XCancel service is suspended until further notice • Hacker News Board

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#691

Post by cjkaminski » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 9:53 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #688

cjkaminski wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 asserti…

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.)

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#692

Post by squirreljak » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 9:53 PM UTC

goyimx.com is still working fine thankfully

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#693

Post by gavinhungry » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 9:57 PM UTC

DavCreator wrote: post #380

https://xxcancel.com is up and redirecting to working Nitter instances.

I put this together this morning:

https://github.com/gavinhungry/nitter-bitter

You can self-host it anywhere, and use the aforementioned Redirector [1] extension:

    ^https://(?:twitter|x)\.com/(.*)
    https://nitter.example.tld/$1

[1] https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#694

Post by shkurski_ » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 10:00 PM UTC

alightsoul wrote: post #639

usernomdeguerre wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 platfor…

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 it legal?

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#695

Post by ajkjk » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 10:01 PM UTC

phforms wrote: post #434

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 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.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#696

Post by immibis2 » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 10:03 PM UTC

sippingabonedry wrote: post #575

immibis2 wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 it's decreased, but not enough.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#697

Post by jonny_eh » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 10:03 PM UTC

ajkjk wrote: post #695

phforms wrote: post #434

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 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 decentral…

You described Bluesky. They did get founded to pursue decentralization, but it's completely ignorable. It largely operated as a centralized service.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#698

Post by immibis2 » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 10:04 PM UTC

j-bos wrote: post #678

immibis2 wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breaking terms of service isn't a crime, at least, although the company is legally permitted to retaliate against it, such as by banning you.

cfaa has broad interpretations

AFAIK it's been interpreted that getting public data while being someone the data holder doesn't like is, unusually, one of the very few things that is not a CFAA violation. Bright Data vs X for example.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#699

Post by mplewis » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 10:05 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #439

sureglymop wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because X is chosen (wrongfully) as the main communications channel of all kinds of important public institutions and people (police departments, city administrations, politicians, etc.). Of course that's a real issue since the whole thing is login gated and inaccessible. But unfortunately it is the reality. So I think something like XCancel is needed.

I have no clue what my local government or any such authority could possibly tweet that would be relevant to me. I have not checked their twitter feeds ever and I am none the worse for wear.

Emergency notifications, mainly.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#700

Post by immibis2 » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 10:06 PM UTC

zzzeek wrote: post #606

immibis2 wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.