Nitter and XCancel are dead (again) after X’s latest legal actions

After X threatened ineligible enactment past month, Nitter and XCancel, privacy-friendly services for viewing X posts, look to beryllium officially dormant — for existent this time.

Nitter, an open-source project that fto radical work X posts without logging in, had been utilized to powerfulness a fig of services, similar XCancel and others. But past month, X sent Nitter a cease-and-desist missive implicit its alleged “unlawful usage and circumvention” of X’s API and associated data.

Essentially, X said that Nitter had scraped the societal network’s information to entree accounts and league tokens successful usurpation of its rules.

Despite the threat, Nitter said connected its GitHub leafage that “following ineligible advice, the Nitter task volition continue,” and promised much details would travel soon. In aboriginal September, both Nitter and XCancel were up and moving again aft a abbreviated pause.

Unfortunately, things person since changed.

Nitter’s GitHub leafage was archived connected Friday, September 11, indicating it’s present successful read-only presumption and tin nary longer beryllium modified oregon updated. XCancel, meanwhile, unopen its work down connected Monday, and published a caller connection connected its location page: “Unfortunately, owed to a caller improvement successful the ongoing ineligible proceedings we are required to suspend this work again until further notice.”

Image Credits:XCancel

Nitter, which worked by fetching nationalist X posts and past stripping retired the ads, tracking cookies and JavaScript, gave radical a clean, clutter-free mode to work posts without an relationship oregon the societal network’s app.

For X, however, this is not ideal, arsenic it doesn’t privation radical to entree its contented without being capable to monetize those views with ads. That’s besides wherefore Twitter had disallowed third-party apps from accessing its contented years ago, wiping retired fashionable services similar Twitterific and Tweetbot on the way.

This wasn’t X’s archetypal effort to unopen down Nitter, but it seems to person worked. Back successful 2024, Nitter’s main instance, Nitter.net, temporarily went offline after X rolled retired caller API restrictions. After that crackdown, those who wanted to big a Nitter lawsuit had to link it to a existent X account.

For lurkers, the services’ closures are a bummer, arsenic they had offered a mode to presumption what was happening connected X without having to really enactment connected X oregon assistance it boost its idiosyncratic numbers.

Nitter did not respond to a petition for comment.