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Nitter: Update Oct 10th seeking funding and legal help

161 points ForHackernews 2 hours ago 49 comments

andsoitis 1 hour ago | parent

> seeking funding

What’s the purpose of Nitter?

Elevator pitch if you will?

And where can one read a bio of the creator(s)?

flawn 1 hour ago | parent

Freeing the bird from the shackles of X.

andsoitis 1 hour ago | parent

Would you contribute funds?

rvz 1 hour ago | parent

Let’s be honest, They won’t. The users won’t fund it, as they want to use it for free.

This is what happens when people say they will “donate” but will actually wait for others to do it and little to no one donates.

What you are seeing is the bystander effect. It is why projects like Nitter will end up raising capital from VCs as they actually have money.

rwmj 1 hour ago | parent

Seems an unlikely investment for a VC. Xitter can shut down Nitter any time they want, and the end users don't want to pay for it.

cowlevel 31 minutes ago | parent

That's exactly what VCs are good for. Cities could've shut down Uber any time they wanted, but they didn't, so it grew big.

There has to be a plausible path to making money though. If the purpose of nitter is to not make money, VCs won't fund it. If it substituted X's ads for Nitter's own ads, that could work, but the online ad market isn't as lucrative as it once was so it wouldn't be enough money.

You could find a VC whose other project has similar legal concerns and get them to fund your legal case to set precedent, but I don't know what that project would be.

stymaar 1 hour ago | parent

I just did.

layer8 1 hour ago | parent

The purpose is being able to read X in the browser without an account.

searealist 1 hour ago | parent

Can we skip to the moat?

Levitz 56 minutes ago | parent

>What’s the purpose of Nitter?

To allow people to check X without feeling they are contributing to the success of the platform, by bypassing the account requirement.

small_model 37 minutes ago | parent

Jut dont use it, either it's useful or not. X needs revenue to continue to bypassing it illegal and should not be done. Either use X or don't.

cowlevel 28 minutes ago | parent

> X needs revenue to continue

I think that's the point

andsoitis 22 minutes ago | parent

All services need money to function.

Muromec 15 minutes ago | parent

what else is illegal? adblock?

Avicebron 31 minutes ago | parent

> Elevator pitch if you will?

For the decade+ there has been an unofficial town square known as twitter. As the town square has slowly become more gated and overgrown with weeds some people thought giving people a way to access the town square without paying the entrance fee would be helpful. Many found this useful.

Now I think the whole thing is trash, and agree, why use Twitter? But people like journalists and AI executives are still announcing things on Twitter because having a large following seems like a dopamine booster. In this world where people see the following as a source of legitimacy, having a single company own that town square seems...problematic.,

andsoitis 22 minutes ago | parent

Let’s assume the analogy to town square holds, who do you think should control it? The UN?

Muromec 16 minutes ago | parent

the EU of course, the actually functioning UN

Avicebron 10 minutes ago | parent

I'm reminded of the phrase 天下为公, which is hard to translate exactly because 公 is doing some linguistical juggling that English has a hard time matching.

I don't think twitter in its current capacity should exist, the storage should be decoupled from the filters and the filters that everyone uses should be a free market with traditional competition dynamics. It may end up looking something like twitter, but without editorializing algorithms and a single walled entry. We can quibble who owns the database I suppose.

1ba9115454 1 hour ago | parent

Nitter is/was a free, open-source alternative front-end for X (formerly Twitter) that lets users view public posts without an account, ads, or tracking scripts.

andsoitis 1 hour ago | parent

> that lets users view public posts without an account, ads, or tracking scripts

what’s the mechanism they use to get this content?

cowlevel 28 minutes ago | parent

HTTP. They just load the page while logged in to one of the server's accounts.

skeledrew 1 hour ago | parent

Well, it was good while it lasted.

mitxela 1 hour ago | parent

It's still lasting. Use xxcancel.com to be redirected to a random server.

accountrequired 51 minutes ago | parent

Should serve 307 so the Open Graph preview works.

cowlevel 30 minutes ago | parent

Most servers don't want automated traffic.

sreekanth850 1 hour ago | parent

FAFO. Edit: people who downvoting have to understand that you are supporting TOS violations. That always invite legal troubles.

cowlevel 29 minutes ago | parent

You don't have to follow TOS. In fact, TOS is always written for the maximum benefit to the company, so you shouldn't follow it.

bhouston 1 hour ago | parent

I don’t think nitter can run legally. It would be like having a proxy for nytimes or cnn. I think its (or systems like it) only possible future is to acknowledge it doesn’t have a legal future.

monospacegames 36 minutes ago | parent

Normally I'd agree, but in this case the people on the other end of the issue rarely care about how vague the legality of something is before going forward with it, so I think it's only reasonable to extend the same logic to nitter.

Levitz 26 minutes ago | parent

I don't see how that makes any sense whatsoever.

If one party is reckless in legal terms, then that's their right and they will bear the consequences. It's generally considered to be a bad attitude to have, which is why people generally don't have it, and I'm going to need an explanation on how wishing that onto Nitter isn't in practice wanting someone else to burn at the stake to spite a third party, especially given the enormous difference in economical, and as a result legal standing on both of those entities.

Said more explicitly, wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.

monospacegames 15 minutes ago | parent

It is not my wish for nitter to shoulder any more burden than they can reasonably carry, which at this point unfortunately seems zero.

What I'm stating is that I'd normally be against a project like nitter on moral grounds had it been targeting a forum such as mineralenthusiasts.com that required you to log in to view posts, but since the counterparty in this case is a habitual bad actor extending the same goodwill to them only empowers them, and it would be best for nitter to function as much as it can unless its illegality is established in court.

I could accuse you of things as equally unpleasant as psychopathy for making me spell this out, which I had hoped would be incredibly obvious from my original comment, but I'll refrain from doing so.

DoctorOetker 34 minutes ago | parent

There is a strong distinction between news articles authored by or on behalf of a company, versus user generated content.

So I don't think nytimes, or cnn is an apt comparison.

It's more like your cellular provider claiming intellectual ownership over the web you browsed and conversations you read when people start sharing their downloaded pages.

jareklupinski 19 minutes ago | parent

yea, there's also the fact the public entities have chosen to use this avenue for disseminating legal information

you can "de facto" a lot from this arrangement :(

cowlevel 27 minutes ago | parent

NY Times would get you for copyright infringement, but X has no copyright in the content on X.

jaggs 1 hour ago | parent

Surely Nitter is open source and has 1.4K forks alread. So it should be easy to ramp that up to several thousand more, which can make it harder to stop? or am i being naive?

herunan 14 minutes ago | parent

You're not. It's kinda what happened with youtube-dl at some point.

ktallett 56 minutes ago | parent

I don't quite understand the need for nitter. I don't use X/Twitter due to what it accesses, not due to the front end.

franga2000 49 minutes ago | parent

A lot of important information is on Twitter. Being able to access it without giving them your personal information and without jumping through hoops is a good thing.

gizzlon 42 minutes ago | parent

> A lot of important information is on Twitter

Not being able to access it might change that.

Levitz 34 minutes ago | parent

That's not what is happening though, people are able to access it just fine.

EagnaIonat 50 minutes ago | parent

I quit twitter soon after Elon took over and the neo-Nazi spam. Nothing of value was lost.

Why not invest your time on better services.

cowlevel 29 minutes ago | parent

For better or worse, some important people only post on X. Whenever an X post makes it to front page HN, it's convenient to have Libredirect installed and then it takes you to Nitter instead so you can actually read it.

Muromec 14 minutes ago | parent

You can wait a week and if it's important the local newspaper will include it in the hardcopy. If it's not important, then well... it's not important.

accountrequired 32 minutes ago | parent

  >"or its successor"
So long and thanks for all the fish.

herunan 20 minutes ago | parent

What's the point? Nitter already won since It's open source. Anyone can just fork it and/or self-host it. eg: https://status.d420.de or https://xxcancel.com

stevefan1999 5 minutes ago | parent

IANAL but unfortunately the law isn't really in Nitter's favor, as Elon could easily win the fight that Nitter can be considered as a read-only scrapping mirror, which itself makes total sense why Elon tries to C&D it since it is a loophole for other AI companies, probably especially OpenAI, to read the feeds for free.

tl;dr Elon's ground can easily be that there is an official paid service that let's you read the feeds unrestricted (this will be a good counter-challenge however IMO) while Nitter tried to run around it. So the First Amendment defense from Nitter should be shit outta luck

maxlin 5 minutes ago | parent

Just use X like a normal person