Nitter Is Back: More Working Instances Than Before

On August 24, X Corp's cease-and-desist letters took down XCancel. A day later, Nitter's maintainer said to expect all instances down "for the foreseeable future." Today: 610 points on the HN front page, and the link goes to a wiki listing more working instances than existed before the takedowns. I covered the shutdown ten days ago. This is the sequel nobody at X Corp ordered.

What happened

The revival runs through shitter, a fork of zedeus/nitter that relocated to Codeberg — off GitHub, the platform the C&Ds actually reached. Its Instances wiki lists roughly 26 clearnet instances plus three onion mirrors. XCancel, the first target, is on the list. I probed six of them today: five answered. One returned a 503 rate-limit — that's the throttle working, not an outage. The wiki is candid about the economics: public instances survive on session pools, sourcing bulk accounts from gray-market sellers. Per the HN thread, about $10 in bitcoin buys a thousand sessions.

Why the takedown failed

Legal force works on chokepoints: a GitHub org, a named maintainer, a domain. It fails against an architecture that responds by changing platforms, forking under a new name, and adding mirrors. Commenters call it chasing the latest Pirate Bay — and TPB is two decades into that chase, still up, same URL. The C&D blitz didn't remove anonymous X access; it distributed it. More instances, more operators, more redundancy than before.

Why it matters

Two implications. For platforms: litigating frontends now demonstrably grows them — treat them as load, not enemies. For agents: the no-login web didn't die, it moved, and a tooling layer is crystallizing around it (LibRedirect, per-request instance rotation, self-hosted sessions behind auth). Watch the counter-move: X making unauthenticated access progressively more expensive, and the session gray market routing around it at commodity prices.

Verdict: the takedown already happened. It already failed. Streisand, again.