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.
ronsor 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Seriously. The UX/UI on Twitter has always been a dumpster fire.
ksenzee 6 hours ago [-]
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.
notpushkin 4 hours ago [-]
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).
encom 51 minutes ago [-]
All of the WWW was better in 2008. Unironically. We've all been frog-boiled into this current hellscape.
charcircuit 3 hours ago [-]
The X app loads posts much faster than these sites, so I find the app has a better UI.
2 hours ago [-]
bluecalm 5 hours ago [-]
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.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 5 hours ago [-]
Yes well if your taste in content is “elon musk” then I imagine that your experience is fantastic.
jasonvorhe 1 hours ago [-]
I'm a nostr user first and X is lurk only but I seldomly see anything by or about Musk and so does everyone else I speak to who actually uses it.
I suspect this has become more of a meme by Mastodon/Bluesky users than anything real.
Hammershaft 31 minutes ago [-]
I understand you can still tailor a good experience, but if you create a fresh X account the density of Elon Musk posts is genuinely absurd. There's no way he isn't putting his thumb on the algorithm to boost his reach.
Also the density of pure hate & ragebait by mask-off fascist accounts! It shocks me how much of that I saw unprompted right away after making a new account recently.
grosswait 6 minutes ago [-]
No different than an uncurated Reddit profile. You’ll get bombarded with garbage until effort is placed into the curation.
TitaRusell 14 minutes ago [-]
The Dutch PM for some reason uses X (or his PR agents do). There is always a lot of impotent homophobic rage coming from the retweets. It is all very sad.
But that's the US first amendment for you.
lloydatkinson 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
teiferer 4 hours ago [-]
I can concur though. I have a rarely used account and I get Elon on top of the feed all the time. Even as mobile notifications. I don't click on them and scroll past, but they keep coming.
bsoqk 3 hours ago [-]
Have you tried blocking him? It’s always seemed an effective strategy to me when I want to stop seeing someone online.
3 hours ago [-]
btreecat 4 hours ago [-]
It can't suck all that much if you're not willing to give it up.
Dylan16807 3 hours ago [-]
It sounds to me like they did give up on using the builtin UI.
pronik 48 minutes ago [-]
I might cut into my own flesh right now, but the funny thing about that XCancel shutdown is that while the website is down, the RSS feeds still work. Almost like they've just been required to shutdown the visible website and they complied with exactly that.
arjie 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Leonard_of_Q 25 minutes ago [-]
The solution is to run your own instance, create a few accounts for it to use and put it behind a reverse proxy with basic auth. Hand out logins to a few people and it will remain useable. If you put your instance out in the open it will sooner or later end up temporarily blocked - I tried this for a few years, same results every time - but smaller instances remain useable.
It isn't hard to run an instance, just park it next to your SearXNG [1], Invidious [2], Redlib [3],PeerTube, ... instances.
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.
netniuq 3 hours ago [-]
LibRedirect kind of does so, it's not 100% there yet
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.
noduerme 6 hours ago [-]
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.
conradfr 2 hours ago [-]
Soulseek is working fine.
But to be honest I never found TPB (or rarbg etc.) really useful for music.
tosti 4 hours ago [-]
It's also because it's difficult to add your own magnet links.
tancop 3 hours ago [-]
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.
2 hours ago [-]
yoavm 5 hours ago [-]
Did TPB ever change a domain? I've been using the .org domain listed on Wikipedia for as long as I can remember.
tosti 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think .org is still official. Look for an orange isometric K
Then you are not in a country where it is blocked. (Or you VPN into one.)
Cider9986 6 hours ago [-]
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.
papyrus9244 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
troupo 3 hours ago [-]
> 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
papyrus9244 3 hours ago [-]
It's as easy as buying 1 month of seedbox for around 10 bucks.
3 hours ago [-]
troupo 3 hours ago [-]
Buying a seedbox doesn't get you into a private tracker. It's a download client.
mitxela 3 hours ago [-]
mid tier trackers partner with seedbox providers who give them kickbacks for referrals, in exchange for an account
troupo 3 hours ago [-]
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
mitxela 3 hours ago [-]
Yep it's not easy. Easy was a lie. The best are actually curated public trackers. TPB is not curated.
troupo 3 hours ago [-]
Sadly, curated public ones are also harder and harder to find (for obvious reasons) :(
Gander5739 43 minutes ago [-]
Rutracker's a good one.
someonebaggy 6 hours ago [-]
Switching torrent sites every time one gets taken down.
But why wouldn't you?
stavros 51 minutes ago [-]
I made a small service that will redirect you to a working one:
Seems to work decently well, I've seen it being linked to on HN.
mitxela 2 hours ago [-]
You just host it and if you're not big they don't notice you. Nitter is legal btw.
50 minutes ago [-]
code_duck 3 hours ago [-]
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.
phrotoma 2 hours ago [-]
old.reddit still works anonymously for me. maybe an a/b test?
raffael_de 2 hours ago [-]
possible that they just changed it for mobile.
wanderingpixel 3 hours ago [-]
for personal use you can just host one on your internal network
Abimelex 12 minutes ago [-]
Hot take: All those instances keep the service relevant giving it more reach than necessary. Just shut it down. Cancel Twitter and jump on the BlueSkye or Mastodon train.
klntsky 5 hours ago [-]
Is there something like a balancer that redirects me to an instance that is not down?
netniuq 3 hours ago [-]
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
xxcancel.com (just add an x to xcancel.com) will redirect you to a working instance!
stavros 3 hours ago [-]
I mean, I was just thinking of writing one in a few lines, so there will be one in a few minutes.
corvad 9 hours ago [-]
I guess X never heard of the Streisand effect...
noduerme 6 hours ago [-]
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.
0xDEAFBEAD 2 hours ago [-]
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.
encom 42 minutes ago [-]
Elon Derangement Syndrome is real, like the Trump equivalent.
> 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?
mitxela 3 hours ago [-]
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.
miningtcup 5 hours ago [-]
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.
agnosticmantis 9 hours ago [-]
Any user scripts that automatically redirect to a working instance?
netniuq 3 hours ago [-]
Not a user script, but the LibRedirect extension does most of that already
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.
kamma4434 5 hours ago [-]
With or without the original interface, twitter is still a dumpster fire
5 hours ago [-]
add-sub-mul-div 9 hours ago [-]
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.
delichon 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
bananaflag 7 hours ago [-]
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.
defrost 9 hours ago [-]
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.
mitxela 5 hours ago [-]
The vote count is just the normal vote count, so I guess only the ordering is different?
defrost 5 hours ago [-]
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:
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
randallsquared 7 hours ago [-]
Decade and a half, really. Eternal September was 1993 or 1994, right?
aaron695 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
alex1138 5 hours ago [-]
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
9 hours ago [-]
Petersipoi 9 hours ago [-]
Awesome. Let's all start using this on HN so we end up with a bunch of broken links in a few years
dadoum 9 hours ago [-]
They would become links with only a wrong domain, so I am not very worried about that personally.
mitxela 5 hours ago [-]
It would be cool if libredirect could redirect a broken frontend instance to a working one.
bigbadfeline 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Rendered at 11:24:46 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
My visits have dropped by about 95%
[1] https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
It's by far the best designed social media site out there. I know it's a low bar but still.
I suspect this has become more of a meme by Mastodon/Bluesky users than anything real.
Also the density of pure hate & ragebait by mask-off fascist accounts! It shocks me how much of that I saw unprompted right away after making a new account recently.
But that's the US first amendment for you.
It isn't hard to run an instance, just park it next to your SearXNG [1], Invidious [2], Redlib [3],PeerTube, ... instances.
[1] https://github.com/searxng/searxng
[2] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
[3] https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
But to be honest I never found TPB (or rarbg etc.) really useful for music.
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.
Twitter is different there's many stories that are only there.
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.
If they were easy to get into, they wouldn't be good
It's probably easier to lurk in r/trackerinvites (or whatever it's called) hoping to snatch an invite
But why wouldn't you?
https://github.com/skorokithakis/detour, running on https://twit.0r.cx.
Just replace x.com with twit.0r.cx.
Example:
https://twit.0r.cx/Stavros/status/2096184846993314184
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.
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.
https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
https://github.com/skorokithakis/detour, running on https://twit.0r.cx.
Just replace x.com with twit.0r.cx.
Example:
https://twit.0r.cx/Stavros/status/2096184846993314184
points to a working nitter instance.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
So that's at least strictly before 2009.
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
Who cares, by that time the originals and their copies would be a lot less worthy of viewing.