Nitter and XCancel - the two services that made it possible to read posts from X without an account, without ads and without tracking - look this time to have gone dark for good. Nitter's GitHub page has been archived since Friday 11 September, meaning the project is read-only and can no longer be changed. XCancel halted its service on Monday with a short message: due to new developments in ongoing legal proceedings, the service is suspended until further notice.

The story began last month, when X sent Nitter a cease and desist letter over alleged "unlawful use and circumvention" of its programming interface and data. The accusation was that Nitter scraped the network to obtain accounts and session tokens, against the rules. The project replied at the time that on legal advice it would carry on operating, and in early September both services did indeed return. Briefly.

What Nitter did was technically unspectacular and useful for exactly that reason: it took public posts from X and stripped out the ads, the tracking cookies and the JavaScript. What remained was a clean page of text, readable without an account and without an app. For a portion of users this was not a question of convenience - it was the only way to see what was happening on a network they do not want to be present on.

From X's side the logic is transparent and needs no interpretation. Anyone reading without an account is a view that generates no advertising revenue and does not count towards the user numbers. The same calculation at Twitter a few years ago closed off third-party apps and took Twitterrific and Tweetbot with it. This is not a new policy - it is the same policy, applied to the next group.

It was not the first attempt, but it appears to have been the last one needed. In 2024 the main Nitter.net instance briefly went down after X introduced new restrictions on its programming interface. Since then, anyone wanting to host Nitter themselves had to link it to a real X account - which means the network already had a hand at the project's throat. This time it simply squeezed.

Nitter did not respond to a request for comment. That is hardly surprising - when an open-source project faces the legal department of a company owned by one of the richest men in the world, silence is the only free strategy available to it.

What remains is a question that stopped being technical long ago. The public posts of public figures - politicians, ministers, institutions - are increasingly read only inside the platform, on its terms and through its algorithm. When the tools that allowed reading from the outside disappear one by one, a minister's statement becomes content owned by a private company. Who decides then what is public?