alt Hacker NewsNitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
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First Instagram and Facebook, then Reddit, now Twitter. This is the new normal, paywalls and walled gardens everywhere. Not to get started on quickly increasing nation-state censorship and trail blazers such as China with the entirety of their national web locked down already.
Great news, as twitter becomes less relevant everyday.
s ot we dott comm
Sad, if inevitable.
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.
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.
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.
could we have a moratorium on twitter links here?
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.
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.
I wonder why X waited until now to send cease and desist letters. I assumed the issue was resolved somehow - maybe they were unenforceable - long ago.
I'm also surprised they don't already have their response prepared to this inevitable event, though maybe they are just seeking to fine-tune it.
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
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!
In response to this, we should push to directly tax Elon Musk's wealth. :^)
Wait until Musk discovers that without these additional services, people will care even less about what happens there.
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.
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.
Let a thousand Nitters bloom.
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.
Now I have no more ways to read Twitter... So, good?
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.
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.
does any one even use twitter any more? that place is a cesspool.
Reminder that hosting your own won’t last long either if it got popular, as long as you don’t control your domain, you are always under the mercy of being shutdown.
EST, huh? Where is this poster located that they are in an Eastern Standard Time zone?
lol I'd say something about X, but man this place fooking loves X and it didn't go well last time. So, "oh nooooo".
This is sad. The government, in doing so, awards e. g. twitter/Musk a de-facto total control over the communication space. I think ALL protocols need to be made fully open, and everyone should be able to write clients adhering these protocols. Any "cease and desist" also must be instantly made public. Right now there is a rogue government running the USA, run by a corrupt orange clown king. All oligarchs who supported this system need to pay compensation money to the other taxpayers.
X makes a platform available. People choose to post on it knowing full well how it works. X makes money by running ads, charging for subscriptions and tracking users.
To me it sounds reasonable that you can't just take that content and repost it without their or the author of the post explicit permission. It sounds like a fair use case and copying the whole content is not that.
Now there are technical details: "are they really copying or generating on the fly for the user" but I don't think it matters. At the end of the day the content belongs to either X or their users. I think arguments against that are arguments against copyright in general.
If I ever posted something on X my expectations would be that if people want to read it they need to obey X's terms and conditions. I wouldn't be happy if there was a platform copying it somewhere else. If I wanted my post to be public I would post on freely available public website (and then maybe repost or link it from my X's account).
> You've gotta be kidding me. Unfortunately everyone still uses the Nazi app so this is actually a big problem.
If the commenter truly believes it’s a Nazi app, why are they the slightest bit upset to lose access to any version of it?
It’s astonishingly easy to not use toxic social media platforms.
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was still using nitter for the handful of accounts I follow without logging in. can't say I'm surprised — a polite read-only mirror of someone else's product was always going to meet a lawyer before a thank-you note.
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What's the point of such a service? It sounds like performative nonsense.
I had twitter since the beginning, it was a very nice place until Musk.
Is XCancel separate ? They have a page up as well