Nitter, XCancel Shutdown Over Cease-And-Desist

83 points by crunxxi a day ago on lobsters | 13 comments

jkachmar | 21 hours ago

as much as i appreciated these resources, good riddance.

Twitter is a cesspool and if they want to force people to log in to view stuff that’s fine by me, anything that even marginally reduces the platform’s reach is good.

landon | 20 hours ago

A loss for adversarial interoperability is a loss. Yeah, twitter sucks, but it sees this as a win.

dfawcus | 20 hours ago

I'd have to disagree.

While Twitter seemed (in the Musk era) to become raw unfiltered opinion, despite the obvious issues, it has been a useful resource in the UK given our now highly censorious government, and the decline and muzzling of the 4th estate.

Since I never subscribed to Twitter, the various Nitter servers were a useful way to get unfiltered news - along with the feed of rubbish and bile. That by reading the feeds for various foreign news services, as well as the domestic ones.

It simply required one to use reason, and secondary checks, to find the pearls.

I guess I shall now have to go to the effort of creating an account, and running my own private Nitter instance on a server outwith the UK.

k749gtnc9l3w | 21 hours ago

They kind of weakened log-in requirement recently: some time ago they restored viewing posts by direct link without login, and recently they even added top replies there (in particular, making short threads readable), so it might not reduce the reach as much as if they did this two years ago.

XCancel is/was a redirect service.

As far as I know, XCancel has always been a Nitter instance and did not offer redirects.

patryk | 19 hours ago

I'd assume @crunxxi mistook it for hitlerx/fixupx and others used to make embeds usable (but xcancel was quite good for this as well)

ptman | 18 hours ago

https://twitterwebviewer.com/ seems to be a new alternative, but not as simple to replace in urls

FIGBERT | 15 hours ago

And, as far as I can tell, not open-source (and entirely coded by LLMs).

marcecoll | 13 hours ago

Has also been taken down

bitslayer | 10 hours ago

Could someone speak to the legality of these services? I'm not sure why they would be illegal.

gerikson | 9 hours ago

I believe Twitter’s position is that they’re facilitating malicious scraping.

spenc | 7 hours ago

Which of course should only be done by X.AI

mdaniel | 2 hours ago

The Golden Rule:

Those who have the gold make the rules