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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

#691

Post by spacechild1 »

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.

Just go ahead and quit! I had a niche use case for FB, but I decided to quit nevertheless because I didn't want to support the platform anymore. Today I don't miss it a single bit. (I never had a Twitter account in the first place.)

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#692

Post by iamnothere »

lousken wrote: post #685

who cares about c&d? just host it outside of us

An anonymous group of devs should host the source on Radicle (over Tor) and the app itself on an onion site. Bonus, it may discourage some scrapers who can’t be bothered with setting up a Tor gateway.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#693

Post by mrngld »

culi wrote: post #384
dolebirchwood wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm totally clueless, but aren't there rules requiring accessibility of public-facing government communications, to the extent that they shouldn't be allowed to use a gated platform when making official statements that are a matter of public interest?

Someone could certainly make a case in a lawsuit for an ADA violation. I bet if people organized, the city would listen before it got to that point There are open meeting laws like the Brown Act but I think that only restricts relying on social media for deliberation. Not communication There is also Lindke v. Freed (2024) which holds that public officials using social media can be sued under the First Amendment viola…

Ya'll are talking lawsuits and organizing protests, but the reality is probably just that no one (outside the Bluesky/HN bubble, which is tiny) cares. Very few probably care what their local government is babbling about today in general, and even fewer what platforms they're using.

And yet if someone did care, there's a decent chance if they asked the right person in the right way they'd be like "Oh, Mastodon? Okay, sounds neat, oh you know what it's just another checkbox in the software we use to cross-post everything! I'll just check the box!"

But nah, lets not do the easy thing, lets look up legal precedent and ponder the ADA.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#694

Post by thih9 »

flaburgan wrote: post #671
leobg wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spre…

Could X similarly shut down a project like this with a cease and desist?

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#696

Post by broodbucket »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #555
S0y wrote: post #343

https://joinmastodon.org/ https://bsky.app/ https://www.threads.com/ Pick literally any one of those, just seriously, if you're still on that platform, leave.

All of these are seriously bad copycat alternatives of twitter. And since twitter's foundations are laid on moving bedrock.... the whole thing is a horrible abomination where the tendrils are these "alternatives".

I'll take the bait, what makes Bluesky a bad copycat? It's just old Twitter. I can't for the life of me see what makes it "seriously bad", it has a pretty large userbase, it's seemingly got a decent number of normies to move over from X, it's pleasant enough to use. It's been a success.

Saying this as one of twelve Mastodon users.

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#697

Post by Your_ID_Collect »

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.

They collect your passport and facial scan for "security purposes" if they feel like it:

https://help.x.com/en/rules-and-policies/verification-policy

This must be Musk's "free speech absolutism".

Re: Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

#700

Post by roryirvine »

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.

"The world's town square", where everyone could gather and see what was going on.

And, for more than a decade, it appeared to work pretty well. Governments, media outlets, public-facing services of all kinds came to rely on it as their main way to talk to the public.

But now it's impossible to use without a login, most of that value has been lost.

The best thing to do is to learn from what happened, and not allow a proprietary platform to become so central again.

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