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
This is very clearly an attempt by X to use the legal system to harass people doing perfectly reasonable things, but are you sure they are legal? I would assume that is against the ToS and I don't think the law makes an exception for cases like this (IANAL of course).
Terms of service have no legal binding unless both parties agree to them.
In other words, if X has a public API and Nitter is using it, then neither Nitter themselves nor the Nitter users have to agree to any terms of service in order to do so.
X cannot expect anyone to behave in accordance with terms and conditions they never agreed to.
We need to revise the law around
terms of service, we are allowing companies to impose all kinds of monopolistic, anti competitive, user hostile, privacy invasion, and other measures against the public interest simply by burying provision in a wall of text they know no one will understand even if they read it.
> In other words, if X has a public API and Nitter is using it, then neither Nitter themselves nor the Nitter users have to agree to any terms of service in order to do so.
That's not true. Publicly available source code with licenses dispute your claim.
(IANAL) That's copyright law and not contract law. Perhaps X could try to put a clause in its ToS that publishing content there grants the copyright to itself, but I'm pretty sure it won't be accepted well even if it's legal.
> Terms of service have no legal binding unless both parties agree to them.
Companies are perfectly entitled to tell people they aren't allowed to use their services anymore. That's what the C&D was. It's perfectly legal to say "here's an API anyone can use, except you, Anish Kapoor."
It's like if Reddit bans you, you aren't entitled to use the site after they've told you you're banned. Even if you can find a technical means around the ban, it's still trespass.
> illegal
No, it’s not. Liability isn’t legality. There is nothing illegal in violating a ToS, nor is it a crime. Violating a ToS makes you liable under some other terms of that same agreement. That is very different from being “illegal”.
If you have entered into the contract and are even party to it in the first place, which is not clear in this case and is likely going to be one of the questions litigated here.
Didn't the guy run an instance himself? Clickwrap licenses are generally held to be enforceable so that's one way he "agreed" to the terms. Also even if he didn't, as a matter of practicality he probably needed to connect to the site to develop nitter , which exposes him there too.
It's impossible for the nitter person to defend against X Corporation and so X will have what it wants done.
So access to X content will be restricted to X servers.
X server operators, Musk, etc, are subject to rules themselves of their home locale, and they are not a disinterested party in many discussion subjects. So one can reasonably expect that the content on X will be regulated by state parties as well as corporate interests.
Also, X has login requirements in order to view a lot of its content.
So, nitter is a backup That has no necessary obligation to corporate or locale jurisdictions, and it has no login restrictions.
Regular average everyday citizens can speak into x, and have distribution through it. But they can expect for their speech to be restricted per the above.
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.
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.
I was misled by an individual who claimed to be helping the Nitter project pro bono with a team of lawyers. He made up a timeline of events that sounded mostly believable.
I have not given legal advice to any Nitter operators, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say?
>I was misled by an individual who claimed to be helping the Nitter project pro bono with a team of lawyers. He made up a timeline of events that sounded mostly believable.
I want to believe this was a case of incompetency on their part rather than malice because wow, that's a horrible thing to do.
Wouldn't be unprecedented. Megamind Musk got scammed out of $ 50.000,- USD by someone claiming to be a PI on then Twitter [0], despite having access to (as near as makes no difference) infinite investigatory resources. If someone claimed to be a pro bono legal team, a less affluent project threatened by letters from high class lawyers, could easily fall for that and I could easily see it be malicious. Maybe trolls, maybe investors wanting to help SpaceXAI or whatever it is called today, maybe someone wishing to convert into donations/crypto rug pull, etc. Could also be incompetence after all, but maliciousness isn't without priors.
Hanlon might say never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, but I've found more often than not that the two happen to come together.
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.
There is a strong distinction between news articles authored by or on behalf of a company, versus user generated content.
So I don't think nytimes, or cnn is an apt comparison.
It's more like your cellular provider claiming intellectual ownership over the web you browsed and conversations you read when people start sharing their downloaded pages.
> articles authored by or on behalf of a company, versus user generated content.
It gives me both a sense of schadenfreude but also a deep depression to watch the shoe on the other foot.
It was only a couple years ago that the talking point was "It's a private company!!", used to defend mass censorship on old Twitter, defend delisting of Parler on app stores, etc.
> It would be like having a proxy for nytimes or cnn
It's a much grayer area, considering NYTimes owns their content and x does not own the content they serve. I think this question deserves zealous representation.
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. If they say “you’re giving us your copyright when you press the POST button” then that would seem to be that.
Seems like a bad place for them to be, given the whole argument of “you can’t sue us for what other people said on our platform, that’s not our speech!” but that seems complicated and IANAL.
Yes, but that's not a high hurdle to clear. All Twitter has to do is have an exclusive content program, and now they have standing to sue for copyright infringement on those exclusively-licensed Tweets. The burden falls on Nitter instance hosters to filter that out. And there is no legal obligation on Twitter to actually provide reliable signals to block exclusively licensed content.
Given caching, blocking, userscripts, etc., most client things are have things built in that are effectively smart proxies or glorified layer 7 application gateways.
You can write your own client for arbitrary services. You can run your own client on your own hardware, and you can host your client on someone else's hardware. Your client can render the content however it likes. You can have someone else do the work to render it like you like it and run that, locally or remotely.
There are a lot of ways to get to an "apparatus" that's analogous to both nitter and to a proxy for nytimes that ensure consuming public comments by other users doesn't suck.
As far as I know, there's no law requiring billboards to be seen by all drivers using the public road it sits beside, nor requiring all web clients to render ads. As far as I know, in most of the world there's no law saying users can't buy DNS or proxy or application firewall or ad blocking services from a third party -- services that can run between you and host, on your router, on your device at various OS levels, or as extensions to your browser.
On the contrary, there seem to be increasing numbers of laws requiring servers to deliver their content to arbitrary clients even when a firm makes its own servers, content, and preferred client devices and wishes to "protect the user's experience" or whatever the firm's justification might be.
Given a decade or two of marketing the "public square", other people's public posts, intended for public consumption, and expected to reach the public, picking that content as worthy of banning "useragents" should be shaky ground. Should be an interesting battleground for digital rights.
It's enough to wonder if a reason to go after the nitters is to establish misfortunate legal precedent using a target that can't defend itself?
Clients are not proxies. The fundamental difference is who accesses the target server. If you’re using a client (in the sense of a local program that renders your request, like a browser or a browser with extensions) then you are the one accessing the information, and once you have that information it’s hard to make a legal argument against transforming it however you want for your own consumption.
But a proxy means you request information from someone else, not from the target server, and the proxy requests from the target server. This is also fine! Except: a) the target server can absolutely say “Proxy A is not allowed to access me.” [1] and b) if the target server has copyright on the material being requested, then the proxy may be violating that copyright by making the data available for your request.
[1] there’s a weird middle ground here where if a server can tell you’re using a client it doesn’t like, then technically it could use its arbitrary denial ability to deny access on that basis, but that doesn’t seem to be legally accepted? IANAL. Or maybe that just doesn’t happen because there’s no way for it to tell what client you’re using. They certainly do try to deny service when they can figure out you’re using an ad-blocker.
> the only legal hurdle would be complying with takedown requests.
If you mean 'takedown requests' related to X content that should not be a problem since nitter does not cache content so anything taken down by X is inaccessible to nitter. If you mean takedown requests for nitter instances the question is on what grounds those requests are made - TOS violations or legal grounds? If it is the former it would be easy for X to just block the user IDs and no takedown request is needed. If it is the latter, which laws would those be based on?
then they would be legally viable for the content on the website, the only reason why youtube, twitter can exist is because they do not own the user content for exactly this reason.
The legal future is whatever people fight for being legal. You see entities that are hostile to humanity making the laws they want all the time, why be so defeatist?
Of course it can run legally. What might not be possible is to open a running instance to the general public, certainly not to paying public but an argument could be made that even allowing free access would violate some law or other. This is not a certainty though and the continued existence of products like Opera Mini speak against there being such legal prohibitions to allowing public access to content-changing proxies.
Normally I'd agree, but in this case the people on the other end of the issue rarely care about how vague the legality of something is before going forward with it, so I think it's only reasonable to extend the same logic to nitter.
If one party is reckless in legal terms, then that's their right and they will bear the consequences. It's generally considered to be a bad attitude to have, which is why people generally don't have it, and I'm going to need an explanation on how wishing that onto Nitter isn't in practice wanting someone else to burn at the stake to spite a third party, especially given the enormous difference in economical, and as a result legal standing on both of those entities.
Said more explicitly, wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.
It is not my wish for nitter to shoulder any more burden than they can reasonably carry, which at this point unfortunately seems zero.
What I'm stating is that I'd normally be against a project like nitter on moral grounds had it been targeting a forum such as mineralenthusiasts.com that required you to log in to view posts, but since the counterparty in this case is a habitual bad actor extending the same goodwill to them only empowers them, and it would be best for nitter to function as much as it can unless its illegality is established in court.
I could accuse you of things as equally unpleasant as psychopathy for making me spell this out, which I had hoped would be incredibly obvious from my original comment, but I'll refrain from doing so.
> wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.
Speaking only for myself: I agree with the spirit of this statement (perhaps minus the use of the word “psychopathic”).
However, it seems like the author of Nitter wants to continue to engage in this risky activity, and is requesting resources to help. If they ever wish to stop developing Nitter/XCancel, I will absolutely respect that. But assuming they wish to continue, I consider supporting them and doing my part to frustrate a man-child, unrepentant fascist, and murderer of thousands a noble thing to do.
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.
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.
You've got legal and moral layers, then you've got to engage with the root problem that some services choose to use X as a channel to communicate with the general problem, but on top of that there's also the political intent to use Nitter explicitly to boycott Musk.
Musk is well-known for spending lots of money on viral marketing and online reputation services with bot accounts and astro-turfing. He has an extremely fragile ego and a pathological desire to be liked and, oddly, he desires to be considered a funny person, too (which he isn't). To cut a long story short, you cannot and should not trust comment sections about Musk anywhere. It's been like that for more than 10 years already.
Despite the VC firm trying to assimilate the word “hacker” to humanize itself, this place is Tech-bro News and the userbase will always tend to take the side of capital.
It wasn’t always like this, it changed in the last 10 ish years as the industry became more lucrative. Or maybe it’s been happening more slowly over a longer period of time, but I do think the earlier founders were more idealistic
+1. There is endless bullshit nitpicking that goes on here. Sometimes useful because we don't want a hive mind, but it becomes... really unnecessary with a lot of apologism (sometimes)
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.
For the decade+ there has been an unofficial town square known as twitter. As the town square has slowly become more gated and overgrown with weeds some people thought giving people a way to access the town square without paying the entrance fee would be helpful. Many found this useful.
Now I think the whole thing is trash, and agree, why use Twitter? But people like journalists and AI executives are still announcing things on Twitter because having a large following seems like a dopamine booster. In this world where people see the following as a source of legitimacy, having a single company own that town square seems...problematic.,
I'm reminded of the phrase 天下为公, which is hard to translate exactly because 公 is doing some linguistical juggling that English has a hard time matching.
I don't think twitter in its current capacity should exist, the storage should be decoupled from the filters and the filters that everyone uses should be a free market with traditional competition dynamics. It may end up looking something like twitter, but without editorializing algorithms and a single walled entry. We can quibble who owns the database I suppose.
It seems like a reasonable question to ask and I'm surprised to see you, in particular, take this point of view.
I could argue that due to the New York Times being the "newspaper of record" they should post my manifesto because, after all, it's very important. The obvious objection to this is that the NYT is privately owned, and despite having made itself very important, I don't have the right to tell them what to do.
This is the obvious objection to "Twitter is important, we should get to tell it what to do" as well, and you're old enough to know that Twitter kneecapping third-party apps is not at all new to the Musk chapter of the company, either.
Is it different, though? If so, how? Granted the jibe about the UN was sarcastic, but it's the same question, and, you know it.
Your NYT analogy seems to be specific to posting things, not reading them.
When it comes to reading, I think you could indeed make a reasonably compelling argument that the NYT must not refuse to provide a subscription to anyone who asks. That would be similar (but obviously not exactly the same) to the way common carriers are treated.
As to publishing, even then your analogy doesn't really fit because NYT has always been extremely selective about what they publish (ie they are curators) whereas twitter was fundamentally based on the polar opposite.
I legit did not know. I have seen it before, I've never really understood what it was, and didn't really have any reason to dig further into why people were linking against it instead of actual twitter/x until today. I've been here about a year less than you.
It was only a “town square” in the minds of Twitter users, no one else thinks that about a news media propped-up social network. If anything it was a comment section attached to nothing. And comment sections all get bad after a while.
Can I just add too, it's why 'popularity' is an incredibly terrible metric for successfulness on the web
Look at Twitter. If it was good under Dorsey (debatable, it did have pretty notable censorship) and Musk ruins it, why are people 'still on it'? Because Musk did a good job? Not necessarily. It takes time to build a new product, and get your friends to switch over. Switching costs. I'm on a platform because Avicebron is on it, because Alice is on it, because Bob is on it
Same goes for sites like (especially) Facebook. It's 'popular'! 3 billion active users! (They lie a lot and probably about that and they make it very easy to be 'active', by faking the notifications or giving you none at all, like increasingly with messages over the years) Well, it's hard to 'just move'. Facebook has become and has been for a while an utterly shit product that deserves the corporate death penalty. People being on it is not the slam dunk people think it is
I don’t use it, but some government organizations keep doing it. Why on earth they do that, I will never know, but I’m not making an account to read a tweet.
Because some people in positions of power ignore the consequences of using external services.
There has been a bit of a wake up call in this regard in Europe, with many governments making efforts to detach themselves from US corporations, but it's a much larger problem. When a government entity chooses to rely on Whatsapp, or Android, or some other piece of technology bound to a corporation, they are creating a bond between the rights and services they enable and interaction with that corporation.
This nuance is often ignored because "Well everybody uses (thing) anyway" and other shortsighted trains of thought. I'm by no means against opposing X in principle, but the issue at hand is not itself about X, and I suspect a lot of people wouldn't care if it was still Twitter.
This is just like the ad-blocker discussion and Nitter is just as fine as ad blockers. Sometimes official sources make announcements via services they should be prohibited by law from using, so you need to buy into the sour apple and read these announcements by other means, whether that means using an ad blocker or Nitter. There is no copyright infringement because X does not hold the copyright on the (vast majority) of that content.
Also worth noting: I click on Nitter links but I would never in my life click on an "X" link. When I use Nitter, X loses zero ad revenue.
This comes across to me as a surprising question - why do you assume there's such a bio at all, rather than it being developed by someone anonymous, as is the case for many questionably legal privacy tools?
That's exactly what VCs are good for. Cities could've shut down Uber any time they wanted, but they didn't, so it grew big.
There has to be a plausible path to making money though. If the purpose of nitter is to not make money, VCs won't fund it. If it substituted X's ads for Nitter's own ads, that could work, but the online ad market isn't as lucrative as it once was so it wouldn't be enough money.
You could find a VC whose other project has similar legal concerns and get them to fund your legal case to set precedent, but I don't know what that project would be.
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?
For better or worse, some important people only post on X. Whenever an X post makes it to front page HN, it's convenient to have Libredirect installed and then it takes you to Nitter instead so you can actually read it.
It's for worse. Stop clicking on twitter/nitter/xitter links, stop following those people. If they care to keep you as an audience, they will move to another platform.
I think it's the saddest thing that the X-articles thing has somewhat caught on there. Some of it is slop, sure, but people started hosting their longer form opinions on X instead of their own blogs, which is unfortunate.
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
A lot of important information is on Twitter. Being able to access it without giving them your personal information and without jumping through hoops is a good thing.
What the people defacto running the world's most powerful economy are saying seems quite important to get from a primary source. It's so easy to take a few screenshots of a few tweets and write many completely contradictory stories.
I can assure you, you don’t need to access Twitter to get that information, they are relayed everywhere. Which is really unfortunate because they don’t deserve the attention they receive. Try for yourself, stop using the platform for like a month, you won’t miss anything of value
You don't have to talk to me like a twitter-addicted baby, I was never on it and I probably open a twitter like three times per year.
If you're happy getting your information second-hand, I guess that's your choice, but not everyone is. If I read a news article that cites a tweet as a source, I'd like to see the rest of the tweet thread for context. It might not be what it seems.
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.
I don't think the first one is how anyone in modern times would define a public square.
Literal public squares in real life also don't have gatekeepers. They're just open spaces where anyone can naturally congregate. Emphasis on the "open".
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
This is very clearly an attempt by X to use the legal system to harass people doing perfectly reasonable things, but are you sure they are legal? I would assume that is against the ToS and I don't think the law makes an exception for cases like this (IANAL of course).
Terms of service have no legal binding unless both parties agree to them.
In other words, if X has a public API and Nitter is using it, then neither Nitter themselves nor the Nitter users have to agree to any terms of service in order to do so.
X cannot expect anyone to behave in accordance with terms and conditions they never agreed to.
We need to revise the law around terms of service, we are allowing companies to impose all kinds of monopolistic, anti competitive, user hostile, privacy invasion, and other measures against the public interest simply by burying provision in a wall of text they know no one will understand even if they read it.
> In other words, if X has a public API and Nitter is using it, then neither Nitter themselves nor the Nitter users have to agree to any terms of service in order to do so.
That's not true. Publicly available source code with licenses dispute your claim.
(IANAL) That's copyright law and not contract law. Perhaps X could try to put a clause in its ToS that publishing content there grants the copyright to itself, but I'm pretty sure it won't be accepted well even if it's legal.
License != ToS
Copyright law applies to all citizens whether or not they've agreed to a contract.
What are you talking about, specifically?
Using software with specific licenses? Or making modifications to it?
That is substantially different from reading the public APIs.
> Terms of service have no legal binding unless both parties agree to them.
Even if both parties agree to them, are there any legal consequences for breaking the terms of service?
> Terms of service have no legal binding unless both parties agree to them.
Companies are perfectly entitled to tell people they aren't allowed to use their services anymore. That's what the C&D was. It's perfectly legal to say "here's an API anyone can use, except you, Anish Kapoor."
It's like if Reddit bans you, you aren't entitled to use the site after they've told you you're banned. Even if you can find a technical means around the ban, it's still trespass.
> if Reddit bans you, you aren't entitled to use the site
I would say that you are not allowed to use their site as a logged in user (i.e. upvoting, downvoting, commenting, making posts).
It does not seem logical to me that Reddit could "ban" anyone from using their public frontends as anonymous users.
They could only do something like that, in my opinion, if access to all their content was gated behind a login.
In the EU you can ask your country for help with FB/reddit/whatever bans.
"Haha I used the API which I KNOW is governed by the ToS but I didn't agree to it"
Judge: "do you agree to the terms?"
"No"
Judge: "then you can't use the API"
"But look at all the downvotes this is getting! You're wrong Mr. Judge!"
There is no agreement you need to enter into in order to use public APIs.
That is the purpose of public APIs. Usage without prior agreements.
If the API providers want to restrict the usage of their APIs, they are free to make them non-public.
Nobody's forcing the operator of the api to respond to those requests. HTTP 401 is right there.
Whats illegal about it? The one vague Texas law that was in the original C&D? Everything else was just TOS violation.
Violating a contract is illegal. It's just not necessarily a crime.
> illegal No, it’s not. Liability isn’t legality. There is nothing illegal in violating a ToS, nor is it a crime. Violating a ToS makes you liable under some other terms of that same agreement. That is very different from being “illegal”.
Are terms of service a contract?
> Violating a contract is illegal.
If you have entered into the contract and are even party to it in the first place, which is not clear in this case and is likely going to be one of the questions litigated here.
Didn't the guy run an instance himself? Clickwrap licenses are generally held to be enforceable so that's one way he "agreed" to the terms. Also even if he didn't, as a matter of practicality he probably needed to connect to the site to develop nitter , which exposes him there too.
I think the click wrap license agreement needs to be revised. Companies are abusing it almost universally.
> Clickwrap licenses are generally held to be enforceable
Sort of. Depends on the jurisdiction, and it's not always the case. That's why this is likely to be one of the core topics litigated in this case.
Nobody on HN is going to know the answer here at this point.
I don't think it's perfectly legal. If I was dumb enough to use X I wouldn't want my posts be used by any other party than X.
Can you expand on why you think this has a chilling effect on speech?
It's impossible for the nitter person to defend against X Corporation and so X will have what it wants done.
So access to X content will be restricted to X servers.
X server operators, Musk, etc, are subject to rules themselves of their home locale, and they are not a disinterested party in many discussion subjects. So one can reasonably expect that the content on X will be regulated by state parties as well as corporate interests.
Also, X has login requirements in order to view a lot of its content.
So, nitter is a backup That has no necessary obligation to corporate or locale jurisdictions, and it has no login restrictions.
Regular average everyday citizens can speak into x, and have distribution through it. But they can expect for their speech to be restricted per the above.
So speeches is freer through nitter.
I love it when users make up law.
TOU is contract law. It falls into the same vein as “no shirts, no shoes, no service”.
It’s contract law.
We may all hate this (I still morn Apollo) - but legally, ‘I hate it” is not law.
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.
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.
I was misled by an individual who claimed to be helping the Nitter project pro bono with a team of lawyers. He made up a timeline of events that sounded mostly believable.
I have not given legal advice to any Nitter operators, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say?
>I was misled by an individual who claimed to be helping the Nitter project pro bono with a team of lawyers. He made up a timeline of events that sounded mostly believable.
I want to believe this was a case of incompetency on their part rather than malice because wow, that's a horrible thing to do.
Wouldn't be unprecedented. Megamind Musk got scammed out of $ 50.000,- USD by someone claiming to be a PI on then Twitter [0], despite having access to (as near as makes no difference) infinite investigatory resources. If someone claimed to be a pro bono legal team, a less affluent project threatened by letters from high class lawyers, could easily fall for that and I could easily see it be malicious. Maybe trolls, maybe investors wanting to help SpaceXAI or whatever it is called today, maybe someone wishing to convert into donations/crypto rug pull, etc. Could also be incompetence after all, but maliciousness isn't without priors.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/report-musks-500...
Hanlon might say never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, but I've found more often than not that the two happen to come together.
Have you been in touch with the EFF? They seem like the first port of call for something like this: https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-assistance
> 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.
But when accessing a nitter host, you're not accessing Twitter itself, just a copy.
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.
There is a strong distinction between news articles authored by or on behalf of a company, versus user generated content.
So I don't think nytimes, or cnn is an apt comparison.
It's more like your cellular provider claiming intellectual ownership over the web you browsed and conversations you read when people start sharing their downloaded pages.
> articles authored by or on behalf of a company, versus user generated content.
It gives me both a sense of schadenfreude but also a deep depression to watch the shoe on the other foot.
It was only a couple years ago that the talking point was "It's a private company!!", used to defend mass censorship on old Twitter, defend delisting of Parler on app stores, etc.
I think this is really something considering the whole ”social media is not responsible for what ppl post” thing
yea, there's also the fact the public entities have chosen to use this avenue for disseminating legal information
you can "de facto" a lot from this arrangement :(
> It would be like having a proxy for nytimes or cnn
It's a much grayer area, considering NYTimes owns their content and x does not own the content they serve. I think this question deserves zealous representation.
> does not own the content they serve
Do they not? And if they wanted to, couldn't they, pretty trivially, with a ToC change?
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. If they say “you’re giving us your copyright when you press the POST button” then that would seem to be that.
Seems like a bad place for them to be, given the whole argument of “you can’t sue us for what other people said on our platform, that’s not our speech!” but that seems complicated and IANAL.
NY Times would get you for copyright infringement, but X has no copyright in the content on X.
Yes, but that's not a high hurdle to clear. All Twitter has to do is have an exclusive content program, and now they have standing to sue for copyright infringement on those exclusively-licensed Tweets. The burden falls on Nitter instance hosters to filter that out. And there is no legal obligation on Twitter to actually provide reliable signals to block exclusively licensed content.
Given caching, blocking, userscripts, etc., most client things are have things built in that are effectively smart proxies or glorified layer 7 application gateways.
You can write your own client for arbitrary services. You can run your own client on your own hardware, and you can host your client on someone else's hardware. Your client can render the content however it likes. You can have someone else do the work to render it like you like it and run that, locally or remotely.
There are a lot of ways to get to an "apparatus" that's analogous to both nitter and to a proxy for nytimes that ensure consuming public comments by other users doesn't suck.
As far as I know, there's no law requiring billboards to be seen by all drivers using the public road it sits beside, nor requiring all web clients to render ads. As far as I know, in most of the world there's no law saying users can't buy DNS or proxy or application firewall or ad blocking services from a third party -- services that can run between you and host, on your router, on your device at various OS levels, or as extensions to your browser.
On the contrary, there seem to be increasing numbers of laws requiring servers to deliver their content to arbitrary clients even when a firm makes its own servers, content, and preferred client devices and wishes to "protect the user's experience" or whatever the firm's justification might be.
Given a decade or two of marketing the "public square", other people's public posts, intended for public consumption, and expected to reach the public, picking that content as worthy of banning "useragents" should be shaky ground. Should be an interesting battleground for digital rights.
It's enough to wonder if a reason to go after the nitters is to establish misfortunate legal precedent using a target that can't defend itself?
Clients are not proxies. The fundamental difference is who accesses the target server. If you’re using a client (in the sense of a local program that renders your request, like a browser or a browser with extensions) then you are the one accessing the information, and once you have that information it’s hard to make a legal argument against transforming it however you want for your own consumption.
But a proxy means you request information from someone else, not from the target server, and the proxy requests from the target server. This is also fine! Except: a) the target server can absolutely say “Proxy A is not allowed to access me.” [1] and b) if the target server has copyright on the material being requested, then the proxy may be violating that copyright by making the data available for your request.
[1] there’s a weird middle ground here where if a server can tell you’re using a client it doesn’t like, then technically it could use its arbitrary denial ability to deny access on that basis, but that doesn’t seem to be legally accepted? IANAL. Or maybe that just doesn’t happen because there’s no way for it to tell what client you’re using. They certainly do try to deny service when they can figure out you’re using an ad-blocker.
They just need to rename to nitter.ai, and it would be "legal".
nitter.si
Twitter doesn't own content generated by users, the only legal hurdle would be complying with takedown requests.
> the only legal hurdle would be complying with takedown requests.
If you mean 'takedown requests' related to X content that should not be a problem since nitter does not cache content so anything taken down by X is inaccessible to nitter. If you mean takedown requests for nitter instances the question is on what grounds those requests are made - TOS violations or legal grounds? If it is the former it would be easy for X to just block the user IDs and no takedown request is needed. If it is the latter, which laws would those be based on?
who owns the content generated by the users? what if i as a user give twitter sole rights to my content
then they would be legally viable for the content on the website, the only reason why youtube, twitter can exist is because they do not own the user content for exactly this reason.
The legal future is whatever people fight for being legal. You see entities that are hostile to humanity making the laws they want all the time, why be so defeatist?
Of course it can run legally. What might not be possible is to open a running instance to the general public, certainly not to paying public but an argument could be made that even allowing free access would violate some law or other. This is not a certainty though and the continued existence of products like Opera Mini speak against there being such legal prohibitions to allowing public access to content-changing proxies.
Normally I'd agree, but in this case the people on the other end of the issue rarely care about how vague the legality of something is before going forward with it, so I think it's only reasonable to extend the same logic to nitter.
I don't see how that makes any sense whatsoever.
If one party is reckless in legal terms, then that's their right and they will bear the consequences. It's generally considered to be a bad attitude to have, which is why people generally don't have it, and I'm going to need an explanation on how wishing that onto Nitter isn't in practice wanting someone else to burn at the stake to spite a third party, especially given the enormous difference in economical, and as a result legal standing on both of those entities.
Said more explicitly, wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.
It is not my wish for nitter to shoulder any more burden than they can reasonably carry, which at this point unfortunately seems zero.
What I'm stating is that I'd normally be against a project like nitter on moral grounds had it been targeting a forum such as mineralenthusiasts.com that required you to log in to view posts, but since the counterparty in this case is a habitual bad actor extending the same goodwill to them only empowers them, and it would be best for nitter to function as much as it can unless its illegality is established in court.
I could accuse you of things as equally unpleasant as psychopathy for making me spell this out, which I had hoped would be incredibly obvious from my original comment, but I'll refrain from doing so.
> wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.
Speaking only for myself: I agree with the spirit of this statement (perhaps minus the use of the word “psychopathic”).
However, it seems like the author of Nitter wants to continue to engage in this risky activity, and is requesting resources to help. If they ever wish to stop developing Nitter/XCancel, I will absolutely respect that. But assuming they wish to continue, I consider supporting them and doing my part to frustrate a man-child, unrepentant fascist, and murderer of thousands a noble thing to do.
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.
> that lets users view public posts without an account, ads, or tracking scripts
what’s the mechanism they use to get this content?
HTTP. They just load the page while logged in to one of the server's accounts.
i should do this with my manning and orielly accounts
The emphasis is on the authenticated session on their end, atleast since Musk locked down X access. It's basically a proxy.
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 think it's more complicated than it would seem.
You've got legal and moral layers, then you've got to engage with the root problem that some services choose to use X as a channel to communicate with the general problem, but on top of that there's also the political intent to use Nitter explicitly to boycott Musk.
Musk is well-known for spending lots of money on viral marketing and online reputation services with bot accounts and astro-turfing. He has an extremely fragile ego and a pathological desire to be liked and, oddly, he desires to be considered a funny person, too (which he isn't). To cut a long story short, you cannot and should not trust comment sections about Musk anywhere. It's been like that for more than 10 years already.
Source? Some random Reddit post I guess?
Musk spends more money in a week trying to get people to like him than most of us will ever have or spend in our lives
I’m not surprised.
Despite the VC firm trying to assimilate the word “hacker” to humanize itself, this place is Tech-bro News and the userbase will always tend to take the side of capital.
It wasn’t always like this, it changed in the last 10 ish years as the industry became more lucrative. Or maybe it’s been happening more slowly over a longer period of time, but I do think the earlier founders were more idealistic
> I do think the earlier founders were more idealistic
The original founders created YCombinator, the most prestigious startup incubator, and Hacker News used to be named Startup News.
100%
Move fast and break other people.
> and the userbase will always tend to take the side of capital
I've been here for well over a decade. Let me tell you, it used to be so, so much worse.
+1. There is endless bullshit nitpicking that goes on here. Sometimes useful because we don't want a hive mind, but it becomes... really unnecessary with a lot of apologism (sometimes)
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.
Can the trademark claim(s) be ignored
Why continue to use a name, "Nitter", that looks and sounds like "Twitter"
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
It should be a signal to others that they aren't getting involved.
> seeking funding
What’s the purpose of Nitter?
Elevator pitch if you will?
And where can one read a bio of the creator(s)?
> Elevator pitch if you will?
For the decade+ there has been an unofficial town square known as twitter. As the town square has slowly become more gated and overgrown with weeds some people thought giving people a way to access the town square without paying the entrance fee would be helpful. Many found this useful.
Now I think the whole thing is trash, and agree, why use Twitter? But people like journalists and AI executives are still announcing things on Twitter because having a large following seems like a dopamine booster. In this world where people see the following as a source of legitimacy, having a single company own that town square seems...problematic.,
Let’s assume the analogy to town square holds, who do you think should control it? The UN?
I'm reminded of the phrase 天下为公, which is hard to translate exactly because 公 is doing some linguistical juggling that English has a hard time matching.
I don't think twitter in its current capacity should exist, the storage should be decoupled from the filters and the filters that everyone uses should be a free market with traditional competition dynamics. It may end up looking something like twitter, but without editorializing algorithms and a single walled entry. We can quibble who owns the database I suppose.
Would 'regulated utility' be a good fit for what you are describing?
Can you stop with the 'just asking questions' routine?
It seems like a reasonable question to ask and I'm surprised to see you, in particular, take this point of view.
I could argue that due to the New York Times being the "newspaper of record" they should post my manifesto because, after all, it's very important. The obvious objection to this is that the NYT is privately owned, and despite having made itself very important, I don't have the right to tell them what to do.
This is the obvious objection to "Twitter is important, we should get to tell it what to do" as well, and you're old enough to know that Twitter kneecapping third-party apps is not at all new to the Musk chapter of the company, either.
Is it different, though? If so, how? Granted the jibe about the UN was sarcastic, but it's the same question, and, you know it.
Your NYT analogy seems to be specific to posting things, not reading them.
When it comes to reading, I think you could indeed make a reasonably compelling argument that the NYT must not refuse to provide a subscription to anyone who asks. That would be similar (but obviously not exactly the same) to the way common carriers are treated.
As to publishing, even then your analogy doesn't really fit because NYT has always been extremely selective about what they publish (ie they are curators) whereas twitter was fundamentally based on the polar opposite.
There is no way someone who is on HN for any amount of time is not aware of what Nitter is.
I legit did not know. I have seen it before, I've never really understood what it was, and didn't really have any reason to dig further into why people were linking against it instead of actual twitter/x until today. I've been here about a year less than you.
That's impressive :)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
the EU of course, the actually functioning UN
It was only a “town square” in the minds of Twitter users, no one else thinks that about a news media propped-up social network. If anything it was a comment section attached to nothing. And comment sections all get bad after a while.
There are a lot of public institutions using twitter for their communications.
There are a lot of public institutions not using Twitter for their communications too. Are those institutions not in the “town square”?
And they should be utterly ashamed of it. They give it a legitimacy that it has not deserved for years now.
Completely agree, feel the same about facebook et al too.
Can I just add too, it's why 'popularity' is an incredibly terrible metric for successfulness on the web
Look at Twitter. If it was good under Dorsey (debatable, it did have pretty notable censorship) and Musk ruins it, why are people 'still on it'? Because Musk did a good job? Not necessarily. It takes time to build a new product, and get your friends to switch over. Switching costs. I'm on a platform because Avicebron is on it, because Alice is on it, because Bob is on it
Same goes for sites like (especially) Facebook. It's 'popular'! 3 billion active users! (They lie a lot and probably about that and they make it very easy to be 'active', by faking the notifications or giving you none at all, like increasingly with messages over the years) Well, it's hard to 'just move'. Facebook has become and has been for a while an utterly shit product that deserves the corporate death penalty. People being on it is not the slam dunk people think it is
>What’s the purpose of Nitter?
To allow people to check X without feeling they are contributing to the success of the platform, by bypassing the account requirement.
Jut dont use it, either it's useful or not. X needs revenue to continue to bypassing it illegal and should not be done. Either use X or don't.
I don’t use it, but some government organizations keep doing it. Why on earth they do that, I will never know, but I’m not making an account to read a tweet.
>Why on earth they do that, I will never know
Because some people in positions of power ignore the consequences of using external services.
There has been a bit of a wake up call in this regard in Europe, with many governments making efforts to detach themselves from US corporations, but it's a much larger problem. When a government entity chooses to rely on Whatsapp, or Android, or some other piece of technology bound to a corporation, they are creating a bond between the rights and services they enable and interaction with that corporation.
This nuance is often ignored because "Well everybody uses (thing) anyway" and other shortsighted trains of thought. I'm by no means against opposing X in principle, but the issue at hand is not itself about X, and I suspect a lot of people wouldn't care if it was still Twitter.
> X needs revenue to continue
I think that's the point
All services need money to function.
You don't have a choice when cities, counties, or other government officials decide to make announcements on there.
what else is illegal? adblock?
This is just like the ad-blocker discussion and Nitter is just as fine as ad blockers. Sometimes official sources make announcements via services they should be prohibited by law from using, so you need to buy into the sour apple and read these announcements by other means, whether that means using an ad blocker or Nitter. There is no copyright infringement because X does not hold the copyright on the (vast majority) of that content.
Also worth noting: I click on Nitter links but I would never in my life click on an "X" link. When I use Nitter, X loses zero ad revenue.
The purpose is being able to read X in the browser without an account.
> And where can one read a bio of the creator(s)?
This comes across to me as a surprising question - why do you assume there's such a bio at all, rather than it being developed by someone anonymous, as is the case for many questionably legal privacy tools?
Freeing the bird from the shackles of X.
Would you contribute funds?
I just did.
Let’s be honest, They won’t. The users won’t fund it, as they want to use it for free.
This is what happens when people say they will “donate” but will actually wait for others to do it and little to no one donates.
What you are seeing is the bystander effect. It is why projects like Nitter will end up raising capital from VCs as they actually have money.
Seems an unlikely investment for a VC. Xitter can shut down Nitter any time they want, and the end users don't want to pay for it.
That's exactly what VCs are good for. Cities could've shut down Uber any time they wanted, but they didn't, so it grew big.
There has to be a plausible path to making money though. If the purpose of nitter is to not make money, VCs won't fund it. If it substituted X's ads for Nitter's own ads, that could work, but the online ad market isn't as lucrative as it once was so it wouldn't be enough money.
You could find a VC whose other project has similar legal concerns and get them to fund your legal case to set precedent, but I don't know what that project would be.
Can we skip to the moat?
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
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?
You're not. It's kinda what happened with youtube-dl at some point.
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.
For better or worse, some important people only post on X. Whenever an X post makes it to front page HN, it's convenient to have Libredirect installed and then it takes you to Nitter instead so you can actually read it.
It's for worse. Stop clicking on twitter/nitter/xitter links, stop following those people. If they care to keep you as an audience, they will move to another platform.
I have never needed to go to X and if the persons comments matter, it shows up on other social media platforms.
You can wait a week and if it's important the local newspaper will include it in the hardcopy. If it's not important, then well... it's not important.
Until Twitter sues the newspapers for rehosting their (users’) content
Is your comment important?
I think it's the saddest thing that the X-articles thing has somewhat caught on there. Some of it is slop, sure, but people started hosting their longer form opinions on X instead of their own blogs, which is unfortunate.
The reason random accounts are popping up saying to use X is because they now get checks for posting engagement bait.
Well, it was good while it lasted.
It's still lasting. Use xxcancel.com to be redirected to a random server.
Should serve 307 so the Open Graph preview works.
Most servers don't want automated traffic.
Nitter is a hydra. One instance goes down, another one goes up.
https://status.d420.de/
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
You’re not identifying as a lawyer so please understand it’s much more complicated than that.
I’m not a lawyer but I’ve been involved with litigation between publishers and tech companies regarding scraped content.
It’s much more complicated than you’d ever think.
Personally, I think Nitter is in a strong position.
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.
A lot of important information is on Twitter. Being able to access it without giving them your personal information and without jumping through hoops is a good thing.
> A lot of important information is on Twitter
Not being able to access it might change that.
That's not what is happening though, people are able to access it just fine.
There is no important information on that platform that you couldn’t get another way
What the people defacto running the world's most powerful economy are saying seems quite important to get from a primary source. It's so easy to take a few screenshots of a few tweets and write many completely contradictory stories.
> What the people defacto running the world's most powerful economy are saying seems quite important to get from a primary source
Are you talking about WeChat, or truth social? I didn’t know nitter worked on either
All the american billionaires and CEOs are still on Twitter, as is the shitposter-in-chief.
I can assure you, you don’t need to access Twitter to get that information, they are relayed everywhere. Which is really unfortunate because they don’t deserve the attention they receive. Try for yourself, stop using the platform for like a month, you won’t miss anything of value
You don't have to talk to me like a twitter-addicted baby, I was never on it and I probably open a twitter like three times per year.
If you're happy getting your information second-hand, I guess that's your choice, but not everyone is. If I read a news article that cites a tweet as a source, I'd like to see the rest of the tweet thread for context. It might not be what it seems.
Many local governments and municipalities use Twitter as the sole way to make announcements.
That should be illegal, as it's not an open platform
I agree, but it isn’t.
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.
It is a public square in the sense that you can speak freely and not get stoned to death.
Also in a public square you’re not supposed to masquerade as another person, which what all these services are trying to do.
I don't think the first one is how anyone in modern times would define a public square.
Literal public squares in real life also don't have gatekeepers. They're just open spaces where anyone can naturally congregate. Emphasis on the "open".
FAFO. Edit: people who downvoting have to understand that you are supporting TOS violations. That always invite legal troubles.
You don't have to follow TOS. In fact, TOS is always written for the maximum benefit to the company, so you shouldn't follow it.
Think of the TOS is a wild arguement.
> people who downvoting have to understand that you are supporting TOS violations.
What's wrong with violating TOS?