tl;dr, direct links to Twitter are no longer banned, but please provide a Nitter/archived link alongside the Twitter link.

Hi all,

A couple days ago we banned direct links to Twitter.

I should have explained our rationale in more detail. We didn’t do this just because Twitter sucks, or because Musk sucks, or because Twitter hosts reactionary content. After all, it has always hosted reactionary content, not much has changed in this regard. What has changed is that Musk is now giving fascists direct access to Twitter’s internal tools, which reveals lots of PII about users, like IP addresses, phone numbers, emails, etc. Because of this, we felt that it fell within our pre-existing policy of banning direct links to reactionary websites.

However, after reading your feedback and our own further discussion, we’re decided that banning direct links isn’t an ideal solution. The main issue is that Nitter’s flagship instance is quite slow, and other instances, while often much faster than Twitter itself, tend to disappear suddenly from time to time. Also, it can be difficult to quickly find other Nitter instances.

For this reason, direct links to Twitter are no longer banned.

Instead, going forward, if you want to link to Twitter we strongly encourage users provide a Nitter/archived link alongside the Twitter link.

We always read your posts in !feedback@hexbear.net, so please feel free to leave your thoughts there if you have any.

Thanks everyone.