After X threatened authorized motion final month, Nitter and XCancel, privacy-friendly companies for viewing X posts, seem like formally lifeless — for actual this time.
Nitter, an open source project that allow folks learn X posts with out logging in, had been used to energy a variety of companies, like XCancel and others. However final month, X despatched Nitter a cease-and-desist letter over its alleged “illegal use and circumvention” of X’s API and related knowledge.
Primarily, X stated that Nitter had scraped the social community’s knowledge to entry accounts and session tokens in violation of its guidelines.
Regardless of the risk, Nitter stated on its GitHub web page that “following authorized recommendation, the Nitter challenge will proceed,” and promised extra particulars would come quickly. In early September, both Nitter and XCancel were up and running again after a brief pause.
Sadly, issues have since modified.
Nitter’s GitHub web page was archived on Friday, September 11, indicating it’s now in read-only standing and might not be modified or up to date. XCancel, in the meantime, shut its service down on Monday, and published a brand new message on its dwelling web page: “Sadly, resulting from a brand new growth within the ongoing authorized proceedings, we’re required to droop this service once more till additional discover.”
Nitter, which labored by fetching public X posts after which stripping out the advertisements, monitoring cookies, and JavaScript, gave folks a clear, clutter-free approach to learn posts with out an account or the social community’s app.
For X, nevertheless, this isn’t ideally suited, because it doesn’t need folks to entry its content material with out having the ability to monetize these views with advertisements. That’s additionally why Twitter had disallowed third-party apps from accessing its content material years in the past, wiping out popular services like Twitterrific and Tweetbot alongside the way in which.
This wasn’t X’s first try to shut down Nitter, however it appears to have labored. Again in 2024, Nitter’s primary occasion, Nitter.internet, temporarily went offline after X rolled out new API restrictions. After that crackdown, those that wished to host a Nitter occasion needed to join it to an actual X account.
For lurkers, the companies’ closures are a bummer, as that they had provided a approach to view what was occurring on X with out having to really take part on X or assist it increase its person numbers.
Nitter didn’t reply to a request for remark.
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