Well, it already ranks pretty highly in Google search results, so it’s unlikely that Elon’s lawyers haven’t heard of the website.
It has some page where it almost goes out of its way to say that it doesn’t bypass security measures like Nitter and XCancel supposedly did. So Elon might not have even a fig leaf of a legal argument to take it down like he did with the other websites.
It’s also possible that Twitterviewer is just flat out disobeying cease and desist letters from Musk, which nitter and xcancel weren’t willing to risk.
In any case, I find it unlikely that Musk hasn’t heard of Twitterviewer.
X lost data scraping lawsuits against both Bright Data and and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Meta also lost a data scraping lawsuit against Bright Data.
Based on these past losses, it seems highly unlikely that X would win a data scraping lawsuit against nitter, xcancel, or twitterwebviewer.
However, I think that X's real goal is to force the nitters to go through the legal process if they want to stay online. X's hope is that nitter and xcancel and twitterwebviewer will shut down rather than hiring expensive lawyers and going through the exhausting legal process.
It's not that important of a loss in the grand scheme of things. It's probably less than 1% of the posts that have ever been made on the Reddit website, since Reddit was a pretty small and obscure website until 2011 or 2012.
But it might be the first step toward making all of Reddit only readable with an account.
Still works for me (although I always use it logged in). If they kill old.reddit, I may finally abandon the site. It's been slowly losing value for a long time and being forced to use the hot garbage of the new UI might be my tipping point.
What? No this is completely incorrect. old.reddit is a way of viewing reddit with the old (in my opinion far superior) UI, but includes new posts and comments. As for whether or not it requires an account, that appears to be something that they are A/B testing.
Twitter's been the worst about forcing you to log in.
Before Elon, Twitter would give him some login reminders roughly every 5-10 minutes if you viewed the site while logged out. It was a little annoying, but it wasn't that bad, and you could get rid of the reminder by just clicking the x button.
Now, under Elon, they force you to login to read any replies to posts. Currently, a person's 5 most recent posts can be viewed without an account, but none of the replies can be.
Reddit is now forcing people to login to view old Reddit. IIRC, old Reddit is posts that are from before 2009 or something like that. It's not that important of a loss in the grand scheme of things, but it might be the first step towards making the entire Reddit website login only.
> Reddit is now forcing people to login to view old Reddit. IIRC, old Reddit is posts that are from before 2009 or something like that. It's not that important of a loss in the grand scheme of things, but it might be the first step towards making the entire Reddit website login only.
It would have taken like 30 seconds for you to verify that this isn't correct. "Old reddit" is old.reddit.com, and is the old/original UI of the site. It has nothing to do with actual post age. If you visit any thread on Reddit, and replace the "www.reddit.com" with "old.reddit.com", you get the old reddit UI.
This UI is seen by many as much better than the current atrocious UI with the god-ugly ""snoos"", ads, "similar posts", and other cruft most of us don't want. They now require a login to use the debloated UI, as well as attempting to view any comments/threads over a VPN (even on new reddit).
At least Twitter lets you see the original post, even over a VPN (only hiding replies while logged-out), Reddit hits you with an obnoxious "woah there pardner! slow ur heckin horses down!" snoo image preventing you from seeing anything of the thread.
It annoys me to no end, as so many technical questions and support threads are now gated behind this restriction.
Twitter meanwhile, has little of value other than ragebait anyway.
Oh, and you could only save a Reddit thread with the old reddit link on the Wayback Machine. The regular www reddit links have JS required to fetch the contents of the thread, so every thread got saved as an empty page.
It's been that way for over like 3-4 years at this point, unless they've fixed it now that they've kneecapped old reddit (assuming it wasn't intentional in the first place).
XCancel is a different website, but they just put up a notice literally a few minutes ago saying that they're also shutting down until they get legal advice. For the past few hours, xcancel had been marginally functional (constantly giving you an error message if you tried more than 2 or 3 searches at a time), but now the website is down altogether.
Twitterwebviewer is still up, but I always preferred nitter and xcancel. And I wouldn't be surprised if twitterwebviewer also goes offline in the next day or two.
"For the forseeable future" doesn't sound very good. It's a vague phrase, but it usually isn't used to describe something that will change next week or even next month.
"For the time being" would have sounded like less bad wording than "for the forseeable future."
You really are the owner of all the posts who make online. When you post on X, you grant X a license to display your posts, but you still have the copyright to your posts. Same thing if you post on Reddit or Facebook or YCombinator or whatever.
This really is an absurd case, but nitter apparently really wants to err on the side of caution until a judge rules in their favor.
> Same thing if you post on Reddit or Facebook or YCombinator or whatever.
Personally if anyone asked me, I’d happily let them take all comments I’ve ever posted to Reddit or HN and repost all of them on their own site.
In fact, I would like to declare the following right now: All comments I ever have made and ever will make on HN are available to use for anyone and everyone who wants to under the terms of the CC0 license. You can point to this comment if questions about copyright ever come up in relation to wanting to copy my comments from HN and rehost them elsewhere.
It’s just a shame that I am not a particularly famous or interesting person, and my comments are not all that interesting especially if taken out of the threads they are posted in without the surrounding comments from others in those threads.
In order for someone to be able to fully replicate all of the user content from a site such as X or HN or whatever, they would maybe need similar permission from every contributor in every thread if there wasn’t already a permissive license the site itself had gotten its users to agree to let their content be distributed under.
Even if you could somehow get permission from each and every user on a site that you could rehost their comments, it might or might not be doing something wrong to download all of the content from the original site itself unless there’s an ok from the site itself to do so.
Right now, I can do about two searches on xcancel before it gives me the "instances have been rate limited" message. Then if I completely close out of my web browser, clear my web history from the last hour, and go back into my web browser, I can do another one or two searches, before xcancel again gives me that message about ""instances have been rate limited".
In theory I can still read the same things I could read before on xcancel by doing an endless cycle of doing one or two searches, then closing out of my web browser and clearing history, and then going back to xcancel and doing another search or two. But certainly that process is very annoying.
Now, I'm not 100% sure if this is related to Musk's cease and desist letter. I've run into this problem or similar technical problems about twice a month before when using XCancel. Usually the technical problem is resolved within 2 or 3 hours and I can use xcancel normally again. So I guess I'll check back in a few hours and see if I can use xcancel normally again.
Edit: Xcancel is working perfectly if you first go to somebody's X profile, and then you turn the x in the url to xcancel. For example, here is Elon Musk's profile on xcancel, where you can still view Elon's tweets, Elon's replies, and the replies that people have made to Elon's tweets.
XCancel still has a problem right now where I can only make a few searches on the xcancel website itself before it tells me I'm rate limited, and I have to sign out of the browser and sign back in before I can make searches on xcancel again.
However, I occasionally have had this problem on xcancel even before today. And I'd assume that this probably isn't related to the cease and desist letter. If this was due to the cease and desist letter, I'd assume that xcancel would be completely down right now rather than having limited functionality.
You're doing voodoo. It's not you that's being rate limited, it's xcancel itself that is being rate limited. If you wait a few moments and reload, things will likely work.
Although now I should say that this was the truth yesterday, but now twitter seems to be actively killing the credentials that nitter instances are using, and they're returning rate limit messages permanently. My guess is that this is a function of how many credentials/tokens a nitter instance was cycling through to get content x the amount of traffic that nitter instance gets. They probably just set the rate-limiting bans longer for everybody (or steadily increase them on each offense), instead of trying to find the specific offending credentials.
edit: xcancel officially gone, so none of this matters.
It has some page where it almost goes out of its way to say that it doesn’t bypass security measures like Nitter and XCancel supposedly did. So Elon might not have even a fig leaf of a legal argument to take it down like he did with the other websites.
It’s also possible that Twitterviewer is just flat out disobeying cease and desist letters from Musk, which nitter and xcancel weren’t willing to risk.
In any case, I find it unlikely that Musk hasn’t heard of Twitterviewer.