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.
And there is no bskycancel.com yet.
Child pornography and dictatorships are good, and there should be more of it.
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.
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)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
After trying a few others I do think I was a bit unlucky with my first few tries.
I've just installed it and tested it on a link from a HN topic which worked exactly as advertised.
- 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/
But I never trust extensions, I do it manually.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Still let this be my personal rebellion. I will still call it Twitter.
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.
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.
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
- 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
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
Banality
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...
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
sftp scratch@scratch.newsdump.org
cd pub
put _your_redirect_export.json # or whatever the extension isTap 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 do prefer to use nitter.poast.org, xcancel has some annoying bot/ddos protection that makes it take longer to load.
{
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
}
}
2Gkashmiri•1d ago
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
CalRobert•1d ago
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.
Dansvidania•1d ago
Telaneo•1d ago
2Gkashmiri•22h ago
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