HN Explorer

XCancel and Nitter are receiving C&D letters from XCorp

3 points by mobilio ↗ HN
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."

98 comments

[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 8.5 ms ] thread
expedited123
Twitter has gone from relatively open to instagram / facebook level of closedness where I can't even share a video with my friends because it asks them to log in. I had to rely on nitter and xcancel for that... Now that no longer works either

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.

Razengan
Lets put AI to the test and make it walk the talk by making a viable alternative to Facebook/Twitter etc :)
spacechild1
Just go ahead and quit! I had a niche use case for FB, but I decided to quit nevertheless because I didn't want to support the platform anymore. Today I don't miss it a single bit. (I never had a Twitter account in the first place.)
kevin_thibedeau
It's glorious. We no longer have to stumble into a blog post split into dozens of tweets.
dimitarbogdanov
I know it is Meta-owned and is just as algorithmic, but Threads is a breath of fresh air in terms of access - the website is pratically the same in terms of UX as the app, and it does not require an account to browse at all. Just thought it'd be worth mentioning.
rwmj
I assume only because Meta have forgotten about it or haven't got around to closing it down yet.
ragnese
Nah, it's just the standard enshitification playbook. It'll start out nice, open, useful, fun; then once they have enough users and the network effect kicks in, they'll lock it down and turn it into a weapon against its users. Happens every time.
linuxftw
You gotta build the garden before you build the walls.
strenholme
Actually, the correct solution is Mastodon, which is an open protocol which can not become a walled garden the way Threads (based on Meta’s activity with Instagram and Facebook) will inevitably become a walled garden.
yuck39
I actually paid for their dumb monthly subscription only so that I could download videos within the app to share with my friends who don't use X. Only after paying did I realize that by "download videos" it means "cache videos locally inside the app for offline playback". It still would not allow me to save the video to my local device. Misleading, tacky, possibly even desparate.
H4cks0r1337
As both Nitter and Xcancel are down and I don't know of any alternatives, I use yt-dlp to download the videos now.
lousken
who cares about c&d? just host it outside of us
iamnothere
An anonymous group of devs should host the source on Radicle (over Tor) and the app itself on an onion site. Bonus, it may discourage some scrapers who can’t be bothered with setting up a Tor gateway.
duskdozer
If the operators are in the US, they probably don't want to risk it if they were anything less than very careful in not having their personal info attached to any of the data.
CM30
I've always found it baffling that more projects by folks that disagree with copyright, access controls, etc aren't hosted in places where the cease and desist won't work.

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?

alightsoul
Because the US is the center of the tech world. The default AWS region is in the us. All large tech companies are in the us. If you use any cloud provider the default and cheapest region is in the us and so on. Everything tech is in English and the largest English speaking country is the us.
alightsoul
Apparently meta can still sue foreign individuals in California if you scrape 300k accounts like a Turkish man did
imrehg
Ripping off the plaster moment? One can only hope.
delegate
Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ?

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.

vaylian
> are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.

The fediverse is a viable alternative. But most non-tech people don't know about it.

xnorswap
Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation.

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.

bigfishrunning
The requirement for strong moderation only exists *because* of centralization. If I'm looking at a linear feed of content, it has to be curated by someone. In the old days, content on the internet was mostly links between webpages -- the "web" if you will. If i like the content on a page, it'll link to other pages i may like, and I'm free to follow those links at will, and no third party moderation is required.

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.

akoboldfrying
Well, replies to a post also require moderation. In general, if you want people to ever see something created by people outside of their explicitly chosen friends: moderation.

(Plenty of people don't want that, or would at least prefer interacting only with their explicitly chosen friends if they were forced to choose between that and unmoderated public access. For them, group chats on Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram suffice.)

bigfishrunning
> In general, if you want people to ever see something created by people outside of their explicitly chosen friends: moderation.

I saw plenty of things pre-social-media that was created by complete strangers. These were mostly things found via search or via recommendations from people I know. Having strangers moderate (and snoop, and have AI train on) the communication I have with people I already know (or people who i meet through them...) is the problem here.

mgbmtl
Most of the forums I participated in, in the past, ended up dying because of a very persistent troll or two. Some of them I knew in person. They were just so arrogant and thought they were doing the right thing. The communities died. A healthy community gives everyone the chance to speak. In person, that's often done subtly by moderators.
akoboldfrying
Fair enough, my claim about ever seeing something by someone you don't know is well countered by your search example. (I think recommendations from people you know is technically another example of that, but not in the sense I intended.)

But I think the case of replies stands. How can replies on a post be handled without moderation, without either showing arbitrarily horrible things to people or restricting to showing replies from explicitly designated friends?

trompetenaccoun
There is a strong demand for censorship coming from not just governments and corporations but most regular people. It's not only big tech.

In the old days, most of the world wasn't online. The average internet user was a male Westerner in a tiny ideological bubble that represented not even 5% of the world's population. I fully agree with you that the old open web was better but the internet is more mainstream and monitored now and the average human isn't libertarian, to put it mildly. Corporations like X actually censor less than user moderated platforms such as Mastodon instances or most Reddit subs. Go on there to voice opinions that are unpopular with the moderators and you'll be banned in no time.

It's Eternal September.

strenholme
To be fair here, X also engages in moderation: I had my account on X suspended multiple times, for supposedly “posting spam”—something which never has happened with any other social media account I ever have had (and I have had them since the days of MySpace).

As far as I can tell, it’s because I posted evidence refuting the misogynistic lie widely spread on Twitter/X that 80% of the women sleep with only 20% of the men.[1] This would anger the kinds of Incel/RedPill men who were determined to believe this lie, facts be damned, and they would report my account.

[1] I detail how this is a lie at https://samboy.github.io/blog/80-20-myth.html

trompetenaccoun
True, that's definitely an issue. As far as I can tell X/Twitter has less political censorship these days (as Musk promised), but they fired most of the human censors and largely replaced them with an automated system that makes a lot of mistakes. So in the end perfectly harmless users still get censored unfairly, for simply expressing opinions that trigger others into abusing the report button. The X leadership has done nothing to address this so far.
echelon
I mentioned on r/technology that watermarks on AI content were bad and would lead to pervasive content tracking. Coupled with attestation and ID requirements in the US and EU, and we'll find ourselves in a 1984-type scenario.

I got 2,000 downvotes ranging from "AI slop" to "typical AI bro".

The next day I was banned from r/technology and found out my posts were shadow banned in several popular subreddits. I log out, open the thread, and my posts have "disappeared".

To be fair, they also didn't like when I spoke out a year ago against Meta glasses and said that not only could surveillance be used to control us, but it puts a damper on real human authenticity when we're being recorded 24/7 in every single human interaction.

I hate this internet.

bigyabai
I can't fully understand this mindset. If you despise AI watermarks, why not rent your own inference hardware and use open-weight models without watermarks? Or LORAs that remove them?

AI steganography exists because all customers are a liability. These AI companies don't really care if you get uncensored or use un-watermarked models, they just want to limit their personal liability when you use their service. If a criminal's chatbot logs get entered into a case as evidence, being able to exonerate your service could save hundreds of millions in legal fees. It's like Apple/Google/Microsoft's CSAM scanner on their cloud services, it's a measure that exists for the benefit of the court and the company.

The problem isn't the government, or the corporate relationship with the justice system; you can't change either of those without overriding Rule of Law. The problem is exactly what people said upthread; centralization. If you refuse to use anything but the most mainstream smartphone, mainstream social media and mainstream AI provider, you're probably opting in to a panopticon no different from Xkeyscore 20-odd years ago.

If you really hate AI surveillance, just host it all yourself. OpenAI and Anthropic were never going to be your savior, it's exhausting going through the motions of "oh no, they're a federal honeypot in disguise!" every time basic retention infrastructure is discovered. The writing has been on the wall for so long that I can't empathize with people that think this is the straw that will break the camel's back.

echelon
> If you really hate AI surveillance, just host it all yourself.

If you think this is a solution for 99.999% of the world, I've got a Linux on Desktop fantasy to sell you.

The world will never have distributed Facebook or Matrix or whatever pipe dream nerds think will work.

The only way to defend ourselves is to protest and legislate against this madness. And unfortunately the political willpower is on the side of surveillance.

Local AI will never be a mainstream thing.

bigyabai
Well yeah, those first two lines have been true for the past 25 years and AI doesn't really change the shape of the problem.

> The only way to defend ourselves is to protest and legislate against this

You can protest and legislate against it, only to have the ruling reversed in a sealed court decision or reactionary "Patriot Act"-style legislation. It doesn't really defend anyone.

The only surefire solution is to stop using remote services. You will never be able to control what a server serves you, so there is an inherent mistrust in demanding certain features be added or removed. When people make these sorts of high-and-mighty demands, that's when we see security theater, theoretical whitepapers and dishonest threat modelling from these businesses. For all of the effort they go through to ensure that you can trust them, you'll never get a copy of the program they run on their server. And that's by design.

cestith
You’re right to a point. The Internet is much older than the Web. Content on the Internet was largely FTP sites, Gopher sites, and Usenet long before the Web existed. We also had MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, talkers, chat rooms, BBSes, and more over Telnet well before the web was widespread.

    Telnet    1969, standardized 1983
    FTP       1971
    UUCP      1979
    SMTP      1981
    RSH       1983
    TCP/IP v4 1984
    NNTP      1986 (the successor to UUCP for newsgroups)
    IRC       1988
    Archie    1990 (search engine for ftp sites)
    Gopher    1991
    WWW       1989 first published 1991
    Veronica  1992 (search engine for Gopher sites)
    SSH       1995
ahknight
And in parallel we had FIDONet. Mustn't forget that magical place and source of many a late night and large phone bill.
cestith
Many BBSes in the later dial-up BBS days had gateways between the BBS itself or Fidonet echoes and parts of the Internet, too. Some of them had Internet email for their BBS users. Some kept a copy of parts of Usenet, or had a reader on the board that was a gateway to a full feed somewhere. Some would mirror popular FTP sites to the board’s downloads section. It was a magical time.
anal_reactor
Open protocols always end up with a "backend engineer doing frontend" situation. Which is okay if end users are other engineers, but not okay when end user is my mom.
1vuio0pswjnm7
"Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation."

Does centralization actually result in moderation

How do we define "moderation" (cf. "curation", e.g., filtering out anything that does not draw sufficiently large audiences for advertising)

Is optimizing information retrieval for data collection, surveillance and advertising "moderation"

Section 230 was supposed to promote moderation

It did not

Instead it allowed a select few websites to grow to sizes where moderation is impractical and, ultimately, bad for "business"

Their "business" is data collection, surveillance and advertising services, not information services. Section 230 did not anticipate this "business model"

They don't work for internet users. They work for advertisers

Having used the internet prior to their existence I am not convinced that the internet is useless without them

Anyone who has made a fortune catering to internet advertisers will of course disagree

That's fine but we have to account for bias

Given what has happened to "search" perhaps more internet users will come to understand that "discoverability" is not a "solved problem" when the "solution" is a middleman that works for advertisers not end users, an easy target for governments that wish to work around limits on their ability to legally conduct data collection and surveillance

arrowsmith
Whatever happened to "Twitter can do what it wants, it's a private platform"?
johnnyanmac
I believe that sentiment started to die out around the time people realized a Nazi gained control over the world's centralized communication hub. Whether that says more about the communication, the nazi, or the people is a question for the ages.
arrowsmith
So in other words it was never about principles, it was only about who was in charge.

Noted.

hamdingers
Have you ever heard of the Goomba fallacy?
arrowsmith
I hadn't, but don't pretend there's not huge overlap between the people who were saying that then and the people who are saying this now.
joquarky
Perhaps you should read it again.
thinkingtoilet
>Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ?

Because it is a private enterprise that you signed up for. You don't have a right to Twitter. You don't have a right to Facebook. If you don't like it, leave. The entitlement is massive here. These sites are poison in so many ways. Stop feeding the beast.

johnnyanmac
>You don't have a right to Twitter.

Regulation over communication channels is not only common through the ages, but expected and needed. There may not be literal landlines to worry about in the modern age, but the general idea of communication being an important medium that shouldn't be squandered by competition remains.

I prefer everyone to simply leave Twitter and to let it crash and burn, but I see the arguments to have stronger regulations on channels central enough for governmental entities to be using it as a communication hub.

Supermancho
This pattern is exceedingly common:

Multiple government agencies have a gap in capability. Larger government body chooses to leverage a popular (private) company Z solution over trying to develop an internal system. This is often because it's already been done in smaller jurisdictions. Z becomes head of agency/regulatory capture cartel. Z abuses the position to curtail the government actions/enable further corruption/abuse.

delegate
Of course I don't have a right to Twitter.

But I do have the right to the public information posted by people who intend it to be public information.

They're not posting 'on X', they're posting to the public and the only reason they do it on X is because there are no alternatives due to the network effect intrinsic for such services.

The 'network effect' part needs to be defined and taken into account by regulators and then regulate the companies such that they make the information available to the public if the poster intends so.

parineum
> Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ?

Because that's not what happened.

Why have users given control over their content to X?

ghastmaster
>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.

RSS. Website. Both have been around for a long time. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.

throw0101d
> RSS. Website. Both have been around for a long time. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.

A "foo-announce@" or "foo-alerts@" mailing list.

BobAliceInATree
> 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.

Government agencies have communicated to their citizens long before twitter has existed. There's a myriad of ways they can use today: websites (with or without RSS), email newsletters, text updates, other social networks (bluesky, threads, etc).

Choosing to give critical updates only on Twitter is definitely a choice and they are deliberately ignoring a very large segment of their population that doesn't have a twitter account.

carlosjobim
The competing app is e-mail. You can subscribe to important information by e-mail and send out important information to mailing lists.

> This needs to be regulated somehow.

Of course, this is HN so regulation is always the solution to all problems. Instead of making the people who are responsible for doing stuff and are getting paid for it get off their asses. They can easily post updates on government alert websites, on e-mail lists, and on social media and everywhere else to get the attention of the public.

gloosx
I don't believe updates on X is an exclusive channel for vital alerts in Spain.

This just doesn't make any sense, maybe what they are posting on X is just some typical SMM slop.

To send nation-wide or localised alerts for forest fires, floods or natural disasters, Spain seems to be using an entirely different system called ES-Alert via cellular broadcast technology which makes a lot of sense.

alightsoul
It's time to repost content on bluesky
sajithdilshan
Because it’s either this or tax payers money and corruption. Maintaining infrastructure and human labour is not free.
21asdffdsa12
Finally some variety by those who want to take over via social control-cults. It used to be all about protecting the children.
electriclove
I agree with you. I hope you've had similar outrage for Facebook over the last 20 years.
strenholme
The Facebook of 20 years ago is very different from the Facebook of today. 20 years ago, one’s Facebook timeline was filled with whatever your friends were posting. These days—and I think this started about a year ago when AI made it really easy for “influencers” to post AI Slop—one’s Facebook feed is filled by random AI Slop accounts posting nonsense like, as just one of many examples, 80% of the women sleeping with 20% of the men. [1]

I am now using a project called Facebook Clean My Feeds [2] which cleans out all of this AI Slop, so that my timeline is like the timeline I had, say, five years ago, with only posts from friends, accounts I follow, and ads. The only problem I see with this plugin is that it is a Greasemonkey script, so I have to trust it to not do anything nefarious.

[1] This isn’t actually true, as I detail at https://samboy.github.io/blog/80-20-myth.html

[2] https://github.com/Artificial-Sweetener/facebook-clean-my-fe...

kova12
I recently came to conclusion that x is deliberately used for psyops. After I made a couple of posts questioning the benefits of data centers on X, account was suspended for "inauthentic behaviors", restored, then suspended again, restored, and now X won't let me access it until I install an app on my phone and jump through hoops. In other words, doxx myself, it will not work with app on throwaway phone. X is clearly not a beacon of free speech it pretends to be
hsuduebc2
I do not use this garbage product made only to make your day miserable because it's ragebaiting algorithm. It's not essentiall by any means, it's only designed so you feel that way.
TiredOfLife
What algorithm? Im my 19 years of using twitter there has always been a following feed with posts only by the people i follow.
janaagaard
> 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.

This what a healthy society shouldn’t be accepting. But we both need to create laws about this and build the alternative.

esarbe
That's it for me. No more twitter.

Elmo really has ruined it.

giov4
I don't understand, is people still using it?

Once Elonified and walled, was already a clear bye bye years ago.

why there would be still the need to have an account and post stuff there?

boycott is the answer.

loosing and having few users is the biggest pain, let them drain into the void.

pxndxx
I use Nitter/Xcancel entirely because I don't have an account, and Twitter is now unusable without one. There's still content of some value there. People still link to it and now I can't read what they shared with me.
giov4
that's what I believed and did too till now, but would be good to remove the problem completely finally.
conradfr
To be honest it was quite closed as well before he bought it.

Before AI or whatever reason for being closed again he actually opened it back.

electriclove
Sad to see you getting downvotes for facts. What you stated is exactly what I witnessed myself.
khalic
Any ideas for a decentralized version of these services? Maybe something tied into the fediverse?
the_interloper
that is what bsky and other twitter-like platforms purport to be

how well they hold up under stress of bad actors/govts remains to be seen

icy
Bluesky?
pohl
Nitter and Xcancel should just announce that they’re training an LLM. Seems to be a get-out-of-scrape free card these days.
londons_explore
Presumably you also need a billion dollar team of lawyers to use that card...
seydor
"SpaceX takes down nitter"
pino83
That's how each of your cat-and-mouse games end, right?

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.

myko
Twitter is just bots and nazis today, not really worth trying to save
Your_ID_Collect
"Elites" of both left and right stay because no matter how much they hate Elon they still need to be in the same country club with other elites. That always takes precedence.

Remember the uniparty.

unethical_ban
Or because the masses of normies haven't left it and presenters want eyeballs.
dzonga
these things have to be operated from Russia or some country that has total independence from US legal system.
fnoef
I dont understand how come there are still people who use the garbage website named X/Twitter.
paulnpace
I wish for definitelynotnitter.net, where people just copy paste from accounts they follow and otherwise non-interactive.
outside1234
Why are people still using X is the real question? STOP USING THIS THING for hundreds of reasons, including this.
lenerdenator
Maybe it's just me, but I think it's time to stop giving any sort of traffic to the CSAM generator website operated by the guy who quotes the Turner Diaries, agrees with antisemitic tweets, and throws Nazi salutes at the inauguration.

If you were using these proxies, just move on. If you still have a Twitter account, well... C'mon, champ. Today's the day. Time to delete your account.

eddieroger
I'm sure this also ends the Safe Harbor protection they've enjoyed, then, if they're going to be in the business of dictating what content can be seen and where.
raffael_de
what I like about xcancel is that it allows me to read but protects me from giving in to the temptation of wasting time by engaging in fruitless discussions. same problem with reddit. funny thing is that my current account just got permanently banned due to ban evasion ... that's fantastic as I can still join and read subs but I cannot post or comment.