You actually can edit your redirects in Firefox Mobile (at least it works in Nightly). There is a focus bug in the Edit Redirects popup.
Tap the Edit Reditects button. Nothing seems to happen, but then tap the back-arrow at the top. Go to your Firefox tab switcher, and you should now see a "REDIRECTOR" tab. This is the editor.
I used to have an extension per each domain then I've decided to publish regurlator https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/regurlator/jfgfmidm... ... this case would be like `^https:\/\/(?:x|twitter)\.com\/(.+)?$` `https://xcancel.com/$1` so you have a single extension with as many rules as you like and you can download/share/restore rules with ease (it's just a JSON file).
Was just looking for a more general extension like this, thanks!
Just a small nitpick / feature request:
I try not to install extensions that require "Read and change all your data on all websites" permission, so may I ask you to change it to something less general, such as requiring access to specific websites once the corresponding new URL is added to a white list?
I saw some Chrome extensions doing this as of late.
https://github.com/pritkr/predirect is also there for many frontends like invidious,searxng,nitter,scribe etc,it's default list of instances is currently outdated but it's customisable
Aside from political or social reasons, X is a terrible platform.
More often than not, I get a blank page, something didn't load.
If I get content, it's (randomly) behind a registration-wall.
Or it shows confusing cookie banners that half the time don't even work. (Dev console full of js errors)
So I don't even bother anymore. This service is technically so fragile and unstable, it's not worth the click.
Aside from how it's socially and businesswise broken. Because I have looked into some of the errors and issues and they'll only occur for "anonymous users" and not for twitter users. They're oftencaused by (normal vanilla) adblockers or privacy protection.
So I dare say they're either malicious, deliberate. Or lack of interest/resources for non-registered and/or privacy-aware users
I find the combination of a Grok button on every post to real time fact check it, along with eventual notifications when a Community Note is added to something you previously interacted with goes a long way to making it the most trustable of all social media platforms.
I don’t see any similar attempts to transparently live fact check on any other platform.
I've seen so many right-wingers self-own themselves when asking Grok to either debunk a left-supporting article or back up a right-supporting one. I've seen people refer to Grok as Elon's Little Nazi Bot, but aside from that one afternoon where it referred to itself as "Mecha-Hitler", that label is far from the truth. Grok tends to actually be pretty factual.
Why does "a Grok button on every post to real time fact check it" increase your trust, given the obvious and open control Musk has over it? When Grok disagreed with him, he kept saying they'd "fix" it, and that's not to mention that infamous "white genocide" issue. It's undeniable that Musk is using his control to align Grok with his own opinions.
How does that not decrease your trust? I can't understand the thought process.
Because when I take the time to spot check it more deeply, it's usually pretty accurate and balanced. Having it built right in, free to use makes it convenient.
I don't all the time, because that would take forever, but every month or so I'll do a deep dive on the sources of something I'm reading about. Strongly recommend that people periodically do this, especially on topics where you catch yourself having a strong reaction such as anger or immediate validation of your view point.
Are you checking general topics, or also specifically ones that Musk has "fixed"?
My concern wouldn't so much be that general information is incorrect, but that anything Musk has opinions on - which seems to be a great number of topics, many of which are completely detached from his companies etc. - has an unacceptable chance of being deliberately manipulated. This is easy to spot when he tries to convince people of his "white genocide", but we don't know what other topics he's "fixed", and you specify that you don't verify all the time.
How do you know you're not being fed another "white genocide" if you don't verify? I wouldn't be as concerned with other AIs because we haven't seen as explicit manipulation as we've seen with Grok, but that seems to be explicitly built to distribute Musks opinions.
I'm 45 years old and I treat every bit of news I read on the internet or otherwise with a large glass of skepticism, whether it came from an AI or anywhere else. My default assumption is that whoever is reporting is pushing an agenda; seldom misreporting facts but often leaving out context that affects framing.
I appreciate Community Notes and Grok for the closest thing to a real-time ability to call it out that exists.
My default AI query on any topic or story is, "Please validate the details of this story and compare to other sources to identify any critical information from other publications that was missing from this source. Highlight those differences."
It gives me a validation, a comparison and helps me to identify the bias/context framing that's going on pretty quickly. I haven't seen many AI sources that can fact check things in real time like Grok can, like Maduro news the other day.
I think you're hitting all the various bot walls. They sometimes deliberately break and show stale content so bots and scrapers don't know they're blocked. If you're logged in everything just works.
i just set up caddy proxy to redirect x.com to xcancel.com
{
local_certs
order reverse_proxy before file_server
}
x.com, www.x.com {
tls internal
reverse_proxy https://xcancel.com {
header_up Host xcancel.com
}
}
I think I installed my caddy cert on my devices so the browser wouldn't throw a fit, but this works on my mobile devices as well with a dns record to point to this caddy instance (and a wireguard tunnel back home).
any improvements to this approach would be appreciated.
I'm using https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ with a couple custom rules. Unfortunately, it appears the author has died (https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector#tribute), and the project is in a maintenance state. But it does exactly everything I need, and I disabled the auto-update, so I should be safe from any takeover attacks. Thank you, Einar.
Was going to mention Redirector too. Excellent tool/extension. Didn't know about Einar. It seems the next most prolific contributor has taken over maintenanceship. But, yeah, for time being works fine as is. (Didn't know tool was that old--has existed ~20y!--either.)
They should really update those links. Could be a coincidence but about half seemed to redirect me to a service that was discontinued or continued under a different name.
Twitter used to have a mobile version which was almost usable compared to regular, what happened to that? Doesn't seem to be working or it's actively redirecting me back to regular.
If that's more like what you're after, Control Panel for Twitter [1] has a bunch of features which undo some of the X-era changes (including continuing to use it via twitter.com, and using the old Messages interface instead of Chat)
It obviously can't fix the damage done to the product as a whole, nor the result of the peverse incentives introduced by boosted Tweets and Premium payouts, but it can lessen some of the personal effect of those (e.g. hiding replies from Premium accounts you don't follow) and keep you on a purely chronological timeline of nothing but what the people you follow are actually saying when X tries to make it otherwise (just last week they tried to make Following algorithmic by default)
If you use Dillo, with dilloc (from a git build, you need socket control support in the configure flag) and a menu command you can do it but not automatically.
Maybe w3m has some plugin to achieve the same too.
Xcancel is not for writing; it is for reading without needing an account. Something that used to be trivial on Twitter until a year or two before Elon bought it. And this:
> you ll never have even an ounce of mind the moment you open anything on x
is not really the case if you know what you are looking for. I never lost my mind reading Ryan Florence, who writes on various challenging frontend topics. Or Ben Lesh, who, on occasion, would write something about observables. Or Uncle Bob, who might rant at something related to software development.
Definitely, 80% of the content is generated by foreign agitators, mostly bots, the other 20% is shared between terminally online people and people who didn't realise they're interacting with bots
Don't look at the "For you" curated feed. If you only look at the "Following" feed and you follow sane, smart people, then your experience on X will be much better.
i have tried that multiple times. the algorithm is sneaky af. slowly and steadily it starts pushing ragebaiting posts to you even if you dont intend to. eventually one fine day you open your account and boom, we are back to fighting over inconsequential stuff
I never had an account past the point where Elon took over, but even twitter before (when I had an account there, once) had tons of issues. I remember twitter emailing me about "your tweets are too mean!" (in style). I don't think my criticism was mean at all - it was accurately to the point. This is where censorship kicks in, when some central authority attempts to regulate what people write and say.
The day the sale to Musk became final is the day I deleted my account and blocked the domains on the firewall here. I have yet to find a single reason to regret that decision and I do not understand local and national authorities as well as other public entities for not doing the same thing. They are giving Musk more power and the only thing that will eventually happen is that he will abuse that power.
I have to agree -- I generally avoided Twitter/X over the past decade. I started poking around in there once in a while the last few months and everything time I'm left exasperated. 'I can't believe people believe any of this!!"
This is like going to a bar then getting mad because the bar owner really wants everyone to consume excessive amounts of overpriced alcohol.
Meanwhile there are people are going to the bar having a decent time and meeting interesting people.
Obviously I think you should do whatever is best for you, so this isn't a recommendation or criticism, but X is fine if you use it right. The issue you describe really only applies if you're mindless scrolling on the "for you" page – something X is very happy to let you do if that's how you want to use it. However this problem isn't unique to X, you'll find most businesses are happy to exploit people like this for profit.
On X if you curate lists of interesting users or look for content within specific communities you'll find it much, much more productive.
The reason sites like xcancel.com even exist is because people know there's some really interesting stuff on X which they want to view. You can improve the signal to noise if you decide to actively curate your own experience on X rather than handing that responsibility to X and your limbic system.
I think there are some people who genuinely can't control themselves though, so for them, yes, I agree – say out of the bars, stay out of McDonalds and stay away from X.
I guess it would be like that, if the bar owner was a seig-heiling nazi [0] who always brings his nazi friends [1][2], and spends most of his time in the bar actively trying to start fights between other patrons, to the point that people who used to go just for fun have left for other bars [3].
Also the bar makes and distributes child pornography [4][5][6].
(I typed out a reply to the above but the gp got flagged into oblivion before I hit submit so I've copy pasted it into the only non-reactionary descendant thread for pastry posterity)
Reply to the original now-flagged comment:
---
This.
I might reword your statement to "musk isn't notably worse than...", & I will say twitter has significantly declined in many ways since he took over - both the software quality (many things no longer work - especially e.g. search - & people just frustratingly accept it because broken window theory I guess) & also many of the new features being objectively horrific (like Grok generating CPM on demand without ramifications).
However at its core Twitter is still the same Twitter it always was in terms of the toxic but politically engaged & zeitgeist-relevent live community discussion that takes place there. Reddit may rival it within some narrow selective niches but there's nothing else giving us what Twitter is giving us in terms of being connected to what is happening in international political culture. On both sides of the spectrum: conservative discourse is a lot more broad & active on Twitter than on Truth Social or similar, & outside of weird insular tankie Discord or Matrix servers, Twitter is also where it's at for leftist discourse; Bsky & Mastodon are both deserts.
It's only "objective" if you accept the beneficiaries of those donations as "objectively" benign.
I don't fully agree with the gp's statement - Musk is at least a little worse than most - but Gates in particular is a terrible counter-example. Especially in light of recent document releases.
Without commenting on Mike's tone in this instance, nobody can be universally friendly, in all situations: many friendlinesses conspire to yield an aggregate unfriendliness, so it's important to avoid those particular friendlinesses (or otherwise mitigate the issue). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
I dont use x, but I use this for redirects to reddit;
I create a two bookmarks in a folder called redirects in the bookmarks toolbar for easy access.
when I click on a link to reddit, I click on the bookmark and it automatically redirects to reddit.nerdvpn.de or redlib.privacyredirect.com. there are many others
I assume the use case is for people who don't have a twitter account but encounter twitter links from time to time (Twitter's been broken for non-logged-in users since shortly after Naughty Old Mr Car took over, and even before his reign was sometimes flaky for them).
More of a "Ugh, I clicked a mystery link, and it's Twitter" situation for me. A rare case for sure, but I'm petty enough that adding even one (legit, non-bot) MAU irks me.
Define depending. I don't post on it and I don't care much about its algorithmic timeline, but if I didn't use it I'd miss out on the announcements and posts from several people and companies I'm interested in. The alternative is cutting myself out from those, not just from Twitter itself.
Xcancel.com is a site that archives discussions that took place on a site I don't want to visit. What's wrong with that?
Similarly archive.org maintains copies of the Fox News website in the past. I don't see that as sad. If anything, it's a way to keep these sites accountable because they can't just memory-hole the content they once hosted.
> How about just admitting the things you hate? Then you can just drop it and live a happier life.
These are two very separate things. I hate X. That doesn't mean I hate the few remaining people on there who still post things I wish to see. It's an annoyingly good source of artwork. Many migrated/dualpost to Bluesky, but far from all.
For some similar real world example:s I hate (all?) the local grocery stores and other shops I buy food from. That doesn't mean I'm going to stop buying food from them. I'm not a fan of any of the local electronics shops, but sometimes they're the only choice if I want a local warranty, which I wouldn't get if I imported one. The actually good option in both of these cases simply doesn't exist in the first place, and doing nothing is rarely a desirable option.
Honestly I barely see the use of this, I've ""needed"" to read a twitter thread like once in my life, I can't imagine needing it so often that a dedicated extension makes sense.
Also, I only adopt new browser plugins very sparingly, because the chance of some random extension getting bought out by a shadowy ad and malware firm is way too high, and Mozilla doesn't assure me with the level of vetting they do (nonexistent, compared to F-Droid or any mainstream linux distro.) Why is this such a problem for Mozilla? They even try to make it difficult to get extensions from anybody but them, so a third party extension store that actually does due diligence is basically off the table. I can't even install extensions straight from a developer's github, which wouldn't be as good as a trusted 3rd party repo, but still better than Mozilla's status quo. In fact, so called userscripts loaded through one trusted extension actually feel a lot safer than normal extensions.
I think you're either over- or underthinking this. I don't want to have an X account, but I do sometimes want to follow a link to a specific tweet and be able to view the surrounding context. So sites like xcancel and nitter are useful to me.
> So, in other words, you want the cargo, but without the tiring "pay for it" aspect?
I'm not trying to be difficult, but I'm not quite sure what this means! In literal terms, I want the ability to read tweets, see threads and replies, and view a user's tweets chronologically, and I don't think the second and third things are possible on X.com without an account. I don't want an account for various reasons, including that I don't want any temptation to become a regular or active user.
The idea that we can independently decide what to ignore in life is a fallacy I think. Not read regularly sure, but we need to know what's written on X in some cases when it could be important for news or politics.
When the information is "what exactly did person X tweet", then yeah. I'm in favour of mostly avoiding X, and I make a point of not spending significant time on it or actively participating. But sometimes, I want to follow a link to a tweet that someone whose work I'm reading thinks is relevant -- or I want to see what a specific person has been saying publicly lately, and it happens that X is one of the main places they do that.
Somewhat related: more than half of my Firefox extensions are to fix YouTube (no shorts, no autoplay in playlists, more videos on the home page, no AI dubs or title translation (plus sponsorblock)). I don't hate it but I hate its progressive enshittification.
Though that's quite different from X; while the issues with YouTube are mostly plain old enshittification, the issues I have with X are more political (thus, I do hate it).
Unfortunately the alternatives aren't much better. Bluesky now does the same BS where they demand an account if you just want to read replies to a tweet or whatever they call that at bluesky.
Huh, no it doesn't? Threads work fine when logged out on Bluesky (unless a post has been set by the author to logged-in users only, in which case it'll be hidden; this is fairly rare tho).
To add to that, this option only limits visibility on official Bluesky app/website. The data for this post is still available and third-party clients can make use of it. Hence what GP asks already exists: https://skyview.social/.
No they don’t. That is an opt-in setting that a user can put on their profile to only have logged in users see their content. The default is open viewing.
Ah ok, I don't use bsky much but I got linked there on another HN post. I could see that but when I clicked on replies I got a login prompt just like twitter.
I normally use nostr more because that really is decentralised. Also mastodon. Though I don't like the short message twitter style blogs anyway. So Lemmy really is my favourite (too bad about all the tankies though)
A bigger problem with BS is the rabid and - to use a phrase often used by them - toxic user base which seems to derive energy from pouring its frenzied opinions on whatever Trump, Musk and those in their general surroundings are supposed to be guilty of. If there was ever a case of the pot telling the kettle it is black it is the b.s. pouring out of a substantial fraction of the denizens of BS who have turned the place into what they accuse X of being and then some.
You're really selling me on bluesky lol. I have no time for toxic masculinity and conservatism.
Though I tend to hang out at fediverse instances that are more lgbt specific and not that political, I'm just sick of politics, I don't believe in democracy anymore since my own country went 30% to the extreme right party. I just hang out with like-minded people and avoid everyone else.
Isn't the concept of 'lgbt' (etc.) inherently political? I never come across the acronym without it being bandied around in a political context. Also, being with 'like-minded people' is, again, political just as intentionally trying to interact with people outside your personal bubble. That's what makes it so hard to 'keep out politics' since just about everything has been made political: from what you eat to what you work with to what you read to where you live, where and how you travel, with whom you speak and, yes, your sexual preferences and everything else. What music you listen to, what books you read, what (if any) movies you see, everything.
And no, BS will most likely not be your place. Even if you're welcomed now you'll have to keep walking on eggshells to make sure you never violate the current and every-changing unwritten rules and regulations and dictions and dogmas or you'll be quickly ousted as not being pure enough. Especially if you don't want to talk politics - and with 'talk politics' I mean agree with and verbally support the current thing. If you're one of the ideological puritans who're in the forefront of ousting infidels you'll sooner or later be hoisted on your own petard so the only way to win that game is by not playing it.
No lgbt is not political. It was made political by our enemies who think they have a say in what consenting adults do in their bedroom.
In lgbt spaces it's much more free for someone to be as they are, the only thing that's not allowed is judging others. No phobias, no ageism etc. And we don't generally talk about politics other than how to survive in the current climate.
I would most equate it with rave culture I think. That openness and acceptance of being different.
> Isn't the concept of 'lgbt' (etc.) inherently political?
I mean in the sense that literally everything is political, yes, I suppose so. Certainly if you ask, say, a Marxist, then yes. But in that sense, so is, say, a chocolate bar.
In the more narrow everyday sense of the word, though, nope, my mere existence isn't a political matter.
> In the more narrow everyday sense of the word, though, nope, my mere existence isn't a political matter.
It isn't, but neither is your existence 'lgbt' since you are not defined solely by your sexual orientation. You may have been gathered - by whom? - under this moniker but had nobody ever thought to create an identity category related to sexual orientation your existence would not have been changed in any way. It is the fact that one of your characteristics has been turned into a 'membership card' of a specific identity which makes 'lgbt' political.
I'm left-handed and as far as I know - ... - there is no identity category related to handedness (yet). If one were to be dreamt up by someone and that person decided I would be counted in as a member of this identity group and be represented by some self-appointed spokesperson my handedness would have been politicised. It would not make a whit of difference as far as my 'existence' were concerned, I'm left-handed with our without a related identity group.
Okay, so on _your_ basis (that it is an identity), being, say, a bird-watcher, or a nerd, can be an identity, and is thus political.
(Ditto for left-handed people to some extent; less of a thing these days, but there _was_ a time they were kinda treated as an outgroup in many places.)
They turned what was supposed to be a refuge from the 'hate' and 'toxic ${subject}' of Musk-owned X into a hive of 'hate' and 'toxic ${subject}', the only difference being that on BS the 'hate' and 'toxicity' is aimed at X, Musk, Trump and those who dare to trespass outside of the desired narrative of the day. BS is for the 'left' what e.g. Gab is for the 'right': an outpost for the looney fringe. On both Gab as well as BS you may be able to find some areas which are not suffused with ideologically driven discourse but that is the exception to the rule.
If you're a happy participant of BS I wish you good luck. If you're not using the site/service yet but plan to do so I advice you to have a good look around the place before you commit too much time and effort in it.
There's Twitter links on the frontpage of HN right now. Sure, I don't have an account but until _nobody_ interesting has an account I have to use XCancel. The UX for signed out users is deliberately bad.
I never liked Twitter and I like X just as little but I don't 'hate' them. I use libredirect to redirect to my own instances of Nitter, Redlib and Invidious (and more services but these are the 'big' one) not because I 'hate' X, Reddit and YouTube but because I don't want them to track me, I don't like ads and using these services through proxies makes then work on hardware which would totally bog down were it not for the proxies. It is amazing how much useless guff can be cut away from these while improving the user experience.
If more people behaved like this, X would never be a problem, because it wouldn't exist. But most people are opportunists and just want to use, without thinking about consequences.
Agree. I have the X domain blacklisted in my Pihole.
Remember when Reddit mods made a whole show of virtue signaling about banning links to X, but most of those same subreddits’ top content (and 20% of the front page) was screenshots of X?
A lot of people are unwilling to withstand even a bit of discomfort to stand up for their supposed principles.
it doesnt sound sustainable anyway, you would need somebody to go through each post to check for twitter screenshots. blocking a certain domain is automated, i would imagine
i find it annoying that whenever there is a new browser extension on HN, i ask for a "firefox version" to which the response is almost always kneejerk "eww no" or something to that end.
So to see a firefox extension, that's refreshing. I hope you continue working on it and help improve the extension ecosystem
The same people bemoaning the war on general purpose computing or the surveillance state happily using Chrome has always been a truly bizarre disconnect I’ve never understood.
Maybe it’s age? I used Firefox since firebird, and Phoenix, and Netscape, but saying “try Firefox” might feel like talking about an archaeological relic to a 28 year old who has never even seen Firefox running.
They all rely on Google and Chromium's browser engine in the end, so make of that what you will. Firefox (plus its derivatives) and Safari are the only two other options if you want a different browser engine today.
I talked to brave supporters and they all say "Firefox is a pita to modify" but we have had waterfox and other derivatives, floorp and others for decades.
In the end, Brendan is the one who does not like Firefox for personal reasons and that's why brave isn't based on Firefox. Personal reasons but brave fanboys don't see it
I see that many of you still call it twitter. I get if it's a protest, but current X seems very unlike twitter, so I don't understand why it should be called by that name.
I think all of us who does this strongly prefer the old name. It doesn't have to be protest; it's personal preference that doesn't yet hinder understanding. When the majority forgets what twitter was and we start getting blank stares, then, if X is still alive, we'll probably have to call it X.
The technology itself hasn't changed, but almost everything else (owner, headcount, moderation, userbase etc. etc., not to mention the name of course) has changed dramatically...
Reddit-style? Why would you say reddit style, and not facebook-style, mastodon-style, or bluesky-style? At least Reddit is arranded thematically, and Twitter is arranged around individuals; this is quite a significant difference.
Interesting. To me, reddit is much closer to bulletinBB (as I remember from phpBB) than twitter. Reddit is like Hacker News in that regard.
What makes the reddit style more similar to Twitter than to bulletin board, in your mind? And do we have a modern example of the bulletinBB style since phpBB?
The term "X" is already in common usage: primarily as a letter. If I said "I saw on X" out loud, most people would have no idea what I was talking about; "They saw on _a letter_?"; "Are they saying some kind of algebra?"; "Did they forget where they saw it and X is a placeholder?"; etc.
You could disambiguate by saying "X Dot Com", but that's longer and more awkward to say than Twitter.
Essentially, "X" as a name for Twitter is a confusing, poorly-forced meme that most folks don't care to entertain.
Every second spent arguing this point, or spent saying the words "X, formerly twitter", is free advertising for a multi billion corporation.
Why are you wasting syllables giving it free advertising?
It was a sewage when named twitter, it's a sewage now. At least "twitter" has the benefit of being unambiguous. X is not. X can be literally anything, or specifically X11, XOrg (x.org).
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/redirector/
Not only do I translate x.com -> xcancel.com, but
- cnn.com -> text.cnn.com
- youtube.com -> inv.nadeko.net
- instagram.com -> imginn.com
And more.
Regular expressions allow translations of paths for the redirection, so it does not just happen at the top level.
Tap the Edit Reditects button. Nothing seems to happen, but then tap the back-arrow at the top. Go to your Firefox tab switcher, and you should now see a "REDIRECTOR" tab. This is the editor.
Just a small nitpick / feature request: I try not to install extensions that require "Read and change all your data on all websites" permission, so may I ask you to change it to something less general, such as requiring access to specific websites once the corresponding new URL is added to a white list?
I saw some Chrome extensions doing this as of late.
https://libredirect.github.io/
javascript:(function(){const p=['https://x.com','https://xcancel.com'],u=location.href,i=p.findIndex(x=>u.startsWith(x));if(i!==-1)location.href=p[(i+1)%p.length]+u.slice(p[i].length)})();
https://gist.github.com/dobladov/62c4be59d774347cb480b115969...
But I never trust extensions, I do it manually.
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/social-switch...
And set it to ImgInn for Instagram
Use this extension to setup a redirect https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/redirector/
https://libredirect.github.io/
Aside from political or social reasons, X is a terrible platform.
More often than not, I get a blank page, something didn't load.
If I get content, it's (randomly) behind a registration-wall.
Or it shows confusing cookie banners that half the time don't even work. (Dev console full of js errors)
So I don't even bother anymore. This service is technically so fragile and unstable, it's not worth the click.
Aside from how it's socially and businesswise broken. Because I have looked into some of the errors and issues and they'll only occur for "anonymous users" and not for twitter users. They're oftencaused by (normal vanilla) adblockers or privacy protection.
So I dare say they're either malicious, deliberate. Or lack of interest/resources for non-registered and/or privacy-aware users
I don’t see any similar attempts to transparently live fact check on any other platform.
I've seen so many right-wingers self-own themselves when asking Grok to either debunk a left-supporting article or back up a right-supporting one. I've seen people refer to Grok as Elon's Little Nazi Bot, but aside from that one afternoon where it referred to itself as "Mecha-Hitler", that label is far from the truth. Grok tends to actually be pretty factual.
How does that not decrease your trust? I can't understand the thought process.
I don't all the time, because that would take forever, but every month or so I'll do a deep dive on the sources of something I'm reading about. Strongly recommend that people periodically do this, especially on topics where you catch yourself having a strong reaction such as anger or immediate validation of your view point.
My concern wouldn't so much be that general information is incorrect, but that anything Musk has opinions on - which seems to be a great number of topics, many of which are completely detached from his companies etc. - has an unacceptable chance of being deliberately manipulated. This is easy to spot when he tries to convince people of his "white genocide", but we don't know what other topics he's "fixed", and you specify that you don't verify all the time.
How do you know you're not being fed another "white genocide" if you don't verify? I wouldn't be as concerned with other AIs because we haven't seen as explicit manipulation as we've seen with Grok, but that seems to be explicitly built to distribute Musks opinions.
I appreciate Community Notes and Grok for the closest thing to a real-time ability to call it out that exists.
My default AI query on any topic or story is, "Please validate the details of this story and compare to other sources to identify any critical information from other publications that was missing from this source. Highlight those differences."
It gives me a validation, a comparison and helps me to identify the bias/context framing that's going on pretty quickly. I haven't seen many AI sources that can fact check things in real time like Grok can, like Maduro news the other day.
That's my point. That's the problem I am addressing.
You present that as a solution. I presented it as a problem.
I do prefer to use nitter.poast.org, xcancel has some annoying bot/ddos protection that makes it take longer to load.
I've just installed it and tested it on a link from a HN topic which worked exactly as advertised.
After trying a few others I do think I was a bit unlucky with my first few tries.
It obviously can't fix the damage done to the product as a whole, nor the result of the peverse incentives introduced by boosted Tweets and Premium payouts, but it can lessen some of the personal effect of those (e.g. hiding replies from Premium accounts you don't follow) and keep you on a purely chronological timeline of nothing but what the people you follow are actually saying when X tries to make it otherwise (just last week they tried to make Following algorithmic by default)
[1] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-twitter
If you use Dillo, with dilloc (from a git build, you need socket control support in the configure flag) and a menu command you can do it but not automatically.
Maybe w3m has some plugin to achieve the same too.
Also: https://farside.link
- like honestly, dont. i have realized lately that x is full of ragebaiting and other algorithmic stuff to make you invested into it.
- you ll never have even an ounce of mind the moment you open anything on x
- good time to make a new year resolution, delete your account on x and say a permanent goodbye. they are trying hard to lure you back in
> you ll never have even an ounce of mind the moment you open anything on x
is not really the case if you know what you are looking for. I never lost my mind reading Ryan Florence, who writes on various challenging frontend topics. Or Ben Lesh, who, on occasion, would write something about observables. Or Uncle Bob, who might rant at something related to software development.
There are still people there who are fun to read.
I am not a heavy user and I genuinely did not know this was an option. My experience is so bad I feel embarrassed opening the application in public.
You may have saved my sanity
And... Then I remember it's rage bait.
Better to just read a book.
Meanwhile there are people are going to the bar having a decent time and meeting interesting people.
Obviously I think you should do whatever is best for you, so this isn't a recommendation or criticism, but X is fine if you use it right. The issue you describe really only applies if you're mindless scrolling on the "for you" page – something X is very happy to let you do if that's how you want to use it. However this problem isn't unique to X, you'll find most businesses are happy to exploit people like this for profit.
On X if you curate lists of interesting users or look for content within specific communities you'll find it much, much more productive.
The reason sites like xcancel.com even exist is because people know there's some really interesting stuff on X which they want to view. You can improve the signal to noise if you decide to actively curate your own experience on X rather than handing that responsibility to X and your limbic system.
I think there are some people who genuinely can't control themselves though, so for them, yes, I agree – say out of the bars, stay out of McDonalds and stay away from X.
Also the bar makes and distributes child pornography [4][5][6].
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VfYjPzj1Xw
1: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67446797
2: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/29/23981928/elon-musk-ad-bo...
3: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar
4: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/05/india-eu-investigate-musks-x...
5: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/06/x-grok-...
6: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/grok-says-safeguard...
Banality
That aside - never heard of xcancel and it seems great!!!
Reply to the original now-flagged comment:
---
This.
I might reword your statement to "musk isn't notably worse than...", & I will say twitter has significantly declined in many ways since he took over - both the software quality (many things no longer work - especially e.g. search - & people just frustratingly accept it because broken window theory I guess) & also many of the new features being objectively horrific (like Grok generating CPM on demand without ramifications).
However at its core Twitter is still the same Twitter it always was in terms of the toxic but politically engaged & zeitgeist-relevent live community discussion that takes place there. Reddit may rival it within some narrow selective niches but there's nothing else giving us what Twitter is giving us in terms of being connected to what is happening in international political culture. On both sides of the spectrum: conservative discourse is a lot more broad & active on Twitter than on Truth Social or similar, & outside of weird insular tankie Discord or Matrix servers, Twitter is also where it's at for leftist discourse; Bsky & Mastodon are both deserts.
Gates and Buffet donated millions to public health initiatives. Musk has not. So this is just objectively not true.
I don't fully agree with the gp's statement - Musk is at least a little worse than most - but Gates in particular is a terrible counter-example. Especially in light of recent document releases.
I create a two bookmarks in a folder called redirects in the bookmarks toolbar for easy access.
when I click on a link to reddit, I click on the bookmark and it automatically redirects to reddit.nerdvpn.de or redlib.privacyredirect.com. there are many others
javascript:(function(){if (location.host.endsWith('.reddit.com') && (location.host !='new.reddit.com') ) location.host='redlib.privacyredirect.com';})()
javascript:(function(){if (location.host.endsWith('.reddit.com') && (location.host !='new.reddit.com') ) location.host='reddit.nerdvpn.de';})()
here is the same thing for x.com redirects to xcancel.com
javascript:(function(){if (location.host.endsWith('.x.com') && (location.host !='new.x.com') ) location.host='xcancel.com ';})()
saves having loads of addons
People hate a service, but they depend on it so much they create whole codebases to cope with it.
Depending on things we hate is a tragedy.
How about just admitting the things you hate? Then you can just drop it and live a happier life.
Unless you are of course somehow required/forced to use X, then I'm all for projects like these.
Similarly archive.org maintains copies of the Fox News website in the past. I don't see that as sad. If anything, it's a way to keep these sites accountable because they can't just memory-hole the content they once hosted.
These are two very separate things. I hate X. That doesn't mean I hate the few remaining people on there who still post things I wish to see. It's an annoyingly good source of artwork. Many migrated/dualpost to Bluesky, but far from all.
For some similar real world example:s I hate (all?) the local grocery stores and other shops I buy food from. That doesn't mean I'm going to stop buying food from them. I'm not a fan of any of the local electronics shops, but sometimes they're the only choice if I want a local warranty, which I wouldn't get if I imported one. The actually good option in both of these cases simply doesn't exist in the first place, and doing nothing is rarely a desirable option.
Also, I only adopt new browser plugins very sparingly, because the chance of some random extension getting bought out by a shadowy ad and malware firm is way too high, and Mozilla doesn't assure me with the level of vetting they do (nonexistent, compared to F-Droid or any mainstream linux distro.) Why is this such a problem for Mozilla? They even try to make it difficult to get extensions from anybody but them, so a third party extension store that actually does due diligence is basically off the table. I can't even install extensions straight from a developer's github, which wouldn't be as good as a trusted 3rd party repo, but still better than Mozilla's status quo. In fact, so called userscripts loaded through one trusted extension actually feel a lot safer than normal extensions.
I'm not trying to be difficult, but I'm not quite sure what this means! In literal terms, I want the ability to read tweets, see threads and replies, and view a user's tweets chronologically, and I don't think the second and third things are possible on X.com without an account. I don't want an account for various reasons, including that I don't want any temptation to become a regular or active user.
If it's that important, you'll see it elsewhere in no time at all.
Though that's quite different from X; while the issues with YouTube are mostly plain old enshittification, the issues I have with X are more political (thus, I do hate it).
* No autoplay on playlists: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/no-playlist-auto...
* No translations and AI dubs: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/youtube-no-trans...
* No YouTube shorts: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-youtube-...
* More videos on the home page / smaller thumbnails: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/youtube-tweaks/ (to be fair, it could probably replace the "No YT shorts" one)
Not sure how safe those are, but since they only require access to data for youtube domains I assume if there was a leak it would not be too bad.
And there is no bskycancel.com yet.
I normally use nostr more because that really is decentralised. Also mastodon. Though I don't like the short message twitter style blogs anyway. So Lemmy really is my favourite (too bad about all the tankies though)
Though I tend to hang out at fediverse instances that are more lgbt specific and not that political, I'm just sick of politics, I don't believe in democracy anymore since my own country went 30% to the extreme right party. I just hang out with like-minded people and avoid everyone else.
And no, BS will most likely not be your place. Even if you're welcomed now you'll have to keep walking on eggshells to make sure you never violate the current and every-changing unwritten rules and regulations and dictions and dogmas or you'll be quickly ousted as not being pure enough. Especially if you don't want to talk politics - and with 'talk politics' I mean agree with and verbally support the current thing. If you're one of the ideological puritans who're in the forefront of ousting infidels you'll sooner or later be hoisted on your own petard so the only way to win that game is by not playing it.
In lgbt spaces it's much more free for someone to be as they are, the only thing that's not allowed is judging others. No phobias, no ageism etc. And we don't generally talk about politics other than how to survive in the current climate.
I would most equate it with rave culture I think. That openness and acceptance of being different.
I mean in the sense that literally everything is political, yes, I suppose so. Certainly if you ask, say, a Marxist, then yes. But in that sense, so is, say, a chocolate bar.
In the more narrow everyday sense of the word, though, nope, my mere existence isn't a political matter.
It isn't, but neither is your existence 'lgbt' since you are not defined solely by your sexual orientation. You may have been gathered - by whom? - under this moniker but had nobody ever thought to create an identity category related to sexual orientation your existence would not have been changed in any way. It is the fact that one of your characteristics has been turned into a 'membership card' of a specific identity which makes 'lgbt' political.
I'm left-handed and as far as I know - ... - there is no identity category related to handedness (yet). If one were to be dreamt up by someone and that person decided I would be counted in as a member of this identity group and be represented by some self-appointed spokesperson my handedness would have been politicised. It would not make a whit of difference as far as my 'existence' were concerned, I'm left-handed with our without a related identity group.
(Ditto for left-handed people to some extent; less of a thing these days, but there _was_ a time they were kinda treated as an outgroup in many places.)
Child pornography and dictatorships are good, and there should be more of it.
I hate X and have never used it.
Any link that resolves to Twitter will instantly become a closed tab; still waiting for that happier life.
That being said, many public figures have not made the same judgement and post their communications there.
Should I just stop informing myself on the public discourse because the place it happens got taken over by a shady character?
I think using code to liberate the discourse from its would-be manipulator is the most reasonable thing to do and a reflection of true hacker ethics.
Since X is still highly popular, will you ever reconsider your position?
Just curious, not looking for a fight or debate.
Of course! It's always important to consider the agenda behind any media.
> Since X is still highly popular, will you ever reconsider your position?
I don't see how popularity is a factor. It has data I want in a system I don't support, so I exfiltrate the data.
Remember when Reddit mods made a whole show of virtue signaling about banning links to X, but most of those same subreddits’ top content (and 20% of the front page) was screenshots of X?
A lot of people are unwilling to withstand even a bit of discomfort to stand up for their supposed principles.
There are still people who only post stuff on Twitter whose opinion I kinda want to hear, but I'm not creating an account there.
i find it annoying that whenever there is a new browser extension on HN, i ask for a "firefox version" to which the response is almost always kneejerk "eww no" or something to that end. So to see a firefox extension, that's refreshing. I hope you continue working on it and help improve the extension ecosystem
Maybe it’s age? I used Firefox since firebird, and Phoenix, and Netscape, but saying “try Firefox” might feel like talking about an archaeological relic to a 28 year old who has never even seen Firefox running.
How tone deaf can people be?
I talked to brave supporters and they all say "Firefox is a pita to modify" but we have had waterfox and other derivatives, floorp and others for decades.
In the end, Brendan is the one who does not like Firefox for personal reasons and that's why brave isn't based on Firefox. Personal reasons but brave fanboys don't see it
What makes the reddit style more similar to Twitter than to bulletin board, in your mind? And do we have a modern example of the bulletinBB style since phpBB?
Hacker news is reddit style, too (by far the closest of those listed). Somethingawful is an example of a BulletinBB style board in 2026.
In what way? More fascists, bots, and bots posting fascist things? The application itself is 99% identical to Twitter.
Still let this be my personal rebellion. I will still call it Twitter.
You could disambiguate by saying "X Dot Com", but that's longer and more awkward to say than Twitter.
Essentially, "X" as a name for Twitter is a confusing, poorly-forced meme that most folks don't care to entertain.
Why are you wasting syllables giving it free advertising?
It was a sewage when named twitter, it's a sewage now. At least "twitter" has the benefit of being unambiguous. X is not. X can be literally anything, or specifically X11, XOrg (x.org).
I don't use X. I use Wayland.
So I say twitter for clarity, not protest.