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.

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?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

My 81 year-old mother has never owned a computer. So yes it's not good to have critical government services only on apps or websites that require log in or subscriptions. Although to her it doesn't matter since she has no clue of these sites.

We went through a hurricane in 2022 and that was an eye opener too. Most "land lines" are no longer a line to anywhere it's just a phone connected to the Internet. Anyone with that type phone had no service after 24 hours without power. My 85 uncle still (even now) had an actual land line and it worked no issues.

After the hurricane no citizen had any way to communicate. Cell towers failed when generators ran out of fuel. No fuel because gas stations couldn't pump gas without power.

My dad passed away just a year earlier he had been on an oxygen generator that needed power 24/7. I don't think he would have survived. I'm not sure if I could even have reached 911.

For awareness radio is the best solution but even emergency services radio stations are being decommissioned here in Canada in favour of Internet services.

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 ?

I agree. I run a small community organisation and we've come off all social media and created a single website. You want information about us? That's where it is - the website.

Nobody should be relying on any social media company to share information widely, and citizens shouldn't be required to sign up for Facebook, X, or anything, to get that information.

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.

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

I would support a law requiring official government messages to be promulgated only via channels that do not require an account to view. It's not the most important thing to spend political capital on, but it would have the positive effect of directly interfering with government officials publishing their messages on proprietary login-only social media because it's the most expedient thing to do or it's the only thing they know how to do.

>Reddit is now this way too.

You can still use https://old.reddit.com with no login. It's cleaner and snappier.

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)

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

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.

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."

From Musk in Dec 2022 (right after purchasing Twitter):

> we should not be prohibiting read-only scroll

Seems Musk agreed Twitter shouldn't require an account just to view the site. Wonder why the change of mind.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=50m47s

The solution is clearly one that isn't controlled by any company:

Nostr.

> get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable

The US House of Representatives posts their live hearings exclusively on YouTube. This is information that should be ungated and freely available, yet is a pain to acquire or archive because YouTube absolutely does not want you getting to the raw video.

I don't understand how this is legal, honestly.

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.

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

Blame boundless AI scraping. X would like very much to be more open.

>suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted

To some decision-makers their idea of "disruption" is limited to enshittification more than anything else.

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

>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.

Burner accounts are dirt, dirt cheap. I have several hundred I rotate out. I’m afraid to mention the library I’m using in case it’s not in their cross hairs, but it makes scraping trivial. At least at the scale I’m scraping I don’t even need a proxy. My residential up is enough to keep the blocks away.

Only had a handful of accounts banned.

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

No, and nitter the software still works too. Apparently the only barrier he could create was a cease and desist letter.

[flagged]

Correction:

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

Gonna be interesting for how long it stays available like this. It's a scraper's dream.

The latter URL looks wrong.

Was doing something similar. But couldn't this still be done with just a slightly more advanced replacement ?

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

C&D has zero legal weight. They're just relying on developers being conflict-averse. At my local hacker space, at least five members are in some kinds of protracted legal battles (five different ones)

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?

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

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.

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

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.

>handled by Cloudflare and claims to be in California

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

Now designated a terror organization by the current US administration.

Is there a link to this argument?

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

[dead]

Because it's not a real platform, it's a series of tiny microplatforms

That's probably where the accounts they use are from.

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

Doing it was always risky.

Doing it and making money from it was always going to end in a ban.

probably trouble with translation to other language

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

It's impossible to build a foobar equivalent unless it's literally foobar, because the value of foobar isn't the software, but the fact that other people post stuff there. There's no point having a restaurant menu platform unless you have restaurant menus on it. Have you considered going around your city and taking pictures of restaurant menus, then attaching them to a map?

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.

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.

I mean, that basically is how the Nazis had power

The number of people who do this is the number of reasons Elon can give to the trademark judge that he is actually using the trademark Twitter and it shouldn't be invalidated for non-use.

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.

I2P Nitter instances exist: va7j3ssqh7e26twc2sflrwjrn7uxryuenatcmfp7njnr5hmvtuiq.b32.i2p

You can just ignore a C&D if you have the balls to enrage Elon

Probably just fetches the page with a login cookie, like Nitter.

Why don't you do it?

Landed as of 17:00 UTC 28 August 2026.

As of August 28, 2026, this website has been permanently discontinued, following a request from X Corp. Profile browsing, search, tweet viewing and video download have all been permanently disabled, and all cached content has been deleted.

<https://twitterwebviewer.com/>

The EU has their own Mastodon instance, but unless you want to have responses (even if the official instance doesn't show them), it's cheaper to run a static news aggregator.

It would be nice, but it seems most people don't care about this.

Because whatever you think of how Musk is running Twitter it's still the most pro freedom of speech platform out there. You can hear ideas(propaganda) from almost all major players, while a UN-operated global social media would be even more censored than reddit.

We already have the internet, anyone can make a site to aggregate all announcements from major officials.

For a more general social media, you’d have to get Russia, China, various European nations, and the US to agree on something.

why tf downvotes? What is wrong in asking an honest question?

We don't need a twitter replacement for any purpose other than pointless dopamine, and we already have tiktok for that. What we actually need is a good discussion about what we actually need, which is not a carbon copy of yestertwodecade's platform.

You have to either run their garbage app, have their tracking cookies in your browser, use a Firefox container or log in every time in incognito mode. None of it is convenient.

the enduring result of the stupidest brand name change ever

it doesn't allow mob censorship unlike HN and Reddit. You can't downvote or hide opposing opinions

This burndown of the Brand Twitter by renaming it to X will make it to digital marketing textbooks for Universities across the world, I promise:

The word Twitter itself became a mega/global brand throughout the years, and Musk detroyed it completely. The verb "to tweet" made it also into dictionaries around the world. You could speak the name in more or less every language, and the bird was widely known just by its iconic styling.

(also dont forget the fail whale! :-)

Free speech right? We can call it whatever we want.

As a compromise, I call it xitter. The main benefit is apparently in some languages x has a "sh" sound so really i'm just calling it exactly what it is (and always has been.)

"Gulf of America"?

Nope.

https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm

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.

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

Who in their right mind would take that site seriously?