GoKawiilNitter gets a cease & desist from X while the atproto makes the Internet more open.
In 2007, Tim Berners Lee write the essay The Giant Global Graph. Quote:
There are cries from the heart .. for my friendship, that relationship to another person, to transcend documents and sites. ..Then any other site or program can use that information.
It seems appropriate as X is sending cease-and-desist letters to Nitter to remember TBL's essay. Nitter is - was - a simple frontend to X which allows users to view tweets without logging in. Even that small use of proxying to the pages is enough to receive threats of legal action.
Twitter's API in 2007 was famously open, which meant thousands of developers building clients, tools, and analytics for free. So, what happened? Why was it pulled? Simple: the network won. The developers stopped being an asset, and the API progressively closed. Rate limits, pricing tiers, login requirements, then technical blocks on the workarounds, and now letters from lawyers. Meta ran the same playbook a decade ago and it's now hard to remember there was ever a Facebook or Instagram API worth building on.
This is why Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, has been calling for over a decade for us to lock the Web open.
Nitter started off using X's APIs. When that closed, it read public web pages. And now that there's nothing left to close, the demand is that the source code come down. A program that displays public posts is being treated as a circumvention device under computer-crime statutes.
We have a walled garden problem. It isn't going to change, and the only option in front of us is to start fresh.
The good news is, atproto continues to grow, activitypub remains resilient, and our community is full of believers and builders in the open social web. Since I work on atproto, that's what I'll talk about next.
SELECT * FROM internet.blogposts
... continue reading