Nitter
An open-source front end that showed public X posts without an account, shut down after legal threats in August 2026.
Nitter was a piece of open-source software that rendered public posts from X, formerly Twitter, as plain web pages: no login wall, no tracking, no JavaScript. Anyone could run an instance, and dozens of people did. Journalists cited posts through it, researchers collected public data with it, and a lot of quiet plumbing such as RSS bridges and archiving tools pointed at it because the official X API had become expensive and restrictive.
In August 2026 X sent cease and desist letters alleging API circumvention and scraping, and the main Nitter.net instance went offline. It is a small case in a larger pattern of platforms fencing off public content that AI systems and researchers had come to rely on.