These privacy-friendly services for viewing X posts are now dead
What's the story
Nitter and XCancel, two privacy-centric platforms for viewing posts on social media platform X, have been officially shut down. The move comes after X threatened legal action last month against these services. Nitter, an open-source project that allowed users to read posts without logging in, was also the backbone of several other services like XCancel.
Legal action
X served cease-and-desist letter to Nitter
Last month, X served a cease-and-desist letter to Nitter over its alleged "unlawful use and circumvention" of the platform's API and related data.
The social media giant accused Nitter of scraping its data to access accounts and session tokens in violation of its rules.
Despite the legal threat, Nitter had announced on its GitHub page that "following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue."
Service suspension
Nitter's GitHub page archived on September 11
However, things took a turn for the worse when Nitter's GitHub page was archived on September 11.
This means that it is now in read-only mode and can't be edited or updated anymore.
Meanwhile, XCancel has also suspended its service and posted a message on its homepage announcing the same.
Service details
Why did Nitter upset X?
Nitter worked by fetching public posts from X and removing ads, tracking cookies, and JavaScript.
This gave users a clean way to read posts without an account or the app.
However, this wasn't in line with X's monetization strategy, as it wanted people to view its content so that those views could be monetized through ads.
Past actions
Nitter was briefly taken offline in 2024
This isn't the first time X has tried to take down Nitter.
In 2024, the main instance of Nitter, Nitter.net, was taken offline temporarily after X imposed new API restrictions.
After that incident, anyone wanting to host a new instance of Nitter had to link it with an actual account on X.