I had recommended XCancel before to read X (Twitter) threads without logins. That same XCancel is suspended again, with its notice citing developments in ongoing legal proceedings. X is now effectively unsuitable for public announcements or discourses.

X is a private company. It operates the infrastructure and bears the costs of the platform. It can reasonably seek a profit and expect compensation from services built around its content. An alternative interface does not automatically deserve free access. X could also point out that creating an account costs nothing. But the price of an account and the requirement to have one are separate matters. An occasional reader following a link has not necessarily decided to become a user.

X imposed a broad login requirement in June 2023, describing it as a temporary response to excessive scraping. Access has varied since. From what I can tell, individual posts can be read without login, just not the threads. More importantly, these changes affect how people should use X for public communication.

Medium provides a useful comparison. Authors can place articles behind a membership paywall or publish them for everyone. They can also share links that grant free access to otherwise paywalled articles. Readers may dislike paying, but the author has an explicit way to choose unrestricted access. On X, making a post public does not necessarily make the surrounding conversation readable to someone without an account. But X, then Twitter, did not always require an account to follow public conversations.

Advertisements are secondary here. Someone willing to see ads may still want to read a thread without registering. XCancel also offered an ad-free experience, but calling that its sole purpose would disregard the access problem it addressed. A free account does not make an account requirement disappear. It simply makes it easier for X to downplay an inconvenience it imposed.

For organizations using X to publish announcements, that inconvenience falls on the audience. A service update should be available to the people affected, including those who have never wanted an X account. I would prefer the same information on an ordinary website, with X carrying a link to it. XCancel’s suspension shows how precarious it is to depend on an unofficial service to make public communication accessible. Organizations should not make joining their chosen social platform a condition of reading their announcements.