Lookup eBay vs BiddersEdge. BE was scraping eBay's site, eBay sued, eBay won on "trespass to chattles" legal grounds. eBay, as owner of the servers BE was scraping, has the right to prevent anyone from accessing those servers. Whether eBay "owns" the data is not relevant; they own the servers being accessed.
I just asked Gemini "do X's TOS allow anyone to access X via the api?" and it said "No", with a long list of conditions for accessing X via their API.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.,
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
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
I used it until they required i download the mobile app. Was fine having an account and viewing via web but requiring I download the app was a bridge too far.
Lookup eBay vs BiddersEdge. BE was scraping eBay's site, eBay sued, eBay won on "trespass to chattles" legal grounds. eBay, as owner of the servers BE was scraping, has the right to prevent anyone from accessing those servers. Whether eBay "owns" the data is not relevant; they own the servers being accessed.
I just asked Gemini "do X's TOS allow anyone to access X via the api?" and it said "No", with a long list of conditions for accessing X via their API.
Nitter should give up and call it a day.
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.
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Whats illegal about it? The one vague Texas law that was in the original C&D? Everything else was just TOS violation.
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Can you expand on why you think this has a chilling effect on speech?
Elon only wants the fash to speak freely.
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.
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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.
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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?
NY Times would get you for copyright infringement, but X has no copyright in the content on X.
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 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?
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.
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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.
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’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
> 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.
100%
Move fast and break other people.
+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)
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.
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
> 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.,
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
Let’s assume the analogy to town square holds, who do you think should control it? The UN?
10 replies →
>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.
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> 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?
The purpose is being able to read X in the browser without an account.
Freeing the bird from the shackles of X.
Would you contribute funds?
6 replies →
Can we skip to the moat?
So long and thanks for all the fish.
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.
Nitter is a hydra. One instance goes down, another one goes up.
https://status.d420.de/
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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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There is no important information on that platform that you couldn’t get another way
6 replies →
just use X already
I used it until they required i download the mobile app. Was fine having an account and viewing via web but requiring I download the app was a bridge too far.
No
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.
Just use X like a normal person
Using X like a normal person is hard in my opinion.
Are there any normal ppl on x?