Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

Banditoz 770 points 658 comments August 25, 2026
github.com · View on Hacker News

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1442 https://xcancel.com/

Discussion Highlights (20 comments)

Banditoz

A lot of instances are showing rate limited too.

raphman

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]

spiderfarmer

Let a thousand Nitters bloom.

bbg2401

> 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.

NoboruWataya

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.

suddenlybananas

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.

numpad0

xcancel.com still works. Isn't that sus?

tamimio

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.

teekert

Now I have no more ways to read Twitter... So, good?

tolerance

In the grand scheme of things I think that this is good.

utopiah

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.

kelvinjps10

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)

erulabs

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.

metalcrow

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

shevy-java

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.

solarkraft

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.

mnls

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.

ThouYS

"The public town square" where you need an account to lurk

Artoooooor

Remember, corporations may scrap you but you cannot scrap them.

g-b-r

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.

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