TECH Signal 481
Nitter shutdown shows why open APIs are insufficient and shared databases are needed for the open web
A blog post uses X's legal action against Nitter to argue that APIs are fundamentally inadequate for building interoperable services and that the open social web needs shared databases instead.
If you build on another platform's API, you are one business decision away from losing access, and even a generous permanent API cannot support the queries, indexing, and cross-service joins that real products require. The argument is that only shared, live, writable datasets, like what atproto attempts, can give developers the access they actually need.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
Nitter moved from using X's APIs to scraping public pages, and now faces legal demands to remove its source code entirely.
APIs are a fixed menu that cannot support arbitrary queries, cross-service joins, or indexing over a full corpus, making them structurally insufficient for building real services.
The author argues the solution is sharing the underlying database rather than offering an API, with atproto and activitypub cited as growing alternatives.
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