First off, this pertains to anywhere that one shares links, not just cohost. This can ALSO apply to cohost but I'm not trying to call out people that post twitter links here. This is also going to be a bit of a saucy grumpy post, so if you'd rather not, here is where you should skip over it.
I'm writing this all up because I'm mildly increasing my efforts to annoy people that share things via twitter links, because that sucks. Twitter sucks, stop using it, but ESPECIALLY stop sharing things from there that you yourself did not post. If you can access it, you can screenshot it or download the media to repost or find it posted somewhere better . Yes you now have to put in more effort, blame the new ownership. You could also just use a better site.
This is also mostly focusing on pure technical / "user experience" reasons why this sucks. The concept of click restraint has always been hard to argue from a moral or mental health standpoint for some reason, so I'm (mostly) ignoring that today.
"Just click the link"
I haven't had twitter logged into my main browser ever, because I've always seen having ready access to all of the sites functions as unhealthy to me personally. For about 8 months now I've had no access to being logged into the site at all. What is using twitter logged out like?

That's the short version. It's fucking broke.
To be fair, that's because I have script blocking on. But I wanted to get the point across before the break. But, it's not a lot better with it turned off. What happens if I go to someone's page not being logged in?

Just a log in, nothing else.
What about going directly to a post? Well, if it's not marked as "sensitive", I CAN view it, albeit with a login pop up nag after a few seconds.

This is the one thing that can still work. As has been pointed out in other posts, one can not even view the thread context of a post anymore, ONLY the post itself. Linking something NSFW? Doesn't work. Linking a thread? Doesn't work. Only a single post.
Interestingly, if you click someone's user from the post page, you DO get their user page...

But no timeline. Thankfully this is enough to get people's bio info (see: links to other sites) if you need it.
In summary, I think this is enough to say that the normal twitter site is unusable without a login. Yes I can bend over backwards and squeeze a few drops out, but that sucks and you should not be asking other people to put that kind of effort in.
Just nitter it
Nitter has been for some time, the get out clause to "well I want to get whatever from twitter without a login". A few months ago the API was changed so that sensitive posts required effectively a login from the nitter instance, so those mostly went away. The recent (since rolled back) rate limit fun has lead to more code updates and, basically nothing works for seeing sensitive posts anymore. They're gone. Sometimes things line up and you find an instance that works but it's not consistent.
At least right now, nitter is effectively dead.
Use fxtwitter/vxtwitter/etc
These seem to be working for the time being, though their long term reliability isn't looking great if twitter decides to continue the arms race. What annoys me the most personally, is the feature that combines multiple images into a single thumbnail also prevents you from getting the original image URL (which, if you have, will still load perfectly fine directly from twitter). What useful original data you can grab out of the link depends on where it was embedded, which service used, and how the service and twitter were feeling that day. So it's still kind of a shitshoot.
Why are you focusing on images?
Well, that's what I care about frankly. Furry art is the one thing I've been willing to dig up nitter to retain access to until now. But, if we step outside of the pure technical arguments for a moment, let me air some of my big Pet Peeves about shit people link to on twitter:
- A post, that contains a headline and a twitter clickthrough URL to an article, which also showed the headline embedded on twitter, which contains the actual article they wish to link to.
I know that phones encourage this kind of workflow but it's always seemed almost insulting. It implies you didn't click through to the original article (if you only want to show the headline, screenshot it imo), and implies that while you want me to read it, you don't want to put in the effort to grab the actual link.
- A thread, talking about something you care about
This is very personal, but I think twitter threads are a fucking horrible way to do longform anything, especially trying to elaborate on important points. They're annoying to read, and also encourage people putting in "funny gifs" every 3-4 posts which just really devalues whatever point they're trying to make in my eyes. I think there are some services which will combine posts like this but, lipstick on a pig. Not like I'd ever get linked to those services in the first place.
Thankfully with all the happenings of the past ~8 months, more people are posting on other more blog-esque sites and at least linking those back to twitter. Baby steps.
- Any twitter link with zero context
This combined with embeds being broken in most places, again shows a big lack of effort on whoever is sending it. "Here's a link, to a username you don't recognize, with no additional info, and to even know what it's about you have to now click this link to a shitty website". Again, if it's not important enough to add 10 words of context then maybe just don't send it?
Honestly, looking at myself for a moment, I do honestly wonder if there's this thing where mild computer inconveniences just wash over me whereas they are a lot larger load to others. I still view myself as a "lazy"/low effort kind of person, maybe I just put a lot more value in the trade off of "site is shitty so higher effort barrier to use it is ok" vs "higher effort barrier means work for me". Like I said, I've been taking links people send me and manually editing them to whatever nitter mirror I'm using at the time for years at this point; I've been accepting that load on my own. I open every youtube video or twitch link in a terminal. I take the few moments to set up RSS feeds for youtube channels I like, and I set up Chatty to keep using twitch without dealing with the shitshow that is twitch's website. Maybe that difference in my perception and behavior explains why all of the twitter stuff above happens and why others don't see as much of an issue with it as I do. Maybe this all sounds absurd to everyone else, I don't know.
But, ultimately, I think that if something is worth sharing, it's worth doing right. And sometimes it's better to just not share at all if one doesn't want to do it right.
Also after writing this ENTIRE post, I looked in a server and sensitive embeds directly from twitter are working in discord today, even including multi image posts, which one could point at to invalidate like half of this post, so who knows lol.
Oh, and @milkycoffi is here on cohost now. 18+ in there as the clickthrough will say
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