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- Hacker News
- I don’t use Twitter, but if I did, I would certainly want to archive the content of my timeline so I could refer back to it for journalistic reasons, perhaps, via a browser extension? No reason to lock down my “ownership” here, because it’d only be public posts. There are obvious fair use reasons for when I want to quote someone when I do acts of journalism. I’d even be willing to share my archive with anyone else, and advertise the tweet_ids I have in case another journalist wanted them. Sort of like… I dunno, napster? That’d be great.by apgwoz
- Thanks for posting here and drawing my attention. Donating 1.22221337 BTC to the address listed on their page right now.
- I am quite surprised by the number of comments critical of Nitter.
I personally don't use it but frontends like these are very important in today's day and age.
As sad as it is, the majority of online discourse nowadays happens on platforms whose algorithms and interfaces are controlled by corporations.
A project like Nitter probably can't run legally, and that's okay. Custom mobile clients for Reddit still work after they banned it, life finds a way. I'm all for funding these projects though because at the end of the day, someone has to build it.
by hrideshmg - More than a decade ago I wrote an academic whitepaper about how I violated Twitter terms of service at scale in a way they had no method of preventing by decentralizing all of my shamelessly abusive anonymous jsonp Tweet Widget API requests across all users via a system of websockets to give me a free firehose to train ML models and serve those same users for free, and presented it at the AAAI.
Twitter presented after me, showing all the ways they were trying and failing to stop people like me. They could not do shit. It was pretty great.
I have repeatedly ignored this class of cease and desists across my career when they have no precedent for winning in court, and nothing has ever happened. These are not police. They are employees of a private company writing you strongly worded letters to scare you because they actually have no other recourse.
If you intend on engaging in a legal battle with them I would not want to participate in that money pit, but if you simply want to keep Nitter online in a way where it is unkillable, take some lessons from thepiratebay and get some cheap disposable proxy fronting VPSs all over the world that ssh tunnel or vpn back to your actual infra so your real infras IPs are never exposed. Have lots of different people run these fronting servers in a round robin pool in many different countries and legal jurisdictions to keep their legal team busy indefinitely. Each one can also distribute the load of data collection across many IPs so you technically never communicate with twitter servers at all but just run the plumbing.
I would happily run one if for no other reason than to annoy elon musk.
by lrvick - Nitter is/was a free, open-source alternative front-end for X (formerly Twitter) that lets users view public posts without an account, ads, or tracking scripts.by 1ba9115454
- I don’t think nitter can run legally. It would be like having a proxy for nytimes or cnn. I think its (or systems like it) only possible future is to acknowledge it doesn’t have a legal future.by bhouston
- It's impossible to know what this "legal advice" was, but it was always a dubious claim.
The software project itself is probably fine. 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 and not listen to anything this guy says.
by petcat - This is very clearly an attempt by X to use the legal system to harass people doing perfectly legal things. The chilling effect on speech is the whole pointby medler