9 ms·

Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

927 points by zImPatrick 27d ago

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://xcancel.com/cdclegal https://xcancel.com/cdclegal https://nitter.net/ https://nitter.net/ https://xcancel.com/ https://xcancel.com/

iamflimflam1 27d ago
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...
- 1asf21 27d ago
  It would be unfortunate for xAI, which abused the TOS of OpenAI for distilling via user accounts, to get a ruling that forbids scraping via user accounts. The entire business model of the AI industry, who resell and launder the scraped data, would collapse. Nitter just makes it visible to a human and has anti-scraper measures necessitated by the thieves like xAI. Additionally, a GoFundMe would reach astronomical proportions given how unpopular Musk is.
  - kova12 27d ago
    Latter is probably a factor, because merely being right doesn't mean you won't run out of money while defending yourself from lawyers
    - terribleperson 27d ago
      While true, parent comment's first point (that the plaintiff would be unwilling to make the winning argument) would have an impact on their ability to spend the defendent to death. Judges do notice when you don't have an actual argument.
- psolidgold 27d ago
  Serious comment: I wonder how this dynamic will change when AI has some real legal chops. One could spin up agents that could sift through all the BS discovery docs and correspondence they send to waste time and money. The agents could presumably even file the necessary paperwork on your behalf. Obviously not a lawyer, just food for thought.
  - alansaber 27d ago
    AI is good at volume, bad at accuracy and nuance. Of all the tasks to go through with a fine-toothed comb (ie, manually) legal is one.
    - bix6 27d ago
      And yet all the lawyers are dripping in AI. I got a near final doc from one the other day with a bunch of perplexity bullshit in it. How is this real life…
      - alansaber 26d ago
        Just as many junior devs are serving slop PRs. Unfortunately, you can only take a horse to water.
    - misstuned 26d ago
      Genuine question - isn't legal stuff one of the things AI should in theory be very good at? Legalese is like code, in that every word is very strictly defined and there to do a specific job in the text. I feel like that's one of the things AI would be good at writing and interpreting.
      - alansaber 26d ago
        It's far from trivial to set up anything more formalised than a loose taxonomy. People have been trying for a few decades now. AI will help automate this formalisation with graphs etc but it's not good enough yet for you to give a judge 13m LOC of mathlic proving your client isn't guilty.
- worldsavior 27d ago
  It seems like youtube-dl/yt-dlp survived. t
  - sourcecodeplz 26d ago
    different things: this is an online service, not downloadable software.
- warrantisall 27d ago
  Not going to work in EU.
- embedding-shape 27d ago
  Do we know where the main author(s) of Nitter is based? Jurisdiction matters a whole lot.
codechicago277 27d ago
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.
- lukan 27d ago
  "Maybe we can call it “agent first” to help move things along." "Agent First" API access for social networks. What could possibly go wrong.
  - deleted 27d ago
    [deleted]
  - tempodox 27d ago
    And the irony is that we don’t even need APIs for social networks to drown in botspam.
    - literalAardvark 27d ago
      I mean... It'd change nothing for the worse. It's regular users that are getting screwed by lack of API.
- gloosx 27d ago
  If you dont mind, could you share an example of information posted exclusively on twitter which was crucial to you? Just curious;)
  - codechicago277 27d ago
    A few recent examples: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/currencies/articles/bessent-ready-repeat-joint-yen-004023739.html https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/currencies/articles/bessen... https://theprint.in/world/us-military-says-it-completed-latest-wave-of-strikes-on-iran/3031352/ https://theprint.in/world/us-military-says-it-completed-late... https://www.reuters.com/technology/brad-lightcap-leaving-openai-2026-08-11/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/brad-lightcap-leaving-ope... It’s still the go-to platform for public figures to broadcast unfortunately, so if you want to verify the original comments you need an alternate frontend or an X account.
sparkling 27d ago
So X(.ai) can scrape the entire web, but nobody can scrape X. Makes sense.
- cdrnsf 27d ago
  Of course. xAI can also run gas generators to power its data centers and pump toxins into the air around local communities. Grok can generate non-consensual nude images of women (and CSAM). Their owner can make nazi salutes and demolish agencies millions depend on. Rules, laws and ethics are for poor people.
- KennyBlanken 27d ago
  And DOGE can get everyone's personal data but nobody can see crash data from his cars or full reports from government agencies about crashes, or where he's flying in his jet, or where he buys and owns properties... It's getting to the point where his private security are harassing people for walking down the street in their own neighborhood that runs alongside one of his "compounds."
- mitxela 27d ago
  Everyone does what's best for their own interests. We should not sit down and obey Elon's interests - we should support our own by running more Nitters.
petcat 27d ago
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.
- miningtcup 27d ago
  The project maintainer, Zedeus, runs the most or second-most popular instance, and I assume his lawyers decided that was okay.
- toomuchtodo 27d ago
  Host the infra in countries unfriendly to the US and its legal framework apparatus. Continually package the archive as torrents for distribution globally. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49567595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49567595
  - miningtcup 27d ago
    X already knows who the maintainer is and could easily go after him.
    - toomuchtodo 27d ago
      They will have to prove he’s operating it, and someone else can orchestrate. Anna’s Archive, Z Lib, Archive.today, Tor exit node patterns. Put a tip jar out, let’s get archiving. “You can just do things.”
- bhhaskin 27d ago
  Except this is settled case law. LinkedIn tried and lost against scrapers.
  - petcat 27d ago
    That was a case of scraping explicitly public data that was already available to the general public without any extra effort.
willmeyers 27d ago
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.
- rfgplk 27d ago
  You're thinking of pre-LLM times. Nowadays GPT-6 can probably advise them better than all the worlds law firms combined. And probably win too, considering the incompetence (and tech illiteracy) of human lawyers.
  - 15155 27d ago
    You presume opposing counsel isn't using GPT-6 and other, legal-specific models trained on data ChatGPT will never gain access to. Hint: they are. Regardless of advice quality, legal proceedings aren't free-to-play, and the adversary in question here has bottomless pockets.
    - loa_in_ 27d ago
      Such speculation is just fear mongering and that is exactly what the daft bullies want.
      - 15155 27d ago
        It's not speculation, it's simple fact. Both Lexis and Westlaw already have LLM integration that smokes the frontier models in this regard. The best legal professionals, just like the best software engineers, have wholly embraced LLM assistance. "Gee, we bill $700/hr but just can't figure out how to put a prompt into a chat interface." Please.
        gamblor956 27d ago
        No they don't, and no they haven't. LLMs have been making so many mistakes that the big firms have slowed or even paused their LLM spend. And that was before CA passed a law relating legal AI use.
numpad0 27d ago
It'll be very funny if everything associated with Twitter branding would survive and the other one just didn't
- mitxela 27d ago
  Elon abandoned that trademark, it's up for grabs according to the law, even though a court didn't think so.
  - numpad0 27d ago
    That means not even the court cares what Elon says anymore.
    - HDBaseT 26d ago
      Not what that means, at least not on a general basis.
  - Marsymars 26d ago
    Keep in mind that trademarks are registered independently in different jurisdictions, so IP offices and courts are likely to not align in different countries on that point.
usern20260720 27d ago
It is sad that Twitter is basically a private closed gate monopoly that people beg to use instead of developing alternatives like RSS
- graemep 27d ago
  Social media is addictive. RSS is not. Social media is profitable so worth marketing. RSS is not.
  - ichad99 27d ago
    [dead]
  - mitxela 26d ago
    It's the ability to reply, I think. Like this one. Makes you feel like you're doing something even though you're just shouting into a black hole where some other people are also shouting and you might even hear each other sometimes.
- slater 27d ago
  There was a time when Twitter supported RSS, it lived at @your-username/rss Then they stopped it, because "eNgaGeMEnT" or w/e
- numpad0 27d ago
  Selfhosting friction has to be close to zero for that to work. And Termux is already way too much.
  - mnadkvlb 27d ago
    what is termux ?
    - muppetman 27d ago
      Way too much, obviously. It’s an Android app that exposes the underlying Android OS cli, and bolts on a Linux user space. Unsure why it’s relevant to this discussion
ocd 27d ago
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.
- add-sub-mul-div 27d ago
  It's a split between user expirences that do and don't optimize for rage and culture wars and engagement bait. If there's also a de facto red vs. blue split, it's due to which community gravitates to which model of what a social network should be.
  - timmmmmmay 27d ago
    Look I wanted to like bsky but the fact is that their userbase has been doing as much rage and culture wars and engagement bait as any other. I mean look at what just happened the other day with the paint.net guy
    - paulryanrogers 27d ago
      It seems the paint.net situation was more about anti-AI folks vs a pro AI dev. Not very red or blue coded, nor engagement bait, as far as I can tell. I suppose it is something of a culture war. Albeit without the CEO's thumb on the scales.
- skeledrew 27d ago
  Maybe there could be a joining path: an ActivityPub joining ATProto and Nitter/X or something so no need to miss out on anything by being on "the other".
- rsynnott 27d ago
  Eh, honestly, "entity gets nasty legal letter, entity stops doing thing, entity resumes doing thing after its own lawyers say, 'yeah, nah'" is a fairly common pattern.
1matin 27d ago
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.
- ranger_danger 27d ago
  Thankfully github is but one in an unlimited sea of choice between both hosted and self-hosted git forges all across the world. Other solutions might not have the exact same functionality, but in this context of mere availability... it really doesn't matter.
delichon 27d ago
> 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.
- miningtcup 27d ago
  The major instances are coming back online.
  - delichon 27d ago
    Twitter has a history of tracking down leakers by watermarks. https://theintercept.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-leaks-twitter/ https://theintercept.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-leaks-twitter/ Nitter might want to make sure that their scrapes are bit-identical to other accounts to defeat this.
    - kay_o 27d ago
      Threat model a bit different, they can just request xcancel.com/unique-string and check what IP or account requested unique-string IMO
  - deleted 27d ago
    [deleted]
Retro_Dev 27d ago
duplicate of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589003
- zImPatrick 27d ago
  Sorry, didn‘t see it in the search before I submitted it
  - Cider9986 27d ago
    Actually i think you submitted a minute or so first.
    - Retro_Dev 27d ago
      I should have checked the timestamps, my bad.
      - Cider9986 27d ago
        How can you check timestamps that precisely?
        tim-- 27d ago
        Hover over the English time. There is a title that has the exact timestamp.
        Cider9986 24d ago
        Thanks
int32_64 27d ago
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.
- mitxela 26d ago
  x accounts with blank reputation cost $0.01 each on the grey web
leumon 27d ago
currently working instances: https://codeberg.org/mv12star/shitter/wiki/Instances https://codeberg.org/mv12star/shitter/wiki/Instances
quaintdev 27d ago
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.
- 0points 27d ago
  [flagged]
  - ballon_monkey 27d ago
    [flagged]
    - ohyoutravel 27d ago
      I think it’s just literally anyone who sees your post and also has eyes.
      - ballon_monkey 27d ago
        No. They don't have eyes, because its quite clear to anyone with half a brain that it's not a nazi salute, and is no different to the same hand gesture that democrats use. It's sad the loud minority still believe calling everyone a nazi or fascist bears any weight.
        r_lee 27d ago
        [flagged]
        ohyoutravel 27d ago
        The comment is a lie. I live in a major US city. They marched through the city in 2025 (minimally) with white face masks, red armbands with the Nazi symbol, doing Nazi salutes. Saw with my own eyes or I would have also not believed it. Absolutely shameful.
colesantiago 27d ago
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.
jauntywundrkind 27d ago
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/3mo2axzqt3s2y https://bsky.app/profile/jauntywunderkind.bsky.social/post/3...
shevy-java 27d ago
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.
- andersonpico 27d ago
  isn't nitter decentralized?
- sanskritical 27d ago
  > Now we need an alternative that works well and is de-centralized from the get go. It's called Nostr. I post on it every day.
  - Vaslo 26d ago
    Who?
    - sanskritical 26d ago
      Nostr is like a decentralized message queue/key-value store with cryptographic identities. It has been funded by Jack Dorsey. Its most common usages are a decentralized Twitter clone, a tailscale clone without any registration needed called NostrVPN, and diVine, a revival of the classic Vine service. But there's also very interesting stuff like this, a completely decentralized git that uses public relays and cryptographic identities to control ownership.
- mitxela 27d ago
  It's called a website
himata4113 27d ago
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!
- Retro_Dev 27d ago
  Correct me if I am wrong, but I'm pretty sure they could get away with this because nitter is not an archival software, but rather a frontend or alternative twitter proxy.
  - XenoCyber0 27d ago
    [dead]
  - himata4113 26d ago
    It's effectively archival since their cache is forever afaik.
amazingamazing 27d ago
Why do people feel the need to go to X so strongly? What am I missing? I don't use nitter or X
- KennyBlanken 27d ago
  Because despite the fact that they're both free and cost nothing to use, a lot of government agencies, companies, and press refuse to use or crosspost to Mastodon or Bluesky. Literally the only cost is setting up an IFTTT workflow or a script, or having an AI agent do it for you, etc. People will complain, in the same sentence, that bsky/mastodon will dilute their follower count and interactions, and "nobody uses it."
  - small_model 26d ago
    Well it's true, these clones were attempts to cash in on the left wing Elon manufactured hate, nitter and xcancel are similar.
- nohuman-labs 24d ago
  [dead]
amazingamazing 27d ago
Why do people feel the need to go to X so strongly? What am I missing? I don't use nitter or X
- dijit 27d ago
  Network effects are really powerful. Same reason at least one person in your company has a windows machine with a copy of excel, even though its a locked in platform which is paid and opaque: its what everyone else uses.
  - OroPla 27d ago
    That doesn't really explain why people went there, only why they stay. I remember back in 2006 when Twitter was new and I still couldn't figure out why anyone wanted to use it. So I never did, to this day.
    - dijit 26d ago
      i signed up because everyone was there… therefore i also likely reinforced that feeling in others too.
- ronsor 27d ago
  Because unfortunately people still post things on X that I find relevant, even if I don't use the platform much, and pragmatism wins over pure principles.
- kimos 27d ago
  Links mostly. To organization or government agencies or whatever official that shares updates only in one place. (Which is bad)
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 27d ago
  Sometimes it's hard to avoid. One small service provider I use updates its X/Facebook status much faster than its official status page during outages. There can be a gap of a few hours.
elcritch 27d ago
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 https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/src/nitter.nim
- Polizeiposaune 27d ago
  Nitter's author has suggested at least once that due to problems with Nim, a rewrite in Go is in the works: "The long-term plan is to rewrite the source code in Go, as I'm no longer interested in using Nim. This isn't a small task, but building more features with the current state of things is painful. Before doing that I'll fix some feature parity issues, and work on some conveniences for instance operators. Stay tuned." https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/discussions/1212 https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/discussions/1212
  - dom96 27d ago
    Honestly seems like a good move. It also isn't likely to be very difficult with the help of LLMs.
    - MrDrMcCoy 27d ago
      Curious as an outsider: what sorts of problems are there in the Nim world, and why would things improve by switching to Go?
      - mathverse 26d ago
        Basically lack of polish. Nim's compiler just keeps evolving around unfinished and unpolished ideas never reaching a momentum. It's a research project of its BDFL and he is alienating the most senior developers and contributors to Nim's ecosystems (ie Zedeus).
      - mitxela 26d ago
        More stable, commonly supported platform I presume. You don't want to be on a snowflake platform for a long running project, it only causes endless problems.
KennyBlanken 27d ago
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.
Decabytes 27d ago
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
- MikhailTal 27d ago
  > if you hook up to the fediverse No this is the hard problem. HN people live in a bubble. Anything else than signup with oauth and then having access to everyone and its too hard and 99% of people will click away.
  - SoftTalker 27d ago
    I think the friction is higher than that. With few exceptions I basically won't use any new service that requires me to create an account. I do all my online shopping on sites that offer guest checkout. Zero chance I'm creating any new social accounts at this point.
    - MikhailTal 26d ago
      Again, this is HN bubble stuff. The vast majority of people do not mind oauth or account.
  - mitxela 26d ago
    You using the word oauth means you're in the same bubble. People want signup with Google or Apple or even better, username/password signup or zero signup
mudkipdev 27d ago
Anyone else wondering what the "legal advice" is?
- kertoip_1 27d ago
  > YOLO
- petcat 26d ago
  I'll be surprised if there was actually any legal advice at all. And if there was it was probably pertaining only to the legality of the software project itself, not actually hosting and running an instance with the explicit goal of facilitating the unauthorized access of Twitter's website.
latchkey 27d ago
Looking at their crypto addresses, they are sitting on many thousands of dollars that haven't moved in a very long time. What's the point of donating if they aren't going to use the funds?
m101 27d ago
Presumably there’s a future where your ai agent posts all your videos / pictures / comments on every platform you have so we get around the idea of X, for example, being the only one to receive posts?
jesuslop 27d ago
Maybe we should define and spec what is an Open Platform, say RSS, Mastodon, grandma cookies recipe in a txt in an Apache, etc. Then paint a beautiful "open platform" logo and start making some collective noises, some pinky flower good-guy psiops. If reply is it alrady exists, it ain't rather working. Currently civil life is being shaped for the algos and the money, that is ok in business terms, we civilians are not coaxed to post or follow Twitter or Facebook as in an Orwellian bad dream. We rather opt-in, yet the politic process is not more illustrated despite all factual discussions at a chat distance of resolution, rational debate is penalized for being boring and much we are offered is as gamified as the Aliexpress user experience. Let's convince ourselves first that the parallel non-profit internet is a grand place to find the full spectrum of human rant in all its glory and gore. Hail the guy in his basement that made and documented a COTS parts scanning tunnel microscope. That is open platform content. Heck, remember webrings? Megacorps are not the problem, it is us being lazy even as spectators.
- mitxela 26d ago
  People don't gravitate to open or closed platforms, or platforms at all. They gravitate to something else. I think it's the ability to reply to a global conversation and feel like you're doing something, like I am right now.
ViktorRay 27d ago
Glad they were able to get legal help and are back. It’s frustrating to me how it’s so hard to access so many websites nowadays without being logged in. Ridiculous that so much of the web nowadays is just a handful of websites almost all of which seem to have so many restrictions.
- dieselgate 27d ago
  One of the reasons Twitter became foundational was because it was so accessible and open…
deleted 27d ago
[deleted]
gblargg 27d ago
Door 1: try to take down sites offering a lite version that people prefer over x.com. Door 2: improve x.com to be better than third-party sites. Which is, Elon?
- hyperionultra 27d ago
  Door 3: turn off API.
  - mitxela 26d ago
    Nitter doesn't use the Application Programming Interface. It uses Adversarial Platform Interoperability, instead.
- archon810 27d ago
  To be fair, I don't think X could ever satisfy many of the users seeking Nitter services simply by definition.
  - davkan 26d ago
    I never bothered with nitter until elon made the site unusable for people not signed in. If he undid the changes and then sold the company I’d probably a bother to update the url the next time my nitter redirects stopped working.
- boelboel 26d ago
  Making services better isn't the goal of the company, I'm sure they could make it better in a month if they wanted to but they'd lose money (which is what's important).
- userbinator 26d ago
  How much does he even care about the details of X these days? I suspect the original C&Ds were just their legal team wanting to "do something" upon hearing about Nitter somehow, and not Elon personally commanding them. ...and I noticed that X did bring back a (quite) limited JS-free "lite version" recently, so maybe they are changing for the better.
gblargg 27d ago
Redirector is a great browser extension (Firefox and Chrome) to easily automatically redirect x.com links to one of these alternatives, BTW.
throw03172019 27d ago
Thank goodness! I only use XCancel for tweets
Markoff 26d ago
Yeah, I think I will stick with redirectors to working instance anyway, seems like safer option than stick with one specific instance. https://twit.0r.cx https://twit.0r.cx https://xxcancel.com https://xxcancel.com
- DavCreator 26d ago
  Glad you like xxcancel.com (I am the dev!). I just added xcancel.com back to the instances list. Can't wait to also add nitter.net back to it soon. Do you have any suggestions for xxcancel.com?
Melatonic 26d ago
Now if only we can get a working one for Instagram
- alex1138 26d ago
  What you mean you don't like Zuckerberg's endless log in to see any page ever hyper aggressive popups
m00dy 26d ago
ok, what's the legal advice ?
sylware 26d ago
Keep in mind that those front-ends are, in general, much more friendly towards noscript/basic HTML browsers than the official front-ends broke a few year ago. (well, nitter was at the time) Don't think the 'whatwg cartel' will let some web not require their web engines. Expect shadowpaid hackers to ruin their infrastructure. Don't be a fool, expect the worst (more so when the whatwg cartel is involved). And if you, yeah you! If you are running an "AI scrapper", have the decency to preserve those front-ends (or get the code and run it yourself).
- account42 26d ago
  They are more noscript friendly ... except for the mandatory bot check. Sad that this is what the Internet has become.
  - sylware 26d ago
    Real BOTs are more and more using whatwg cartel web engines, namely this has an end. If not all, namely the end was already reached. The ones not using them are more likely to be shadowpaid hackers by the whatwg cartel to ruin anything noscript/basic HTML (or they could be beyond idiotic hackers, unlikely). Not to mention, many "maths challenges" out there are nothing more than a 'wait loop' in the end. Namely, you could replace them with a HTTP hard refresh timer with human scale wait times in order to get the same pertinent result. Those are actually even worse because they are pleasing the whatwg cartel since those are made to work only in their web engines. The least they could do is to standardize those 'maths challenges' and make them HTTP header friendly.
    - BenjiWiebe 26d ago
      Human scale wait timers aren't a big issue for bots. More parallel requests. Or more websites being scraped in parallel, if the website doesn't allow multiple timers going at once. Whereas number crunching actually ties up some CPU time.
      - sylware 25d ago
albert_e 26d ago
Some government bodies and officials post "official" public communications on x/facebook which may not be mirrored or oreserved anywhere else in same format. There has to be a reasonable way to preserve these comms for public benefit.
paulnpace 26d ago
Wait, so this was all a Streisand Effect shenanigan to increase the reach of "X"?
regginrevol 26d ago
It looks like graf and his legal team at poast really came through
josefresco 26d ago
Related, Xcancel.com redirector extension for Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xcancelcom-redirector/pgbegepjkmpcolalkpbakcbjlkodakie https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xcancelcom-redirect...
- winterrdog 26d ago
  Nice! Is there sth like this but for old reddit
- mitxela 26d ago
  Or use Libredirect, which supports 20+ different sites and free choice of instance.
jacquesm 26d ago
Anybody still think Elon Musk is a great guy who wants nothing but the best for humanity? I mostly wonder how far he'll fall, but to say I'm disappointed would be a gross understatement. What surprises me is that people keep working for him.
KolmogorovComp 26d ago
I wonder if instead of an alternative frontend, coordinated scrappers was investigated as the solution, the benefit being partial access still available when the defense step up.
solarkraft 26d ago
Good for X to be somewhat up again, I guess
silexia 26d ago
X.com is far superior to the original Twitter and far better than any other social media sites.
- avidruntime 26d ago
  How is it superior when viewing w/o an account is impossible? From my POV this was the moment X/Twitter completely rejected its stated mission of being a town square.
  - silexia 25d ago
    Create a free account, easy.
krttherealest 26d ago
helps a lot
deleted 25d ago
[deleted]
_giorgio_ 20d ago
So it's legal to systematically clone a website and host it as an alternative service? Seems quite different from google cache or archive.is, (one is offline), and the othere is too unreliable and full of holes to configure as a real and credible threat.

927 points by zImPatrick 27d ago

iamflimflam1 27d ago

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...

1asf21 27d ago
It would be unfortunate for xAI, which abused the TOS of OpenAI for distilling via user accounts, to get a ruling that forbids scraping via user accounts. The entire business model of the AI industry, who resell and launder the scraped data, would collapse. Nitter just makes it visible to a human and has anti-scraper measures necessitated by the thieves like xAI. Additionally, a GoFundMe would reach astronomical proportions given how unpopular Musk is.
- kova12 27d ago
  Latter is probably a factor, because merely being right doesn't mean you won't run out of money while defending yourself from lawyers
  - terribleperson 27d ago
    While true, parent comment's first point (that the plaintiff would be unwilling to make the winning argument) would have an impact on their ability to spend the defendent to death. Judges do notice when you don't have an actual argument.
psolidgold 27d ago
Serious comment: I wonder how this dynamic will change when AI has some real legal chops. One could spin up agents that could sift through all the BS discovery docs and correspondence they send to waste time and money. The agents could presumably even file the necessary paperwork on your behalf. Obviously not a lawyer, just food for thought.
- alansaber 27d ago
  AI is good at volume, bad at accuracy and nuance. Of all the tasks to go through with a fine-toothed comb (ie, manually) legal is one.
  - bix6 27d ago
    And yet all the lawyers are dripping in AI. I got a near final doc from one the other day with a bunch of perplexity bullshit in it. How is this real life…
    - alansaber 26d ago
      Just as many junior devs are serving slop PRs. Unfortunately, you can only take a horse to water.
  - misstuned 26d ago
    Genuine question - isn't legal stuff one of the things AI should in theory be very good at? Legalese is like code, in that every word is very strictly defined and there to do a specific job in the text. I feel like that's one of the things AI would be good at writing and interpreting.
    - alansaber 26d ago
      It's far from trivial to set up anything more formalised than a loose taxonomy. People have been trying for a few decades now. AI will help automate this formalisation with graphs etc but it's not good enough yet for you to give a judge 13m LOC of mathlic proving your client isn't guilty.
worldsavior 27d ago
It seems like youtube-dl/yt-dlp survived. t
- sourcecodeplz 26d ago
  different things: this is an online service, not downloadable software.
warrantisall 27d ago
Not going to work in EU.
embedding-shape 27d ago
Do we know where the main author(s) of Nitter is based? Jurisdiction matters a whole lot.

codechicago277 27d ago

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.

lukan 27d ago
"Maybe we can call it “agent first” to help move things along." "Agent First" API access for social networks. What could possibly go wrong.
- deleted 27d ago
  [deleted]
- tempodox 27d ago
  And the irony is that we don’t even need APIs for social networks to drown in botspam.
  - literalAardvark 27d ago
    I mean... It'd change nothing for the worse. It's regular users that are getting screwed by lack of API.
gloosx 27d ago
If you dont mind, could you share an example of information posted exclusively on twitter which was crucial to you? Just curious;)
- codechicago277 27d ago
  A few recent examples: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/currencies/articles/bessent-ready-repeat-joint-yen-004023739.html https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/currencies/articles/bessen... https://theprint.in/world/us-military-says-it-completed-latest-wave-of-strikes-on-iran/3031352/ https://theprint.in/world/us-military-says-it-completed-late... https://www.reuters.com/technology/brad-lightcap-leaving-openai-2026-08-11/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/brad-lightcap-leaving-ope... It’s still the go-to platform for public figures to broadcast unfortunately, so if you want to verify the original comments you need an alternate frontend or an X account.

sparkling 27d ago

So X(.ai) can scrape the entire web, but nobody can scrape X. Makes sense.

cdrnsf 27d ago
Of course. xAI can also run gas generators to power its data centers and pump toxins into the air around local communities. Grok can generate non-consensual nude images of women (and CSAM). Their owner can make nazi salutes and demolish agencies millions depend on. Rules, laws and ethics are for poor people.
KennyBlanken 27d ago
And DOGE can get everyone's personal data but nobody can see crash data from his cars or full reports from government agencies about crashes, or where he's flying in his jet, or where he buys and owns properties... It's getting to the point where his private security are harassing people for walking down the street in their own neighborhood that runs alongside one of his "compounds."
mitxela 27d ago
Everyone does what's best for their own interests. We should not sit down and obey Elon's interests - we should support our own by running more Nitters.

petcat 27d ago

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.

miningtcup 27d ago
The project maintainer, Zedeus, runs the most or second-most popular instance, and I assume his lawyers decided that was okay.
toomuchtodo 27d ago
Host the infra in countries unfriendly to the US and its legal framework apparatus. Continually package the archive as torrents for distribution globally. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49567595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49567595
- miningtcup 27d ago
  X already knows who the maintainer is and could easily go after him.
  - toomuchtodo 27d ago
    They will have to prove he’s operating it, and someone else can orchestrate. Anna’s Archive, Z Lib, Archive.today, Tor exit node patterns. Put a tip jar out, let’s get archiving. “You can just do things.”
bhhaskin 27d ago
Except this is settled case law. LinkedIn tried and lost against scrapers.
- petcat 27d ago
  That was a case of scraping explicitly public data that was already available to the general public without any extra effort.

willmeyers 27d ago

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.

rfgplk 27d ago
You're thinking of pre-LLM times. Nowadays GPT-6 can probably advise them better than all the worlds law firms combined. And probably win too, considering the incompetence (and tech illiteracy) of human lawyers.
- 15155 27d ago
  You presume opposing counsel isn't using GPT-6 and other, legal-specific models trained on data ChatGPT will never gain access to. Hint: they are. Regardless of advice quality, legal proceedings aren't free-to-play, and the adversary in question here has bottomless pockets.
  - loa_in_ 27d ago
    Such speculation is just fear mongering and that is exactly what the daft bullies want.
    - 15155 27d ago
      It's not speculation, it's simple fact. Both Lexis and Westlaw already have LLM integration that smokes the frontier models in this regard. The best legal professionals, just like the best software engineers, have wholly embraced LLM assistance. "Gee, we bill $700/hr but just can't figure out how to put a prompt into a chat interface." Please.
      - gamblor956 27d ago
        No they don't, and no they haven't. LLMs have been making so many mistakes that the big firms have slowed or even paused their LLM spend. And that was before CA passed a law relating legal AI use.

numpad0 27d ago

It'll be very funny if everything associated with Twitter branding would survive and the other one just didn't

mitxela 27d ago
Elon abandoned that trademark, it's up for grabs according to the law, even though a court didn't think so.
- numpad0 27d ago
  That means not even the court cares what Elon says anymore.
  - HDBaseT 26d ago
    Not what that means, at least not on a general basis.
- Marsymars 26d ago
  Keep in mind that trademarks are registered independently in different jurisdictions, so IP offices and courts are likely to not align in different countries on that point.

usern20260720 27d ago

It is sad that Twitter is basically a private closed gate monopoly that people beg to use instead of developing alternatives like RSS

graemep 27d ago
Social media is addictive. RSS is not. Social media is profitable so worth marketing. RSS is not.
- ichad99 27d ago
  [dead]
- mitxela 26d ago
  It's the ability to reply, I think. Like this one. Makes you feel like you're doing something even though you're just shouting into a black hole where some other people are also shouting and you might even hear each other sometimes.
slater 27d ago
There was a time when Twitter supported RSS, it lived at @your-username/rss Then they stopped it, because "eNgaGeMEnT" or w/e
numpad0 27d ago
Selfhosting friction has to be close to zero for that to work. And Termux is already way too much.
- mnadkvlb 27d ago
  what is termux ?
  - muppetman 27d ago
    Way too much, obviously. It’s an Android app that exposes the underlying Android OS cli, and bolts on a Linux user space. Unsure why it’s relevant to this discussion

ocd 27d ago

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.

add-sub-mul-div 27d ago
It's a split between user expirences that do and don't optimize for rage and culture wars and engagement bait. If there's also a de facto red vs. blue split, it's due to which community gravitates to which model of what a social network should be.
- timmmmmmay 27d ago
  Look I wanted to like bsky but the fact is that their userbase has been doing as much rage and culture wars and engagement bait as any other. I mean look at what just happened the other day with the paint.net guy
  - paulryanrogers 27d ago
    It seems the paint.net situation was more about anti-AI folks vs a pro AI dev. Not very red or blue coded, nor engagement bait, as far as I can tell. I suppose it is something of a culture war. Albeit without the CEO's thumb on the scales.
skeledrew 27d ago
Maybe there could be a joining path: an ActivityPub joining ATProto and Nitter/X or something so no need to miss out on anything by being on "the other".
rsynnott 27d ago
Eh, honestly, "entity gets nasty legal letter, entity stops doing thing, entity resumes doing thing after its own lawyers say, 'yeah, nah'" is a fairly common pattern.

1matin 27d ago

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.

ranger_danger 27d ago
Thankfully github is but one in an unlimited sea of choice between both hosted and self-hosted git forges all across the world. Other solutions might not have the exact same functionality, but in this context of mere availability... it really doesn't matter.

delichon 27d ago

> 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.

miningtcup 27d ago
The major instances are coming back online.
- delichon 27d ago
  Twitter has a history of tracking down leakers by watermarks. https://theintercept.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-leaks-twitter/ https://theintercept.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-leaks-twitter/ Nitter might want to make sure that their scrapes are bit-identical to other accounts to defeat this.
  - kay_o 27d ago
    Threat model a bit different, they can just request xcancel.com/unique-string and check what IP or account requested unique-string IMO
- deleted 27d ago
  [deleted]

Retro_Dev 27d ago

duplicate of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589003

zImPatrick 27d ago
Sorry, didn‘t see it in the search before I submitted it
- Cider9986 27d ago
  Actually i think you submitted a minute or so first.
  - Retro_Dev 27d ago
    I should have checked the timestamps, my bad.
    - Cider9986 27d ago
      How can you check timestamps that precisely?
      - tim-- 27d ago
        Hover over the English time. There is a title that has the exact timestamp.
        Cider9986 24d ago
        Thanks

int32_64 27d ago

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.

mitxela 26d ago
x accounts with blank reputation cost $0.01 each on the grey web

leumon 27d ago

currently working instances: https://codeberg.org/mv12star/shitter/wiki/Instances https://codeberg.org/mv12star/shitter/wiki/Instances

quaintdev 27d ago

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.

0points 27d ago
[flagged]
- ballon_monkey 27d ago
  [flagged]
  - ohyoutravel 27d ago
    I think it’s just literally anyone who sees your post and also has eyes.
    - ballon_monkey 27d ago
      No. They don't have eyes, because its quite clear to anyone with half a brain that it's not a nazi salute, and is no different to the same hand gesture that democrats use. It's sad the loud minority still believe calling everyone a nazi or fascist bears any weight.
      - r_lee 27d ago
        [flagged]
        ohyoutravel 27d ago
        The comment is a lie. I live in a major US city. They marched through the city in 2025 (minimally) with white face masks, red armbands with the Nazi symbol, doing Nazi salutes. Saw with my own eyes or I would have also not believed it. Absolutely shameful.

colesantiago 27d ago

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.

jauntywundrkind 27d ago

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/3mo2axzqt3s2y https://bsky.app/profile/jauntywunderkind.bsky.social/post/3...

shevy-java 27d ago

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.

andersonpico 27d ago
isn't nitter decentralized?
sanskritical 27d ago
> Now we need an alternative that works well and is de-centralized from the get go. It's called Nostr. I post on it every day.
- Vaslo 26d ago
  Who?
  - sanskritical 26d ago
    Nostr is like a decentralized message queue/key-value store with cryptographic identities. It has been funded by Jack Dorsey. Its most common usages are a decentralized Twitter clone, a tailscale clone without any registration needed called NostrVPN, and diVine, a revival of the classic Vine service. But there's also very interesting stuff like this, a completely decentralized git that uses public relays and cryptographic identities to control ownership.
mitxela 27d ago
It's called a website

himata4113 27d ago

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!

Retro_Dev 27d ago
Correct me if I am wrong, but I'm pretty sure they could get away with this because nitter is not an archival software, but rather a frontend or alternative twitter proxy.
- XenoCyber0 27d ago
  [dead]
- himata4113 26d ago
  It's effectively archival since their cache is forever afaik.

amazingamazing 27d ago

Why do people feel the need to go to X so strongly? What am I missing? I don't use nitter or X

KennyBlanken 27d ago
Because despite the fact that they're both free and cost nothing to use, a lot of government agencies, companies, and press refuse to use or crosspost to Mastodon or Bluesky. Literally the only cost is setting up an IFTTT workflow or a script, or having an AI agent do it for you, etc. People will complain, in the same sentence, that bsky/mastodon will dilute their follower count and interactions, and "nobody uses it."
- small_model 26d ago
  Well it's true, these clones were attempts to cash in on the left wing Elon manufactured hate, nitter and xcancel are similar.
nohuman-labs 24d ago
[dead]

amazingamazing 27d ago

Why do people feel the need to go to X so strongly? What am I missing? I don't use nitter or X

dijit 27d ago
Network effects are really powerful. Same reason at least one person in your company has a windows machine with a copy of excel, even though its a locked in platform which is paid and opaque: its what everyone else uses.
- OroPla 27d ago
  That doesn't really explain why people went there, only why they stay. I remember back in 2006 when Twitter was new and I still couldn't figure out why anyone wanted to use it. So I never did, to this day.
  - dijit 26d ago
    i signed up because everyone was there… therefore i also likely reinforced that feeling in others too.
ronsor 27d ago
Because unfortunately people still post things on X that I find relevant, even if I don't use the platform much, and pragmatism wins over pure principles.
kimos 27d ago
Links mostly. To organization or government agencies or whatever official that shares updates only in one place. (Which is bad)
8cvor6j844qw_d6 27d ago
Sometimes it's hard to avoid. One small service provider I use updates its X/Facebook status much faster than its official status page during outages. There can be a gap of a few hours.

elcritch 27d ago

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 https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/src/nitter.nim

Polizeiposaune 27d ago
Nitter's author has suggested at least once that due to problems with Nim, a rewrite in Go is in the works: "The long-term plan is to rewrite the source code in Go, as I'm no longer interested in using Nim. This isn't a small task, but building more features with the current state of things is painful. Before doing that I'll fix some feature parity issues, and work on some conveniences for instance operators. Stay tuned." https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/discussions/1212 https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/discussions/1212
- dom96 27d ago
  Honestly seems like a good move. It also isn't likely to be very difficult with the help of LLMs.
  - MrDrMcCoy 27d ago
    Curious as an outsider: what sorts of problems are there in the Nim world, and why would things improve by switching to Go?
    - mathverse 26d ago
      Basically lack of polish. Nim's compiler just keeps evolving around unfinished and unpolished ideas never reaching a momentum. It's a research project of its BDFL and he is alienating the most senior developers and contributors to Nim's ecosystems (ie Zedeus).
    - mitxela 26d ago
      More stable, commonly supported platform I presume. You don't want to be on a snowflake platform for a long running project, it only causes endless problems.

KennyBlanken 27d ago

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.

Decabytes 27d ago

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

MikhailTal 27d ago
> if you hook up to the fediverse No this is the hard problem. HN people live in a bubble. Anything else than signup with oauth and then having access to everyone and its too hard and 99% of people will click away.
- SoftTalker 27d ago
  I think the friction is higher than that. With few exceptions I basically won't use any new service that requires me to create an account. I do all my online shopping on sites that offer guest checkout. Zero chance I'm creating any new social accounts at this point.
  - MikhailTal 26d ago
    Again, this is HN bubble stuff. The vast majority of people do not mind oauth or account.
- mitxela 26d ago
  You using the word oauth means you're in the same bubble. People want signup with Google or Apple or even better, username/password signup or zero signup

mudkipdev 27d ago

Anyone else wondering what the "legal advice" is?

kertoip_1 27d ago
> YOLO
petcat 26d ago
I'll be surprised if there was actually any legal advice at all. And if there was it was probably pertaining only to the legality of the software project itself, not actually hosting and running an instance with the explicit goal of facilitating the unauthorized access of Twitter's website.

latchkey 27d ago

Looking at their crypto addresses, they are sitting on many thousands of dollars that haven't moved in a very long time. What's the point of donating if they aren't going to use the funds?

m101 27d ago

Presumably there’s a future where your ai agent posts all your videos / pictures / comments on every platform you have so we get around the idea of X, for example, being the only one to receive posts?

jesuslop 27d ago

Maybe we should define and spec what is an Open Platform, say RSS, Mastodon, grandma cookies recipe in a txt in an Apache, etc. Then paint a beautiful "open platform" logo and start making some collective noises, some pinky flower good-guy psiops. If reply is it alrady exists, it ain't rather working. Currently civil life is being shaped for the algos and the money, that is ok in business terms, we civilians are not coaxed to post or follow Twitter or Facebook as in an Orwellian bad dream. We rather opt-in, yet the politic process is not more illustrated despite all factual discussions at a chat distance of resolution, rational debate is penalized for being boring and much we are offered is as gamified as the Aliexpress user experience. Let's convince ourselves first that the parallel non-profit internet is a grand place to find the full spectrum of human rant in all its glory and gore. Hail the guy in his basement that made and documented a COTS parts scanning tunnel microscope. That is open platform content. Heck, remember webrings? Megacorps are not the problem, it is us being lazy even as spectators.

mitxela 26d ago
People don't gravitate to open or closed platforms, or platforms at all. They gravitate to something else. I think it's the ability to reply to a global conversation and feel like you're doing something, like I am right now.

ViktorRay 27d ago

Glad they were able to get legal help and are back. It’s frustrating to me how it’s so hard to access so many websites nowadays without being logged in. Ridiculous that so much of the web nowadays is just a handful of websites almost all of which seem to have so many restrictions.

dieselgate 27d ago
One of the reasons Twitter became foundational was because it was so accessible and open…

deleted 27d ago

[deleted]

gblargg 27d ago

Door 1: try to take down sites offering a lite version that people prefer over x.com. Door 2: improve x.com to be better than third-party sites. Which is, Elon?

hyperionultra 27d ago
Door 3: turn off API.
- mitxela 26d ago
  Nitter doesn't use the Application Programming Interface. It uses Adversarial Platform Interoperability, instead.
archon810 27d ago
To be fair, I don't think X could ever satisfy many of the users seeking Nitter services simply by definition.
- davkan 26d ago
  I never bothered with nitter until elon made the site unusable for people not signed in. If he undid the changes and then sold the company I’d probably a bother to update the url the next time my nitter redirects stopped working.
boelboel 26d ago
Making services better isn't the goal of the company, I'm sure they could make it better in a month if they wanted to but they'd lose money (which is what's important).
userbinator 26d ago
How much does he even care about the details of X these days? I suspect the original C&Ds were just their legal team wanting to "do something" upon hearing about Nitter somehow, and not Elon personally commanding them. ...and I noticed that X did bring back a (quite) limited JS-free "lite version" recently, so maybe they are changing for the better.

gblargg 27d ago

Redirector is a great browser extension (Firefox and Chrome) to easily automatically redirect x.com links to one of these alternatives, BTW.

throw03172019 27d ago

Thank goodness! I only use XCancel for tweets

Markoff 26d ago

Yeah, I think I will stick with redirectors to working instance anyway, seems like safer option than stick with one specific instance. https://twit.0r.cx https://twit.0r.cx https://xxcancel.com https://xxcancel.com

DavCreator 26d ago
Glad you like xxcancel.com (I am the dev!). I just added xcancel.com back to the instances list. Can't wait to also add nitter.net back to it soon. Do you have any suggestions for xxcancel.com?

Melatonic 26d ago

Now if only we can get a working one for Instagram

alex1138 26d ago
What you mean you don't like Zuckerberg's endless log in to see any page ever hyper aggressive popups

m00dy 26d ago

ok, what's the legal advice ?

sylware 26d ago

Keep in mind that those front-ends are, in general, much more friendly towards noscript/basic HTML browsers than the official front-ends broke a few year ago. (well, nitter was at the time) Don't think the 'whatwg cartel' will let some web not require their web engines. Expect shadowpaid hackers to ruin their infrastructure. Don't be a fool, expect the worst (more so when the whatwg cartel is involved). And if you, yeah you! If you are running an "AI scrapper", have the decency to preserve those front-ends (or get the code and run it yourself).

account42 26d ago
They are more noscript friendly ... except for the mandatory bot check. Sad that this is what the Internet has become.
- sylware 26d ago
  Real BOTs are more and more using whatwg cartel web engines, namely this has an end. If not all, namely the end was already reached. The ones not using them are more likely to be shadowpaid hackers by the whatwg cartel to ruin anything noscript/basic HTML (or they could be beyond idiotic hackers, unlikely). Not to mention, many "maths challenges" out there are nothing more than a 'wait loop' in the end. Namely, you could replace them with a HTTP hard refresh timer with human scale wait times in order to get the same pertinent result. Those are actually even worse because they are pleasing the whatwg cartel since those are made to work only in their web engines. The least they could do is to standardize those 'maths challenges' and make them HTTP header friendly.
  - BenjiWiebe 26d ago
    Human scale wait timers aren't a big issue for bots. More parallel requests. Or more websites being scraped in parallel, if the website doesn't allow multiple timers going at once. Whereas number crunching actually ties up some CPU time.
    - sylware 25d ago

albert_e 26d ago

Some government bodies and officials post "official" public communications on x/facebook which may not be mirrored or oreserved anywhere else in same format. There has to be a reasonable way to preserve these comms for public benefit.

paulnpace 26d ago

Wait, so this was all a Streisand Effect shenanigan to increase the reach of "X"?

regginrevol 26d ago

It looks like graf and his legal team at poast really came through

josefresco 26d ago

Related, Xcancel.com redirector extension for Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xcancelcom-redirector/pgbegepjkmpcolalkpbakcbjlkodakie https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xcancelcom-redirect...

winterrdog 26d ago
Nice! Is there sth like this but for old reddit
mitxela 26d ago
Or use Libredirect, which supports 20+ different sites and free choice of instance.

jacquesm 26d ago

Anybody still think Elon Musk is a great guy who wants nothing but the best for humanity? I mostly wonder how far he'll fall, but to say I'm disappointed would be a gross understatement. What surprises me is that people keep working for him.

KolmogorovComp 26d ago

I wonder if instead of an alternative frontend, coordinated scrappers was investigated as the solution, the benefit being partial access still available when the defense step up.

solarkraft 26d ago

Good for X to be somewhat up again, I guess

silexia 26d ago

X.com is far superior to the original Twitter and far better than any other social media sites.

avidruntime 26d ago
How is it superior when viewing w/o an account is impossible? From my POV this was the moment X/Twitter completely rejected its stated mission of being a town square.
- silexia 25d ago
  Create a free account, easy.

krttherealest 26d ago

helps a lot

deleted 25d ago

[deleted]

_giorgio_ 20d ago

So it's legal to systematically clone a website and host it as an alternative service? Seems quite different from google cache or archive.is, (one is offline), and the othere is too unreliable and full of holes to configure as a real and credible threat.