X is sending cease-and-desist letters to open-source scrapers

X has started sending cease-and-desist letters to open-source projects that scrape its content, including the well-known Nitter project. The move targets small tools that let people browse X without an account — tools that exist precisely because X's own interface is locked down and often blocks you unless you log in.

This is the kind of legal pressure that usually lands on startups with venture capital, not on a 28-year-old developer in the Netherlands. Nitter's creator, Pieter Vanschelven, wrote the project in 2019 as a privacy-focused mirror of X. It's open-source, free, and maintained by one person. X is treating it like a corporate competitor.

The bigger picture: X's CEO, Linda Yaccarino, has been clear that the company wants to control every interaction with its content. That's fine if you're a billion-dollar platform selling ads. It's less fine when the tools being threatened are tiny community projects that keep the web from becoming walled gardens. Open-source scraping tools have been part of the internet for decades — they're how people access content when the platform itself decides you don't get in.

Why this matters for us: when X shuts down the tools that let the comunidad access its content without an account, the only people left inside are the ones who can afford the premium — and the ones the algorithm wants to keep watching.