TwitterWebViewer also no longer in operation, following a request from X Corp

22 pointsposted 6 hours ago
by flotzam
(twitterwebviewer.com)

11 Comments

Kim_Bruning

4 hours ago

For HN, does that mean we should no longer be using X links, since most can't view them?

moritzwarhier

2 hours ago

Content from X worth sharing is rare anyway.

I'm not any authority here, but I'd say, there's no need for a Reddit-moment to ban it entirely.

Though it wouldn't bother me either.

Directly linked single text posts are still publicly accessible last I checked, but it's a microblogging platform littered with spam.

HN submissions are usually long-form content, so it's rare to see X links anyway.

And comments obey the voting system, so who cares whether people link to X, LinkedIn, Facebook or whatever else.

Banning X in comments would require to ban the others as well, and I think the mods and users can handle by themselves what is relevant in that case.

And in case an X submission is genuinely interesting, it won't be hard to access or infer the content from the comments or other sources.

rvz

6 hours ago

This was obviously going to happen once Nitter got an immediate C&D.

It just means that it will happen to these alternatives as well and the lawyers have all the money from X Corp to do just that.

These open source projects circumventing X for free, unfortunately have zero chance in fighting these legal takedowns.

flotzam

5 hours ago

Hoping we'll see more resilient development/hosting emerge

toomuchtodo

5 hours ago

Probably the best use case for onion routing and IPFS. Each X URL gets a content addressable IPFS URL, served via an onion site that should be hard to take down.

Browser->Tor Onion site->IPFS as storage system pull through cache->X

flotzam

5 hours ago

Or just a .onion for the frontend and code forge + another server at some clearnet domain proxying it (until taken down and replaced with the new one) would probably work fine. The hidden service can even terminate TLS with a valid cert for the clearnet domain.

toomuchtodo

4 hours ago

True, I suggested IPFS as an hidden content addressable, globally distributed caching proxy and persistent object store. Run it from outside the reach of the US legal framework, like private/shadow libraries/archives (as you could consider it an archive of X, with public access when available).

Another idea I recently had was extending Karakeep (https://github.com/karakeep-app/), which has robust archiving capabilities today, to enable announcing archived URLs via a DHT and serving the archive bundle as a torrent (similar to how the Internet Archive creates a torrent file for each item). With some work, it would be the equivalent of a distributed Wayback Machine, with each instance able to act as both scraper and server. With a browser extension that could query this DHT, you could retrieve an archived version of any URL that has been archived by cherry picking from the swarm (each URL becomes a magnet torrent URL, very similar to IPFS, but with less bootstrapping required imho).

Distributed web adjacent (https://getdweb.net/).

throwaway81523

an hour ago

Meanwhlie Grok and other AI bro bots non-consensually scrape everything.

ChrisArchitect

6 hours ago

Related discussion and predictions (2 days ago):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49449576

flotzam

6 hours ago

Seemed worth a new post, now that they actually killed it today :(

Is there any frontend still standing?

zImPatrick

5 hours ago

Nitter itself is still fine, there are like 2 public-ish instances I‘m aware of but I think people should go out and host some in more private communities/run one over Tor or something