Do you make the same complaint when folks post links to archive.is? If not, why is this different?

Others have explained about not being able to see all content, profiles and such.

I’ll add another reason why I redirect to it: XCancel is/was a lot faster than X and had IMO a much cleaner UI, especially when reading larger conversations or groups of tweets. I don’t browse X much, but I already have an extension installed to redirect certain sites, so adding a redirect was an easy win. I’ll miss it.

Odd. Try to read stuff on twitter without an account/logged out.

It's a kind of enshittification pattern where a site based on user content closes off more and more access over time.

Xcancel and Nitter are/were easier to work with, afaict.

It's mostly useful if you want to link someone to a post on twitter to people who don't have an twitter account.

I use it to make RSS feeds for accounts where I don't want to miss a single post

You need an account to access X. Change the URL to xcancel and you can view these accounts.

It also looks like X requires a Google or Apple account to sign up if you don’t use your phone number. I’m not linking any of that to the X cesspool.

You do not need an account to access specific X posts/tweets. You do need an account to read all replies.

You need to be linked to specific tweets to know where they are. You can't just open up a timeline and read more than the last few posts (literally like 5, including any pinned post.)

I've also found sometimes you get (cached?) versions of profiles with really old posts if you're not logged in.

And media often won't play without doing bypass shenanigans (forcing native controls).

The main site won't even let you attempt to search but nitter and xcancel search worked great.

Twitter is basically unusable on the official site without logging in, even though it may not seem that way after a cursory check.

You are referring to X/Twitter right?

That is the point. It's a way to get the value of a service you don't like, while signaling to everyone that you're too virtuous to use the service you're getting value out of.

I prefer not to share links that require the people receiving the link to create an account to read the content and it's replies or post to such websites for that matter. That's basic netiquette.

Same, and I'm learning that we're definitely a minority.

So that's supposed to be the motive? Frankly I think most users just see it as a path of least resistance to a tweet. You guys really aren't familiar with this Internet thing.