Hopefully, this ends up being good for the fediverse - if you have to log in to view posts, you’re probably much less likely to create an account, and maybe just a little bit likely to at least just creep on mastodon posts…
Realistically, the thing was always living on borrowed time.
I could have believed that Twitter and Reddit might have been okay with alternate third-party platform-native clients, but not third-party Web frontends.
Well, in theory, it actually wasn’t. Nitter doesn’t use the official Twitter API, which you can easily block access to, but rather uses the webpage API. Blocking access to the webpage API requires blocking access to the whole webpage without user login, which no one expected would ever happen for a service which’s main use is to publicly announce things.
Well, and then came the great scraping to feed the LLMs + the questionable sanity of Musk, which meant Twitter did actually block public access to the webpage.
It isn’t so much a front end as a privacy-enhancing proxy service. You can’t participate, you can only consume. If our governments are going to conduct their interactions with us on fucking Twitter, we need services like this. Or we need our states to stop neglecting our need for online infrastructure and punting to capital interests.
All they achieved was make me not ever engage with their website in any capacity. I’m not making an account, I’m not logging in. If I can’t see the content without logging in, or with a proxy, I’ll just never see it. It’s no sweat off my back if I can’t see some random porn someone linked in a group chat.
If anyone needs to use Twitter but doesn’t want to use the official app/website, Squawker (F-Droid) (GitHub) still works, but you need to log in with an account now.
all this does is make me completely uninterested in twitter. at least with nitter i would make an effort to use it to look at the few accounts that stayed in twitter that i liked
Ours does the exact same. Sometimes they even put an obfuscated link to a tweet that was very quickly deleted, so you just get an error and there’s no info unless you both log in and go searching their twitter for whatever tweet they may actually still have that has info. It’s pretty ridiculous.
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Click here to see the summary
An open source project that let people view tweets without going to Twitter.com has shut down, as Elon Musk’s changes seem to have closed off all possible ways to access the Twitter network without a user account.
“Most Nitter servers were using a technique of generating loads of temporary tokens that were used for accessing the content, but that path is now blocked as well,” the NoLog update today said.
“I conclude that it is possible to easily acquire thousands of guest accounts within just a few minutes by using proxies, and they are all usable from a single IP address without getting rate limited,” the August 2023 post said.
I will also develop a service that fetches these continuously, and lets operators request guest accounts for their own instances without having to pay for proxies."
Pointing to a recent discussion on GitHub, today’s update from NoLog said there may be “a way to spin up a personal Nitter instance with your own account to keep the interface you are used to, but there is no guarantee this will work long-term.”
“Unfortunately regular accounts can only support a small group of users, so running a public instance this way is not feasible,” the update said.
Of course Elon is free to close twitter like this, as sad as it is. It’s his company (which already halved in value since he bought it…)
BUT, governments and officials really must stop using twitter for official communication at this point. It’s not OK to require people to make an account just to view their communication.
Our Dutch government actually set up their own Mastodon instance, but many politicians still continue to use twitter.
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Hopefully, this ends up being good for the fediverse - if you have to log in to view posts, you’re probably much less likely to create an account, and maybe just a little bit likely to at least just creep on mastodon posts…
Realistically, the thing was always living on borrowed time.
I could have believed that Twitter and Reddit might have been okay with alternate third-party platform-native clients, but not third-party Web frontends.
Well, in theory, it actually wasn’t. Nitter doesn’t use the official Twitter API, which you can easily block access to, but rather uses the webpage API. Blocking access to the webpage API requires blocking access to the whole webpage without user login, which no one expected would ever happen for a service which’s main use is to publicly announce things.
Well, and then came the great scraping to feed the LLMs + the questionable sanity of Musk, which meant Twitter did actually block public access to the webpage.
It isn’t so much a front end as a privacy-enhancing proxy service. You can’t participate, you can only consume. If our governments are going to conduct their interactions with us on fucking Twitter, we need services like this. Or we need our states to stop neglecting our need for online infrastructure and punting to capital interests.
All they achieved was make me not ever engage with their website in any capacity. I’m not making an account, I’m not logging in. If I can’t see the content without logging in, or with a proxy, I’ll just never see it. It’s no sweat off my back if I can’t see some random porn someone linked in a group chat.
If anyone needs to use Twitter but doesn’t want to use the official app/website, Squawker (F-Droid) (GitHub) still works, but you need to log in with an account now.
Still works for me without using a login.
It will work for a while until the guest account expires, but then you’ll need to log in with a Twitter account.
(I think)
Doesnt work because it uses the same method as nitter, which is creating ghost account. It got automatically banned
It got updated so you can log in with Twitter accounts instead of only using guest accounts. It still works as far as I can tell
Which version is it? Is it 3.6.5 or 3.7.3?
I’m on 3.7.3
all this does is make me completely uninterested in twitter. at least with nitter i would make an effort to use it to look at the few accounts that stayed in twitter that i liked
It amazes me how much effort people will go to in order to experience the shitshow that TwitXter is.
Just avoid entirely.
The sooner it dies the better society will be
it is not as easy as it sounds because public services and figures send their news/notifications through X
They only do that because there is an audience there.
If we demand they use better methods of notifying the ublic, that draw for viewers/readers won’t be there either.
Weird, I’ve survived without it for 8 years.
Recently our county sheriff put out an Amber Alert (a forced alert on all mobile devices) but the obfuscated link resolved to Twitter.
I wonder what portion of the public saw the Twitter login page and just closed the tab, never to see the details of the child abduction.
Ours does the exact same. Sometimes they even put an obfuscated link to a tweet that was very quickly deleted, so you just get an error and there’s no info unless you both log in and go searching their twitter for whatever tweet they may actually still have that has info. It’s pretty ridiculous.
Sounds like a misuse of the amber alert system
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
An open source project that let people view tweets without going to Twitter.com has shut down, as Elon Musk’s changes seem to have closed off all possible ways to access the Twitter network without a user account.
“Most Nitter servers were using a technique of generating loads of temporary tokens that were used for accessing the content, but that path is now blocked as well,” the NoLog update today said.
“I conclude that it is possible to easily acquire thousands of guest accounts within just a few minutes by using proxies, and they are all usable from a single IP address without getting rate limited,” the August 2023 post said.
I will also develop a service that fetches these continuously, and lets operators request guest accounts for their own instances without having to pay for proxies."
Pointing to a recent discussion on GitHub, today’s update from NoLog said there may be “a way to spin up a personal Nitter instance with your own account to keep the interface you are used to, but there is no guarantee this will work long-term.”
“Unfortunately regular accounts can only support a small group of users, so running a public instance this way is not feasible,” the update said.
Saved 72% of original text.
That’s a shame, but fortunately I see fewer and fewer twitter links being posted these days anyway
Of course Elon is free to close twitter like this, as sad as it is. It’s his company (which already halved in value since he bought it…)
BUT, governments and officials really must stop using twitter for official communication at this point. It’s not OK to require people to make an account just to view their communication.
Our Dutch government actually set up their own Mastodon instance, but many politicians still continue to use twitter.