X Corp Kills Nitter, Twitter Becomes a Walled Garden

X Corp sent cease and desist letters to Nitter and XCancel, the two most-used open source Twitter proxies, forcing instances offline. The HN thread hit over 800 comments. Nitter allowed anyone to read Twitter without an account and without the platform's tracking. XCancel did the same with a slightly different approach. Both are now down for the foreseeable future.

This is the completion of a years-long trajectory. Twitter used to have a relatively open API. Then the API became expensive. Then free-tier access was killed. Then third-party clients were banned. Now even read-only proxies are getting lawyers sent at them. The commenter who noted 'Twitter has gone from relatively open to Instagram/Facebook level of closedness' is describing a deliberate product decision, not a drift.

The interesting secondary discussion: people are genuinely asking about Mastodon and the fediverse as alternatives, not just as ideological protest. Brazil's X block driving users to Mastodon was cited as a real data point. The irony that AI companies scrape Twitter freely while a privacy proxy gets shut down was the most-upvoted observation in the thread.