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  • Hacker News
  • Door 1: try to take down sites offering a lite version that people prefer over x.com.

    Door 2: improve x.com to be better than third-party sites.

    Which is, Elon?

  • How much does he even care about the details of X these days?

    I suspect the original C&Ds were just their legal team wanting to "do something" upon hearing about Nitter somehow, and not Elon personally commanding them.

    ...and I noticed that X did bring back a (quite) limited JS-free "lite version" recently, so maybe they are changing for the better.

  • To be fair, I don't think X could ever satisfy many of the users seeking Nitter services simply by definition.
  • Door 3: turn off API.
  • Making services better isn't the goal of the company, I'm sure they could make it better in a month if they wanted to but they'd lose money (which is what's important).
  • > 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.

  • The major instances are coming back online.
  • Cool to see such a notable Nim based project continue! It's unfortunate that X tries to block Nitter so often, but zedeus always seems to find a path around technical or now legal issues.

    The code looks surprisingly easy to hack on: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/src/nitter.nim

  • Nitter's author has suggested at least once that due to problems with Nim, a rewrite in Go is in the works:

    "The long-term plan is to rewrite the source code in Go, as I'm no longer interested in using Nim. This isn't a small task, but building more features with the current state of things is painful. Before doing that I'll fix some feature parity issues, and work on some conveniences for instance operators. Stay tuned."

    https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/discussions/1212

  • Related, Xcancel.com redirector extension for Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xcancelcom-redirect...
  • Nice!

    Is there sth like this but for old reddit

  • Or use Libredirect, which supports 20+ different sites and free choice of instance.
  • It is sad that Twitter is basically a private closed gate monopoly that people beg to use instead of developing alternatives like RSS
  • Yeah I keep yelling at Mum “Stop logging onto Twitter and develop and enhance RSS” but lately she’s stopped speaking to me.
  • There was a time when Twitter supported RSS, it lived at @your-username/rss

    Then they stopped it, because "eNgaGeMEnT" or w/e

  • Selfhosting friction has to be close to zero for that to work. And Termux is already way too much.
  • Social media is addictive. RSS is not. Social media is profitable so worth marketing. RSS is not.
  • 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.
  • You're thinking of pre-LLM times. Nowadays GPT-6 can probably advise them better than all the worlds law firms combined. And probably win too, considering the incompetence (and tech illiteracy) of human lawyers.
  • It would be cheaper to run it like a pirate site.

    https://annas-archive.gd for reference.

  • 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!
  • Correct me if I am wrong, but I'm pretty sure they could get away with this because nitter is not an archival software, but rather a frontend or alternative twitter proxy.
  • Glad they were able to get legal help and are back. It’s frustrating to me how it’s so hard to access so many websites nowadays without being logged in. Ridiculous that so much of the web nowadays is just a handful of websites almost all of which seem to have so many restrictions.
  • One of the reasons Twitter became foundational was because it was so accessible and open…
  • 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.
    by ocd
  • Eh, honestly, "entity gets nasty legal letter, entity stops doing thing, entity resumes doing thing after its own lawyers say, 'yeah, nah'" is a fairly common pattern.
  • It's a split between user expirences that do and don't optimize for rage and culture wars and engagement bait. If there's also a de facto red vs. blue split, it's due to which community gravitates to which model of what a social network should be.
  • Maybe there could be a joining path: an ActivityPub joining ATProto and Nitter/X or something so no need to miss out on anything by being on "the other".
  • 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...

  • Not going to work in EU.