X cease-and-desist letters take open source Nitter and XCancel offline

What happened

X Corp has sent cease-and-desist letters to Nitter, the open source project that let people read X posts without an account, and to XCancel, a service built on top of it. According to The Register, the notices allege data scraping and violations of X's rules.

XCancel confirmed the move on its home page, saying it received a letter from X Corp on Monday 24 August at 8 PM EST demanding that it stop operating, and that the service has been suspended until further notice.

Zedeus, Nitter's maintainer, posted a separate statement saying nitter.net is offline and development has stopped for the time being. The maintainer is seeking legal advice and will not comment further on the specifics for now. The project's GitHub repository is still up but has been archived and set to read-only, with an explanation added to its README.

What Nitter actually did

Nitter was a read-only front end for X. As The Register describes it, the service served no JavaScript and no ads, did not expose the reader's IP address to the platform, and generally felt faster than the official client. That combination made it a fixture among privacy-minded readers who wanted to see public posts without logging in, and a persistent annoyance for the platform itself.

This is not the project's first shutdown. In January 2024, zedeus declared Nitter finished after Twitter removed the guest account feature the software depended on. Roughly a year later the project returned once a workaround had been found, and judging by the reported contents of the letter, that revival is what prompted X's lawyers to act this time. The Register says it asked X for comment and had received no reply.

Selective enforcement

X is far from the only platform hostile to scraping: Meta sued Israel-based scraping firm Bright Data in 2023. But The Register highlights the tension in this case. Elon Musk has positioned X as a champion of free expression, and the company itself draws on public X data to train its Grok chatbot, yet it used legal notices to close an open source tool whose main purpose was letting people read what is publicly posted there.

Why it matters

For open source maintainers, the episode shows how asymmetric disputes with platforms can be. A single letter was enough to take the project offline and freeze development within days, and the response so far has been to seek legal advice rather than pledge a fight, whatever the merits of the scraping claims.

For everyone else, the practical effect is a narrower web. Many organisations still publish through X, but with Nitter and XCancel gone, reading those posts without registering an account has become dramatically harder. Any developer building an unofficial client around a platform is effectively working on borrowed time, and the more visibly a workaround succeeds, the likelier it becomes the target of the next legal notice.