alt Hacker NewsNitter and XCancel restored
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Somebody needs to figure out how to move millions of people from one platform to other. Otherwise we will never get better platforms and our current techlords will keep getting richer.
I once consulted a lawyer when a large company contacted me.
His response was - they've got a team of lawyers on payroll whose job it is to make you run out of money...
Probably the first time I've read a headline of some kind where good news followed something like "Due to legal advice". I hope the best for any service using Nitter, because the split between X and Bluesky is becoming another red vs. blue making life difficult for everyone else.
It is sad that Twitter is basically a private closed gate monopoly that people beg to use instead of developing alternatives like RSS
Reading between the lines it appears that the only argument twitter had is that they could not enforce content moderation due to the archival nature of nitter. Pretty cool to see that archival sites cannot get C&D'd that easily!
Cool to see such a notable Nim based project continue! It's unfortunate that X tries to block Nitter so often, but zedeus always seems to find a path around technical or now legal issues.
The code looks surprisingly easy to hack on: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/src/nitter.nim
I feel like setting up the social media is a solved problem. And while getting users is hard, if you hook up to the fediverse, you can piggy back off other Platforms. I think the harder problem is making it profitable
When I got my first cease and desist my lawyer basically asked me if this is a hill you are willing to die on (i.e. spend enormous amounts of time and money on). I with them luck. I suspect a Go Fund Me announcement coming soon.
duplicate of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589003
It seems like it would be a trivial statistical exercise to find all the nitter instance X accounts and just ban them, it's actually embarrassing they got lawyers involved instead of just doing that if they didn't want nitter to function.
> Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue.
The word "project" doesn't make a clear distinction between the repo and the instances. Nitter is on good ground with respect to the repo. The instances will be much harder to defend. From that one sentence it isn't clear if this is what the legal advice says or not.
Nitter changed their design such that it now requires an X account to scrape through. This was to stay functional after X removed guest accounts. This exposes them to a legal attack through the terms of service that must be accepted for the account, and to technical attack by blocking the scraping accounts.
It'll be very funny if everything associated with Twitter branding would survive and the other one just didn't
currently working instances: https://codeberg.org/mv12star/shitter/wiki/Instances
The software project itself is probably fine, but the legal risk is always going to be with the person that hosts it with the intention of facilitating the unauthorized access of Twitter's website. Seems like that could run afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Those people should seek their own legal advice.
Why do people feel the need to go to X so strongly? What am I missing? I don't use nitter or X
Why do people feel the need to go to X so strongly? What am I missing? I don't use nitter or X
Let's hope X doesn't pressure GitHub to take the repo down.
It's actually sad to see how deeply do we depend on monopolies.
So X(.ai) can scrape the entire web, but nobody can scrape X. Makes sense.
Total defeat of Elon "I have too much money" Musk.
Now we need an alternative that works well and is de-centralized from the get go.
I find it hilarious that the world's richest man, who:
- refuses to speak to the press and lies about having a PR department, but still expects the press to cover everything his companies do
- is ignoring environmental regulations wholesale and literally poisoning tens to hundreds of thousands of people with very high NOx emissions, for which there is a great deal of high quality evidence showing causes significant health issues
- knew his giant rocket test would send debris miles, which caused extensive damage to wildlife near the launchpad and substantial private property damage...but he wanted to launch on 4/20
- runs a car company which was caught speeding up the odometers on cars nearing their end of warranty, purposefully either erases logs from its cars involved in crashes or lies to investigators and in court about whether logs exist/are retrievable, and has blamed its customers for car windows randomly shattering, drive units being destroyed by water ingress due to faulty seals (literally telling people they drove in too heavy a rainstorm)...not to mention currently have a significant problem with their suspensions failing, something that is wildly dangerous and just generally does not happen...not to mention being top per vehicle in deaths, fires, crashes...
- felt entitled to get his hands on nearly every kind of personal data the government has
- produces AI tools that have been repeatedly found to have some of the worst safety limitations on deepfake porn, and also sexual imagery involving minors
- set records for the largest number of complaints at numerous federal regulators and at one point his companies combined were under investigation by ~30 different federal regulatory agencies
- literally paid people to vote for his preferred candidate, because....see prior point
...throws such a major wobbly over nearly anyone doing anything he doesn't like "to" him.
I'm so here for an age where some of this IP protectionism felony anti-circumvention nonsense gets absolutely bulldozed. Please please please.
It's entirely unacceptable, is suicidal corporatism to riff off the bad man, to have humanity's "public" messaging system be off limits to researchers, academics, observers. To trust a network at their word that they and they alone have a right to defend and protect us from propaganda, from malicious & shadow influence. This is not an ok basis that our information driven civilization can rest on.
I look forward to getting out of this trap. https://bsky.app/profile/jauntywunderkind.bsky.social/post/3...
This is great news!
Lawsuits and cease and desists should never exist for software. I've just seen 10 more instances go live, you can't just go and sue everyone in the world.
It makes no sense to do this to an OSS community project just trying to provide information for free.
I hope as a society we stop censoring projects by using shallow and evil tactics like this.
Few details but glad to see the project will continue. Given how much crucial information is posted exclusively to X, having an alternative frontend is important.
Interesting that they were inspired by Invidious (alternative YouTube frontend). That’s another project that could use some love. Hopefully AI coding tools can do some good and make it easier for these projects to find ways into the walled gardens and work around the counter measures.
Waiting for the day all the social networks allow api access and become usable again. Maybe we can call it “agent first” to help move things along.