I used Twitter for over 10 years without an account then suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted and no longer an option. Reddit is now this way too.

But I find it ridiculous that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable without being logged in (and in some cases requiring an app instead of the site). Even Bluesky has this problem!

Sometimes this information is really important! And I even if I did have an account I may not have access to log in on every device (or even want to).

It’s absurd that social media can become this like critical communications platform for severe weather alerts or business hours or anything but the sites hosting it are completely hostile to allowing you to see it.

Sites like this are a bandaid on a gangrenous foot. Thanks for allowing me to see links from twitter but it isn’t a sustainable solution clearly.

Here in the Netherlands, WhatsApp has the defacto communication tool. Everyone is expected to have it installed, not just by friends but also municipals and companies. Same level as having an e-mail address.

It's a missed opportunity for the digital soverignty the EU says it so badly needs. The code for a government backed WhatsApp competitor is there, in multiple instances even. Launch a WhatsApp clone and put all governement communication through it so everyone has to have it installed, and you have an instant EU-wide userbase. From there, people will naturally start to use it between themselves.

There is a carrier neutral WhatsApp, called SMS.

Eurocrats could never in a million years make it happen. For starters, every country would insist on having its own ChatsApp, with roll out taking years. Then, to satisfy strict security and compliance regulations it would be restricted to devices passing Google & Apple hardware attestation checks. And once everyone is finally forced to be on board, any confidentiality guarantees can go out the window to catch pedos and terrorists.

It's for the best.

Reminds me of what Brasil did with Pix which of course the outside payment processors have been trying to undo.

I think my main communication is probably the last tool that I want to be government backed tbh.

Even if it's communication/announcements from the government?

I too am constantly frustrated that official communications from governments happen on Twitter or Facebook.

Communications/announcements from the government can easily be posted on the government's website or, if really needed, sent as an SMS

My local government still lets you sign up for email notifications about services and local alerts. It’s great!

Too expensive, bad idea.

What do you mean? They'll just pass a law saying carriers have to deliver them for free

are those your "main communication" tools?

Do you think if government accounts were on Signal, people would install it?

Signal is an improvement, but not federated.

Increasingly access is hidden behind mobile apps too, which in turn requires succumbing to app stores and handing over the keys to 2 giant US companies. For slopware and social media, fine. Some would even argue it is a blessing in disguise. However on the government level it is totally unacceptable. E.g. why should anyone and especially non US citizens accept the Google/Apple TOS in order to file their taxes, access their health recds or schedule a gov appointment?

It's all by design to. People call for social media regulation without realizing that it is by no coincidence these companies have been able to grow so large. The security state has been outsourced to private industry.

My phone can’t even open most of the apps since it’s so old. Reddit does not load (this actually helped me a lot).

Even worse, it's hard or impossible to even have an account with any shred of privacy.

I've tried to create pseudoanonymous accounts on both Bluesky and Twitter and then had them be instantly banned before I ever used them. Not even doing anything real privacy like TOR or a VPN, just trying to create an account without revealing my personal phone number.

Ironically, their attempts to crack down on bots means real people like me can't access the sites, while the scammers, propagandists and shills will put in the work to register accounts.

You might try attacking the problem from the other direction. If your country allows buying a SIM card without KYC, then do that.

Just to clarify, what do you mean by "without revealing my personal phone number"?

Did you use a voip number (e.g., Google Voice/Twilio/etc.) instead? Or somehow no number at all? Or a secondary (real) phone number, and Twitter somehow determined it wasn't your primary personal phone number?

Not pushing back against what you said, just trying to understand what factually happened.

Bluesky didn't require phone numbers back when it was invite only, and then there was a period of time after they allowed everyone to create accounts where users need a phone number to verify. That requirement might have been replaced by a captcha according to:

https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/2762

But I didn't try to create an account recently, maybe they went back to requiring phone numbers.

Lots of services demand your phone number after the fact now, hoping to use the sunk cost fallacy to extort it out of you when you're in a hurry.

Walmart recently deleted my phone number from my account for vague reasons but most likely because another account had the same number. That other account is my wife and the number is our VoIP line. I have no desire to interact with walmart through my cell phone so I didn't give it to them. So I used a google voice number, which is not my number, to get back in. Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company and autopopulated the field. Jokes on me!

> Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company

Holy moly, don't you have any law at all to protect people's privacy ?

in the US? no.

But I don't think that's the case for Bluesky

It's because of spam. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Ironically AI could fix this when trivial spam detection inference becomes cheap enough to throw away on every upload.

AI would classify anything disagreeing with the government as spam. For example right now it would classify anything opposing Israel as spam.

It's been years since I tried making a Twitter account, I believe at the time it sometimes required a phone number to sign up but other times it was optional (some A/B test).

I think Bluesky didn't require a phone number to sign up, just an email. Maybe I'm misremembering though and it forced a phone number so I had to provide a fake one or a voip one.

Right now X requires either a phone number, or email + phone hardware ID.

I wouldn't even care if they blocked my anonymous account from posting or really interacting besides reading things. But of course, preventing bot actions isn't actually why I need an account so they aren't going to let you do that.

I don't remember giving my phone to bluesky

I didn't

> Reddit is now this way too.

Which is why OpenAI formed a partnership with reddit, in exchange for access to OpenAI's models, OpenAI gets access to reddit's data, and access to reddits live feed.

The reason X and Reddit started forcing accounts is to prevent or add barrier for web scraping, and forcing companies to pay for access to the data.

Notably this was called a “temporary emergency measure” by Elon Musk — yet another promise he couldn’t keep

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-now-needs-users-s...

“Temporary emergency” should always be considered skeptically - especially when it comes to government. They almost always stay permanent.

Because it worked without an account before Elon came to Twitter and changed it?

Would've happened either way. Data is more valuable and also trivial to scrape now.

The governments go where the people are. If they post on their own sites it’s the equivalent of “on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’”.

But government information should definitely be first source on their site with federation elsewhere.

Yeah, "first source" is the key here. The information should be available openly and independently of any 3rd-party platform.

In a broader sense, I believe that every person who publishes on the internet should have a standard way to keep their profile data (accounts, posts, etc.) in a secure, user-owned vault that is independent of any company or institution and platforms should have to pull data from that place (in a restricted, user-controlled way) instead of from their own servers. Platforms should be exchangeable, profiles should be entirely user-owned. But of course, this is just a dream and hard to realise technically and economically (incentive-wise) with our current systems. Decentralised protocols are a step in this direction, but unfortunately still too technical/complicated for most people to really "own" or host their data themselves.

ATProto attempted to do this with their PDS based structure but it isn’t fully decentralized yet. The vision is similar to what you describe though.

Thats entirely how atproto works now!

Except for the part where bluesky maintains a central registry and also the part where the protocol is really complicated with its authenticity stuff.

The problem is not governments or people posting there. The problem is platforms/utilities not being treated as such.

totally agree, businesses that only have Facebook or Instagram are basically hidden from me. I can not see their opening hours, nor the menue, if it is a restaurant. I understand why the businesses use facebook, its easy, but its also a bit sad.

Similarly, society decided at some point that linkedin, a completely private and constantly hacked social network, is a must-have when looking for work (not any work, but for a lot of jobs it applies). Just give them all your private data and we'll have a look.

Makes one miss the days when Craigslist or Monster (and its clones) were legitimately the best places to find employment.

I've always loathed LinkedIn due to their poor security and their data mining practices, starting from day 1. I haven't used LinkedIn in over 10 years and only used it briefly to connect with old colleagues. I never had a problem getting work without it. Due to AI, scammers, and infiltration by countries like North Korea, LinkedIn seems to be the only other source outside of "networking" to get hired these days though, unfortunately.

At this point nothing would make me happier than to see Meta, X, LinkedIn, and their friends collapse. They are a cancer and only amplify the enshittification of everything.

It's frustrating, but we need to accept that we are not the kind of user that these platforms want. I stopped using Reddit for the same reason, and I accepted that I'm not the best user for them. For my luck, Reddit is not used as the main communication channel for government agencies

> Even Bluesky has this problem!

Bluesky is totally accessible for me without an account. What do you see ?

Plenty of people restrict their account to require that you too have an account to see their posts. A link to Bluesky often feels like roulette on whether I can see a post or not.

It isn’t as egregious as other sites but it’s still restrictive.

That's why we really need some kind of non profit or maybe two "social media" sites made with the public good in mind. One could be officially government sanctioned and funded (sort of like Voice of America but internal to the US more so) and have a strict organisation verification policy for local police / government and other quasi public entities (say like transportation systems and energy companies - etc)

So HTTP and IP

I wholeheartedly agree on every point. I've felt this way for years. It's scandalous.

Many companies also rely on socials as their only effective means of customer service. If you have a problem or want to provide feedback but you don't use social media then you are SOL.

Or you sue them and (if they did something wrong) they're SOL.

But you won't. And they know you won't. Not even small claims.

There is a browser addon https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect to view Old Reddit without an account.

Should governments not have posted announcements in newspapers back when they were widely read, even though they require paying to read them?

I'm sympathetic, as I also don't have an account, but honestly I don't think requiring a free account that takes 10 seconds to make and needs no personal info constitutes "completely hostile to allowing you to see it."

Twitter requires your phone number to sign up

In the EU, EU-Alert exists. They can push alarms to any phone with that system.

They have Amber Alert here and the other day I noticed it linked to twitter for more information...which I couldn't actually but for a split-second when a pop-up loaded. This is silly. Perhaps govt can reach more people by posting a message to twitter vs their website. But if you're sending a link out, there is no excuse not to link to your website or any number of other open, stable hosts.

Amber alerts accomplish nothing, with or without twitter links

The Reddit thing is disappointing. I stopped being a user a long time ago, but their links often show up in search results. I started noticing I couldn't see the page without logging in. I ended up blocking Reddit in my search results. It's not worth it.

>are completely hostile to allowing you to see it.

You say like this like it doesn't literally take like 10 seconds to make an account to see it.

It doesn't. Have you actually tried? Recently?

Create an account then? Not sure why that's an issue.

You can't make new accounts on twitter. You can only use existing apple or google accounts.

I think you can, if you install their app.

I learned from experience at least a decade ago that you should not take anything he says seriously or as an assertion of fact. Countless examples[0] prove that this is the case.

[0] https://elonmusk.today

He thinks Twitter data is valuable for AI training. He also blocks archive.org.

Grok 4.0, before it deteriorated, had a phase when it was good at writing tweets. The feature was used by Musk sycophants but it becomes boring soon.

Since Grok is closed now too and Cursor is pivoting to octocnt (GitHub clone), nobody knows where things are heading.

I think buying Twitter for data was a blunder big as expecting self driving to be solved by 2015 or whenever it originally was.

It is only clear with hindsight, but now everyone knows that tweets are literally detrimental for LLM style AI for whatever reason. Personally I think it's because tweets are responses without CoT or prompts, or could be also because all its meat is in the shape incompatible with en-US culture, even when it's in English, though all that matters is it's actively useless.

He didn't buy twitter for data, he bought it to shut down criticism of himself and it worked

Maybe for training, but how about look up? I often use claude voice and grok voice (both on iOS) and reasonably frequently claude simply cannot find any info about a breaking topic, whereas grok always can.

I wonder if "no one says no" culture is practically the same thing as instructing LLMs to always hallucinate.

You know, LLM hallucination is a phenomenon where the AI would generate syntactically bulletproof chunks of text that are not grounded in reality. Lots of efforts by frontier LLM labs had been made in past few years to solve this by enabling AIs to refute premises in the prompt.

Ordinary people still need to be instructed to google stuffs. They don't go to a niche de facto non-American social media to be disappointed by its notoriously bad search to then conclude its notoriously dumb AI can be abused as a makeshift search tool. People are simply unable.

Twitter has been doing so much things backwards lately. That's reminiscent of how hallucination hurts whatever you do with AIs.

> Musk is aggressively optimistic on what can be achieved and by when

That’s putting it quite charitably, IMO.

> but rational on product decisions

Hard disagree. You only need to look to his entire tenure at DOGE for literally hundreds (thousands?) of counterexamples.

Or, if you don’t count that work as “product decisions,” there are other highly questionable product decisions that he is responsible for: the rear doors on the Model X; the lack of instruments/gauges of any kind in front of the driver on the Model 3 and Y; the lack of proper safety sensors/protection for the hood of the Cybertruck, leading to mangled fingers; that stupid yoke steering wheel; and the entirety of Neuralink (just to name a handful).

I am certifiably not a fan of Musk but the yoke in the cybertruck when combined with the drive by wire steering is an absolute engineering masterpiece and a masterclass in systems calibration. The yoke itself has a relatively narrow range of motion of .94 turns lock-to-lock and at slow parking lot speeds that means you can do a 3 point turn, park, parallel park, navigate around, without making large movements of the steering input and you never have to (because you physically cannot) go hand-over-hand. Then at highway speeds the steering ratio is vastly different and the vehicle feels solid as a rock. It's absolutely effortless.

Now, on the flipside, the yoke also exists in the Tesla Model S Plaid, which has a traditional manual rack. In here it is the worst god-damned thing to ever curse a vehicle. The width is roughly the diameter of a school bus steering wheel and going hand over hand with it is annoying at best and the whole experience feels like utter garbage.

> Now, on the flipside, the yoke also exists in the Tesla Model S Plaid, which has a traditional manual rack. In here it is the worst god-damned thing to ever curse a vehicle.

Yes, as I said, bad product decisions.

You don't think he has the resources to sue the scrapers?

And you have to have a phone number to login to these sites (Authenticate). Even On-line Banking, you need a phone number to log in. And in my country Mobile contracts are hideously expensive.

Its all part of the plan: the Digital Control Grid.

Just wait till the Genius Act kicks in with Stable Coins. Programmable money is coming.

Disruption was never an unblemished positive for society.

Musk’s takeover of Twitter was a net win for free speech

Thanks, new account that only posts to support Musk

Politics aside, Twitter/X has become a bad place to share information on and to link to. It's a bad option from a technical point of view.

We can't read a multi-part tweet (or follow-ups from the author) or check the latest updates from an official account without an account, which requires a mobile phone number and sometimes extra verifications. A digital "town square" can't require an account and a phone number to read what's said there.

Same with Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Linkdin, etc.

I wish I understood why the majority of the AI discussions happen on Twitter/X.

Network effect. Most people worth discussing with are already there, so more people join the discussion there, and so on.

Because obviously everyone who participates in a discussion has an account, so they don't feel this annoyance other than maybe when sharing a link to someone else.

Tells me how valuable they actually are.

Read Social and Economic Networks by Michael O Jackson.

A lot of crypto bro grifter crossover in AI.

why not?

Don't be obtuse. the reasons why not were spelled out in the GP.

Inertia. Twitter has basically no value, it's just a bad app and bad website. It was never actually "good" for information communication, but it was tolerable.

When it comes down to 99% of these "why are people using sucky thing?" questions, the answer is inertia. Never confuse popularity for quality, they're completely orthogonal.

Anyone know the specifics of how this works under the hood? I assumed the people over at Twitter/X would aggressively block systems like this from working. Are they doing something creative to get around that?

sad that i come here for technical information and yours is the first lonely comment asking about how this works

API works great, for now

https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/user/[username]

https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/user/[username]&uid=[id...

Beware the website is jam-packed with ads and tracking

Correction:

https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/tweets/[username]?uid=[...

What is the uid parameter for? It looks to me it's ignored.

Having the same issue. I think they might have turned it off. Was looking forward to using this.

uid optional

The latter URL looks wrong.

It would be nice if URL schema was compatibile with X. In case of Nitter, I could’ve just replaced x.com with xcancel.com with a web extension and URL still works.

it's brave to look at other companies receiving cease and desist notices and treat it as a market opening

twitterwebviewer.com was registered in Hong Kong

according to https://www.whois.com/whois/twitterwebviewer.com

Looks fine, they don't care about the notices i guess

.com domain zone is managed by Verysign US company. They will just C&D them.

"Check our Wikipedia page for our latest domain. Next stop the Central African Republic!"

the maker - https://peterslab.co/products/twitter-web-viewer

I guess my brain has been cooked by internet libertarianism but what's the basis of a C&D for proxying a website?

Is the legal basis just copyright of the contents?

Bigger "guns" diplomacy. They don't need any legal basis for a C&D. Just depends on whether you have enough money to fight it in court.

i dont know the legal basis used, or the validity. i just know that i wouldnt want to have to spend the time or money fighting twitter over it

Well yeah the copyright violation is pretty clear cut here.

My understanding is that copyright of what's posted is retained by the poster. The Nitter C&D was around a ToS violation for scraping.

Show HN some months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46513823

The X account of the person running this has been suspended.

https://x.com/PeterAndersonE

https://www.autistici.org offer great services with very strong effort to protect privacy, for more then 20 years, now... and all is done by volunteers.

Very proud of their work, and kudos for affecting how the world is handling information and their will to do good

Now designated a terror organization by the current US administration.

yes, I've answered in the wrong post, sorry

Is this referring to the new Twitter company that recently launched (https://twitter.now)?

If not, then this is just going to lead to confusion.

I don’t think there will be any confusion. Clearly this is not referring to this random new Twitter thing you’ve linked to that most people have never heard of, it is referring to Twitter the previously global piece of software with hundreds of millions of former users.

Well, I was confused. New Twitter got big coverage today [1] and then more Twitter related news on HN today too.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/new-twitter-laun...

there is no chance that people would assume this is about a startup that's about to get nuked by copyright cease and desists

Are you talking about Twitter or X?

The general rule: any social media owned by a corporation will eventually lock posts behind a login.

Any social media product will be acquired and co-opted.

And stuff their UX full of dark patterns, and get very angry whenever someone tries building a third-party client without the bullshit.

Prepping for another C&D I see. The only way something like this can survive is through Tor or similar, fully anonymous and decentralized.

What ever happened to IPFS? Wasn't it built for just this kind of thing? I remember trying it years ago and it was absolutely unusable, but was kinda hoping it had made a turnaround by now.

IPFS might be in trouble. Haven't really followed the tech so I have no idea how much of an effect there will be with Shipyard dropping it, but from the number of things I see named in their exit post I'd guess the blast radius is sizable.

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421489

- https://ipshipyard.com/blog/2026-the-end-of-ipfs-at-shipyard...

That dev community continued into iroh and atproto. We built atproto with whyrusleeping as a very active consultant

Dead, approximately. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421489

I2P Nitter instances exist: va7j3ssqh7e26twc2sflrwjrn7uxryuenatcmfp7njnr5hmvtuiq.b32.i2p

Listen I know this comment is off topic, flag this if you want but I think it’s an important discussion

Speaking of twitter, are there any posts here about the ycombinator discourse?

Given a high level member of ycombinator blocked the chairman of the FTC after an argument over immigration, I foresee issues in the future.

Is there a link to this argument?

I don’t think it’s an issue. Their site, their rules.

And compared to Twitter or others discussed here no government agency or similar uses Hacker News as their primary channel for news updates. However Twitter, Instagram and auch are used for such official purpose from different agencies worldwide. Thus access for the respective citizens is relevant.

I've been on Mastodon for a few years, and though it has less drama than Twitter/X, it does seem to have reached critical mass of users and does cover most of my needs for random gossip. I am surprised that that nobody has mentioned it here.

Are there any Instagram equivalents that don't suck?

People love to virtue signal by linking to Twitter proxies, but Instagram is still a walled garden that all sorts of useful information (event details, restaurant menus, etc.) is locked inside. I occasionally have luck with whatever the top Google results are, but they're all encrusted with dodgy ads.

I've had people send me reels as links to ddinstagram.com and kkinstagram.com, which at least in Telegram, get transformed into a video that can be played inline from the link preview and downloaded.

Depends if you want an alternate front-end and you can self-host, or you're looking for a third party.

For the former, I generally look at what LibRedirect has as options: https://libredirect.manerakai.com/

Proxigram seems unmaintained, but kittygram seems to be actively developed: https://codeberg.org/irelephant/kittygram

I've never had an Instagram account, and I'm trying to keep it that way.

Hmm, on the one hand Elon begs for new users with animated ads on the x.com front page, on the other hand one of his (likely) alt accounts claims that "Every $1 [of advertising on X] spent delivered an average return of $5.42":

https://twitterwebviewer.com/?tweet=2092490213121761787

I am kind of addicted to studying propaganda and reading about baseball stadiums on the moon to drive up the SpaceX stock price. For this I need the Twitter gateways.

The search is somehow faster than twitter's own search.

The site is very fast even though it should be overloaded now. Registered in Hong Kong (good), handled by Cloudflare and claims to be in California:

https://github.com/peters-lab/twitter-viewer

Repo is fake, only a README and a LICENSE. I guess we'll take what we can get now.

>handled by Cloudflare and claims to be in California

Where? are you just pulling cloudflare's ip info?

We need this for Linkdin too!

Sometimes a walled garden can be a good thing, if it functions as a quarantine.

More like a tall fence around a superfund site.

New account, 4 comments, one includes “Musk’s takeover of Twitter was a net win for free speech”

Oh, is this supposed to be a liberal echo-chamber?

Are you mad other users have their own opinions?

Bless his heart, babies don't know any better.

I ignored Twitter before Musk bought it and oddly I still have no problem ignoring it.

It doesn't even have good cat pictures.

I built dailycat.app and it has good cat pictures!

Yay for daily cat apps! I run daily.cat

you guys are doing the important work. Keep it up!

Literally every time I decide to stop ignoring X, I log in and am greeted with overt racism and religious hatred. Always a good reminder to just ignore that cesspit.

I guess other people have more tolerance than I do for the constant stream of hatred that floats to the top of the algorithm like scum over there.

Totes. I searched for cat pics and within a few results I was being given racially charged fights.

How does this work, does it use the twitter api?

To this day I am still calling the website Twitter and access it every single time typing twitter.com. That rename was so dumb. So, I really love the name

I don't think the worldwide trendings are right. The ones I see (with personalization disabled) are not all in arabic (?)

Cease and desist in 3... 2... 1...

Thanks Peter! Now do the same for the 'gram!

Related:

Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283

It does not work for me like xcancel did

not going to be long before they cut access to this app.

Nice, how do you make this freely available?

What is Twitter?

the enduring result of the stupidest brand name change ever

whackamole is the only way for now, unfortunately.

It's disappointing that this is even necessary given earlier promises of opening up the Twitter algorithm.

The algorithm is free, it's the data that matters.

Based on the downvotes, there's a lot of folks who just can't stand to be reminded who and what they're associating with by continuing to use Twitter.

Folks, you don't have to give the nazi bar your business. You will live without Twitter.

'everyone who disagrees with me is a nazi'

I think you’re talking to bots. Anything that doesn’t align with Trump/Elon’s perceived worldview gets downvoted here.

Don't care. The occasional human who might see the comment still makes it worth it. Even if they don't change their behavior, they've been reminded that they are hanging out at the nazi bar.

It's important to remind people of what they're doing, when they're doing something like that.

No, he's downvoted because he's saying objectively false things like "Musk is a mass murderer", and subjective but unproductive things like "he's a Nazi". You can dislike Elon Musk and make that point in a mature way that actually leads to a good discussion. People do that all the time and don't get flak for it. This poster has chosen to be incendiary, and people dislike flamebait so it got downvoted.

Yeah we get it, you like to hang out at the nazi bar.