[conspire] Twitter successors

[Nick Moffitt]

On 08Mar2024 06:40pm (-0800), Rick Moen wrote:
> Until yesterday, I'd happily used one or another Nitter proxy 
> to follow a couple of Twitter users without ads, without surveillance,
> without Javascript, and without money to Elmo.  But Elmo cannot permit
> _any_ third-party access to Twitter, even killing off the firm's own 
> mobile client, so the guest-account API that Nitter relied upon got
> garroted in late January.
> 
> For now, I'm putting up with Twitter's dismal WebUI just to keep a tab
> open to Nance's tweets, but if I can help him move somewhere better,
> I can fully kiss off Xitter with no regrets.  (Or, of course, Elmo may 
> do corporate level flight into terrain, first.)

First of all, I'd like to state quite clearly that any further workaround is a house built on sand.  I'm not advising this because I think it's the correct way forward.  Getting intelligent thoughtful people off of "enshittified" walled gardens is clearly the path to progress.

But I still have pretty good luck with the "bird.makeup" Xitter-to-Fediverse gateway.  It seems to have some amount of lag, so the people I follow sort of show up in bursts every few days.  But I'm not expecting to be able to respond to them (the gateway is effectively read-only), and I'm also enjoying not having to follow down-to-the-second breaking news online.

For an example, I follow the excellent active travel author and Guardian political journalist Peter Walker.  On Xitter, he's @peterwalker99.  So I followed @peterwalker99 at bird.makeup and am able to get threads like the following in my notifications:

	https://bird.makeup/users/peterwalker99/statuses/1766119213037392042 

The web view in that link is a bit rubbish compared to how it shows up in my actual feed.  I get proper threading and inline media without calls out to "twimg" or other Xitter services, and can forward messages along to others.