just announce that they’re training an LLM. Seems to be a get-out-of-scrape free card these days.

jwilk 35 minutes ago | parent

Still on front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283 (over 800 comments)

seydor 25 minutes ago | parent

"SpaceX takes down nitter"

pino83 20 minutes ago | parent

That's how each of your cat-and-mouse games end, right?

I mean, even the name already is the perfect symbol of what goes wrong in people's brains, right?

Xcancel should be about cancelling X. Not about adding another pipe to it. ;)

But yeah, people will never become smarter, I guess... Jusz their glasses do.

myko 17 minutes ago | parent

Twitter is just bots and nazis today, not really worth trying to save

Your_ID_Collect 3 minutes ago | parent

"Elites" of both left and right stay because no matter how much they hate Elon they still need to be in the same country club with other elites. That always takes precedence.

Remember the uniparty.

dzonga 13 minutes ago | parent

these things have to be operated from Russia or some country that has total independence from US legal system.

ChrisArchitect 6 minutes ago | parent

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283

fnoef 3 minutes ago | parent

I dont understand how come there are still people who use the garbage website named X/Twitter.