A great loss
On a few occasions in the past, I had already said that I did not use any social media beyond Facebook, and even then only as a passive observer. That, however, was not entirely true at the time.
While my Facebook use remains fairly sporadic, I will admit that I sometimes lose a good few minutes of my weekends watching videos of bricklayers building houses from the foundations all the way up to the roof, along with the antics of some lunatic messing around with all sorts of vehicles in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro. But that does not compare to my (terrible) habit of checking the late Twitter.
I do not post so much as a peep on that network. First, because I do not want to, especially given the risk of having my data in Elon Musk's hands. Second, because I could not, at least until today, since I am, and apparently was, an avid Nitter user.
Nitter is a somewhat old project that allowed people to browse Twitter without all the clutter that had already plagued the network long before Musk took the reins. For a brief period, it was brought down by the backend mechanisms introduced by the platform after the change in management. But these were eventually circumvented, and the project came roaring back.
For a short while, I tried using BlueSky. But it somehow manages to be even worse, with all its US-centric bias and, above all, its politically "liberal" bent in the sense that word has in that country. It was impossible to do things such as follow the minutiae of the war in Ukraine or the controversies surrounding a season of Big Brother Brasil through a product hated by those who created it for failing to become a hub for libertarianism and cryptocurrency discussions.
Nitter made my life much easier in this regard. Although there had been promises that the project would eventually allow users to create feeds with followed accounts, the "nuisance" of having to use the search engine to look for information, or even go directly to the profiles of one or more people to follow them, was much healthier.
Apparently, all of that ended today. A "cease and desist" letter sent to Nitter has killed the project and all of its mirrors. It is hard to imagine the project coming back after a blow like this.
It really is a shame, as well as yet another piece of evidence that the internet is already dead and that what we have now are the lingering traces of consciousness of a zombie that refuses to rot away. Yes, we have a few alternatives, and I accept that my problems with BlueSky are so specific that they make me quite the outlier. But it is impossible not to feel an enormous sadness when a small trace of romanticism like the one Nitter offered, "pirating" Twitter for those who would rather give Musk the middle finger than surrender to his efforts to lock the network in itself, is lost in such a ridiculous fashion.