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21 sats \ 12 replies \ @ae52f929c 13 Jul 2023 \ on: [Opinion] Please stop sharing Twitter and Youtube links. tech
Reddit's content quality has dropped off a cliff. Everyone that thought the front page sucked before had no idea how good they had it.
My biggest problem with getting information right now is Twitter provided a good avenue for me to keep up with certain OSINT things and journalists. It is not possible to do now without an account. Twitter links that get posted often still will not display anything without logging in, but sometimes they do.
The knowledge is walled off and left to die. What is being done at Twitter makes more sense when you frame it from the perspective of an authoritarian hungry for power. But it is not just Twitter. The crazy conspiratorial part of my brain says we're all becoming too good at understanding world events and the "powers that be" need to disrupt and erode the flow of knowledge in order to keep the curtains closed.
I have been through many chapters of the internet. These periods of transition between each chapter really suck to get through. Anyone that recalls the transition into web 2.0 should be able to tell you that.
Thankfully we now have all the technology required to build the internet as it should be and the way cypher punks from decades ago had imagined.
Nitter is working again.
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Yep, after a month of health related downtime Indra is full steam ahead and will be a low latency and async message channel where the timing data is scrambled as good as encryption.
I'm sure that it won't be too long before some surveillance capitalists start pushing to create the same kind of "trusted paths" bullcrap as we have in the HDMI standard. And of course ways of scraping those data streams will be found because you can't lock a person out of their own stuff without having a key that you can pobably eventually find a way to get, or bypass somehow.
If this subject pops up again in coversation with anyone I'm gonna lay an egg, I swear. I mean, it's the logical next step. Licensure of the right to host internet services. Up to now they have just been content to mainly block us with lawyers and ridiculous and unlawful adhesion contracts that disrespect any notion of us OWNING our own hardware.
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I have not heard of Indra, what is it?
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It's a source-routed anonymity network with similar purpose as Tor but exclusively uses source routing, like Lightning (and sphirx messaging), and in order to encourage people to provide relay service on the network, they can be paid, presumably enough to cover their costs and thus continue to operate and maybe even expand as user base grows.
There's a lot more I can say about it, such as enabling anonymous, low latency remote access to remote servers, paywalling content to collect fees both for relaying and to forward on to content creators, and even enabling in-band payments for access to wireless hotspots, and facilitate community aggregation of content and bandwidth capacity, creating greater efficiencies at the local level as well as protecting people's privacy.
That will be enough for now.
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That sounds cool as hell I am going to check it out!
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Awesome.
I gotta keep plugging away at it, the sooner I can get a simple testnet working, one without the lighting payment integration done yet, the sooner other people can see what it can do and we can start refining how it works further.
Like decoys, really need to be able to model what a "well heeled attacker" on the network can learn by the timing of messages, and to find and refine the algorithms that create patterns that quickly break traces. This is simple stuff that can be easily tested on a small testnet where you can be gathering signal timing and volume from each node and validate the evasion sufficiently obscures the endpoints of the messages.
Anyhow, the more the merrier. I know that once people see what this enables it's gonna be a hit, like Tor was when it first appeared. For me the hype faded fast when I realised it was garbage for SSH and media streaming. Even with UDP based Mosh SSH over Tor is like sticking needles under your fingernails.
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Those things under tor have improved a lot but it is still painful. Things like SSH extra painful because so many points along the network path can fail and kill your session. I never realized SSH could have latency until I tried over tor. It was funny to type something in only for it to actually type out a minute or two later into the terminal. Media streaming is also why I don't use tor. It is actually very useful to surf youtube over tor because the algorithm is more likely to show you a raw feed of content. Great for discovering new stuff.
I want a solution that allows me to securely access things remotely without exposing my ports and services to the world. There are VPN solutions that are quick to install to resolve this but none are decentralized.
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Regarding Twitter, I share your frustration; however, good news it seems Twitter was only walled off from people without accounts for a few days. You can still use your bookmarks in a browser (or use a FOSS app) to keep up with those journalists if you use any variant of the Nitter URL (i.e. nitter.fdn.fr nitter.it etc) and still do this without an account!
The only restriction that still applies is that anon users can't search within each feed anymore.
Just in case you've enjoyed Reddit and think that's off bounds to view anonymously - you can still use Redreader from Github or F-droid sources.
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He said he will stop this time
The mentality of domestic abuse.
It's over. We've seen this cycle before, if not even before the internet. These platforms serve evil now. Divest.
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The only thing logged out accounts can view are individual tweets. I cannot view timelines or even navigate for the context of a tweet if its apart of a thread. It is 100% still walled off to logged out accounts and this is easy to verify.
Nitter does appear to work for now. The frustrating thing is I switched from Nitter links back to Twitter links because just after Elon took over, Nitter was only able to pull information randomly. The API would just fail. This works for now though so that is good news.
Reddit does work because subreddit feeds are technically not an API request, so even things like Reddit is fun still works logged out. But Reddit did disable the ability to view NSFW subreddits outside of their website and official app so a bunch of content is walled off even if you are able to use a third party client.
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I cannot view timelines or even navigate for the context of a tweet if its apart of a thread
Maybe I've got a crazy setup (browser, vpn, no java, no cookies, tracking queries removed) but on Nitter when I click on the red 'show this thread' the whole thread still shows up. Dunno why...
¯_ (ツ) _/¯
...but I'm okay with that.
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Good points !
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