Yet another Hacker News

42 points mobilio 2 hours ago 10 comments

https://xcancel.com "On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel. The service XCancel is stopped until further notice. We are seeking legal advice and won't share more details for now. Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel."

https://nitter.net "On 24 August 2026 cease and desist letters have been sent by X Corp. demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project's repository.

nitter.net is offline and development has stopped for the time being. I'm seeking legal advice and won't be commenting further on the specifics for now.

Thank you to everyone who used, hosted, packaged, donated and contributed to Nitter over the past seven years."

expedited123 1 hour ago | parent

Twitter has gone from relatively open to instagram / facebook level of closedness where I can't even share a video with my friends because it asks them to log in. I had to rely on nitter and xcancel for that... Now that no longer works either

I have one niche that I use twitter for. If it wasn't for that - would have deleted my account long time ago. Things like this push me towards that direction, though.

Razengan 39 minutes ago | parent

Lets put AI to the test and make it walk the talk by making a viable alternative to Facebook/Twitter etc :)

mannycalavera42 36 minutes ago | parent

this one :thumb-up

llm_nerd 32 minutes ago | parent

There are many already. The code is not why people use those sites. In the case of Meta specifically, it's basically in spite of the user-hostile, garbage code.

The network effect / entrenchment means that any replacement has to be massively better in every dimension to have a chance. Otherwise people just stick to what they know, and then other people stick to it because the other people do. And so on.

I personally think Musk is a garbage-tier human who represents everything wrong with culture wars, and his brain is long blasted into a mush of worthless racist noise and stupidity by drug abuse, so I deleted my X account. Loads of others are too cowardly/selfish to do so.

jamesnorden 14 minutes ago | parent

I think people try alternatives, turns out to be a ghost town, then they just go back.

phoghed 31 minutes ago | parent

It’s a trivial project, it’s babbys first crud app. Getting everyone to use it is the hard part. There are already great alternatives that show this.

Then scaling and paying for it is the hard part.

spacechild1 12 minutes ago | parent

Just go ahead and quit! I had a niche use case for FB, but I decided to quit nevertheless because I didn't want to support the platform anymore. Today I don't miss it a single bit. (I never had a Twitter account in the first place.)

lousken 18 minutes ago | parent

who cares about c&d? just host it outside of us

iamnothere 9 minutes ago | parent

An anonymous group of devs should host the source on Radicle (over Tor) and the app itself on an onion site. Bonus, it may discourage some scrapers who can’t be bothered with setting up a Tor gateway.

duskdozer 3 minutes ago | parent

If the operators are in the US, they probably don't want to risk it if they were anything less than very careful in not having their personal info attached to any of the data.