Terms of service have no legal binding unless both parties agree to them.

In other words, if X has a public API and Nitter is using it, then neither Nitter themselves nor the Nitter users have to agree to any terms of service in order to do so.

X cannot expect anyone to behave in accordance with terms and conditions they never agreed to.

Whats illegal about it? The one vague Texas law that was in the original C&D? Everything else was just TOS violation.

It's impossible for the nitter person to defend against X Corporation and so X will have what it wants done.

So access to X content will be restricted to X servers.

X server operators, Musk, etc, are subject to rules themselves of their home locale, and they are not a disinterested party in many discussion subjects. So one can reasonably expect that the content on X will be regulated by state parties as well as corporate interests.

Also, X has login requirements in order to view a lot of its content.

So, nitter is a backup That has no necessary obligation to corporate or locale jurisdictions, and it has no login restrictions.

Regular average everyday citizens can speak into x, and have distribution through it. But they can expect for their speech to be restricted per the above.

So speeches is freer through nitter.

>I was misled by an individual who claimed to be helping the Nitter project pro bono with a team of lawyers. He made up a timeline of events that sounded mostly believable.

I want to believe this was a case of incompetency on their part rather than malice because wow, that's a horrible thing to do.

Have you been in touch with the EFF? They seem like the first port of call for something like this: https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-assistance

> articles authored by or on behalf of a company, versus user generated content.

It gives me both a sense of schadenfreude but also a deep depression to watch the shoe on the other foot.

It was only a couple years ago that the talking point was "It's a private company!!", used to defend mass censorship on old Twitter, defend delisting of Parler on app stores, etc.

I think this is really something considering the whole ”social media is not responsible for what ppl post” thing

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 :(

> does not own the content they serve

Do they not? And if they wanted to, couldn't they, pretty trivially, with a ToC change?

Yes, but that's not a high hurdle to clear. All Twitter has to do is have an exclusive content program, and now they have standing to sue for copyright infringement on those exclusively-licensed Tweets. The burden falls on Nitter instance hosters to filter that out. And there is no legal obligation on Twitter to actually provide reliable signals to block exclusively licensed content.

Clients are not proxies. The fundamental difference is who accesses the target server. If you’re using a client (in the sense of a local program that renders your request, like a browser or a browser with extensions) then you are the one accessing the information, and once you have that information it’s hard to make a legal argument against transforming it however you want for your own consumption.

But a proxy means you request information from someone else, not from the target server, and the proxy requests from the target server. This is also fine! Except: a) the target server can absolutely say “Proxy A is not allowed to access me.” [1] and b) if the target server has copyright on the material being requested, then the proxy may be violating that copyright by making the data available for your request.

[1] there’s a weird middle ground here where if a server can tell you’re using a client it doesn’t like, then technically it could use its arbitrary denial ability to deny access on that basis, but that doesn’t seem to be legally accepted? IANAL. Or maybe that just doesn’t happen because there’s no way for it to tell what client you’re using. They certainly do try to deny service when they can figure out you’re using an ad-blocker.

nitter.si

> the only legal hurdle would be complying with takedown requests.

If you mean 'takedown requests' related to X content that should not be a problem since nitter does not cache content so anything taken down by X is inaccessible to nitter. If you mean takedown requests for nitter instances the question is on what grounds those requests are made - TOS violations or legal grounds? If it is the former it would be easy for X to just block the user IDs and no takedown request is needed. If it is the latter, which laws would those be based on?

who owns the content generated by the users? what if i as a user give twitter sole rights to my content

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.

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

The emphasis is on the authenticated session on their end, atleast since Musk locked down X access. It's basically a proxy.

Source? Some random Reddit post I guess?

Musk spends more money in a week trying to get people to like him than most of us will ever have or spend in our lives

It wasn’t always like this, it changed in the last 10 ish years as the industry became more lucrative. Or maybe it’s been happening more slowly over a longer period of time, but I do think the earlier founders were more idealistic

100%

Move fast and break other people.

> and the userbase will always tend to take the side of capital

I've been here for well over a decade. Let me tell you, it used to be so, so much worse.

+1. There is endless bullshit nitpicking that goes on here. Sometimes useful because we don't want a hive mind, but it becomes... really unnecessary with a lot of apologism (sometimes)

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

Can I just add too, it's why 'popularity' is an incredibly terrible metric for successfulness on the web

Look at Twitter. If it was good under Dorsey (debatable, it did have pretty notable censorship) and Musk ruins it, why are people 'still on it'? Because Musk did a good job? Not necessarily. It takes time to build a new product, and get your friends to switch over. Switching costs. I'm on a platform because Avicebron is on it, because Alice is on it, because Bob is on it

Same goes for sites like (especially) Facebook. It's 'popular'! 3 billion active users! (They lie a lot and probably about that and they make it very easy to be 'active', by faking the notifications or giving you none at all, like increasingly with messages over the years) Well, it's hard to 'just move'. Facebook has become and has been for a while an utterly shit product that deserves the corporate death penalty. People being on it is not the slam dunk people think it is

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.

Would you contribute funds?

It's for worse. Stop clicking on twitter/nitter/xitter links, stop following those people. If they care to keep you as an audience, they will move to another platform.

I have never needed to go to X and if the persons comments matter, it shows up on other social media platforms.

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.

I think it's the saddest thing that the X-articles thing has somewhat caught on there. Some of it is slop, sure, but people started hosting their longer form opinions on X instead of their own blogs, which is unfortunate.

Should serve 307 so the Open Graph preview works.

> A lot of important information is on Twitter

Not being able to access it might change that.

There is no important information on that platform that you couldn’t get another way

I don't think the first one is how anyone in modern times would define a public square.

Literal public squares in real life also don't have gatekeepers. They're just open spaces where anyone can naturally congregate. Emphasis on the "open".