I know it’s hard for some people (for understandable reasons), but at some point we have to ignore the X site completely and make politicians and public services/institutions aware that some people do not have or want access to the site. That is the only way anything might change someday. Maybe I’m just being naive here, but what else can you do?
xcancel was amazing and I hope they can continue in some way. But since I have no actual need to go to the X site, I choose to completely ignore it, regardless of who posts what there. Most important things will be in the news anyway or you just pick it up from talking to other people.
The unfortunate part is that each individual who attempts to leave is fighting the Network Effect[0]. It's fighting against the human organism's basic social nature.
If every person wants to leave the platform but X person stays because Y person is there, and Y person stays because Z person is there, and Z person stays because X person is there then it's a feedback loop. Each person wants a better solution or platform, but none end up leaving because of the network effect.
Breaking that dependency involves the individual user but can't be overcome by the individual alone. Over time, the network re-asserts itself and monopolizes the connections.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
I think Twitter is the best counterargument to this defeatism. I don't personally know anyone that uses the platform any more, and I don't recall needing it for anything for years. From that remove, it's now just the platform for lazy politicians, lazy journalists, and scammers of one form or another. If there's more exclusive information there I'm not aware of, I really don't need it.
Yes. And if something truly important should occur on the platform then it will be reported elsewhere.
What do we really think we're missing out on by not using X?
Also, for some reason, AI companies like DeepSeek who would rather post news exclusively there than vibecode their own news site.
Do you actually need that news?
No, but I'm referring to the AI news that gets posted on HN with a former Twitter link, because those companies don't have a proper news site of their own.
And love that after many years, despite going all in on the silly x name, it’s still Twitter to many.
my understanding is twitter is primarily bots at this point
i'm surprised any human is still there
then your understanding seems to be quite limited :)
what even was the point of typing that? it just reads as kindergarten bully on an ipad.
dont see how its bullying? someone is demonstrating a very childish point of view , almost to the point of preaching. which I would say a little bit of critical thinking says is otherwise. why else would so many want xcancel in the first place?
My solution to this is creating bots that repost content on sites like bluesky. The network effect can be overcome because people use a site for the content it has and not necessarily to interact with others
Of course I only do it with accounts that are very obviously intended to be public like news and government accounts otherwise x and meta can argue you were violating user privacy or some shit like that
Is there any service that exists to do this for people?
Like say you want your Twitter forwarded to your Facebook page and email list, you just punch in the logins and it does the rest?
Ideally it would fill in the details like formatting the images/video correctly
There are some examples at https://fedi.tips/crossposting-between-mastodon-and-other-so...
The key point is that you must not post in XTwitter first, but you have to use the crossposter's client as source. Pulling content out of XTwitter, even your own, is onerous.
Many.
Search for social media management tools.
If This Then That?
I used to cross post any Instagram photos to twitter with if this then that. But the platforms have made it harder.
I thought hubspot does that but looking at their website I have no idea what they do..
Is it legal?
Why wouldn't it be? I know we've all got accustomed to the idea that preventing a billionaire from extorting money gets you in trouble, and it usually does, but it's not illegal.
>Why wouldn't it be?
Well, for one, because xcancel was forced to suspend its service.
There's legal as in "what the law says", and legal as in "what the judge will order you to do", and the latter sense is not as clear-cut as we'd want it to be.
Xcancel was accused of using the twitter API. You don't have to use it. You can have a machine vision model process screenshots. You can also process the Dom. You don't offer a freely usable service or software to the public, only the final result. That final result is opinionated according to the very public accounts you want and does not offer broad scope access to accounts. You do not let the public control it nor provide a product to browse to random or posts about anything like nitter. Or you can process the content into your own news account with ai which is what most news accounts do anyways and then it becomes yours.
Is it legal to make the whole world addicted to your product? Litigation, in the same way, is a ticking time bomb for meta worldwide.
xcancel wasn't actually forced to suspend its service. It got two increasingly threatening C&Ds, but nothing actually happened to it, and the creator took it offline in an abundance of caution.
I have a solution for this problem: just delete the fucking account anyway.
problem solved
I deactivated my account when Musk took over, and am not aware of anything I’ve missed since then. Is there anything big that I missed?
I think you're playing dumb on purpose here but in general yes, you are missing out on all the friends and connections and interesting conversations you have not made. I don't know what those are for you, but they're transparently obvious for me in the counterfactual, and a lot of people on the site.
Twitter is far from special. So I guess you're missing out on all the friends and connections and interesting conversations you have not made on Threads, Facebook, Linkedin, instagram, tiktok, reddit, bluesky, mastodon, discord & tumblr.
Also twitter is the worst of all the things I've listed.
Not really relevant for public service announcements like gp is talking about. I just want a live feed of my local services updates. I get weather alerts from my city and county over text (contracted by the government through a third party platform), I would take them as a dedicated app or rss feed or anything. I'm not connecting to my friends or family through a weather alert or train delay notice
I find texting pretty decent but not ideal. Most alert systems offer it already, you know it's going to be a short message, and you'll be informed quickly of things instead of having to reach out somewhere.
Maybe there should be a texting app where you can make pages of contacts to swipe between, and you can customize notifications. If you want to get fancy, maybe local AI to determine if something looks important or not? They'll always have ALERT or something in the message.
RSS was so good for this. No wonder Google had to kill it.
RSS still exists though? Do you mean Google Reader?
By killing Google Reader they essentially killed RSS. Yes, I know there are other clients some of us still use, but Google's was the biggest and most popular.
I don't think I agree with this characterization. If you consider the open standard to be indistinguishable from the proprietary client, I'd argue it was already dead before the client got killed off.
Yes, yes, and yes.
Let's revive RSS.
It's still good, even if it's been on the floor beyond the "five second rule".
If there were an API or reliable way to delete accounts programmatically, you could create a reverse-kickstarter-like site in which you pledged automatic future deletion of your account once a critical percentage of the people you followed (or who followed you) did the same. Action would be suspended for all participants until that critical threshold was reached.
Unfortunate, yes.
Futile? No.
Remember that AT&T once had a firm grip over human communication. That didn't last.
Remember that AOL once had a firm grip over how a massive percentage of the population accessed the internet. That didn't last.
Elon Musk currently has a firm grip on social media (via X) and internet access (via Starlink). This too will not last.
X and Starlink don't even remotely have a "firm grip" over the social media or Internet access markets. They have many active competitors.
Ok. Show your work.
Which social network has larger reach than X? Which social network has stronger influence on humans who make policy decisions than X?
Which internet provider can deliver reliable access to remote regions than Starlink? Which internet provider has manipulated access in contested regions than Starlink?
Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. I don't know. What I do know is that your baseless assertions are meaningless to me. Show the facts and figures that support your claims. That's the only way to avoid being a garden-variety internet troll.
How do you define "reach" and "influence"?
Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube all have more users, more daily active users, more aggregate data transferred.
Excellent question. My definition is admittedly qualitative. I spend a fair bit of time listening to commentary by people who are connected to policy decisions at the state and federal level (in the USA). An unusual amount of people admit to relying upon X as their barometer of public sentiment, despite their intellectual understanding that Elon Musk has his thumb on the scale. Most of them have admitted they understand the "water has been poisoned" but they also claim that all alternatives are inferior. This might not apply to YouTube as much as the others, but I haven't seen evidence that disproves this theory. I'm open to the possibility, for sure. This said, I believe that Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok have a profound affect on large swaths of the population. The evidence I observe suggests that X is doing more work among the people who can text someone who makes decisions. Curious to know more about your POV. What am I missing?
Those are silly questions entirely irrelevant to the point above.
How so? Defend your position.
(edit: I genuinely don't understand how your replies are anything other than ad hominem attacks. Your responses are about as effective as a toddler asking "why?" over and over and over again. Either deliver a substantive counter argument or stop replying.)
(edit 2: I assume you are the one who downvoted this reply. That only adds to the factual evidence that you are struggling to defend your position via legitimate means. This isn't a personal attack. I hoped you would engage in legitimate discourse. Please do better in the future.)
Ad hominem would be if the GP was making a personal attack on you. Saying a question is "silly" is not that.
Downvoting can also mean that the downvoter doesn't think it's worth the time to engage with prose. It's a bit arrogant to assume that a downvote means someone can't come up with a cogent argument against you; the fact that you make that assumption points even more strongly at the idea that it's not worth arguing with you.
Fair points.
I would say that classifying an argument as "silly" without any supporting evidence is borderline ad hominem because it doesn't make a substantive critique of the assertion, and instead colors the character of the opposition. But that shouldn't take away from your position.
As for your suggestion that I am being arrogant, I can see where you're coming from but I also feel as though I'm within the bounds of fairness to push for a reasoned response (instead of an emotional appeal).
All that said, thanks for replying in a way that advances the discourse. Much appreciated.
You assume incorrectly. I flagged your comment for breaking site guidelines, not downvoted. Perhaps you're unfamiliar with how the site works but it's not possible to downvote a reply to one's own comment. The button isn't there.
Okay, how did I break the guidelines per your assessment? I'm genuinely curious.
Why does Starlink matter in a Conversation about X?
Because they are both part of the SpaceX Company. They are intimately tied together.
Only in financial word games, not technically.
> Which internet provider can deliver reliable access to remote regions than Starlink?
Why do remote regions matter? No one relevant lives there.
lololol. Obviously you don't know any Ukranians.
> lololol. Obviously you don't know any Ukranians.
Please take a step back and remember that your original claim was "a massive percentage of the population accessed the internet (via starlink)"
That's demonstrably false. It's a small percentage. Even in Ukraine. You're now moving the goalposts.
No, I did not claim "a massive percentage of the population accessed the internet (via starlink)". Try again.
I said that people in REMOTE regions, by which I mean those who are underserved by traditional internet access such as fiber or coax or twisted-pair, are served by Starlink in significant numbers.
Please give demonstrable facts that dispute this claim if you disagree.
> X and Starlink don't even remotely have a "firm grip" over the social media or Internet access markets. They have many active competitors.
Starlink's market isn't "Internet access" in general. Anywhere you can get fibre, fibre will be faster and cheaper. For many use cases a cell tower works better too, if you are in its coverage area.
Starlink's market is "high bandwidth / low latency Internet access no matter where you are on Earth". And for that it is by far the market leader. Its closest competitors are way behind – second place Amazon's Kuiper has under 400 satellites in orbit, Starlink has over 11,000. So Starlink is over an order of magnitude in front.
If you define a market narrowly enough then pretty much any company has a "firm grip" on some market. That doesn't mean much in terms of overall market dynamics or broader power. My local neighborhood taqueria has a firm grip on the burrito market for a radius of at least 3 miles.
> My local neighborhood taqueria has a firm grip on the burrito market for a radius of at least 3 miles.
This is a bit of a silly comparison though – the market of providing high-speed low-latency Internet access (a highly general-purpose service) anywhere on the planet, versus the market of providing one particular type of food in a small localised area.
Remember AT&T only lost its monopoly because the government forced it to.
Yes, yes! I might be old enough to remember when that happened.
Elon Musk learned from the other two and many others. Unfortunately, Silicon Valey techno-feudalism is built to last.
I agree that SV's regressive culture is a problem. I've seen it up close. I don't have a solution, but I am concerned about where this trend might lead us.
I like this reasoning. Network effect means if a website gets very big it will be very big forever. This is why I get my news from the o rly owl on the world’s most popular website, the OffTopic Forums
Maybe it is different elsewhere but I have seen little reason to use X at all and none of the public services or institutions seems to use it all that much. If they do post to it, they are also posting to all the other major social media services.
All the news you want is available elsewhere and often with far less toxic commentary attached.
Exactly. I do not use it at all and other than never ending propaganda or ridiculous ragebaiting claims I miss nothing of importance.
Very well said, and I'd like to extend the idea much further: Old reddit, Windows debloater, youtube adblock, ... There are plenty of services that turned into customer disrespect, but people do huge efforts to keep them a bit less abusive. Huge kudos to these people, but isn't it time to just let the bad businesses die? If the power users are just as unhappy as everyone else, the exoduses start much faster.
Nobody needs social media of any sort. Everyone should just turn it off and stop making excuses for yourselves to stay addicted. That said, it's easier said than done. Trust me, I know.
I'm not sure I would class Youtube as social media. It can be, but some people just watch it on their TV's and never engage in a social way at all.
We do, just not social media for the sake of extracting maximum ad revenue out of users. We're a widespread society we need large online spaces, but not ones algorithmically designed to addict and derrange users.
HN is social media.
I'm really just here because Google is shit and there are only so many alternative ways to find an aggregation of links to potentially interesting tech articles. I'm hoping to find new blogs or sites to follow, in part so I can stop coming here.
I might give up on it soon though, like I've given up on reddit. Too many junk article lately.
As for my commenting, that's because I, like everyone else here, am a bit of an idiot. HN makes it easy enough to comment that it's hard to resist sometimes.
Could you make your own HN?
about once a year I try signing up for X after friends tell me I really should be on there for news in certain niches.
multiple times now I've signed up with a fake name/handle/email/etc..., sometimes from a VPN, and within 10 minutes a friend usually tells me they see me as a recommendation to follow (they can tell, by the handle).
Insta delete, every time.
This isn't a criticism, but I do think this comment actually raises part of the problem. There are people on twitter telling people they should be on twitter, and it's apparently effective enough that at least some people are still signing up or trying to at least. The world needs more of the inverse, people telling those they care about who are on twitter to get off it.
And likewise, continuing to call it "Twitter" when that is long dead, which has amazingly positive brand association as near as I can tell entirely from the name doesn't do any of us a service.
If you want people to stop using it call it "X". Not something clever, like "Shitter" -- which I personally enjoy! Just call it by what it was intentionally renamed to:
"Oh you mean X? No I don't take part in that hateful stuff, sorry"
I call it "former Twitter" to honour the good times, and maybe because deep down I hope it'll one day escape from fElon Musk's evil clutches.
You should prefer to donate accounts to circumvention efforts rather than deleting them.
explain?
Nitter has to be logged into an account to read tweets so it can show them to you. Elon made it quite difficult to make even one account, let alone many. If you have an unused registered account, some Nitter instance operator would be happy to have it. The same is true for all the other alternative front-ends, like the ones for Instagram, and Play Store.
I tried installing it last year so I could something specific. I forget what it was.
Didn’t follow anybody or provide any interests. Open it up for the first time, and saw a bunch of posts by Elon musk.
Instant delete
> but at some point we have to ignore the X site completely [...] xcancel was amazing and I hope they can continue in some way
To ignore the X site completely would mean to ignore the xcancel site aswell otherwise the 'politicians and public services/institutions' will stay aware that even people who don't use x/twitter still read whatever quips they come up with through xcancel, thus mission accomplished. Same for the seemingly increase of twitter/x toilet epiphany threads that somehow count as worthy enough of the first couple pages of HN.
I expect that the percentage of politicians and public services/institutions who have even heard of xcancel is incredibly small.
The real way to combat this is to write to your representative. The best way is probably to ask questions about something you care about, and when they reply "I've posted about this on X", tell them you are unable/unwilling to use that platform, and as a government official they should not be using a closed service as the sole means of communicating with constituents.
Of course, that probably still won't work, since politicians are lazy, and most care more about fundraising and getting re-elected than doing their jobs, but it's probably the best you can do.
> The real way to combat this is to write to your representative.
I always kind of chuckle at this advice. Is there any case of a representative changing their mind on an issue because someone wrote to them about it? I've written to representatives in the past and you are always going to get one of two outcomes:
1. If you are writing in support of something the representative already agrees with, you'll get a form letter back saying: "Thank you for your input. Representative Jones fully supports initiative X and is fighting to enact it in Congress!"
2. If you are writing in support of something the representative disagrees with, you'll get a form letter back saying: "Thank you for your input. While your input is valuable, Representative Jones is adamantly against initiative X and will not be supporting it in Congress."
I think of lawmakers as unchanging boxes of fixed beliefs and you only get to vote for and change the contents of that box every N years. The real way to combat this is to elect representative who already align with what you want.
My experience of being on the other end of this is quite old (2001-2002) but I doubt the fundamental dynamics have changed.
There are some things for which your representative absolutely has a fixed vote, either because they personally have a strong view or because political constraints (district demographics, internal party pressure, whatever) are significant. For other things, they will likely pattern match against their broad inclinations (for free trade, anti taxes, for green energy, whatever) at least as an initial position. For many issues, though, your representative probably doesn't care much at all, by default.
But the ways things move from the second or third boxes to the first are pressure (enough voters/co-partisans/whoever caring makes inaction politically expensive), money (election campaigns cost cash and so cash buys attention if not actual votes on legislation), or convincement.
If enough people write on some esoteric subject someone in the rep's office will notice, because tracking political issues is part of their job. Staffers help shape reps' policy positions and voting behaviour, at least in part because reps are too busy to pay attention to everything that comes up. And if the campaign is big and noisy enough that it threatens to become a major electoral issue then that will also force a decision one way or another. So it is possible to influence positions and behaviour, but not on every issue and very likely not if you're doing it alone (and don't write large cheques).
You'll definitely get a form letter for anything they have a form letter for, though. And even without then the actual letter is likely written by an intern or junior staffer (or I guess GAI these days). But then when I was reading incoming mail most of that was form letters and pre-printed campaign postcards too, so it was difficult to feel too regretful that the replies were mostly mass-produced rather than artisanal.
Well, there's one or two more ways, but I think it's illegal to even say them.
Politicians are lazy, sure. I also believe that hearing sustained and prolonged resistance to X as a communication platform will make a difference. It's real grassroots effort.
Wouldn't this also apply to people who use X telling people who don't use X what happened?
It's gotten ridiculous. I get it if they have a login wall. I've had a Twitter account for years for occasional reasons. But suddenly it thinks I'm a bot and wants me to scan some QR code, download an app on my phone separately, and take photos of my hand. For whatever reason, that didn't work on my phone, maybe cause it's a Samsung A16 (not to be confused with a16z) they decided is too poor to generate ad money.
Maybe they have legit reasons for all that, but it's not my problem. It's not worthwhile to me to view stuff on there anymore.
Photos of your hand?
What is next? Run some arbitrary command? Make photos of your feet?
We really ought to think what is an acceptable way to verify that someone is an actual human.
"We reserve the right to retain your security feet pics indefinitely, but won't use them for advertising purposes. We may use them for other business purposes, subject to change at any time without notification."
--new TOS
Then, a few months later x.ai announces a new SOTA frontier model, FeetGrok.
They'd use it for AI training purposes <:S
The prospect of going to a website I've never visited before, getting a captcha, and it saying "we don't think those are YOUR feet, access denied" is a little TOO believable.
You know, as a television personality, Jeremy Clarkson is a pretty polarising figure. The gammons see him as all that's wrong with Britain with his pro-EU views, the cartoon student lefties are whining about "oh it's all just about him zoomzoomzooming about dangerously in fast cars", some people actually like him.
But whatever your views, you cannot deny that without his blend of journalistic acumen, wit and humour, and sheer talent, the world would be a poorer place.
Because, quite simply, it would be a world without the "Oh no! Anyway..." meme in it.
And every time I see a link about Twitter losing users or blocking some third-party client, guess what I think?
> And every time I see a link about Twitter losing users or blocking some third-party client, guess what I think?
All we know is, he's called the Stig
I don't understand who all these people are who keep saying 'but I need twitter for my local politicians.' Like really? I have not followed any local politicians or authorities twitter and I still get relevant information. Believe it or not, which you might not if all you do is parrot these comments and I have seen this very comment line of thinking parroted for YEARS about twitter, most people do not follow the city hall twitter if they even have a twitter, and they get by fine. I mean people are citing they need to follow their utility. Are you kidding me? Your utility will post a highly localized service outage that might only affect 1 block of a city or less to their world facing twitter feed? And not simply alert customers via their phone on file as they've done for me forever?
Where I live currently in Europe utility companies need to inform me even in an offline way. There is no need for internet for this.
I'm reading the news with a two week delay for almost a decade, and I haven't missed anything worthwhile. There are exactly zero reasons to read Facebook/Twitter for it. For example, the value of the current US administration's word is zero. When they say something, there is no change in probability distributions in anything anymore. This two week delay makes this very obvious on the occasions when I checked the latest state of some issues. But others are the same, just for different reasons: in reality you have a very small effect on any highly politicized topics. When parents trust their kids less than politicians, then there is not much to do with everyday tools, like arguing (there are some places where there is a value, but those won't ever move the needle).
That is an European privilege. Paper costs money so in the global south companies want to get rid of it asap because money is much more scarce for everyone because many things are imported from industrialized countries
The current American government is basically entirely comprised of people who were terminally online on Twitter and communicating with the right politicians - those people got everything they wanted. This seems like evidence that it actually does matter.
Remember when Obama was lauded as the first 'online' president, with everyone from Redditors to news media gushing about his BlackBerry? What is the point you are trying to make, aside from "VC-funded apps and smartphones and how we use them have naturally evolved since 2008"?
I got through the first trump presidency without reading his tweets. I'm halfway through the second with the same streak. I don't expect this should change. What is the worst he tweets, nukes away? I would rather have my remaining 15 minutes be of peace.
I've always had this thought that the Trump administration's views of other countries comes disproportionately from insanely online users on Twitter and Reddit, who might actually be bots too. Like the thing about not working with European countries "that hate us."
> Your utility will post a highly localized service outage that might only affect 1 block of a city or less to their world facing twitter feed? And not simply alert customers via their phone on file as they've done for me forever?
It doesn't match your very contrived example specifically, but yes essential services in my major metropolitan area provide more useful and timely information via twitter/X than other sources. People don't or can't register for updates from the city or county, so government organizations have no means of publishing information for public consumption other than social media, and twitter was the de facto standard.
Also, many local schools, clubs, etc. used it as their "official" source for updates for years.
You are definitely out of the loop if you can't access it, and places are glacially slow to change.
Is it possible to help or encourage our local municipal services to have either an RSS or BlueSky feed? At this point, it's becoming apparent that putting all the information eggs in the twitter basket is/was a bad idea. This is a place where open source standards should shine.
This is an area where Mastodon ought to shine. Departments/organisations can create their own instances, with named users. Interested constituents follow those users with their client of choice. Direct following means you avoid the federation dramas.
No algorithim means that people get the updates they want when they're posted. Users get a familiar-looking client to bang out the quick updates.
Obviously the issue is someone will need to run it, but if you're not open to public signups then the moderation burden doesn't exist and it's just a case of keeping things updated.
On the last point, it's a lot harder to manage than you're making it sound. A public org isn't going to gate signups.
You wouldn't let Joe Public create an email account on your mail server, why would you let them do so on a mastodon instance?
Sorry, I misread your first comment. So only the org can post and people can only view. Doesn't seem like people would follow it then.
But that's not how Mastodon works.
Like email, I sign up for a Mastodon account on a server that suits my tastes. I then follow other accounts, on other servers, using a client - I use Ivory on the mac & iPhone (because it's made by the same company who made Tweetbot) - and those accounts show up in my feed in chronological order, like Twitter in the old days.
I'm not going to say RSS is inherently inaccessible to normies, because the blogosphere of 20 years ago saw even elderly non-techies happily using it. However, I think the trends in computing in the years since, where most people use the internet solely through popular phone apps, mean that RSS is no longer going to see any significant use. So, a municipality is not doing a palpable service to its constituency by moving communications there.
We even saw it with RSS. Everyone using RSS was lamenting Google Reader going away. Isn't the client supposed to be the most easily replaceable part of RSS?
It's weird that people still lament Google Reader going away.
We've had RSS for about 27 years.
Google Reader was around for less than 8 of those years, and it has now been 13 years since it died.
Normies dont think in protocols, they think in apps.
Websites said "follow our RSS feed," not "follow on Google Reader." Then again maybe normies never used RSS.
The most practical way would probably be to create that feed yourself based on their Twitter feed. You could automate it using some Nitter-like service (please do not scrape public Nitters, but you can run your own Nitter and scrape it as you like). It is generally easier to do something like this yourself than to convince someone else, who does not care at all, to do it. I don't know how you would advertise it.
How about municipal councils looking around at any remaining "mainstream media" local outlets and committing to post relevant notices/updates on their websites?
This is something I wanted to push while working on newsroom CMS projects: giving direct input access to the CMS from external bodies - police, fire, ambulance etc. Posts could be vetted/edited by newsrooms, as with any externally filed copy, but turnaround would be a matter of half-a-minute or so. Either that or enable direct publishing permissions to said authorities.
OK, I am out of the loop. But, my point is, what loop? What is an essential piece of information that was only possible to reach you via twitter? Did this make or break your life recently? Would there truly have been no other way for you to find this information out?
Road closures, youth sports/school schedule changes due to things like weather, etc.
Is it possible to live without this knowledge? Of course. But it's not unreasonable to me that people would want to receive this sort of information or that it is of some value to them, or that they'd rather have it pushed to them in an app on their phone than have to call friends or the school office to find out whether the status of some event has changed.
When there is a road closure it gets pushed to the systems that hook into google maps to reroute navigation. And short of that, there are also detour signs that redirect you around the obstruction.
If something happened e.g. a snow day at school surely you could call the office and find that out. There is no way twitter is the sole source of that sort of information. I guarantee it is on their school website.
You have to remember that the world has to work for the senile old person too.
All my local groups are on facebook. It's horrendous. Could do with a browser plugin which only shows posts I want to see, it might even be good enough to send me back to facebook
I think the last facebook group I was participant of was in school some 15 or 20 years ago before parents were allowed to make their own facebook accounts. Life has been just fine without any such dependence on twitter or facebook. It is always surprising to me how the people who use these networks so religiously cannot imagine living without them. I am here to say that yes, it is possible, and probably more people around your periphery are living like that to success without you even realizing it.
I don't think ignoring is the right choice. This site has power that must be challenged.
One of the biggest issues I see is that governments still use X as a primary form of communication with the public. We need to push back on this with lawsuits.
There is absolutely no reason I should have to agree to a private company's TOS to receive communications from the government. It is a violation of my rights that refusal to agree to the X TOS would cut me off from public information.
It's fine if they post to X, but we need to demand laws that the government isn't allowed to have special private clubs where the general public isn't allowed without giving up some amount of their speech rights.
>One of the biggest issues I see is that governments still use X as a primary form of communication with the public. We need to push back on this with lawsuits.
This.
I’m in the northeast and I’d love to not have to go search x/facebook etc to find out it’s a snow emergency (which city dept will post this?). My city has a website, use it.
This would be totally doable except for a couple of recent changes during the DOGE take-over where federal agencies mandated communication on X as their primary means.
This is clearly illegal as all comms need to be posted in different accessible places as well as the federal register - but that never stopped anybody in this administration from a bit of grifting to drive users to their own platform.
I’m bummed about this service being taken down. I will now just not be able to see updates from folks in the AI field that choose to post there and I’ll rely on aggregators instead.
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No, we don’t have to ignore it completely. You might be unable to tolerate a company CEO having a different worldview to your own, but the rest of us don’t care, and we’ll use whatever online services we like, thank you very much
I feel like the answer is not that hard... someone just needs to make a copy of the basic functionality of twitter with better intentions and not owned by Musk et al. If they are sufficiently trustworthy and competent in how they do it, I really believe that lots of people would be willing and even eager to jump ship immediately.
Mastodon and others tried to do this but they keep spending all this energy on decentralization which is not the problem to solve. The problem is just to be Twitter but (a) not shit, (b) trustworthy, and (c) prosocial. People want to move, just give them somewhere to go and demonstrate more empathy for them than twitter does (not hard).
Implementing this should not be too hard in the AI era and considering that a lot of people would probably donate engineering effort to a Twitter replacement. Paying for it is of course annoying, especially at scale but maybe that's solvable (ideally with a donation model / raising money from people who want to see it exist instead of taking outside investment, or at least limiting the influence of investors so you don't end up making Twitter again). Running it should be easy, just "try to do a good job" (I volunteer, but I don't even use Twitter so I'd probably not be a good candidate). Getting sued for patent violations or something might be a real problem, but maybe it's circumventable, I dunno.
It often feels like every knew large-scale project is corrupted by the Silicon valley funding model (yes I know I'm on a site that has a lot to d with that), so everyone has lost any trust that a new thing will ever be benevolent... but seriously it is not that hard to start a website, that's what Twitter and Reddit and all them did back in the day. The problem is aligning the site to people's morals enough that everybody hypes you up for free. Which ... I think things have gotten so bad now that one could get a lot of free labor if you even start moving in this direction and seem like a serious contender. Although all the VCs are trying to cash in, all the other 'normal' people really just want to live in a safe and happy world where institutions operate prosocially instead of the opposite, and they'll often do whatever they can to manifest that... if somebody just makes it easy to do.
You described Bluesky. They did get founded to pursue decentralization, but it's completely ignorable. It largely operated as a centralized service.
From my vantage point the decentralization stuff distracted them from winning, but I am too ignorant to be sure if that's valid or not.
The ideal twitter clone does, unfortunately, have to clone the "virality" aspect, including the recommendation algorithm, at least at first. A necessary evil, but at least it would be in better hands if it was rebuilt by more prosocial owners.
I agree that the focus on decentralization is a distraction, but Mastodon and Bluesky are perfectly fine alternatives that are just as easy to use as Twitter.
The fact that they have not succeeded in attracting a critical mass of Twitter users to jump ship is all the evidence we need to show that network effects are real, and overcoming them is really hard.
Also, I don't think most people on Twitter "want" to move. I think most people don't care about Musk or his politics, at least not enough to care about leaving his social media site. (And a significant chunk of people in the US, at least, likely are in Musk's camp anyway.)
> someone just needs to
You did the meme. ;) Literally billions of dollars are waiting for you, after you complete this simple task!
Problem is, what's stopping you? What stopping everyone else? Why did everyone that tried so far fail? If the answer to a billion dollar, highly public, problem is trivial, but nobody has done that trivial thing, then that entire aspect of the problem is not actually that important, or even a factor at all, as an http server, serving a cloned twitter is in this case!
I did it on purpose! In one sense it's really hard, of course, but in another it's simple, right? Simple enough that if a bunch of people who skim this a try plus their personal touches, I could easily imagine one of them succeeding.
As with many problems in the world... the first subproblem is that not many people many are very inspired to fight. Which is why it's important to emphasize its straightforwardness.
> at some point we have to ignore the X site completely
I've been doing that for years. Since just prior to Elon's purchase of it. Nothing of value in my life has been lost.
Things like twitter aren't supposed to be worth money anyway :)
In an ideal world nothing would be able to change that.
Edit: not my downvote btw, where did that come from? - - corrective upvote instead contrary to bot action
Not since then, but before it, I could read smart people's opinion there about random topics. Of course, when the takeover happened, almost all of them left already years prior.
There is no such place since. Most of them went back to anonymous internet presence, if at all.
You are naive, yes. It's thier data. You have no claim to it. If you don't like it don't use it.
Or, you know, just be a normal reasonable person and just use X.
We got to get rid of this extremist-esque narrative. X is more unbiased than it has ever been, and Community Notes work better than any other platform's nearest attempts.
maybe my brian is memory holed but twitter used to not require an account which made the whole public square gov thing very valid even if u were banned for political reasons u could still read and be informed.
x requiring an account to even read content from gov officials has to be a massive insane deal breaker for anything gov official.
i hate x, not because of elon but because it is still just twitter where the format breeds the most disgusting human interactions possible. Everyone is performative in every interaction which leads to a net negative. Instragram and meta cannot even claim such a divisive crown although they win on other fronts.
No, bluesky is just yet another twitter with the same fundamental problem because the format is the issue not the politics. At least on bs i can generally read without logging in tho so it wins for me.
No Twitter was also sometimes walled off. Elon Musk actually opened it back at the start.
Instagram is also hard to browse without an account.
It's all so annoying.
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Plenty of smart people on mastodon.
Pretty well everyone who still posts on X is deep fried, smart or dumb. Some of them can tell but can't stop (Nate silver, one of the greens, Zvi) and some seem unaware.
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Holy buzzword-salad, Batman!
In any case X is a pretty decent place, as long as you mute the topics that get annoying. But the Algorithm is quite good at serving you what you engage with.
> as long as you mute the topics that get annoying
People have been saying this since the Dorsey days, they were wrong back then and they're still wrong today.
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Did it way before that.
Shitter was already bad before Elon bought it.
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Twitter stopped publishing stats on its user counts when it went private, so we don’t know if those have gone up, down, or sideways. We do have some numbers for Europe since about 2023 because of reporting mandates, and they seem to show a downward trend.
We could split hairs about numbers or acknowledge that X (and TikTok, and Instagram) still owns the zeitgeist. No normie gives a shit about BlueSky and Threads is anemic considering they gave every Instagram user a free account. I'm being real here.
Certainly it didn't implode and is not failing but it's not clear to me that its user base is increasing from pre-Musk. And Threads supposedly has a similar number of active users.
Twitter had around 230 million monetizable daily active users in 2022 before Elon Musk acquisition. They didn't publish monthly active users. [1]
Twitter IPO S-1 in 2013 said 500 million tweets per day from 215 million MAU and 100 million DAU. "We currently estimate that false or spam accounts represent less than 5% of our MAUs." [2]
2024 Elon Musk claims 600 million monthly active users [3]
2025 SpaceX S-1 Filing 520 million monthly active users. [4]
2026 Also SpaceX S-1 Filing 550 million monthly active users. 350 million daily posts. "The total number of supported accounts may include fake, spam or bot accounts if they are active" [4]
Threads hit 500 million monthly active users in June 2026 [5]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/28/twitter-twtr-earnings-q1-202...
[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312513...
[3] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1793779530282443086
[4] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...
[5] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/metas-threads...
Do we actually have proof that X is more popular now than it was then?
X is either dying, or this is a 550+ comment discussion about how we cannot divorce ourselves from it. It can't be both, Schroedinger's X.
Maybe X hasn't increased userbase, and nobody uses BlueSky, and there are some people on HackerNews who complain a lot about X.
Maybe it's decreased, but not enough.
Sure it can.
If HN has a bubble of X users
BTW if BlueSky is fading to obscurity why did a post about how they put their logo on their screenshots got 715 points
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338459
Schrödinger‘s BlueSky?
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How many of the userbase are real people and how many are bots?
I don't know, but the people that hate Elon and blame everythng on Jews are on X, whereas the people that don't aren't on Bluesky.