The major instances are coming back online.

Threat model a bit different, they can just request xcancel.com/unique-string and check what IP or account requested unique-string IMO

X already knows who the maintainer is and could easily go after him.

They will have to prove he’s operating it, and someone else can orchestrate. Anna’s Archive, Z Lib, Archive.today, Tor exit node patterns.

Put a tip jar out, let’s get archiving. “You can just do things.”

I think that this is different because Nitter uses real X accounts for scraping, rather than publicly available data.

That is still a form of publicly available.

Explain to me why that matters at all in an ethical sense. Especially given the scraping / pirating that's gone on by all of these companies in the last number of years.

Who cares this is a subthread about legal advice.

When have ethics ever mattered in law?

The project maintainer, Zedeus, runs the most or second-most popular instance, and I assume his lawyers decided that was okay.

Most nitter instances don't do anything to avoid legal trouble from X. They simply hope that X will not go after them. There are some instances which do put in effort to stay anonymous, and they usually do that with a Cloudflare tunnel to hide their server IP and by not posting any personal details online.

For Reddit you can use Redlib (https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib), I host an instance at https://redlib.miningtcup.me/ and people also like https://safereddit.com/.

None of the sites on the codeberg instance list spread malware. If you can link to one that does, I would be shocked. Some of the instances use CAPTCHAs such as DogWAF to prevent scraping, but those are absolutely not malware.

That does work, but it misses out on several of nitter's benefits:

- It requires JavaScript - It is not great for privacy, being behind Cloudflare and having numerous trackers - It is not open-source

It is possible to create X accounts without a phone number. I run [service].miningtcup.me and it uses 5 accounts, none of which required phone numbers for me to create, and none of which I paid for. You just have to get creative.

All the instances on the list agreed to be put on it. Their maintainers decided that they were willing to be on it because it's unlikely that they will get a C&D.

No, not automatically. The list is instances which are reliable, so if an instance is ratelimited any noticeable portion of the time, it won't be up there.