Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

iamflimflam1

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...

codechicago277

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.

sparkling

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

petcat

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.

willmeyers

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.

numpad0

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

usern20260720

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

ocd

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.

1matin

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.

delichon

> 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.

int32_64

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.

Retro_Dev

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

leumon

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

quaintdev

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.

colesantiago

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

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...

shevy-java

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.

himata4113

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!

amazingamazing

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

amazingamazing

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