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Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

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Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#671

Post by flaburgan »

leobg wrote: post #662
flaburgan wrote: post #591

I 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.

As I am not a lawyer, I can't confirm if this is legal or not. I do plan to contact legal people to tell me which kind of jurisdiction would allow that. I am still hopeful because: - This is only about public tweets - The project does not add any context or interpretation around them - The project links to the original content - Speeches by public people such as politicians or corporations are usually fine to be spread around. They actually want what they say to be as spread as possible. It would not cross anyone's mind to sue a newspaper because they quoted a tweet of a famous person, saying that there is PI on the content of the tweet.

This project is more an "Internet archive" of the social networks. There is no follow button, no way to comment or interact or anything. It just puts the data in the open. It may still be illegal as much as archive.org is illegal. To be seen.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#672

Post by account42 »

tossit444 wrote: post #118
raphman wrote: post #3

Not 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]

From Nitter matrix group: basically, it demands that I: 1. Permanently take down nitter.net and the GitHub repository, and delete all "X Data" in both 2. Stop all use of the "Twitter" and "X" marks 3. Cease all access to X data, including copies 4. Delete all X account credentials and session tokens 5. Confirm compliance in writing within three business days The claims asserted are breach of X's Terms of Service, Dev…

Why not use those three days (or any time that can still be considered reasonable to respond to this) to contact the EFF before responding by taking down the site?

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#673

Post by wyclif »

dschu wrote: post #639
earth-tattoo wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

The correct answer is, "Of course he did not; free expression and free speech only exist for people who subscribe to doublethink. All other opinions are thoughtcrime."

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#674

Post by lynndotpy »

zuzululu wrote: post #596
TkTech wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting new one for Canadians (that's built on AT and interops with bsky) is https://gandersocial.ca/ . It uses our national postal service's identity validation, so it dramatically reduces foreign actors and bots, and without handing PII to shady private companies like Persona. They collect no PII either, they just get an "is_a_human" response back from Canada Post. You can still do read-only things like see…

intersting take, I'm not Canadian but wasn't there some pretty draconian bills that were passed where you could be reported for voicing or sharing your opinions on some things ? That already seems like a hard barrier for any sort of Canadian social network especially when you require your users to dox themselves and open themselves to all sorts of scrutiny. The problem with all of this is that it creates a sterilized…

There is no American social media with more than 10,000 users that is not heavily censored.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#675

Post by Razengan »

expedited123 wrote: post #665

Twitter 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.

Someone should be putting AI to the test and make it walk the talk by making a viable alternative to Facebook/Twitter etc :)

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#676

Post by encody »

maipen wrote: post #656
encody wrote: post #606

I work out of cafes a lot, so I use a commercial VPN often. This means that I am unable to read Reddit. (Not to mention I have to pass two Cloudflare captchas on most other sites.) If I can't use Xcancel, then I won't be able to read Twitter on the rare occasion I want to. Strangely, as someone who is online a lot, I seem to be getting gradually cut off from other Internet users. HN is kind of the last survivor for m…

You are replying on HN with an account. Just make an account on X if there's content you want to see. We got used to something being free and open, doesn't mean this is how it should be.

Sorry to move the goalposts on you, but the specific feature whose elimination I am lamenting is anonymous, read-only access. HN still supports this. Making an account kind of defeats the purpose.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#677

Post by mannycalavera42 »

Razengan wrote: post #675
expedited123 wrote: post #665

Twitter 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.

Someone should be putting AI to the test and make it walk the talk by making a viable alternative to Facebook/Twitter etc :)

this one :thumb-up

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#678

Post by lynndotpy »

loeg wrote: post #144
Leynos wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mostly a porn site these days

This is one of those situations where describing your algorithmic feed tells us more about you than about Twitter.

I think we should leave this kind of argument for schoolchildren denigrating one another and for the deranged people who will dole out verbal abuse to defend their favorite platforms and/or CEOs.

This is not one of "those situations".

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#679

Post by dansquizsoft »

maelito wrote: post #617

Once upon a time I used Twitter's API to scan for tweets that were talking about a particular Wikipedia page. Doing semantic analysis, I did insert the tweets in the right place of the page. I did it as a student, using the free API. Twitter was the open, technically respected network with a great engineering blog. Now it's a political project to elect the extreme-right in Europe.

Just Europe?

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#680

Post by llm_nerd »

Razengan wrote: post #675
expedited123 wrote: post #665

Twitter 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.

Someone should be putting AI to the test and make it walk the talk by making a viable alternative to Facebook/Twitter etc :)

There are many already. The code is not why people use those sites. In the case of Meta specifically, it's basically in spite of the user-hostile, garbage code.

The network effect / entrenchment means that any replacement has to be massively better in every dimension to have a chance. Otherwise people just stick to what they know, and then other people stick to it because the other people do. And so on.

I personally think Musk is a garbage-tier human who represents everything wrong with culture wars, and his brain is long blasted into a mush of worthless racist noise and stupidity by drug abuse, so I deleted my X account. Loads of others are too cowardly/selfish to do so.

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