Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account
twitterwebviewer.comI 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.
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.
Funny, it has already happened: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/developer-portal/me...
Mastodon instances would be a drop-in replacement, no? Federated instances and as a bonus, it solves the biggest problem of new users not knowing which server to join. Just join your local government's if you don't know of another.
So true. Even within a country, different states would argue for their own version of it. (Looking at you, Bavaria)
The EU should rather embrace open standards rather than building a closed competitor here. We already have XMPP and Matrix, all that's required is for public institutions to use them.
It is ubiquitous, but as a Dutchie who's never had WhatsApp, it is not quite at the level of an email address yet, luckily.
> 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.
I think you have completely misjudged how much the majority of people would not want to use an EU-controlled chat app.
Reminds me of what Brasil did with Pix which of course the outside payment processors have been trying to undo.
There is a carrier neutral WhatsApp, called SMS.
Whatsapp etc. only took off because SMS is so limited, and the mobile companies are so profit-focused they can't make a decent competitor.
(how is whatsapp paid for again?)
It's not all about profit as European SMS is now free. It is however about decentralisation stifling feature development - a trap we run into again and again, from email to IRC to SMS to Fediverse/ATProto.
WhatsApp is one company so if they want to enable sending images they can just do it, and they don't have to coordinate with anyone else. MMS was a failure because you couldn't be sure if your recipient would actually get it, or if your carrier would actually let you send it.
SMS made you pay by character. RCS is the current free alternative.
Not neutral if you are Apple. That's their battlefield
Cell towers failed in my region after a hurricane. SMS is pointless in that situation.
Not even remotely close.
For natural disaster emergency annoucememt it is more reliable than whatsapp.
Cell Broadcast yes, SMS no.
Isnt the one just "mass usage" of the other?
Like Cell Broadcast just duplicates the SMS on carrier level?
Nah, Cell Broadcast has a lot less overhead since it does not have to do any routing or delivery confirmation and such. The load does not scale based on recipients which makes it far more reliable during an emergency.
Why, because it can't be monetized by Facebook?
Because it doesn't do the job well. It's difficult to send any media, group chats are a pain, international messages often incur fees, it doesn't work on wifi-only, and so on.
Whatsapp is used by a lot of "neighbourhood watch" groups, so you'd need an IRC-like channel to replace it.
Yes, no, try to have group chat with SMS, and tell me how that went...
RTS is the SMS replacement and is quite old. And as evidence it works, I direct your attention to the ubiquitous iMessage, which only "couldn't" interop with Android because Apple was trying the vendor lock-in approach and actively enshittifying its own users' experience and blaming it on Android users.
Which it also had to do because SMS doesn't have half its features, like encryption and sending images.
Do you mean RCS or are these 2 seperate things?
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.
SMS are virtually free for every carrier. The prices for the customers exist to partially offset the fixed costs of the infrastructure (which already exists).
Here unlimited free SMS for customers has been the norm for most plans.
This is how you get the Andy Burnham "don't use disposable BBQs" announcement sent via the emergency system.
What do you mean? They'll just pass a law saying carriers have to deliver them for free
are those your "main communication" tools?
I agree that I don't trust governments today to provide the necessary confidentiality guarantees but remember that both physical mail and the phone network are government backed - in the sense that they set the rules even if they are operated by private entities in some countries.
I think the lessons of 2026 must be:
- the dangers of fascism are very real
- technological choices won't save you from the snatch squads, although grassroots use of tech by communities can help
- fascism is extensively promoted by some corporations and their owners
- a non-captured government that is willing to push back is much better than relying on corporations
- anything headquartered in America is potentially subject to arbitrary sanctions against non-US users
- just because we don't like the solution doesn't mean the problem isn't real (see age verification debate)
Fascinating! Where I live, fascism is not the threat, it is rampant socialism. It is spreading like cancer and destroying lives and economies.
Where do you live? Because I’m guessing you’re wrong.
Probably he lives on Twitter.
what country are you from that you trust US corps more than your own government?
That bar is low. Less than 8% of the world population lives in a full democracy (Economist Democracy Index).
Why not just a website?
Hard to keep up with lots of sites. At least provide a common interface, like an atom feed.
Do you think if government accounts were on Signal, people would install it?
Signal requires a mobile phone for an account; so it's not entirely web-friendly. Plus, can you read what's posted to signal without an account?
Signal is an improvement, but not federated.
Which is one of the many many reasons Zuckerberg needs to be investigated the hell out of for every single thing he does
I grant you 2014 is 12 years ago now and you could plausibly argue it was their doing to grow network effects but I'm pretty sure WA had that infrastructure already in place - Acton, Koum et al already did the ground work to get carriers to... whatever it is
Zuckerberg stole it like he steals everything
People insisted then that paying tens of Instagram for WhatsApp was too much.
I have no idea. The point is they took competition out back, and shot it
Whether that's 'too much' depends on your view of it
I'm tired of people calling them 'savvy acquisitions'. Not when Zuck's on record as saying 'Instagram can hurt us'
The problem is that an EU-mandated digital communicating tool would look like the Minitel.
Anyone remembering the French minitel?
I think it was quite good for the 1980s, it just got stuck there.
Touché. Getting stuck with an obsolete service/protocol for decades is a nightmare, even if it is just ye olde user inertia. If it is mandated by law or pushed by the government, it becomes nearly impossible to update.
In this, I trust the government way less than either the open source movement or the actual Silicon Valley. Both of the latter are much better at iterating of their designs when a new idea comes along.
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.
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.
Yes and most importantly when the black box flags something as spam there will be no appeal.
Are you sure that's not just people getting fed up with you and hitting the mute button? I just mute those people.
That trains the AI
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.
Can you use Google voice still without providing another phone number ?
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
You might try attacking the problem from the other direction. If your country allows buying a SIM card without KYC, then do that.
> 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.
I'm fine with the criticism, but what's the solution? And what makes this a uniquely Elon problem when the rest of the social media industry does the same? There was backlash when the models learned computer programming from open source repositories, so I wonder if the same applies to casual speech.
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.
Which is the root of the problem - that we have allowed companies to claim ownership over and sell their user's data.
Usenet worked without any antispam, until the first spammer appeared.
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.
Re the "land lines", I think the answer to that is not "keep 100+ year old copper infrastructure running" but "make our modern infrastructure as reliable as Ma Bell made it 100 years ago".
Of course, neither will happen, so there's that.
> "make our modern infrastructure as reliable as Ma Bell made it 100 years ago"
Sadly, I don't think that makes sense. Switches have a lot more to do a lot faster when it comes to the internet as compared to a phone. 100 years ago, calls were completed by a person physically moving one or more wires from one plug to another.
Better to have an emergency system that will always work - and maybe the only way to keep an emergency system maintained is to use it during non-emergencies. Hard phone lines and radio.
Just a nitpick - by 1926, about 20-30% of Bell exchanges were already automatic, on Strowger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strowger_switch equipment.
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.
I think stackoverflow jobs was better than all the alternatives we ever had or have now (which are ridiculous).
If there is one thing I miss on the internet is indeed stackoverlow jobs. Crazy that it didn't work out.
LinkedIn is the Facebook of people who don't want to be on Facebook but want to post Facebook kind of stuff.
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.
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.
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.
Isn't that just "the World Wide Web"?
The reason these sites require login is because they also want to control the resulting conversations, whether for moderation (generous) or selling your data (more likely).
Announcements/political campaigning doesn't require feedback in the same way so no reason for them to use X, FB or anything else.
Seeing the state of most conversations on X or FB, I'm quite happy with limiting the general public's ability to broadcast to the world.
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
We actually don't need to accept that. When they become big enough for network effects to become inescapable they need to be treated as utilities more than random private companies.
Are you saying that they should be regulated or controlled by the government in some ways?
>Reddit is now this way too.
You can still use https://old.reddit.com with no login. It's cleaner and snappier.
They're starting to block that and are starting to require logins for old reddit
You can use Old Reddit Redirect [1] to fix it (for now).
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
Is this a cruel joke?
Why ?
> 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.
I don't understand why they have this option. Why would anyone toggle this on?
Maybe to minimize bots scraping your info.
If bluesky ever becomes popular boots will just scrape the firehose directly.
The solution is clearly one that isn't controlled by any company:
Nostr.
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.
...because the overhead of even small claims is bigger than what you can possibly recover in most regular disputes. There needs to be something like a class action for small claims - government regulators where you can submit complaints with evidence to and if enough people complain about a company the government has to look into it.
Isn't small claims designed for, well, small claims and therefore low overhead? That's why you can't bring a lawyer. Which is super annoying for a company, because a company has no physical embodiment and has to send a lawyer or other representative just by virtue of being a company.
There is a browser addon https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect to view Old Reddit without an account.
A workaround that will surely be patched in the next site update.
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)
This is Mastodon, and there are instances such as https://ec.social-network.europa.eu.
Exactly, we don't need any more closed silos when there are open options that governments can adopt.
So HTTP and IP
I think if you think that technologies which were around for decades before social media took off are equivalent to social media, then it's actually on you for missing what the difference is.
See HN classics of "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame" and "you can replicate dropbox with webdav"; at some point you have to stop thinking that it's everyone else who is wrong and work out what they want which you're missing, which is convenience.
Yeah but you have to think about what that convenience actually is. You can't just say "twitter is convenient". Visiting someone's website is actually much easier than visiting their Twitter, so what happened?
> 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.
Should governments not have posted announcements in newspapers back when they were widely read, even though they require paying to read them?
Newspapers never required logging in to buy a copy.
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.
At least for now Reddit doesn't require neither phone number nor email address (I think)
I just don't want to be logged in. I used to be an active user. It sucks up too much time and there's a lot of toxicity. I finally got off when they blocked third party apps. Their official app is horrible and the website has enough annoyances that I don't want to use it. I was content to click on the occasional search result though. Now that they finally took that away I'm done.
In practice you wont be able to comment if you don't provide email. Though, you will be able to view.
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'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
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
Likely the realization what AI companies (themselves included) are willing to pay for that data.
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.
This should be your prior for any public figure.
Agreed for sure. I think part of the problem is that at least for a while, he was good at selling the lie that he was an intelligent engineer, which caused a lot of people (especially tech-savvy ones) to trust him more than the average random public figure. Unfortunately it seems like some people never realized he was a fraud and still view him this way.
Musk is aggressively optimistic on what can be achieved and by when, but rational on product decisions.
Musk stating that read-only scroll should be allowed seems very sensible (I think we all agree on that). But he (or someone he delegated to) clearly changed their mind. Intrigued to know why. Occam's razor would probably suggest that allowing scrapers to host twitter posts elsewhere costs them ad revenue, so they make it difficult.
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
He bought twitter because he was forced to. He got it at twice any valuation (based on fake usage stats) and at least 4x what it was worth. Criticism of him was not "shut down" either off or on twitter.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/12/elon-musk-admits-he-only-b...
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.
Hallucination is not something specific to LLM by any means.
Remember when you were a kid, your teacher probably told you "At an exam, leave no question unanswered, even if you don't know what to write. Nobody is penalised for wrong answers, but even total gibberish might sometimes add a half-point to your score".
> 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.
In the EU, EU-Alert exists. They can push alarms to any phone with that system.
Which is appropriate only for the extremest of extreme situations like an imminent open war our natural catastrophe.
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
Blame boundless AI scraping. X would like very much to be more open.
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.
>suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted
To some decision-makers their idea of "disruption" is limited to enshittification more than anything else.
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
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 don't have a smartphone.
Then use one of the other options. It's not really that difficult.
>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?
A couple years ago was the last time.
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.
but it's a really shallow form of discussion, as most tweets are the equivalent of short-form videos of tiktoks.
I think Pareto principle applies here: most discussions will be shallow, only occasionally diving deep — and Twitter acknowledges that reality, and builds around it.
The real problem is that places like HN and Reddit allow downvotes / reports to drown people out. Someone on Twitter will post on their page. They control it. It can be slop. It can be low quality. It can be their random thoughts but all that is irrelevant while you slowly build up your audience and the stuff you wanna work on. This generally takes time and is something that grows organically. Meanwhile on HN I will regularly see posts "flagged" where the account didn't actually say anything bad or against the rules. It just goes against the group think and it doesn't even take that much. It can be 1 or 2 people flagging your post and then suddenly it's hidden. This simply does not happen on Twitter.
So eventually people stop posting. I stopped posting on Reddit entirely for example even though I had dozens of very highly upvoted technical posts mainly because I would regularly see highly inaccurate information get upvoted while the real accurate information is downvoted.
HN has the same problem with Elon Musk overall and SpaceX / Twitter.
On Twitter there is a highly active community of space enthusiasts. Absolutely none of them would post slop like "Elon is not an engineer" but on HN that is what passes for discourse.
I mean at least they tell on themselves but I would prefer a technical forum have actually smart people in it. Not just larpers.
I just can't take this discourse seriously.
I don't think anything on twitter can really be called a discussion. The UI is designed for shouting into the void, anything else is an afterthought
Tells me how valuable they actually are.
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.
A lot of crypto bro grifter crossover in AI.
Read Social and Economic Networks by Michael O Jackson.
why not?
Don't be obtuse. the reasons why not were spelled out in the GP.
I recently tried the X API to fetch the latest tweets about a given topic, and I spent ~1$ in one go just to retrieve them and some additional info about the users. This is ridiculously expensive.
So I can only be happy that such service exists (though if there was a better support for an API would be 10x better)
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?
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.
No, and nitter the software still works too. Apparently the only barrier he could create was a cease and desist letter.
TechnoKing!
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
Gonna be interesting for how long it stays available like this. It's a scraper's dream.
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.
Was doing something similar. But couldn't this still be done with just a slightly more advanced replacement ?
it's brave to look at other companies receiving cease and desist notices and treat it as a market opening
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)
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.
Violating ToS is legal, but so is sending a C&D for anything you like
Would there be a way to turn a user's account into an RSS feed? i mean the accounts of other users, not the own, personalized feed.
Show HN some months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46513823
This is an awesome blast-from-the-past UI - I checked out Obama's profile and it made me almost confuse it with the real twitter from ~10 years ago.
But it may only takes another X-ed lawyer letter to make it go all away again.
I wonder whether there could be a decentralized (torrent-based?) way that would be robust ?
In the end, the only real solution that would take away the power of the SM Propaganda networks is regulatory Interoperability
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.
Not sure how this is even possible but the trending box for Taiwan just shows the Thailand trending searches in a different order... And worldwide trending searches are predominantly... in Greek?
My account has been suspended. The administrators determined that I used hate speech against a plant called Canadian goldenrod.
probably trouble with translation to other language
I don't understand the issue. Am I the only person with a fake account, using a throw away email and fake information? It doesn't have to be this complicated. It's the internet. You can lie.
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.
Because it's not a real platform, it's a series of tiny microplatforms
The X account of the person running this has been suspended.
Doing it was always risky.
Doing it and making money from it was always going to end in a ban.
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.
Antifa terrorists use autistici as their IT department
yes, I've answered in the wrong post, sorry
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
indeed, bluesky is a great example of self-quarantine
New account, 4 comments, one includes “Musk’s takeover of Twitter was a net win for free speech”
Musk's takeover of Twitter was in fact a net win for free speech, in large part because it encouraged large numbers of people to actually abandon the platform and post on somewhat-more-censorship-resistent platforms instead, which those people would not have done if the previous management of Twitter had continued to operate it.
Oh, is this supposed to be a liberal echo-chamber?
Are you mad other users have their own opinions?
New account, -2 karma, mostly posts about how evil immigrants are
Bless his heart, babies don't know any better.
Yes, burn the witch!!!
How dare someone disagree with our MSM opinions!
That's quite an MSM opinion you've got there.
I would say don't burn anything, especially not an innocent neophyte without an ounce of maturity who doesn't know right from wrong yet.
I'm certainly not going to downvote them either, and surely not silently, that would be kind of chickenshit. Plus it's like their opinion, man.
OTOH who needs a "witch hunt" when it's self-described.
When you think about it lots of people around here don't even need to hunt for that missing sock any more ;)
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.
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?
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
Something to use with a normal web browser that requires no login would be nice. Like Libreddit or Nitter.
I've never had an Instagram account, and I'm trying to keep it that way.
Most of these front ends need to be stocked with login cookies, that's how they bypass the login wall. If you want to self host a bypass you need to create at least one dummy account on that service.
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.
The search is somehow faster than twitter's own search.
Anybody find a good way to use a regex redirect to this that consistently works ?
I don't see an MCP endpoint, what am I missing?
Again, what's the point?
If a site wants your eyeballs it should allow you access without jumping through hoops.
There is nothing of use to be viewed over there.
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
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.
How does this work, does it use the twitter api?
Probably just fetches the page with a login cookie, like Nitter.
I don't think the worldwide trendings are right. The ones I see (with personalization disabled) are not all in arabic (?)
Thanks Peter! Now do the same for the 'gram!
Why don't you do it?
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
You can just ignore a C&D if you have the balls to enrage Elon
Cease and desist in 3... 2... 1...
It does not work for me like xcancel did
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
First off I think you mean trademark, secondly you're allowed to just ignore a C&D, thirdly your trademark is invalid if you don't use it so Elon might not actually have a trademark on Twitter any more
Who in their right mind would take that site seriously?
Are you talking about Twitter or X?
Whatever twitter.now is which is neither.
Related:
Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
Twitter does not have freedom of speech.
Nice, how do you make this freely available?
You've been told for years not to use X, (twitter is now clearly the pre Musk era), but Elon knows you crave his dopamine so he can keep imposing harsher conditions.
To be fair: after a certain billionaire who keeps on raising his right arm and talks about enslaving mankind took over, I lost all interest in twitter. I also think the platform is dead. What we need is a de-centralised system that also works.
X. It's not twitter anymore
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! :-)
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.)
Free speech right? We can call it whatever we want.
"Gulf of America"?
Nope.
not going to be long before they cut access to this app.
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.
A fig leaf
The algorithm is free, it's the data that matters.
Why are people so obsessed about twitter
it doesn't allow mob censorship unlike HN and Reddit. You can't downvote or hide opposing opinions
paypal should have never ever given back Musk the x domain
and ICANN should have nuked it long ago
but all that aside, wtf is anyone still on it
Musk is a mass murderer
apparently the nazis would still be in power today if they just had a web service people were too freaking lazy and addicted to ever quit
and Tesla "FSD" is still trying to murder passengers a decade later but that's also definitely a choice
I mean, that basically is how the Nazis had power
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'
When what they said is that Nazis are bad... literally yes? Literally everyone who disagrees with "Nazis are bad" is literally 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.
DOGE killing a few million people is no secret.
Yeah we get it, you like to hang out at the nazi bar.
Isn't it called X for years now?
Honest question: Why don't we have a UN-operated global social media that is used by all officials worldwide, instead of them using privately owned social media?
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.