They have archived the nitter repo :( [1] [1]: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/
... and now it isn't as I'm writing this
Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
661–670 of 1001 posts
Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
#662I did not plan to announce it yet as it is in a very early stage, I was targeting November, but I think it should be mentioned now: I am working on OpenWeb, https://framagit.org/open-web/open-web , a project which allows to access posts (at the moment only tweets but more platforms to be supported later) without any account nor tracking. It *downloads* them instead of proxying, with the goal to make the data public d…
How can that be legal? You’re assuming anyone famous enough to have a Wikipedia page is granting you a license to republish their content? I think the only thing between your project and a cease and desist is lack of popularity. If proxifying gets you into hot water, downloading will be worse.
Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
#663lol I'd say something about X, but man this place fooking loves X and it didn't go well last time. So, "oh nooooo".
I think it's less that "this place" loves X, more that there is a committed segment of folks with flagging privileges that really really like a certain South African business guy.
More accurately, there are people here who don't hate the guy with a burning passion, and find the rhetoric of those who do really, really obnoxious. Especially the persecution complex and the dark hinting.
Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
#664Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit is the worst for this. I hate the disgusting, low class UX design where they let you read about 10-15 seconds of a page before locking you out. Though I think Pinterest takes the cake for being just the ugliest example of this.
Old Reddit is now completely unusable without an account. Maybe it's time for me to finally stop using it.
The changes to old.reddit mean I've started using redlib.catsarch for simple browsing.
Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
#665Twitter has gone from relatively open to instagram / facebook level of closedness where I can't even share a video with my friends because it asks them to log in. I had to rely on nitter and xcancel for that... Now that no longer works either
I have one niche that I use twitter for. If it wasn't for that - would have deleted my account long time ago. Things like this push me towards that direction, though.
Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
#666Not much detail so far. > We have received cease and desist letters. Awaiting legal advice at the moment, but for now expect all nitter instances to remain down for the foreseeable future. [for all those who - like me - first check the comments before clicking on the link]
Are they expecting legal advice to take a long tine?! It's fairly reasonable to check with a lawyer first, before damaging yourself by complying. The legal system gets this concept. Otherwise random, unwarranted desist orders from your enemies could break you. Anyone can send an request. Weird.
Yes and it's not like there hasn't been ton of precedent for scraping recently, including by X themselves, so why would they expect to not be able to win this?
Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
#667Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both Imgur and Reddit have put a lot of roadblocks up lately as well. I think some of it is driven by trying to reduce bot traffic. It's quite inconsistent though which is really frustrating. I can look at the imgur homepage feed, but if I go into a specific post and accidentally click anywhere it throws a modal up that can't be dismissed. If I go on a specific subreddit or post I can freely look, but reddit homepage…
> Does the free ad model just not pay anymore, or is the selling user data model just that much more lucrative that they would rather no user at all if they aren't logged in? Traffic from google is probably in the process of collapsing, so these sites are trying to capture all the users they can as registered users before it's gone completely. And yes, the free ad model is probably in the process of dying, the inform…
> the information that was once given away for free in return for looking at ads is now more valuable sold to llm's who will have the eyeballs going forward.
I don't believe it.
Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
#668Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are they expecting legal advice to take a long tine?! It's fairly reasonable to check with a lawyer first, before damaging yourself by complying. The legal system gets this concept. Otherwise random, unwarranted desist orders from your enemies could break you. Anyone can send an request. Weird.
Getting legal advice can absolutely take a long time, and the first thing they'll probably tell most people in this situation is "turn it off for now until we can do more research and collect money from you." However, C&D's don't really carry any legal weight in the US to my knowledge... but I don't see any harm in complying ahead of time just to be safe. The only "damage" I can see is just by nature of the service b…
> Getting legal advice can absolutely take a long time, and the first thing they'll probably tell most people in this situation is "turn it off for now until we can do more research and collect money from you."
Normally I would agree, but Nitter has been an adversarial integration from the start. I would expect them to have anticipated this attack.
> However, C&D's don't really carry any legal weight in the US to my knowledge... but I don't see any harm in complying ahead of time just to be safe. The only "damage" I can see is just by nature of the service being down temporarily.
Which is significant damage. By complying too eagerly you give those notices power that they would not otherwise have.
> If there is even a possibility that a court may find the service violating a law, I think the legal advisor would likely say to just leave the service down unless you have many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to fight it... you can most likely avoid the entire lawsuit altogether just by complying with the C&D.
If you're of that mindset why create Nitter in the first place. And they are pretty much guaranteed public (including financial support) for any lawsuit if they ask for it since Nitter is something a lot of people want to exist.
> And this kind of suit is one that can easily ruin your company or even personal life... so avoiding it seems smart.
It's ultimately not that smart when you're in the "business" of creating Nitter because it just tells the bullies that all that's needed is a nicely formatted letter and you'll fold.
Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
#669Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
#670Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both Imgur and Reddit have put a lot of roadblocks up lately as well. I think some of it is driven by trying to reduce bot traffic. It's quite inconsistent though which is really frustrating. I can look at the imgur homepage feed, but if I go into a specific post and accidentally click anywhere it throws a modal up that can't be dismissed. If I go on a specific subreddit or post I can freely look, but reddit homepage…
Imgur has been totally unusable in the UK for a couple of years - it's an irritant, because it's used for so many image embeds and I'm reluctant to fire up the VPN just so I can see someone's meme that they posted on a forum thread. Nobody has ever used Imgur as a destination site, it's a utility, and any attempts to make it a destination or an app you'd deliberately open are futile. Reddit isn't so badly impacted, b…
There's a chrome plugin called 'MirrorImage'[1] that basically rewrites all imgur links/embeds to use a proxy service, it seems to work pretty well to get around it.
I dare say something similar also exists for Firefox
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mirrorimage/mglldpk...