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 point
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why are folks still using Xitter? Genuinely can't understand it. You want reach? Don't post on a site that prevents people from reading your posts without logging in, because I assure you a lot of people will never read what you post there. A lot of people don't want anything to do with a site run by a genocidal white nationalist and you can't read a thread there without being logged in. You also seem like you kind of approve of what Musk has done to the site...do you really want to be participating in modern day Stormfront?
I wish the Nitter folks well, but the real solution is ending Xitter's relevance.
Surely Nitter is open source and has 1.4K forks alread. So it should be easy to ramp that up to several thousand more, which can make it harder to stop? or am i being naive?
IANAL but unfortunately the law isn't really in Nitter's favor, as Elon could easily win the fight that Nitter can be considered as a read-only scrapping mirror, which itself makes total sense why Elon tries to C&D it since it is a loophole for other AI companies, probably especially OpenAI, to read the feeds for free.
tl;dr Elon's ground can easily be that there is an official paid service that let's you read the feeds unrestricted (this will be a good counter-challenge however IMO) while Nitter tried to run around it. So the First Amendment defense from Nitter should be shit outta luck
Perhaps Musk is in his legal right to turn Twitter into a walled garden, but it certainly seems like false advertising to me after he kept describing his model as a public square. You can be a public square or a walled garden, but not both.
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 point
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for posting here and drawing my attention. Donating 1.22221337 BTC to the address listed on their page right now.
What is this, can't EFF or FSF or some related org provide legal aid
And does the access act as a kind of fair use? Not like Nitter is making money from the access to the content
> seeking funding
What’s the purpose of Nitter?
Elevator pitch if you will?
And where can one read a bio of the creator(s)?
Can the trademark claim(s) be ignored
Why continue to use a name, "Nitter", that looks and sounds like "Twitter"
Why are folks still using Xitter? Genuinely can't understand it. You want reach? Don't post on a site that prevents people from reading your posts without logging in, because I assure you a lot of people will never read what you post there. A lot of people don't want anything to do with a site run by a genocidal white nationalist and you can't read a thread there without being logged in. You also seem like you kind of approve of what Musk has done to the site...do you really want to be participating in modern day Stormfront?
I wish the Nitter folks well, but the real solution is ending Xitter's relevance.
Surely Nitter is open source and has 1.4K forks alread. So it should be easy to ramp that up to several thousand more, which can make it harder to stop? or am i being naive?
Well, it was good while it lasted.
The reason random accounts are popping up saying to use X is because they now get checks for posting engagement bait.
What's the point? Nitter already won since It's open source. Anyone can just fork it and/or self-host it. eg: https://status.d420.de or https://xxcancel.com
IANAL but unfortunately the law isn't really in Nitter's favor, as Elon could easily win the fight that Nitter can be considered as a read-only scrapping mirror, which itself makes total sense why Elon tries to C&D it since it is a loophole for other AI companies, probably especially OpenAI, to read the feeds for free.
tl;dr Elon's ground can easily be that there is an official paid service that let's you read the feeds unrestricted (this will be a good counter-challenge however IMO) while Nitter tried to run around it. So the First Amendment defense from Nitter should be shit outta luck
Nitter is a hydra. One instance goes down, another one goes up.
https://status.d420.de/
I don't quite understand the need for nitter. I don't use X/Twitter due to what it accesses, not due to the front end.
I quit twitter soon after Elon took over and the neo-Nazi spam. Nothing of value was lost.
Why not invest your time on better services.
Perhaps Musk is in his legal right to turn Twitter into a walled garden, but it certainly seems like false advertising to me after he kept describing his model as a public square. You can be a public square or a walled garden, but not both.
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FAFO. Edit: people who downvoting have to understand that you are supporting TOS violations. That always invite legal troubles.