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Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

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Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

#361

Post by philipallstar »

smcin wrote: post #309
Implicated wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a horse in this race but I would question the idea that a municipal service has a better reliability record than x/twitter.

But who is publishing the outage information to X/Twitter if not the utility itself? I'd be surprised if they do that more timely and reliably on a third-party platform than their own app. That's not the case for any European or US transit authorities I know. Can any other user of public transport in Paris comment?

The information may be as reliable, but:

1. the service may not be - every small provider has downtime, perhaps proportionally to their size.

2. the tools to update Twitter are well understood, and you can get software that does scheduling of posts across multiple platforms, previews of what posts will look like, etc etc, and said preview works well on the many platforms that people are already using. People doing the updating may prefer to use those tools over what the internal tool gives them.

Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

#362

Post by alansaber »

misstuned wrote: post #341
alansaber wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is good at volume, bad at accuracy and nuance. Of all the tasks to go through with a fine-toothed comb (ie, manually) legal is one.

Genuine question - isn't legal stuff one of the things AI should in theory be very good at? Legalese is like code, in that every word is very strictly defined and there to do a specific job in the text. I feel like that's one of the things AI would be good at writing and interpreting.

It's far from trivial to set up anything more formalised than a loose taxonomy. People have been trying for a few decades now. AI will help automate this formalisation with graphs etc but it's not good enough yet for you to give a judge 13m LOC of mathlic proving your client isn't guilty.

Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

#363

Post by mathverse »

MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #314
dom96 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly seems like a good move. It also isn't likely to be very difficult with the help of LLMs.

Curious as an outsider: what sorts of problems are there in the Nim world, and why would things improve by switching to Go?

Basically lack of polish. Nim's compiler just keeps evolving around unfinished and unpolished ideas never reaching a momentum.

It's a research project of its BDFL and he is alienating the most senior developers and contributors to Nim's ecosystems (ie Zedeus).

Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

#364

Post by usern20260720 »

muppetman wrote: post #139
usern20260720 wrote: post #10

It is sad that Twitter is basically a private closed gate monopoly that people beg to use instead of developing alternatives like RSS

Yeah I keep yelling at Mum “Stop logging onto Twitter and develop and enhance RSS” but lately she’s stopped speaking to me.

macOS mail application used to receive RSS news feeds. It couldn't be simpler for your mom than that. She wouldn't even need to log onto twitter

Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

#365

Post by OroPla »

rsynnott wrote: post #223
OroPla wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia has a whole lot of problems, you just don't notice them, because the media isn't interested in shining a spotlight on it like they do with other platforms and the drama that happens there is fairly well hidden, despite being openly accessible for the most part. People have also been conditioned to mostly trust whatever is on Wikipedia despite years of efforts to hammer it into people that this is not an oka…

> It would be better for there to be a bunch of Wikis that are competing with each other evenly. Having only Wikipedia is not a healthy thing. ... I mean, there _are_ (Conservapedia, Ruwiki, Metapedia, etc). It's just that the non-wikipedia generalist ones are so poorly run that no sensible person would ever use them, and usually have a fairly extreme ideological bent (there's a spectrum; Metapedia originally showed…

Other Wikis nobody knows or uses aren't really alternatives. Just like Odyssee isn't an alternative to Youtube.

Unfortunately Wikipedia exists within a collective blind spot, so I am not expecting the situation to change. At most people will drop Wikipedia in favor of LLMs, which is even worse.

Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

#366

Post by sylware »

Keep in mind that those front-ends are, in general, much more friendly towards noscript/basic HTML browsers than the official front-ends broke a few year ago. (well, nitter was at the time)

Don't think the 'whatwg cartel' will let some web not require their web engines.

Expect shadowpaid hackers to ruin their infrastructure. Don't be a fool, expect the worst (more so when the whatwg cartel is involved).

And if you, yeah you! If you are running an "AI scrapper", have the decency to preserve those front-ends (or get the code and run it yourself).

Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

#367

Post by rob74 »

misstuned wrote: post #335
quadrifoliate wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It almost seems like we need laws that information about public services have to be available on a public website Won't happen in the US/UK because the governments are in Elon's pockets. Won't happen in the EU because they are incapable of getting anything done. So unless you're in a jurisdiction other than the above three I wouldn't hold your breath about any laws being passed about this.

I'm in the UK and tired of basic public services like the railway company posting service updates to X first. I keep a bookmark to the local train company (Northern in my case) on XCancel but while it was down, I was a bit under-informed. The stuff is on their own website, but it seems to appear there after it appears on X, the layout is crap, and there's no way to contact the company other than via X. A lot of priva…

More or less the same over here in Germany, except with WhatsApp, which is only slightly better than X, but at least you are likely to already have it installed because of all your contacts that refuse to use a more secure messaging app...

Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

#368

Post by petcat »

mitxela wrote: post #252
petcat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a case of scraping explicitly public data that was already available to the general public without any extra effort.

Which is exactly what Twitter is?

no twitter requires a login

Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

#369

Post by Staross »

quaintdev wrote: post #35

Somebody needs to figure out how to move millions of people from one platform to other. Otherwise we will never get better platforms and our current techlords will keep getting richer.

I think something that could help is moving together rather than one-by-one. We could have a website where you can register as "ready to move from X to Y when N other people are", when the goal is reached everybody gets a notice it's time to move.

Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

#370

Post by vidarh »

OroPla wrote: post #354
vidarh wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I refuse Nazis access to my house and other people chose to visit my house knowing I won't let Nazis in, I'm not censoring Nazis as I have no influence on their freedom of speech - they remain entirely free to speak elsewhere, to people who are willing to listen. I have no power to stop them from speaking, just to offer those who don't want to listen somewhere where they won't have to. Nobody is forced to join a M…

I never used either Twitter or Mastodon and don't quite understand what people use these platforms for. But I hear folks saying they are there because other people they know are there. How would it work on Mastodon if you want to communicate with two people that happen to have each others instances blocked? Is it like having to use both Twitter and BlueSky or does it solve the problem more elegantly?

If that matters to you, you pick an instance that rarely blocks, and then you can talk to both of them seamlessly.

Occasionally some people are affected because they've picked a major-ish but somewhat block-happy instance, in which case they can either move their account (the experience for a move on Mastodon isn't great but it does work) or create a second one if it really matters to them.

Usually people will find out pretty early on if they're on an instance whose policies they agree with or not, so even if the account migration is jankier than it should be, it's rarely a major problem (in that instance - if instances shut down it's more problematic)

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