After X threatened Following legal action last month, Nitter and XCancel, privacy-friendly services for viewing X posts, appear to be officially dead, this time for real.
Nitter, an open source project which allowed people to read X posts without logging in, had been used to power a number of services, such as XCancel and others. But last month, X sent Nitter a cease-and-desist letter for its alleged “unlawful use and circumvention” of X’s API and associated data.
Basically, X said that Nitter had mined the social network’s data to access accounts and session tokens in violation of its rules.
Despite the threat, Nitter said on its GitHub page that “following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue” and promised more details would be coming soon. At the beginning of September, both nitter and XCancel was working again after a brief pause.
Unfortunately, things have changed since then.
Nitter’s GitHub page was archived on Friday, September 11, indicating that it is now in read-only status and can no longer be modified or updated. XCancelMeanwhile, it closed its service on Monday and published a new message on their home page: “Unfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal process, we must suspend this service again until further notice.”
Nitter, which worked by fetching public X posts and then removing ads, tracking cookies and JavaScript, gave people a clean and tidy way to read posts without an account or the social media app.
For X, however, this is not ideal, as you don’t want people accessing your content without being able to monetize those views with ads. It’s also why Twitter had banned third-party apps from accessing its content years ago. removing popular services like Twitterific and Tweetbot along the way.
This wasn’t X’s first attempt at shutting down Nitter, but it seems to have worked. In 2024, the main Nitter instance, Nitter.net, was temporarily disconnected after X implemented new API restrictions. After that crackdown, those who wanted to host a Nitter instance had to connect it to a real X account.
For lurkers, the services shutting down is a bummer, as they offered a way to see what was happening on X without having to participate in X or help it grow its users.
Nitter did not respond to a request for comment.
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