X's lawyers shut down Nitter, the open source tool that let you browse Twitter without an account
X sends in the lawyers to shut down open source project
X has sent cease-and-desist letters to Nitter and its related service XCancel, alleging data scraping and rules violations. Nitter's maintainer, zedeus, has taken the service offline and paused development while seeking legal advice. The move highlights the tension between Musk's free speech rhetoric and his company's actions, especially as X itself uses public data to train Grok. The takedown leaves privacy-minded users with fewer options for browsing X without an account.
Although the repository is still on GitHub, it is marked as archived and read-only, with some explanatory text added to the README.MD.
- zetanor
It's both funny and sad that despite several malicious actions like this, despite wasting a ton of Twitter's social capital and despite years of broken promises (e.g., dealing with bots, bringing back free speech, ending algo/report manipulation), none of the writers and artists whose work I enjoy have even attempted to move away. I mostly just read there, but presumably posters feel bound to their social network. Maybe the site really was worth $44B.
- a4isms
Not that it matters, but my use case for Nitter and XCancel was to provide a link to accompany a screen shot when discussing a tweet on Mastodon. Now I'lll just use a screen shot, there is zero chance I will send them direct traffic of any kind.
- galoisscobi
If XCancel is gone then I'm cancelling X. I don't need to read what people have to say on that website.