X.com Sends Privacy Frontend Nitter a Cease and Desist, Permanently Shuts It Down

The popular privacy frontend Nitter has received a cease and desist letter from X Corp demanding a permanent takedown of the project's repository and all instances.

X.com is fairly data-hungry even as social media sites go, and it requires an account to even view many posts, although it's inconsistent about whether it blocks you from viewing.

Nitter acted as a frontend for X: it displays content from X but with its own UI that allows users to see posts without the obnoxious sign in that blocks you from being able to simply view content.

Logging in to a website allows the website to track your activity between sessions, since you re-identify yourself necessarily by logging in. Accounts also typically require potentially sensitive personal information, for example X requires you to provide either a phone number or an email to sign up.

These can potentially be used to link your other accounts together or even link your account to your real identity. Not to mention every extra account you have means more spam in your inbox that no one wants.

It also enabled you to view posts without JavaScript enabled, which is a big way advertisers track you around and fingerprint your browser. JavaScript is also a huge attack surface and is responsible for a significant portion of vulnerabilities in web browsers.

The main instance, nitter.net, has now been taken offline and replaced with the message above explaining the situation. Other popular Nitter instances, such as xcancel.com, appear to have also received similar cease and desist letters and consequently taken their service down as well.

The GitHub page for the Nitter project has been archived, meaning the source code is still available but there will be no more updates or support. The donation methods are still up if you want to support the developer through a difficult time.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. In the past, a popular YouTube video downloader, youtube-dl, was hit with a DMCA takedown and deleted off GitHub. GitHub eventually reinstated the project and even made a blog post about it.

The nature of open source software means that likely someone will just fork the project and maintain their own version. There are still a few Nitter instances up for now such as nitter.app.