On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.
The service XCancel is stopped until further notice.
We are seeking legal advice and won't share more details for now.
Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel.
(Read TechCrunch’s coverage of the cease-and-desist against Nitter, the open source software powering XCancel.)
XCancel allowed you to view posts on X/Twitter without contributing views and clicks that benefit Elon Musk. It was also faster to load and let you read complete threads without logging in, not just the single post X otherwise limits you to.
I don’t link much to X/Twitter (if you don’t hang out at the Nazi bar, you don’t know what’s happening at the Nazi bar), but when I did, I most often linked to xcancel.com instead of x.com (with exceptions made to links embedded in quoted material).
That means—for now, at least—existing links will be broken. I’m considering doing a search-and-replace across the site to swap xcancel.com links with x.com, but I’m holding out hope it’ll be unnecessary.
It also means that any future links will necessarily be to X.com. My apologies in advance.
(I do something similar with “Truth” Social, linking instead to Trump’s Truth. I clearly need to rethink that decision, too.)
The value of X (such as it is) exists in the content its users create and consume. X should not be able to gate that content—it’s not its content to gate. Both XCancel and Nitter are “seeking legal advice.” If they decide to fight the cease-and-desist, I’ll gladly contribute to their legal fund.