Cool to see such a notable Nim based project continue! It's unfortunate that X tries to block Nitter so often, but zedeus always seems to find a path around technical or now legal issues.
Few details but glad to see the project will continue. Given how much crucial information is posted exclusively to X, having an alternative frontend is important.
Interesting that they were inspired by Invidious (alternative YouTube frontend). That’s another project that could use some love. Hopefully AI coding tools can do some good and make it easier for these projects to find ways into the walled gardens and work around the counter measures.
Waiting for the day all the social networks allow api access and become usable again. Maybe we can call it “agent first” to help move things along.
I don't know about crucial, but a recent amber alert went out last week. It contained a bit.ly link to the CHP's Twitter page and I couldn't see the information. I clicked on it because the alert was from my town, but light on the details.
Surely a public post on a CHP website would have gotten the job done better.
It’s still the go-to platform for public figures to broadcast unfortunately, so if you want to verify the original comments you need an alternate frontend or an X account.
API access to social networks has been around for ages, and are still going strong.
"Firehose" [0] is probably best known. But those are pricey. And community projects like nitter, with a bit of tinkering, can be used as a free alternative to the (paid) API access. Hence those projects are viewed as direct threat to that revenue stream.
Serious comment: I wonder how this dynamic will change when AI has some real legal chops. One could spin up agents that could sift through all the BS discovery docs and correspondence they send to waste time and money. The agents could presumably even file the necessary paperwork on your behalf. Obviously not a lawyer, just food for thought.
Unserious comment: The big company will spin up swarms of agents whose job is to overwhelm your AI agents with legal requests / correspondence, still with the goal of making you run out of money (but now via AI spend).
Plot twist they'll be running Claude Bible or GPT-Galaxy with max reasoning on against my dumb local Qwen-0.8b and they'll run out of money before I do.
It would be unfortunate for xAI, which abused the TOS of OpenAI for distilling via user accounts, to get a ruling that forbids scraping via user accounts.
The entire business model of the AI industry, who resell and launder the scraped data, would collapse.
Nitter just makes it visible to a human and has anti-scraper measures necessitated by the thieves like xAI.
Additionally, a GoFundMe would reach astronomical proportions given how unpopular Musk is.
While true, parent comment's first point (that the plaintiff would be unwilling to make the winning argument) would have an impact on their ability to spend the defendent to death. Judges do notice when you don't have an actual argument.
Probably the first time I've read a headline of some kind where good news followed something like "Due to legal advice". I hope the best for any service using Nitter, because the split between X and Bluesky is becoming another red vs. blue making life difficult for everyone else.
Maybe there could be a joining path: an ActivityPub joining ATProto and Nitter/X or something so no need to miss out on anything by being on "the other".
It's a split between user expirences that do and don't optimize for rage and culture wars and engagement bait. If there's also a de facto red vs. blue split, it's due to which community gravitates to which model of what a social network should be.
Look I wanted to like bsky but the fact is that their userbase has been doing as much rage and culture wars and engagement bait as any other. I mean look at what just happened the other day with the paint.net guy
When I got my first cease and desist my lawyer basically asked me if this is a hill you are willing to die on (i.e. spend enormous amounts of time and money on). I with them luck. I suspect a Go Fund Me announcement coming soon.
You're thinking of pre-LLM times. Nowadays GPT-6 can probably advise them better than all the worlds law firms combined. And probably win too, considering the incompetence (and tech illiteracy) of human lawyers.
Optimistically assuming you can do a lot of stuff well with GPT-6 in the legal space, its still going to be a lot of money -
1. Various court fees may still be thousands
2. You still will likely need to have at least _some_ legal representation. Not as much as before, but still thousands of dollars worth
3. You need to pray that your non-legal brain can catch any issues, both strategic & tactical, that GPT-6 produces because X's lawyers will be happy to pounce.
A problem right now is that GPT-6 is just a chatbot, and wouldn't be able to file any counterclaims (which involve human lawyers and billable hours) when fElon decides to wage a battle of attrition in the courtrooms.
Have citations of case law that doesn't exist been addressed? It seemed like that kind of outcome being punished might make people less likely to try relying on LLM output for legal situations without an expert human performing a review.
It seems like it would be a trivial statistical exercise to find all the nitter instance X accounts and just ban them, it's actually embarrassing they got lawyers involved instead of just doing that if they didn't want nitter to function.
> Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue.
The word "project" doesn't make a clear distinction between the repo and the instances. Nitter is on good ground with respect to the repo. The instances will be much harder to defend. From that one sentence it isn't clear if this is what the legal advice says or not.
Nitter changed their design such that it now requires an X account to scrape through. This was to stay functional after X removed guest accounts. This exposes them to a legal attack through the terms of service that must be accepted for the account, and to technical attack by blocking the scraping accounts.
The software project itself is probably fine, but 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.
Explain to me why that matters at all in an ethical sense. Especially given the scraping / pirating that's gone on by all of these companies in the last number of years.
Host the infra in countries unfriendly to the US and its legal framework apparatus. Continually package the archive as torrents for distribution globally.
Of course. xAI can also run gas generators to power its data centers and pump toxins into the air around local communities. Grok can generate non-consensual nude images of women (and CSAM). Their owner can make nazi salutes and demolish agencies millions depend on. Rules, laws and ethics are for poor people.
I'm so here for an age where some of this IP protectionism felony anti-circumvention nonsense gets absolutely bulldozed. Please please please.
It's entirely unacceptable, is suicidal corporatism to riff off the bad man, to have humanity's "public" messaging system be off limits to researchers, academics, observers. To trust a network at their word that they and they alone have a right to defend and protect us from propaganda, from malicious & shadow influence. This is not an ok basis that our information driven civilization can rest on.
Cool to see such a notable Nim based project continue! It's unfortunate that X tries to block Nitter so often, but zedeus always seems to find a path around technical or now legal issues.
The code looks surprisingly easy to hack on: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/src/nitter.nim
Few details but glad to see the project will continue. Given how much crucial information is posted exclusively to X, having an alternative frontend is important.
Interesting that they were inspired by Invidious (alternative YouTube frontend). That’s another project that could use some love. Hopefully AI coding tools can do some good and make it easier for these projects to find ways into the walled gardens and work around the counter measures.
Waiting for the day all the social networks allow api access and become usable again. Maybe we can call it “agent first” to help move things along.
If you dont mind, could you share an example of information posted exclusively on twitter which was crucial to you? Just curious;)
I don't know about crucial, but a recent amber alert went out last week. It contained a bit.ly link to the CHP's Twitter page and I couldn't see the information. I clicked on it because the alert was from my town, but light on the details.
Surely a public post on a CHP website would have gotten the job done better.
A few recent examples: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/currencies/articles/bessen... https://theprint.in/world/us-military-says-it-completed-late... https://www.reuters.com/technology/brad-lightcap-leaving-ope...
It’s still the go-to platform for public figures to broadcast unfortunately, so if you want to verify the original comments you need an alternate frontend or an X account.
"Maybe we can call it “agent first” to help move things along."
"Agent First" API access for social networks. What could possibly go wrong.
API access to social networks has been around for ages, and are still going strong.
"Firehose" [0] is probably best known. But those are pricey. And community projects like nitter, with a bit of tinkering, can be used as a free alternative to the (paid) API access. Hence those projects are viewed as direct threat to that revenue stream.
[0] https://docs.x.com/x-api/enterprise-gnip-2.0/fundamentals/fi...
I once consulted a lawyer when a large company contacted me.
His response was - they've got a team of lawyers on payroll whose job it is to make you run out of money...
Serious comment: I wonder how this dynamic will change when AI has some real legal chops. One could spin up agents that could sift through all the BS discovery docs and correspondence they send to waste time and money. The agents could presumably even file the necessary paperwork on your behalf. Obviously not a lawyer, just food for thought.
Unserious comment: The big company will spin up swarms of agents whose job is to overwhelm your AI agents with legal requests / correspondence, still with the goal of making you run out of money (but now via AI spend).
Plot twist they'll be running Claude Bible or GPT-Galaxy with max reasoning on against my dumb local Qwen-0.8b and they'll run out of money before I do.
AI is good at volume, bad at accuracy and nuance. Of all the tasks to go through with a fine-toothed comb (ie, manually) legal is one.
> The agents could presumably even file the necessary paperwork on your behalf.
Someone's name needs to be at the bottom of the paperwork, and those court filing costs would also add up.
It would be unfortunate for xAI, which abused the TOS of OpenAI for distilling via user accounts, to get a ruling that forbids scraping via user accounts.
The entire business model of the AI industry, who resell and launder the scraped data, would collapse.
Nitter just makes it visible to a human and has anti-scraper measures necessitated by the thieves like xAI.
Additionally, a GoFundMe would reach astronomical proportions given how unpopular Musk is.
Latter is probably a factor, because merely being right doesn't mean you won't run out of money while defending yourself from lawyers
While true, parent comment's first point (that the plaintiff would be unwilling to make the winning argument) would have an impact on their ability to spend the defendent to death. Judges do notice when you don't have an actual argument.
Do we know where the main author(s) of Nitter is based? Jurisdiction matters a whole lot.
Not going to work in EU.
It seems like youtube-dl/yt-dlp survived. t
Probably the first time I've read a headline of some kind where good news followed something like "Due to legal advice". I hope the best for any service using Nitter, because the split between X and Bluesky is becoming another red vs. blue making life difficult for everyone else.
Maybe there could be a joining path: an ActivityPub joining ATProto and Nitter/X or something so no need to miss out on anything by being on "the other".
It's a split between user expirences that do and don't optimize for rage and culture wars and engagement bait. If there's also a de facto red vs. blue split, it's due to which community gravitates to which model of what a social network should be.
Look I wanted to like bsky but the fact is that their userbase has been doing as much rage and culture wars and engagement bait as any other. I mean look at what just happened the other day with the paint.net guy
It is sad that Twitter is basically a private closed gate monopoly that people beg to use instead of developing alternatives like RSS
Yeah I keep yelling at Mum “Stop logging onto Twitter and develop and enhance RSS” but lately she’s stopped speaking to me.
Social media is addictive. RSS is not. Social media is profitable so worth marketing. RSS is not.
Selfhosting friction has to be close to zero for that to work. And Termux is already way too much.
what is termux ?
Way too much, obviously. It’s an Android app that exposes the underlying Android OS cli
There was a time when Twitter supported RSS, it lived at @your-username/rss
Then they stopped it, because "eNgaGeMEnT" or w/e
When I got my first cease and desist my lawyer basically asked me if this is a hill you are willing to die on (i.e. spend enormous amounts of time and money on). I with them luck. I suspect a Go Fund Me announcement coming soon.
You're thinking of pre-LLM times. Nowadays GPT-6 can probably advise them better than all the worlds law firms combined. And probably win too, considering the incompetence (and tech illiteracy) of human lawyers.
Optimistically assuming you can do a lot of stuff well with GPT-6 in the legal space, its still going to be a lot of money - 1. Various court fees may still be thousands 2. You still will likely need to have at least _some_ legal representation. Not as much as before, but still thousands of dollars worth 3. You need to pray that your non-legal brain can catch any issues, both strategic & tactical, that GPT-6 produces because X's lawyers will be happy to pounce.
You presume opposing counsel isn't using GPT-6 and other, legal-specific models trained on data ChatGPT will never gain access to. Hint: they are.
Regardless of advice quality, legal proceedings aren't free-to-play, and the adversary in question here has bottomless pockets.
Such speculation is just fear mongering and that is exactly what the daft bullies want.
A problem right now is that GPT-6 is just a chatbot, and wouldn't be able to file any counterclaims (which involve human lawyers and billable hours) when fElon decides to wage a battle of attrition in the courtrooms.
Have citations of case law that doesn't exist been addressed? It seemed like that kind of outcome being punished might make people less likely to try relying on LLM output for legal situations without an expert human performing a review.
Advice? Maybe ballpark quality if you can avoid hallucinations. The legal connections that will help net you a win, certainly not.
It seems like it would be a trivial statistical exercise to find all the nitter instance X accounts and just ban them, it's actually embarrassing they got lawyers involved instead of just doing that if they didn't want nitter to function.
> Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue.
The word "project" doesn't make a clear distinction between the repo and the instances. Nitter is on good ground with respect to the repo. The instances will be much harder to defend. From that one sentence it isn't clear if this is what the legal advice says or not.
Nitter changed their design such that it now requires an X account to scrape through. This was to stay functional after X removed guest accounts. This exposes them to a legal attack through the terms of service that must be accepted for the account, and to technical attack by blocking the scraping accounts.
The major instances are coming back online.
Twitter has a history of tracking down leakers by watermarks.
https://theintercept.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-leaks-twitter/
Nitter might want to make sure that their scrapes are bit-identical to other accounts to defeat this.
currently working instances: https://codeberg.org/mv12star/shitter/wiki/Instances
It'll be very funny if everything associated with Twitter branding would survive and the other one just didn't
The software project itself is probably fine, but 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.
The project maintainer, Zedeus, runs the most or second-most popular instance, and I assume his lawyers decided that was okay.
Except this is settled case law. LinkedIn tried and lost against scrapers.
That was a case of scraping explicitly public data that was already available to the general public without any extra effort.
I think that this is different because Nitter uses real X accounts for scraping, rather than publicly available data.
Explain to me why that matters at all in an ethical sense. Especially given the scraping / pirating that's gone on by all of these companies in the last number of years.
Host the infra in countries unfriendly to the US and its legal framework apparatus. Continually package the archive as torrents for distribution globally.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49567595
X already knows who the maintainer is and could easily go after him.
They will have to prove he’s operating it, and someone else can orchestrate. Anna’s Archive, Z Lib, Archive.today, Tor exit node patterns.
Put a tip jar out, let’s get archiving. “You can just do things.”
Why do people feel the need to go to X so strongly? What am I missing? I don't use nitter or X
Let's hope X doesn't pressure GitHub to take the repo down.
It's actually sad to see how deeply do we depend on monopolies.
Thankfully github is but one in an unlimited sea of choice between both hosted and self-hosted git forges all across the world.
Other solutions might not have the exact same functionality, but in this context of mere availability... it really doesn't matter.
So X(.ai) can scrape the entire web, but nobody can scrape X. Makes sense.
Of course. xAI can also run gas generators to power its data centers and pump toxins into the air around local communities. Grok can generate non-consensual nude images of women (and CSAM). Their owner can make nazi salutes and demolish agencies millions depend on. Rules, laws and ethics are for poor people.
I'm so here for an age where some of this IP protectionism felony anti-circumvention nonsense gets absolutely bulldozed. Please please please.
It's entirely unacceptable, is suicidal corporatism to riff off the bad man, to have humanity's "public" messaging system be off limits to researchers, academics, observers. To trust a network at their word that they and they alone have a right to defend and protect us from propaganda, from malicious & shadow influence. This is not an ok basis that our information driven civilization can rest on.
I look forward to getting out of this trap. https://bsky.app/profile/jauntywunderkind.bsky.social/post/3...