XCancel and Nitter are receiving C&D letters from XCorp
110
mmobilio about 3 hours ago 38 comments
https://xcancel.com
"On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.
The service XCancel is stopped until further notice.
We are seeking legal advice and won't share more details for now.
Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel."
https://nitter.net "On 24 August 2026 cease and desist letters have been sent by X Corp. demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project's repository.
nitter.net is offline and development has stopped for the time being. I'm seeking legal advice and won't be commenting further on the specifics for now.
Thank you to everyone who used, hosted, packaged, donated and contributed to Nitter over the past seven years."
Discussion (38 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Why do the users agree to the limits imposed by them and let the platform decide who gets to see the content they posted ?
Because they're offering the infrastructure. The tech for such a network is now within reach of many, but these apps are heavily dominated by network effects and that makes it impossible for competing apps to take hold.
This is negative for society.
Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
People who don't have an account are not getting vital information because the company decided to restrict access to the entire network.
This needs to be regulated somehow. At least for public services and major news outlets - as a tax for the network effect these apps benefit from.
Even FINGER had .plan files, where you could get status updates from people.
But how are you going to query whose plans you want to read, and who is going to moderate without centralisation?
It's the moderation in particular that dooms most federalised efforts. The web itself is only really moderated through the relative lack of discoverability, with Google and hosting providers having become a form of gatekeeper to remove the very worst of the web.
Twitter in the early days took off because it did solve a technological problem of the time. You only had your SMS enabled phone, no WAP or smartphone, and wanted to provide updates. They gave you a number you could text, which would post updates. Hence the character limit ( less than the SMS limit, to leave space for your credentials ).
Plenty of alternatives exist for getting information out, people just don't know where to look for it.
That technical problem disappeared, but it had by then grown to provide a service to rapidly get updates from people, one that had a sense of authority and the moderating effect and discoverability of centralisation is impossible to ignore.
Contrast with modern social media, where everything is condensed into a single list of algorithmically curated content, and we've implicitly eroded a lot of freedom (and handed control to Big Tech)
All this to say: bring back webrings.
The fediverse is a viable alternative. But most non-tech people don't know about it.
Bluesky attracted socialist progressives, furries, and kink-positive folks early on.
I'm not making any value statements, and there's nothing wrong with the userbase, but this is what dominates the feed for new users.
A lot of people are turned off by that when they see it as their first experience with the platform. Or they're actively turned away upon interaction. That's not how you build a big social network.
Mastodon is the exact same.
These platforms are also not winning people over by calling them "toots" and "skeets".
It's like Gimp refusing to adopt a Photoshop style UI for years and not changing their name.
Despite stated intentions, I think these platforms want to stay small and niche and non mainstream. If they wanted to grow big, they'd behave much differently. They'd try to get the Kardashians and would welcome posts about handbags and guns and sports.
I think that's essentially it, whether they are doing it intentionally or not.
Running a social network is like curating a party or conference. Who you do and don't let participate, and who you do and don't promote above others, is essentially the product. And that is a lot of work.
Open protocols don't solve any of these problems, and people who care about open protocols don't tend to be the same people interested in curating giant parties and conferences for a mass audience.
I'd say Mastodon at this point is mostly people talking in a vacuum (even more than BlueSky)
No mainstream discussion or debate comes from Mastodon, you don't see screenshots around (and you do see skeets around)
As much as SpaceXAi lost audience, there's a lot of discussion still going around there
I have one niche that I use twitter for. If it wasn't for that - would have deleted my account long time ago. Things like this push me towards that direction, though.
Then scaling and paying for it is the hard part.
The network effect / entrenchment means that any replacement has to be massively better in every dimension to have a chance. Otherwise people just stick to what they know, and then other people stick to it because the other people do. And so on.
I personally think Musk is a garbage-tier human who represents everything wrong with culture wars, and his brain is long blasted into a mush of worthless racist noise and stupidity by drug abuse, so I deleted my X account. Loads of others are too cowardly/selfish to do so.
It’s a shame: I remember when people would be so excited to get 100 strangers visiting their blogs but in a month, but now someone blogging for an audience like that would seem a little crazy, maybe paradoxically even overly grandiose.
Also, the harm from using X is complex. It basically comes from endorsing the site and encouraging other people to come there where they’ll be exposed to a cesspit of bigotry and right-wing ideas. It’s easy to tell yourself that what you’re doing there outweighs the cons, and that other sites are just as bad, etc.
how well they hold up under stress of bad actors/govts remains to be seen
there's still a lot of info you can only find on twitter
It's like, you're doing something to annoy a large company with lots of legal resources, and you host everything in the US? Why?
I mean, even the name already is the perfect symbol of what goes wrong in people's brains, right?
Xcancel should be about cancelling X. Not about adding another pipe to it. ;)
But yeah, people will never become smarter, I guess... Jusz their glasses do.
Elmo really has ruined it.