NO THANKS.

I cannot tell you just how much I hate this kind of bullshit. This is becoming increasingly common. Call me old and grumpy, but I would much prefer to go back 10-20 years. The web was a symbol of freedom, decentralization, and so forth. Now we have major websites that you can count on one hand that makes up the Internet. Along with their fucking shitty, severely restricting or limiting systems.

On the other hand, they might be successful in reducing my Internet consumption. :)

I was trying to read an article about gpt-3 and the author had decided to embed tweets with pictures of text on, so not only could I not read the text without right-clicking the image to view on its own then zooming and panning but after a while Twitter would just prevent me from reading any further without logging in.

Twitter won't let you create an account without a phone number and, like most services that want to harvest your data like a Dementor from Harry Potter, they want to push you towards an app.

Tiktok is pretty hostile towards desktop users too. I refuse to install it on my mobile and why should I anyway?

And then there's the many iot devices that don't give you an interface at all if you don't have a phone. Ridiculous.

Use nitter, libreddit, invidious, bibliogram (is that one dead?) and others.

It's a shame that these big companies seem to suck at making usable websites. They probably chase "conversion" to new accounts at all costs. And that probably works (A/B tested).

The Reddit and Twitter web apps are actually great on mobile, but they lock you out after a few minutes. I used to use both all the time until three or so years ago when the constant app pushing made both unusable.

- Time to load a twitter link: 14s (20s to display a preview of the picture).

- Same link on a nitter instance: 5s, page fully loaded, with replies.

Also, less than half the page is dedicated to content, I have:

- a search bar

- log in/sign up

- Cookies notice

- "Twitter is better on the app" "Not Now/Switch to the app" (that one takes a lot of space).

All of the above keeps floating above the content, so I can only scroll through a tiny window. The content is lazy-loaded, which makes scrolling annoying. A lot of space is wasted with buttons that are only useful if you're logged in.

The experience is terrible on mobile, and it's mostly the same for reddit.

For now, this removes the login pop-ups. For mobile use, there's Fritter.

[0]: https://i.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/sew1rn/twitterc... [1]: https://reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/sew1rn/twittercom... (.compact does the exact same thing)

I feel like we all desperately took our eye off the ball when that was passed.

Strange that no one has brought up hosting a peertube instance

No they don't make up the Internet. We have a couble big sites backed by megacorporations that have taken over the majority mindshare, but there are still plenty of smaller sites left. Don't give in and pretend that Google et al have won. Find traditional forums for your interests and participate in them. Start one if needed. Subscribe to individual blogs via RSS. Consider hosting your own. Want to share your creations? Create a website for them instead of just putting them on the most convenient social media platform. The independent web is not lost until we all agree that it is.

call your elected representatives and complain if you're in the US.

They might have introduced now mandatory age verification on per-video instead of per-account basis, but the stages they use are very questionable.Besides, YT is such an unusable platform these days one has to use NP/Vanced to have the same experience of youtube pre-2012, and still: back then there was less spam and phishing going on.

I believe you can create a Google account without a phone number by setting it up on Android's (stock ROM) setup screen. This won't bypass YouTube's nagging though, sadly.

[1]: https://mpv.io/

Personally, I much prefer playing all videos in an external mpv window anyway.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re...