alt Hacker NewsNitter project received cease and desist
Comments
Middle powers should heed Cory Doctorow's advice [0] and start offering legal protection in their jurisdictions for precisely this type of projects.
America is a hostile nation, who has sought to align everyone with its interests, under a false pretense of mutual benefit, while instead its tech sector has caused much harm at a global scale. America is now doubling down on value extraction, at an obvious expense to everyone else.
Middle powers should not be granting to America any goodwill whatsoever. There is nothing in it for them anymore, except irresponsible reliance on a bad faith actor.
Not much detail so far.
> We have received cease and desist letters. Awaiting legal advice at the moment, but for now expect all nitter instances to remain down for the foreseeable future.
[for all those who - like me - first check the comments before clicking on the link]
I just noticed a couple days ago that when I paste a tweet in claude.ai to ask to explain it, sonnet 5 knew to look it up in nitter and xcancel to get the tweet and its context automatically. Shutting down these aggregators allows twitter to drive a harder bargain with Anthropic and OpenAI directly. I wonder whether this was the impetus for the C&D.
What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be? Clearly the exodus that happened when Musk took it over didn't kill it but I do seem to see fewer links to it than I used to.
Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
I’ve been writing an HN clone that’s literally a clone. It copies all front page posts and comments. I just wanted to say publicly that dang is awesome. Instead of shutting down the idea, he’s been actively helping the project by answering periodic emails and… well, not shutting it down.
Not sure what to do with it yet. Maybe I could let users have custom filtering rules. But the point is, companies should support community projects like this, not throw around ToS violation claims like they’d hold up in court.
Is there any jurisdiction where Nitter instances could be hosted while inconvenient Cease and Desist letters were... let's put it this way, rendered useless?
Look, we should make a concerted effort—a huge one, I know—to strip away all that is potentially of value in X, and through pulling and separating it from the whole, establishing dignified alternatives to every single one of them.
Here's what X does "well":
- Witness media/citizen journalism.
- Text publishing (narrowed down to short-form and very opinion-based, but still).
- Link sharing (there are TONS of links to great pieces of media; the vast majority of posts containing links to pirated content are never removed).
- Self-promotion (art, video games, software, etc.).
Now, imagine all of these facets turned into dignified, decentralized, and uncensorable platforms or protocols. It might sound like wishful thinking or some kind of utopian aspiration, but I really think we're fighting a battle for Internet freedom RIGHT NOW. What we do in the next two to five years will establish how much of it we'll get to keep in the long term, because there might be no turning back.
Okay, fine; no more X then.
I need to start preparing for Redlib to meet the same fate, as this god-damned site will be the only other site I care about on the Internet left once that happens.
Nitter is a great project, way lighter than using Twitter and gets the job done if you want to check few accounts. I have a list of 30 accounts that I'm checking with Nitter and it's absolutely fantastic for this. Oh well, I guess I'll live without following those accounts.
Political stuff notwithstanding, I used to be an active X user with a large following, but stopped using it because I couldn't configure a client that reliably allowed me to 1) consume a non-algorithmic feed and 2) disable videos and photos in the feed. It's really quite a bummer to be forced into the engagement maximizing app.
"The public town square" where you need an account to lurk
And twitters gotten increasing aggressive in forcing you to download the app and log in
Irritates me every time there is a hn link to tiwtter
Move to the fediverse or die. Twitter has been irrelevant for nearly a decade now.
https://xcancel.com is down too.
This is ultimately X’s problem. Remove the ways to consume its content, remove its relevance.
If at all, people should only fully quote content or post screenshots now.
A still-working Nitter instance here: https://nitter.rdrama.net
I have a Twitter account and even then I use xcancel and such because Twitter signed me out one time and then i couldn't read replies to tweets without being signed in, and I really hate being nagged to get a shitty app or sign in just to read some stuff.
I donated to xcancel because id rather support that than pay for Twitter blue or whatever.
I would literally stop opening twitter links, for me the utility of twitter is not having an account, but sometimes certain projects or governments and businesses use it for announcements. Before Musk put the login only for seeing tweets and comments, I would use regular twitter and when they did that I switched to nitter. (I had an account for some time but it was a complete was of time)
Contrast with Bluesky, where the firehoses will give you an archive of everything, every post signed by the original account, for better or worse.
Remember, corporations may scrap you but you cannot scrap them.
Anyone familiar with the legal reasons Twitter might be able to prevent sites like nitter from working? I believe scraping is legal but I'm sure there are details that make this different
Just saying but a tor hidden service to access Twitter would be nicer than possibly having your behavior tracked by people who don’t care much about laws(I mean the unofficial ones) and I suppose the liabilities for a third party providing a proxy to that content on the open web for convenience(and or tracking) would be significantly reduced.
They have archived the nitter repo :( [1]
This thing of needing to log in to view public pages needs to die
It's not "security". You know it's not. I feel like Facebook started the whole thing in their desperate attempt to get more users (while simultaneously screwing around with privacy settings on posts). It's incredibly widespread (I refuse to sign up for Instagram)
"Scraping" isn't an argument (LLMs for example) either
The leadership of these companies, are incredibly ethically bankrupt
It's hardly unique to Twitter but it's so frustrating how much "content" online requires an account. Whenever my friends send me something on Instagram or TikTok or a restaurant puts their menu on Instagram, I'm barraged with a thousand dark patterns forcing me to log in. Even Reddit is doing it now. I do wonder how much of this is to boost engagement versus another "wonderful" side effect from LLMs since they need training data.
I thought nitter shut down a year or two ago? I've been using xcancel, thinking they've been running on the old codebase...
old reddit and nitter finished in the span of a month? What an incredible month to be undistracted.
It was only a matter of time before they got in the way of someone committing a crime under the pretense of power.
Without a nitter instance, I simply won't see posts to X.
This seems predictable, so at least one goal is to reduce the reach of people posting on X.
Explains why the various links were suggesting to use different instances today. Surprised it lasted this long.
A lot of instances are showing rate limited too.
Twitter / X was predicted to be dead / destroyed / shut down and completely taken offline.
It turns out that Twitter / X has never been more alive!
The open web is dead. The open web remains dead. And we have killed it.
I'm actually much less anti-Musk than the average HN commentator but it should be universally agreed here that a small handful of mega-corp websites dominating the majority of content on the web is a bad thing. Nitter was hardly a solution. Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed, and "free speech" platforms like X are "technically" closed.
IMO we all need to start vibe coding PHP bulletin boards again. 'RETVRN' etc.
Sad for the project but unsurprising knowing how much SpaceX (sigh) relies on xAI which it mostly a shelf for a neocloud bootstrapped precisely from Twitter/X as a dataset. I imagine they will legally fight to close as much as possible in order to make it look like a valuable dataset that is exclusive.
Note that the frequently-used workaround for regwalled Twitter content posted to G+, xcancel.com, is itself a Nitter instance.
HN mods may wish to take notice.
seems all instances except xcancel.com stopped working
I left Twitter few years ago as active user, it was not really giving me anything in return for contribution, I was still passively reading few accounts I followed through Nitter and used also Nitter redirect for all Twitter links in news articles.
If Musk thinks by shutting down Nitter instances I will return to Twitter he could not be further from truth, it doesn't really provide me anything essential I would not find elsewhere. It's almost as Google thinking I will ever pay for Youtube premium, if adblockers would stop working.
for all of elon's pratting on about crypto and open protocols for x to be a single reader application is insane. Wait the problem is AI scraping??!!? and yet Grok is hoovering the planet... what's good for me isn't good for you.
xcancel.com is also displaying cease and desist now.
So you have to get an X account to get access to "your" own politicians. Similarly, on Truth Social hedge funds are paying $100,000 bribes to Trump for premium access (essentially frontrunning).
This is from the company (X is owned by xAI) that distilled OpenAI against the terms of service.
I have ignored many cease and desists from powerful entities, for years, with no problems. Call their bluff. They are almost always a baseless fear tactic.
If you guys are really going to stay down otherwise because you are worried, transfer ownership of the Nitter servers to me on paper and I will approve turning them back on and resume operations as usual.
I have zero problem telling Musk to fuck off. In court, if needed.
As long as people are using X and linking to it this pain will just go on. If you have an account there you will not notice how unusable it is for others. And that's by design.
This means that you need to stop posting links to it anywhere, unless you attach to the link everything you find interesting about it (so the discussion too, if it's interesting).
Doing otherwise should be banned here.
Now I have no more ways to read Twitter... So, good?
as a former (and the best) mod of the Twitter subreddit and having a well attuned sense for how this will all play out it seems that X will very soon be a defunct service. We've all seen these patterns play out before.
this wikipedia page will be there for that day:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
It is absolutely silly how many people here deny the importance of X for at least journalism and politics. Musk isn't the only one on X.
There is a reason these Nitter based gateways exist. If you want to change it, come up with a better alternative.
To the people who say there are only "right wing" figures. Really?
If you only read Musk and AI boosters, you may get a wrong impression.
Let a thousand Nitters bloom.
The only reason why I needed nitter to access x is due to organizations still using it as their main communication solution to their customers. Even my local council uses it. I would like this to be the final push for people to get off x but I suspect its going g to stay and I guess I don't get to see news from my local council anymore.