Nitter Says It Has No Lawyer, Retracting Its September Claim
Software / news
Nitter Says It Has No Lawyer, Retracting Its September Claim
The maintainer of the open-source X front end told users on Oct. 10 that the legal advice behind the project's comeback rested on information that was untrue, and he is now asking for funding and counsel.
Nitter has no legal counsel, its maintainer said on Oct. 10, retracting a Sept. 7 notice that said the project would continue "following legal advice." The maintainer, who goes by zedeus, is now asking lawyers, organizations and donors for help defending the project against X Corp.
The update is posted on nitter.net, and the project's GitHub repository carries a matching README line: "I'm seeking funding and legal help." GitHub also shows the repository archived by its owner on Oct. 9 and read-only. Nitter is an open-source front end for reading X posts without an account.
What the Oct. 10 update says
Zedeus wrote that the assurance given on Sept. 7 was based on information that turned out to be untrue, and apologized for it. The post names no dollar target and no law firm.
Donations go first to legal costs if they are needed, the post says, and anything left over funds Nitter or a successor. It lists Liberapay, Patreon, Ko-fi and five cryptocurrency addresses, plus an email address and a Matrix handle for lawyers who want to get in touch.
How the dispute reached this point
X Corp sent a cease-and-desist letter on Aug. 24, demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the repository. It's FOSS reported a deadline of 5 p.m. Eastern on Aug. 25 and said X alleges "unlawful use and circumvention of X's Application Programming Interface (API) and associated data," a quote it attributed to TechCrunch. The same report says X cites the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act and the Lanham Act, and says it has evidence Nitter scraped data and accessed accounts and session tokens.
| Date | Event | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Aug. 24 | X Corp sends first cease-and-desist letter | nitter.net |
| Aug. 25 | Reported deadline for compliance, 5 p.m. Eastern | It's FOSS |
| Sept. 7 | Nitter says it will continue "following legal advice" | TNW, It's FOSS |
| Sept. 8 | X Corp sends a second letter with the same demands | nitter.net |
| Oct. 9 | GitHub repository archived by owner | GitHub |
| Oct. 10 | Maintainer says there is no counsel, asks for help | nitter.net |
Nitter complied at first: the repository was archived, nitter.net showed a shutdown notice and the XCancel instance stopped. On Sept. 7 the project reversed course. The Next Web's Ana-Maria Stanciuc, its editor-in-chief, reported on Sept. 8 that XCancel was serving pages again and the repository was public, though nitter.net itself had not resumed normal service. That report also said X had not sued and had not commented, and credited The Register's Richard Speed with first reporting the reversal. None of the sources fetched for this story report a filed lawsuit.
What is at stake for a 14.5k-star project
The repository shows 14.5k stars, 1.4k forks and 132 open issues. Stars measure attention, not use: the site made the same point about rea, the reverse-engineering repository with 73,114 stars, and nothing here says how many people read X through Nitter.
The code is licensed AGPL-3.0, and the README says no proprietary instances are permitted. That licence governs the code and does nothing about X's claims over access to its service. A licence also does not settle who may ship a project: on Oct. 9, Bitwarden told its forum that its store apps would move to a commercial licence while the GPLv3 source stays on GitHub.
The project has been here before. It's FOSS reports that X removed the guest-account feature Nitter relied on in early 2024, the lead announced an end, and the project came back in 2025 after finding a workaround.
The README states that Nitter "Uses Twitter's unofficial API (no developer account required)." Its Docker notes mention mounting a sessions.jsonl file, which hints at session-based access, but the repository page does not explain how those sessions are created. X's session-token allegation is therefore unanswered in public.
Zedeus's post thanks everyone who used, hosted, packaged and donated to the project over seven years. The next thing to watch is whether the repository comes out of archive, or whether a lawyer or an organization answers the call for help.
Sources
More in Software
- 01Rust Borrow Checker Bug 11 Years Old Lets Safe Code Hide a Short-Lived Reference in a 'static ValueIssue #164250 shows a Drop impl smuggling a stack reference past the compiler on stable releases back to 1.85.0, and commenters trace variants to Rust 1.4.
- 02REA, a Reverse-Engineering Tool for AI Agents, Gained 52,186 GitHub Stars in a Day. It Has 653 Watchers.Three trackers report three different star totals for morluto/rea, and the 15 newest issues and pull requests show an installer still being patched.
- 03QGIS Merges a 'Closed Door' on AI-Written Code 13 Days After Proposing ItQEP 428 bars LLM, AI and agent-assisted code from qgis/qgis after a vote that closed October 7, with two follow-up proposals still open.
- 04Anthropic Moved Its Monorepo Off Git to Scion as Daily Merges Grew From 2,500 to 30,000A seven-person team built Scion in five months. The post is candid about merge-queue conflicts and says the system is not a git replacement for general use.