alt Hacker NewsNitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
Comments
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.
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.
Pick literally any one of those, just seriously, if you're still on that platform, leave.
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]
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.
Whenever Meta is mentioned on HN, there will be HN users asking why people are still on Facebook or Instagram when we all know Meta hired psychology PHDs to make their products addictive yadda yadda. Usually you will just see people tell each other that they have gotten off Facebook before it became uncool. You hardly see anyone accusing each other of virtue signaling or having any kind of political slant.
But Twitter or X comes up, someone will say they don't use it, and people will start calling out their supposed virtue signaling and making wild speculations about their politics in no time.
Why?
I just noticed a couple days ago that when I paste a tweet URL 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.
"The public town square" where you need an account to lurk
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.
Especially rich coming from X Corp, with their xAI-Bot web scrapers.
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.
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?
It's insane that their sign-up process now requires a phone number to complete on the web, and even basic features like playing a video in a tweet recently stopped working on x.com without an account. (In the past, searching for tweets, looking at an account's entire timeline, etc., never required logging in at all.)
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.
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.
Move to the fediverse or die. Twitter has been irrelevant for nearly a decade now.
Regardless of the outcome, I’m very thankful for xcancel and all the excellent work they’ve done.
I wish them the best in the legal fight!
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.
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
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)
X is really a bad joke with their "Public Town Square".
https://xcancel.com is down too.
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
Elon was more or less made in environments where the informational flow was free. I'm not sure what he thinks he's doing with all this.
Someone should make a Twitter competitor.
If the courts consider these cease and desist orders authoritatively valid, does that mean all notary services are under threat?
The other day in the bay there was an amber alert. it had a bit.ly link which opened up twitter (or i guess x) app. that wouldnt let me see the alert unless i logged in.
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.
Folks need to learn to start putting such projects outside of the reach of US. Put it in an "unfriendly" country where the C&D means nothing.
In the grand scheme of things I think that this is good.
A still-working Nitter instance here: https://nitter.rdrama.net
This is part of the enshittification of social media: Places which used to be open for anyone to read, logged in or not, have become walled gardens, where you can only read the content if you log in, allowing the social network to use browser fingerprinting to track you, even if you erase all cookies.
Of course, the content on Twitter/X has gone down the toilet. While I am anything but “woke” (you can my posts defending RMS from the “woke mob” a few years ago), having a lot of content showing a random <<person in group Twitter posters don’t like>> committing a crime, and none of the comments letting us know when and where the incident in question happened (and, back when anyone could ask Grok where a given incident happened, it would invariably be something that happened five years ago or eight years ago), but a lot of comments going full Stormfront, saying that’s how all people in <<group they are bigoted against>> act.
Nitter was useful for archiving threads on Twitter/X, since it’s not possible to archive the same threads when they are directly on X. Even though anyone sensible has left Twitter/X, I will miss being able to archive the kind of content (as much as it is garbage) that is on X.
They have archived the nitter repo :( [1]
A dump question, can we use Internet Archive for that?
In the meanwhile for anyone that have android, use QuaX (still requires account)
I thought nitter shut down a year or two ago? I've been using xcancel, thinking they've been running on the old codebase...
Xcancel was my only window to X.com which I prefer for our hyperlocal news. With the mainstream media not covering hyperlocal news I am now denied a freedom access to our hyperlocal content. It is a shame that we are denied freedom access to content in this AI slop era.
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.
A lot of instances are showing rate limited too.
Explains why the various links were suggesting to use different instances today. Surprised it lasted this long.
s ot we dott comm
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.
I do not know if xcancel is going to survive this :(
As far as I understand, people use XCancel because they do not like X (and Elon) so do not want to give money or traffic to X. But they still want to read and share content posted there.
The added value of XCancel is they are not owned by Elon Musk.
Am I correct here?
Great news, as twitter becomes less relevant everyday.
well I guess I won't be reading anything on that hellsite anymore
A real shame. Even if you put all the political arguments aside it sucks when a site requires you to log in before you can read content on it.
For me that’ll mean I just don’t read content on there any more. Which I realise X doesn’t care about, I’m not monetisable anyway. But a shame nonetheless.