Comment by KPGv2
7 hours ago
> 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.
> access to all their content was gated behind a login.
Don't give Reddit ideas.
It's already happening basically
Actually, I hope they do. The faster Reddit puts up more walls and dies, the faster some other upstart can come in and replace them with a more open version, like they did to Digg. Of course, in 5-10 years the upstart will enshittify and we'll all be wishing for the next upstart, and on and on and on...
You are conflating technical feasibility with permission.
Are you sure? Post doesn't mention "it would be hard", it says commenter thinks it would be unreasonable.
In the EU you can ask your country for help with FB/reddit/whatever bans.
IANAL, but if I were a lawyer, I would be making the case that Nitter is not using X's services. Nitter is no different than Firefox or Chrome, it's a user-agent acting on behalf of the user.
Completely different users! It's using authorized accounts of people who agreed to the Terms of Use. Not just those, but the Developer Terms apply to the API.
https://docs.x.com/developer-terms/agreement
But the "users" who are viewing Nitter content are not those same authorized users. They are unauthorized users. They are not authenticated by X. They are unknown, anonymous, and untraceable to X. That is unacceptable for any service--especially a service that's restricted to authorized users. Especially a service that puts forth Terms of Use that apply to the actual user using the service.
It is patently absurd for someone to say that, since there are "public endpoints" hanging out there, that X has no right or authority to govern how they're used, and who uses them. Of course they do.
When I access X with Chrome, I sign in... I'm the same user authenticated and authorized by them, and Chrome is my interface. It's not a proxy, a scraper, or an API gateway. It's my client and X knows exactly who I am. I agreed to use X properly, and conduct myself properly on their platform. Nitter did none of this.
I think the bigger problem is that Twitter used act as a quasi public service and now is completely changing that stance.