I was misled by an individual who claimed to be helping the Nitter project pro bono with a team of lawyers. He made up a timeline of events that sounded mostly believable.
I have not given legal advice to any Nitter operators, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say?
>I was misled by an individual who claimed to be helping the Nitter project pro bono with a team of lawyers. He made up a timeline of events that sounded mostly believable.
I want to believe this was a case of incompetency on their part rather than malice because wow, that's a horrible thing to do.
Wouldn't be unprecedented. Megamind Musk got scammed out of $ 50.000,- USD by someone claiming to be a PI on then Twitter [0], despite having access to (as near as makes no difference) infinite investigatory resources. If someone claimed to be a pro bono legal team, a less affluent project threatened by letters from high class lawyers, could easily fall for that and I could easily see it be malicious. Maybe trolls, maybe investors wanting to help SpaceXAI or whatever it is called today, maybe someone wishing to convert into donations/crypto rug pull, etc. Could also be incompetence after all, but maliciousness isn't without priors.
Hanlon might say never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, but I've found more often than not that the two happen to come together.
More and more, this has been weaponised: "No, we're not evil! We never intended for this to happen. It was just an accident" Is something I hear too often
Hi. I was briefly following the developments regarding legal representation and thought everything was going well. Is there anything more you could disclose as to how you were misled or what happened here? Thank you again for creating and maintaining Nitter, it's such a valuable tool and I've donated a few times over the years.
I'm a senior software engineer with 8 years of experience, primarily focused on backend development, systems architecture, web scraping/reverse engineering, performance optimization, and infrastructure. I work best in small teams where I can operate autonomously and take ownership of difficult problems end-to-end.
I'm the developer of Nitter (https://github.com/zedeus/nitter), an open-source alternative frontend for X/Twitter that I developed and operated for 7 years. At its peak it served millions of users and had a large community around it. I maintained it through major changes to X's infrastructure, including reverse engineering, API usage, caching, performance optimization, anti-bot/WAF systems, and production infrastructure. It was ultimately shut down following legal threats from X.
Outside of Nitter, I've worked on internal logistics systems, APIs and integrations, cloud infrastructure, automation, and various other backend systems. I'm particularly interested in difficult technical problems where I can have substantial ownership, whether that's backend/infrastructure, data acquisition and scraping, developer tooling, or AI-related systems.
I'm anonymous here because of the nature of Nitter and the legal situation surrounding it. I'm happy to verify my identity privately and can provide my CV and additional details by email. Anonymity would not be a requirement after employment.
I'm open to full-time employment or contract work.
> X has documentary evidence that you are scraping X Data, circumventing X’s API access controls and rate limits, accessing X using X accounts and session tokens in violation of X’s rules, and republishing X Data to the public. X’s Terms of Service, Developer Agreement, and Developer Policy strictly forbid such conduct. See https://x.com/en/tos (“[C]rawling or scraping the Services in any form . . . is expressly prohibited.”). By your own description, Nitter “uses Twitter’s unofficial API” and routes all requests through your servers, and requires operators to supply real X accounts to function.
> Your actions constitute a flagrant breach of the contractual and legal obligations you agreed to when accessing the X services. Your actions also violate 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).
I have not given legal advice to any Nitter operators, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say?