As they’re forcing age verification on the march towards digital ID, it was no longer acceptable to let people read X without being identified. And this is really about tracking individuals, what they read, post, associations… due to get much worse with the addition of their financial services. Consequently, it tracks with Reddit which is difficult to read without giving up your IP address, as they block most VPN servers. I’d bet we see them go after Redlib instances that provided a privacy proxy to Reddit like Nitter did for X. There is interesting information on these platforms occasionally, but like most social media platforms there are too many toxic individuals with too much time on their hands making the platforms mostly a nuisance best avoided.
https://reclaimthenet.org/nitter-goes-dark-after-x-corp-cease-desist-letters
There was no revenue here and no competing product, only a way to privately read public posts that the platform did not control.
By Rick Findlay
Another part of the open internet is closing off. Nitter, the open-source alternative front-end that allowed people to read X without an account, without ads, and without the platform’s tracking, has gone dark. All its public instances went offline after X Corp. sent cease-and-desist letters, demanding the permanent takedown of every Nitter instance and the project’s source-code repository.
The letters went out on August 24, 2026, with a deadline of 5 p.m. Eastern on August 25.
“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’s creator, who goes by zedeus, posted on the site.
“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.”
He signed off by thanking “everyone who used, hosted, packaged, donated and contributed to Nitter over the past seven years.”
Nitter’s GitHub repository was archived the same day.
What X alleges is that Nitter made “unlawful use and circumvention of X’s Application Programming Interface (API) and associated data.” The letter said X has evidence that Nitter “scraped X data and accessed X accounts and session tokens in violation of X’s rules.”
X’s lawyers said the conduct broke “various state and federal laws, including, but not limited to, the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act (§ 143.001 and § 33.02) and the Lanham Act (15 U.S.C. §§ 1114, 1125).” X and SpaceX gave no statement beyond the letter itself.
The main project was not the only target. Graf, who runs the social network Poast and hosted a public Nitter instance, got a cease-and-desist as well, and said he will take legal action. His people have already contacted the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Graf went after X owner Elon Musk directly, slamming “the richest man in the world” for “coming after open source devs.”
He later moved Poast’s public instance off its old domain (nitter.poast.org) to a new one (bitter.st), though it is not working yet because it needs account reauthentication.
XCancel.com, another popular site that piggybacks on Nitter to display X posts also received a cease-and-desist letter from X Corp and is going to stop operations.
By going after both the hosted instances and the open-source code itself, X is closing off a tool built to do one thing well: read public posts on X without logging in, without ads, and without being tracked.