[jamesear]

+1. I wasn't happy to have to use Nitter to access Twitter, but I accepted it. I'm not jumping through any more hoops for Twitter. Random Twitter links become random FB/Medium/LinkedIn: a closed world I'm not interested in.

I only ~followed two people's content:

* Dan Luu, available on https://mastodon.social/@danluu

* Paul Graham, available on https://mas.to/@paulg but he doesn't post anymore. I'll live without this.

[justaj]

If lurking Twitter / X works only with JS enabled, and if the same applies to Mastodon as well, then (strictly speaking in reading / lurking ability) what would be the difference between those two other than perhaps the size of total JS served?

[lavela]

1. If I understand correctly they talk about whether you need an account to lurk or not (I'd agree) and 2. the same does not apply to Mastodon. There even are CLI clients and I'd be interested to hear where you got the impression that js is required for Mastodon.

[autoexec]

When I clicked on https://mastodon.social/@danluu I got: "To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your platform."

That's probably going to leave people with the impression that JS is required. Sure, there are desktop clients (all third party) and I could probably try those, but generally the kinds of people who'd run random code on their systems and give it network access will probably just have JS enabled by default in the first place. At least some are open source I guess.

Looking at some of the the open source projects I was amused to find a client for MS-DOS (https://github.com/SuperIlu/DOStodon) and then amused again to see all the .js files it needs to work. It looks like it might take a little work to find a desktop client that doesn't just run a bunch of javascript anyway

[justaj]

Not only is JS required, but for some reason those Mastodon pages can't be (easily?) archived in https://web.archive.org/, whereas Twitter pages can.

[hmcq6]

Archiving is an interesting issue to bring up.

Due to the federated nature of Mastodon every other instance is ostensibly an archive as there is currently no way to guarantee that a tweet/comment/account is removed from remote instances when you delete it from your local instance.

[autoexec]

What I've been doing when people here post Mastodon links to is add .rss after the @whatever bit which lets me grab their RSS feed and then I can scroll through that to try to find the post being mentioned. I'm not sure the entire post always shows up, and I think you don't get replies or comments or whatever Mastodon is supposed to have with posts, but you can at least get some kind of information out of Mastodon that way.

[ehPReth]

Try adding /embed after - sadly you don't get the replies etc (same as RSS) but it's a lot less hassle than scrolling though RSS

[ehPReth]

It used to work, then they broke it in v4 with whatever 'upgrades' they made and haven't brought back the lost functionality yet :/.

You can add /embed on the end to see the singular post without replies, but it's not really a good substitute.

GH issues:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19953

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/23153

[hardcopy]

https://mastodon.social/@danluu.rss

[jamesear]

Yes, that's it. I don't want an account.

[justaj]

I can see the posts just fine (albeit with JS enabled), but not the replies and subsequent conversations. Assuming you were referring to the latter, then yes I'd agree with you.

[jamesear]

Sometimes when I load Twitter, even to view a single, it requires sign in.

I don't know why it sometimes does and sometimes doesn't.

[unnervingduck]

I've noticed the same and it's really frustrating, it just straight up redirects to the login page sometimes. I guess I'll have to accept the fact that it's closing down, visitors are not welcome. Can't view a single post or picture in the future but so be it.

[moneywoes]

weird i can’t lurk twitter without login

[ineedaj0b]

Make an account. Only follow those guys. You don’t even need to include your real name man.

This is like saying you wanna use windows without a user account.

You want to use twitter no account in the age of AI. It don’t work like that anymore

[orangecat]

This is like saying you wanna use windows without a user account.

It's like saying I want to use Windows without a Microsoft account, which I do.

[Liquix]

If you choose to roll over and give $PRISMpartner unfettered access to your data in exchange for a modicrum of convenience, go for it. But there are millions of people who stopped using Windows, Chrome, Android, Facebook, etc because they care. Many people will stop interacting with Twitter after this change. Don't bash them for being principled where you have surrendered.

[serf]

>You want to use twitter no account in the age of AI. It don’t work like that anymore

how does having an account to view twitter meaningfully change anything during this mystick time of AI?

If it's to prevent AIs from reading twitter threads, well, good luck.

>It don’t work like that anymore

well if a company doesn't follow customer demand they fail; I don't intend to continue using a service that requires me to have an account to lurk -- i'm not the only one. The rules for customer service don't somehow just get cast away because of magic software.

[anileated]

> how does having an account to view twitter meaningfully change anything during this mystick time of AI?

> If it's to prevent AIs from reading twitter threads, well, good luck.

If you require an account, it’s harder to scrape you and train an AI for free using platform you've build with your own investment and effort. Until court rule in favor of copyright holders, welcome to the future where nothing is shared in the open anymore.

[soraminazuki]

I'm curious who you consider that rights holder to be.

[anileated]

The creator.

[soraminazuki]

I asked because it sounded as if you considered it to be the platform. And let's not kid ourselves by pretending that this has to do with protecting the creators.

[jamesear]

> Make an account. Only follow those guys. You don’t even need to include your real name man.

I understand this is easy, and others won't mind doing this. That's fine.

I object to the idea of needing an account solely to read heavily linked, otherwise free, content.

Besides, my browser doesn't store logins/cookies, so it'd be another login I have to do on each session.

> You want to use twitter no account in the age of AI. It don’t work like that anymore

So be it, I guess? The content isn't that valuable to me anyway.

[j1elo]

> my browser doesn't store logins/cookies, so it'd be another login I have to do on each session.

To be fair, that's a burden you imposed on yourself.

But I agree that requiring an account just to browse and read content, is BS.

[Liquix]

no, adtech and walled gardens collecting your browsing data and monetizing/weaponizing it against you is the imposition. refusing to provide this data by wiping cookies is not a "burden" this guy chose to impose on himself for fun, it is the logical answer to the adtech companies' hostile action.

[j1elo]

adtech monetizes your browsing data by collecting it across lots of sites we visit, and aggregating them all to build a profile.

It's true that wiping cookies was the most effective to prevent building up this trail of cookies from every visited site adhered to those ad companies.

But this seems to me like a solved issue since Mozilla deployed their Total Cookie Protection [1] with Firefox i.e. each domain has its own isolated set of cookies.

[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-rolls-out-total-...

[swells34]

> This is like saying you want to use Windows without a user account

If only I was able to do what you describe, I would use Windows. But sadly, Microsoft wants to invade users' lives like a malignant cancer, so Linux it is.

[charcircuit]

Linux requires a user account too. There is no anonymous mode. You will always be running something as a user who has a user id. getuid and geteuid are always successful and correspond to a valid user. In theory there could be a way to run things without a user, but Linux was designed to not allow that.

[felixgallo]

Linux user accounts are local to the system, not centralized in a cloud service. There is no corporation tracking or monetizing your uid or gid.

[charcircuit]

That's beside the point. Linux has a login wall before you are able to do anything. You must have an account in order to use it.

[autoexec]

I thought you could skip creating a MS account if you ran the setup entirely offline. Does that trick not work anymore? To be honest, even if it did work you can't trust MS to stay out of your business. Windows is constantly collecting data on the what you do on your system including the name of the file you open and what software you have installed. Jumping through hoops to try and work around a user hostile OS is a losing battle. You'll always be one forced update away from defeat. Linux is the way to go. I'm forced to use windows at work, but at home the last windows OS I had was 7 professional and it looks like it'll be the last I ever use.

[Marsymars]

> I thought you could skip creating a MS account if you ran the setup entirely offline. Does that trick not work anymore?

It still works. There are several alternative workarounds as well. I have a laptop that normally runs Debian that I can dual-boot to Windows for BIOS updates or to use Acer’s app to limit battery charge to 80%. I use a local Windows account without a password, as I don’t keep any data on the Windows partition.

[jasonfarnon]

Is this level of tracking (files you open) something you can't opt out of? If so I hadn't realized that. Do you have a link so I can read more?

[autoexec]

I don't know if you can opt out that specifically or not. There are third party tools that claim to disable a lot more than MS will normally allow, but I don't put much faith in them (if for no other reason than the fact that MS can undo anything with an update)

MS took these pages down, but there were two posts that I think gave users the most in depth look at at the kinds of data they've been collecting:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170722175209/https://docs.micr...

https://web.archive.org/web/20170407072948/https://technet.m...

This only gives examples of some of the types of things they collect though. For example, it says that the Photo App (default image viewer) will tell MS if the file was on your hard drive or a network share or a cloud server or an SD card, and it will send them the metadata (resolution, file size, encoding, etc) and tell them if you looked at the photo or video in fullscreen mode, as well as how long you spent looking at each file, but you shouldn't assume that's all the information they take. That's why the start of each section has the words "such as"

Now that they're fully committed to using their OS as an ad delivery platform they likely collect everything that they think will help them target those ads to you better.

[elsjaako]

I had an account to follow two or three guys, and maybe 4-5 accounts that only post every few months. The timeline gets filled with all kinds of things. Besides the horrible clickbait ads, it puts in random posts from unsubscribed parties. You really have to look between the crap for the stuff you're subscribed to.

If this is Twitter in the age of AI, Twitter isn't worth the effort to me in the age of AI.

Especially since I can use Mastodon, and that is actually very nice. I get that not all interests are as well represented, but I like it.

[Marsymars]

I’d actually be willing to use a Twitter account, except that I find the Twitter front-end unusably bad. Nitter doesn’t really support the use-case of serving as an alternative front-end with an account (and is discontinued), so I’m done with Twitter.