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#twitter#free#content#don#nitter#account#legal#xcancel#https#com
Discussion (209 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I always use xcancel instead of X. I don't have a twitter account and I don't want to sign in. I just occasionally want to read what some people had to say about something. Even this is usually a mistake. It's probably better taken as entertainment.
My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
That assumes the company's behavior is rooted in ineptitude rather than malice, which is too generous at this point.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49695912
The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads, or if it does have ads/tracking, that you are trivially capable of blocking them while still totally enjoying the service/product.
xcancel, archive, whatever are all tools almost solely meant to access monetized content without having to contribute to the monetize part. Then those companies are told they "suck" when they don't like it.
Most importantly, the competitors that the internet endlessly cries for to show up to dethrone these giants, see what is going on and say "lol, nope".
There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still serving ads.
> The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free
Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable.
This vision is ripe for the picking:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
Or in the case of X, how about just let me browse without creating an account? Likewise with meta/FB, IG, etc. The reality is businesses and other services post here, share status updates, etc. often before their main pages. I'd like to read those, and yet I have no desire to actually post or interact with any of the content, just read it. I should not need an account for that.
I suspect Nitter's first round with lawyers pointed out that scraping is legal, but now they have been threatened with something else than scraping - Elon claims something else the way Nitter runs is illegal, such as the use of fake accounts to circumvent an access control device (DMCA 1201).
Obviously ungrounded and frivolous cases tend to be easier to defend asymmetrically, but if I was X's legal team, there's no shortage of semi-plauisble claims I could throw at the wall and see what sticks.
As an example of this imbalance in action, BrightData is a 'gray area' company that basically does this exact kind of scraping. They have somehow won against Meta Platforms suing them, and even got X's lawsuit against them for scraping -- identical (?) activity to XCancel -- dismissed.
According to Wikipedia:
> In May 2024, a federal judge dismissed the suit, ruling that Bright Data did not violate X's terms of service or copyright by scraping publicly accessible data.[24] The judge emphasized that such scraping practices are generally legal and that restricting them could lead to information monopolies
But does XCancel have the resources of a company like Bright Data, that's funded and used by companies like Deloitte and Moodys?
Isn't Nitter abusing account sign-in for this?
Perhaps that is it in fact. The act of protecting it from scraping means you object. 99% of the blogged contents etc. Big AI helped themselves to was just… there. Public. Not free from copyright but still not paywalled.
It seems unreasonable to stop there though; the agentic bots are designed and marketed as able to compete with the initially-scraped sources.
I'm not convinced that a competitive use at one remove should be treated as not competitive.
What cases are you citing when you say this?
Taking something someone else made and showing it as-is, bypassing their own restrictions: No no.
Taking something someone else made, modify it or use parts of it in some bigger thing or completely change it: Fine, if you have money and/or run a company
Because that's stupid. These laws are stupid.
In general fair use pretty much always requires it to be transformative and/or point to the source. Simply scraping it to prevent people from going to X isn't free use in any definition I've heard.
if you started doing the same to, say, instagram content both meta and individual creators would sue you as well.
sites like archive.ph are in a similar bucket btw, and yet nobody's complaining (except websites seeing people evading their paywall). but at the end of the day it's not really fair to apply laws differentially on the basis of whose political ideas we like more.
Edit: not a moral stance
You let it happen. Once people stop letting it happen, it'll stop. But social media is apparently the new "opium of the masses" so here we are and no one wants to do anything.
Edit: iPhone autocorrected my OP which meant to say rehosting not reposting
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
UPDATE: Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.
It's impossible to know what this "legal advice" was, but 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.
Edit: I see I'm being downvoted for just providing facts, so here's some evidence: you can see on the main project page that the repo was archived on 11 Sep[0]. Looking in the commits, the "UPDATE" message was commited on 6 Sep[1].
[0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
[1] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/commit/1428b4c2b4246f92a7e5...
Why do you say it’s permanent? Unarchiving a GitHub repository is reversible, and just as easy as archiving it.
They probably don't want their echo chamber leaking to the wider internet, because external discussion of the content would reveal it for the siloed thought bubble that it is.
Consider X now requires personal information to sign up, and after handing that info over, signups are often still rejected with no explanation given. Yet another tell they're very interested in maintaining that echo chamber.
That is directly the result of the evil pull of advertising. "Logged in" users are more valuable than "non-logged in" users to advertisers (because logged in ones are identified) and so what you are seeing as "nagging" is Shitter (formerly X, formerly Twitter) desperately trying to increase its ad revenue at your expense. You are watching enshittification right before your eyes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Speaking only for myself, well, no. If Elon doesn't want non-users to be able to read tweets then that's simply one section of the internet I'm swearing off. I'll get my news from actual news sites and I have plenty of hot takes on my own to last me this life and the next.
It's like paywalls. Some news companies share free news as a sort of loss leader. Others say, "if you aren't going to pay we simply don't want you here."
[1]: https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox
Some organizations only post information on Twitter, especially those with limited resources. And if their followers are themselves limited in number, then that information is not disseminated.
For example, the Dutch Air Force is currently posting updates on their ongoing airborne exercise exclusively on Twitter: https://www.defensie.nl/onderwerpen/f/falcon-leap
*if you log in to an account
A big reason many people use Nitter instances is that X has become very locked down for unauthenticated users.
If it's public, people can link to it and promote the site. If it's not, then either info there doesn't get free publicity or people just screenshot the tweets instead.
Yes, we all know what "free speech" really means and it has nothing to do with X, but when the owner of X conflates what it means, we can mock that SOB for it.
Now that said, I sure hope Elon will pivot this and make these services unnecessary. I'm not holding my breath though.
He speaks out both sides of his mouth.
A nice UI around such API probably can be one-shotted with modern LLM-coding models and tools.
Or, you can go the hard way and vibecode something around buying twitter accounts (just several bucks per each) and proxies.
What I'm trying to say, that with modern tools it is incredibly easy to bypass the restrictions on reading twitter without an account, even if they manage to take down all the nitter instances, try to make finding nitter source code harder etc.
regardless, no matter how hard elon turns the screws on their customers, people will continue to use twitter/X because "that's where everyone is" and places like HN will continue to allow these links because "that's where the news is" despite healthier alternatives like the Mastodon network and Bluesky existing.
whatever. i've redirected x to 0.0.0.0 when the first warning shot was fired and called it a day. rocks are looking like a great place to live under right about now anyway.
You look very odd and silly if you still want to engage with it and just use a different UI layer (i.e., "XCancel", "Nitter".)
If they want you to have an account to read the post and you want to read the post, create an account, log in, and move on. If you don't want to do that, nobody is forcing you to view a public website. There's alternatives like "Bluesky" out there that might be good for you.
Why? The site still hosts plenty of content worth seeing. Is it really so silly to do it via a better UI, or to not want an account?
Bluesky is here anyway.
Hell, you’re arguably on a Twitter alternative right now.
The consistent view is one regarding IP in general - not reverse engineering your morals based on the case.
But more directly addressing your point, I do think you could easily find a consistent moral stance that thinks taking tweets to train AI is worse than republishing those same tweets on a website. An argument can be made that the person writing those tweets wants to be heard, so republishing the tweet is in line with (your best guess of) what they want. Whereas consumption of the tweet for AI training is less likely to be consistent with the wants of the original author.
I wish legal issues wouldn’t exist for this project and X would stop attacking projects that provide information for free.
Privacy is important more than ever as many of us don't want to login into X.
No they didn't, or you'd see the text "Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown." and wouldn't have access to the repo at all. Instead you have full access to it, its author having merely archived it out of caution.
No reference to nitter in https://github.com/github/dmca/
Here is what the "free speech" platform have censored previously on GitHub:
> X Corp. employs various technical protection measures to control access to its copyrighted works, including those at issue here (API schemas and platform content): e.g., official X Corp. API key/OAuth authentication, rate-limiting mechanisms, proprietary behavioral pattern detection, TLS fingerprint validation, and x-clienttransaction-id checks. The repository referenced above appears specifically designed to circumvent these measures using browser cookies, curl_cffi TLS impersonation, fake headers, request jitter, and reverse-engineered GraphQL queries.
https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/b2c88bad7dd771dc7d1842ff...
Consider running your own to spread out the HN/Slashdot effect.
There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.
This comment also applies to facebook too, which I think is even worse than twitter.
RSS.
There are millions of accounts for sale, roughly $0.10 per account.
https://hstockplus.com/accounts/twitter-x-accounts?sortBy=pr...
It feels like an end of an era.
But at least reddit still has lots of nitter-style mirrors as an alternative.
Despicable behavior.
Either you cancel X. Meaning: NOT consuming X content.
Or you just visit X.com.
Right? Right?
A bit like your comment.
It's possible that other people you want to read, are using a platform you don't want to use. Have this perhaps never happened to you, even once?
Either these people are important enough to you, and you don't disfavor the platform soo much. Then visit that platform.
Or you dislike the platform so much that you even wonder why these people are there. You definitely don't want to be in contact with the platform. If so, then give up these people.
There's no free lunch, right? You also (typically) cannot buy steak, but then somehow not pay the money by showing some fake credit card. That would typically involve crime, right?
Make decisions, guys!!! Make decisions!
Your cat and mouse games are embarrassing...
And that doesn't get better in any way just by downvoting me. ;) ;) ;)
Xcancel allows HN users and adjacent to swear that they have left Twitter because it has nothing to offer them because its all shit, but still consume Twitter content because every other similar platform really sucks and is boring and has no content