The important part is the linked GitHub comment from the primary maintainer (and owner) of the Nitter project. To save readers a click
Guest accounts have been removed, they weren't just led to believe that. With real accounts getting rate limited immediately and likely banned, I don't see any path forward for Nitter.
I would say that Nitter as a whole is not owned by anyone, that person is the owner of one of the Nitter instances, in addition to being the primary maintainer of the project as you correctly stated.
I agree with the second part of your comment about all instances being in danger. It is unfortunately a common problem faced by many privacy-respecting frontends (Nitter, Libreddit, Proxigram, Piped etc)
This is one of the long time running instances shutting down, linking to the primary nitter author saying it's the end for all instances eventually. And providing insights from the status page.
If they don't get new guest accounts, they're all going to shut down withing 30 days. It's just left over accounts and caches giving you the impression everything is fine.
Don't forget the rolling DoS herds of scrapers having no more ways to do stuff on their own, which are now trying to use the remaining instances - killing even more.
I shouldn't have to paste this here, but: "If nothing changes, all remaining instances will go down eventually: Instances rely on guest accounts, which are valid for a certain time and of which you need a ton to run a public instance. The API for this got taken down and it doesn't look like a fluke this time."
It's unfortunate that this mistaken comment is top voted.
"If nothing changes, all remaining instances will go down eventually: Instances rely on guest accounts, which are valid for a certain time and of which you need a ton to run a public instance. The API for this got taken down and it doesn't look like a fluke this time."
The submitted title was "Nitter Is Dead". We changed it to the article title overnight, but I've since changed it to a representative sentence from the text.
I'm with you that this is disappointing, but folks who use these sorts of tools tend to be a bit naive about the impact of them going away. It's a little silly, to be honest. Best numbers I could come by is X does something like 100B impressions/day and x.com saw 1.2B visits in the month of December. Will some people stop seeing X posts on Nitter? Sure, maybe. Will it matter to X? I doubt it.
It's created a reverse eternal September. The masses stay confined to one place. Other places can flourish with the old school smaller community kind of feel and quality. Let twitter live in its current state if it means other places won't be taken over by influencers and other bullshit.
Exactly. Even the reddit blackouts etc did nothing really - sure a few people left in a huff and all that jazz, but Reddit is still trucking along happily.
The only time I've seen the "eff it, we're leaving!" thing actually work was with Digg v4.
I think leftists who are losing their minds over Elon Musk's Twitter are a loud minority. If Nitter goes down, nothing at all will change. Twitter will continue to thrive and people will continue to use it and link to it.
I hate that Twitter is a walled garden but I understand why it is like that today as the well has been poisoned. To be honest I gave it try and it looks like today Mastodon/Bluesky are worse and Twitter better due to the migrations.
Comparing traffic, pre sale, of logged in twitter users vs traffic generated by those without accounts would give insight into what percentage of users have to take action to continue to use twitter normally.
I spent a 1-2 minutes googling and could not come up with numbers though.
I know I am part of the percentage of people that used to read twitter without an account, or at least not logged in, and now read twitter a trivial amount.
This actually came up in a conversation yesterday, funnily enough: I'm mostly using Twitter because I'm curious as to how much worse it's going to get. So far, I've seen them allow NSFW paid-for advertisements, doxxing of well-known figures, daily crypto mention farming spam (with highly suspicious, easily-detectable patterns, spread across ~10 accounts per day), obvious engagement bait to benefit from ad-revenue sharing, fake interaction spam, and plenty more.
As an excerpt, the @support account on Twitter is completely dead, too -- if I remember correctly, the last reply to an issue was around August / June of last year. So clearly they don't have the staffing needed to support... well, the support, and they seem to have issues admitting that.
That becomes even more clear when you look at the spam on the platform: obvious spam patterns are completely ignored, with reports going to the wayside, and crypto / NFT spam being left up to victimize someone who doesn't know what it really is. It's quite grotesque.
Even though a lot of people may use the platform, quite a substantial amount of people also speak out about how much worse Twitter has got since the acquisition -- while I have nothing against Elon Musk, I find it quite amazing how badly the platform seems to be doing ever since he's been at the helm.
This is disappointing because often times people link to threads on Twitter but if you’re lucky enough to not get a login wall, the full thread wont be visible without logging in. (Which I’m not going to do)
I really wish people would just stop linking me to twitter (or better yet, stop using it altogether).
It's a terrible site though and calls to disallow submissions from there (in comments here) were common going back well before Musk took over, so the Twitter dislike originated independently of anyone's views about him.
I refuse to login to twitter for ethical reasons. If someone links me to a tweet I assume it’s because they thought I’d find it interesting. It’s a thoughtful act which deserves a little bit of effort on my part, so I’m willing to change the domain to see it. I’m not willing to login though. It’s a principle thing.
Not the OP but: because I've never wanted to post there and as far as I'm concerned there's no compelling reason I should need one and I'm so offended by Musk and his attempt to force me to get one that I would rather not read it than let him succeed.
Why make me create an account if I want to read e.g. announcements of government organizations? Many of these publish only to Twitter and don't have an RSS feed.
Twitter can't both be the de-facto successor of RSS and a walled garden enforcing signups for read-only users.
I just want to run a headless browser that logs into my socials periodically and scrapes the stuff I want from the account I follow and puts it into a less addictive format that provides an upper limit on my possible exposure and engagement. I’m happy to run it locally from my device. Ideally it redirects links to socials I come across too. Where is such a thing?
This was the dream of RSS, but it went against the long-term business interests of the corporations hosting content, so it has since largely faded away
I started using RSS again recently for this reason. I use it for for facebook, twitter, hackernews, etc. Feedbro extension supports public facebook profiles. Nitter clones like https://farside.link/nitter/elonmusk/rss still work.
You may want social media to be pipes, not platforms.
Convince the government to forbid the business model in which most of users are not paying customers but a product offered to advertisers. Then, social platforms will not care if you use whatever client you desire.
Big Social shareholders don’t want it, though. Being a double-sided market is addictive, and no one can compete with them if they capture the market by not charging money.
This can be done with little AWS Lambda scripts that periodically scrape (or API) whatever sites you want and e-mail you results. All the credentials to login to whatever sites can be personal/dedicated to your instance (so no real API limits), and the usage will almost certainly fall into the AWS free tier since it's only for you.
The ideal install workflow would be to have a repo of AWS CloudFormation templates to automate the installation of the lambdas for different sites in your account. Anyone can open an AWS account, and using CloudFormation is a few fields, and a button click.
Also, if the scripts are developed properly, they are runnable locally. A sane developer will run them locally during development, and then test deployed before releasing.
With an AWS IP and a bot usage pattern they’ll surely ban your account pretty quickly or put you in front of a CAPTCHA. I wish it was as easy as a small script. Without anti-bot techniques, sites would be overflown by scraping bots. Try to scrape a Cloudflare protected site, for example. They’re really good in figuring out if you’re human or a bot. IIRC they even fingerprint your TLS handshake or cypher suite, which ultimately made me give up with headless Chrome and Puppeteer even after proxying through my residential IP, spoofing user-agent and screen size and rate limiting. Unfortunately, there’s no way to distinguish good bots for personal usage from bad bots.
In theory, anything is possible with months of developer work. The trouble is, there are billions of people addicted to social media. There aren't many widespread solutions to scrape it. Whenever a scraper becomes even remotely popular, Facebook takes action against it, as accessing posts outside the walled garden is a violation of their terms of service. Currently, I am using a combination of Feedbro and Nitter to scrape all the accounts I want to follow. They currently work with Facebook and have not been blocked.
This is what I made for myself at https://www.bulletyn.co - regular email digests of content from Reddit, HN, RSS feeds, etc. It's helped me significantly cut down the amount of time I spend on Reddit particularly.
I had been planning to add Twitter before the API changes...alas.
I want the vision that Rabbit is selling, a headless browser that periodically scrolls through my socials and have AI assemble all entries into a readable digest. I would settle for manually scrolling through my timetime to a screen recorder that OCRs all the text and removes the fluff.
That sounds like a case of be the change you wish to see. Such a project sounds rather substantial, not only initially but also in upkeep. Might want to be more specific, such as "does this exist for my favorite social network called <insert network here>?"
I wonder if Youtube will ever do the same with Invidious by requiring an account for people to view videos.
Sure, it might seen unthinkable for this to happen in 2024, but give it more 5 or 10 years and I could see this being something acceptable to the eyes of the average user. I don't like the direction the internet is going :\
Oh yeah, I see it as inevitable. I'm blown away that YouTube is still accessible without an account. It's only a matter of time, though, I'd wager. I never thought Twitter would require an account to view its content.
It's not the same site, but it's the same company: one thing that caught my attention lately is those little messages nagging you whenever you access Google without being logged in. And... those sorta passive aggressive behavior always start like this. Like, "Oh, why don't you log in? It's good for you, log in!", and as the time passes that behavior just gets more and more hostile towards the user until you end up reaching twitter/instagram levels.
Why would they want to lose out on the additional ad revenue of not-logged-in users? As long as they manage to generate ad impressions, I don't think they care all that much.
Yes, assume every video you watch and like is going to get deleted in a week or month or year, or whatever. We don't know the timeline but it's really not a question of "if", just when.
> I don't like the direction the internet is going :\
Haven't read "The Internet Con" yet but apparently Cory Doctorow has some ideas what can be done about this direction.
> We can – we must – dismantle the tech platforms. We must to seize the means of computation by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users to leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission. Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and enduring annihilation of the platforms. The Internet Con is the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet. [1]
Maybe this is a good moment to reconsider the acceptance of X links on HN. If users without accounts have no way to read the content, why redirect people there en-masse?
Nitter currently relies on the mass generation of guest accounts, a weird anonymous form of account that was only supported by old versions of the Twitter app. Creation of them was totally disabled today, so every nitter instance will be dead in under 30 days (when they expire). Scrapers apparently also relied on this, as every public nitter instance was being hammered by scrapers earlier. Instances will probably shut down quite soon unless someone finds another way to create tens of thousands of accounts in an automated fashion for free.
Websites like Quora, Instagram, TikTok, and now X, work against the idea of an open Web. Content is increasingly concentrated into separated silos. But I understand why it's happening: People who don't have an account can't receive personalized ads.
> FB, Linkedin, Pinterest as well. All of these walled gardens are "built on the shoulder of giants", whose work pioneered the open internet.
Very true. Using the openness when it’s convenient and actively shutting the door behind you, it’s one of the most morally reprehensible things that one can do in a shared ecosystem.
I'm not even mad at them that they want to pay the bills. What I find sad was the method they have used: capture community as big as possible and then sell the community.
So many people and orgs fell for that. Now the 'squares' are closed. There is no public internet, just niches.
Yeah it's sad. I hope Musk reverses course for X. At least in showing threads, not necessarily for individual user feeds. Perhaps when the platform is in a better financial position.
Has there been any guides about self-hosting Nitter and using your own personal account, rather than trying to generate a bunch of guest accounts?
I ask because while I no longer use Twitter, I have been using the RSS feature from Nitter to follow a few accounts that aren't available elsewhere. So if there's any way to keep doing that, I'd appreciate it if anyone has a solution. And I really don't want to login to Twitter anymore.
Keep in mind that Twitter might ban you for doing that. They really don't like anything that could be considered scraping (unless you pay them a lot of money).
They asked about using their personal account. The README does not mention this.
And without a personal account, you won't have any luck with self-hosting this, as guest accounts don't work anymore.
Just accept that it's lost. Like tears in the rain, yada yada. Some people don't want permanent chains of information, they prefer sand mandalas that are broken after completion.
After all, it's just a big fake bullshit. There are “fabulous kids clubs” in school. There are “limited membership” snake oil selling and paper medal awarding companies. There are social network services relying on invites and other stuff to make public believe being there is something valuable. It is clear as day that Twitter is at the stage where it has to inflate usage stats by requiring sign-in, and hold user data hostage because it's one of the remaining ways to make some money. If people decide to have a nice chat in a building that is getting demolished without thinking about consequences, it's their choice, after all.
All historic MySpace data was thrown out at some point. Have people killed themselves over that? No, they simply forgot. And you will forget all that, too.
What do you mean by important? If it's something related to public safety (civil defence for instance) then it's a real issue that you as a citizen should fight. For everything else you could just stop engaging and hope that enough others do for the content creators to get the message.
Unfortunately, waiting for them to ‘get the message’ is a losing battle.
The main issue i find is that non-tech related folks just don’t care enough about this stuff to move to different platform.
Yeah, it's unfortunate as it took years for governments/municipalities/orgs etc. to start posting stuff to Twitter and embracing that modern "information pipeline" (as opposed to, at best, a rarely-updated website). Now it's taking years for them to adopt or figure out a self-hosted/self-owned alternative.
Often people who witness live event report what they witness on twitter. Like the boston massacre or Jan 6th attack had a lot of people reporting important eyewitness post right on social media
And with that twitter is once again dead to me.. Not even by choice. The layout/UI is utter crap and my computer hates it. I refuse to use it. For a short time i was able to read things.. guess it's back to nothing again. lol
What's frustrating about social media closing off public access is that, most of the time, they don't even do it correctly--instead of showing a dialog or a message to sign in to view content, they just straight up show an unclear, ambigous error message. Twitter and Instagram does this AFAIK.
Also a bit OOT but there is also something that I think needed to be said: search engines SHOULD be clear whether a content is accessible without account or not, whether a content is accessible is paywalled or not.
A good example of the enshittification of Twitter:
Instead of improving their UI / loading times / privacy standards, they just cut all alternatives off.
Just like reddit.
The user needs are treated like a child would - If I can't see them they're not there.
My bet is if they won't find a new niche, administer themselves (much unwoke, such legal battles, wow) instead of adapting to the users' needs. Eventually, a better option comes along and Twitter falls into oblivion.
Maybe they get some political money along the way.
A real shame, I've been using Nitter to check lots of art accounts, but even with https://twiiit.com/ I find myself reloading it multiple times to find an instance that's not rate limited.
Would a self-hosted private instance of Nitter be an option to avoid rate limits, or are Twitter accounts being penalized for using any third-party API client?
yes but those extra steps make the difference. those extra steps are the entire point. The difference between using the blessed client and using a preferred client that previously accessed the platform via an API is those steps!
Are there any services that make daily twitter digests out of lists that doesn't cost arm and leg in terms of API access? I've been running a pretty hacky google sheet script to parse nitter list rss on supported instances, but guess that's going to be DOA in the coming days.
It's just like the fediverse, what you see depends on where you hang out around. I can easily find extremely bad corners of the fediverse but again, that's not representative
Dunno who you followed, but my little corner of twitter is not gross at all. A lot of smart people, doing cool things, and linking to interesting stuff.
AFAIK you can't curate stuff in 4chan by following/muting/blocking, so it's more like reddit or HN than twitter.
I don’t follow anyone on Twitter or even look at it. Content from there just feels slimy. Usually if someone posts a link, it’s something popular or viral, and that means the comments section will be filled with all kinds of crap. Right now I prefer Threads.
So a place on the Internet that's still fun? It's sad you're so serious that you're grossed out by that.
You might be from the Tumblr side of the tracks, a place of humorless, distributed Orwellian purity testing and virtue signalling where people sublimate their depression and anxiety disorders by trying to police and cancel each other online while pretending they're making the world a better place. That's way less gross than just having a good time. :D
Sad. Used to browse since it was so nice and easy. Strangely they didn't accept one off donations only monthly. Musk has dismantled left control over Twitter but this is a side effect.
Uninstalled Reddit app it was battery draining plus slow.
On one hand, this is unfortunate since X always directs me to a login page, and Nitter was the only way I could view whatever gets posted nowadays. On the other hand, the cynical side of me is thankful that I have no more desirable means to see the contents of posts on X.
Edit: a similar thing happened with Reddit and Teddit(?). API restrictions effectively killed alternative frontends, so I simply don't look at Reddit posts anymore. I am aware of old.reddit.com, but in the case of Reddit I preferred the alternative frontends not only for no-JS compatibility, but also a (possibly false) sense of privacy
There's a weird world of outrage about twitter ... on twitter by people who keep providing content for twitter. I don't get that.
The further downside being that all the alternatives I've dipped my toes in, the content is pretty much similar to twitter and all the alternatives are offering are various back end type differences, but the same content. So personally I'm not particularly happy with those either.
People are working through their grief, knowing that a utility that is essentially the modern postal service was sold to someone who is essentially the modern Hearst.
I disagree. I find Mastodon to be much more like the Twitter of '08 that we all loved.
It's like watching over the shoulder of a stranger as they go about their day. But you're welcome there! You can say hi and the stranger is happy to have you.
It's real people sharing their weird hobbies. The often-boring minutiae of their daily life. Their feelings and hopes and dreams.
I've made friends. I feel like I know people. I love it.
It's the same enshittification we're always talking about now. Something you once enjoyed strategically turns to shit once it believes people are too locked in and docile to leave.
Yep, it will be easier to cut the X habit off. I'll miss Nitter, but I'll be happier in the long run.
I was a Reddit Apollo user, and it was easier to wean off of Reddit when I had to use their horrible app or their website. Even using old.reddit has been painful.
I lurk Reddit for local news without ever logging in. They recently started restricting anonymous users to a limited amount of comments on long threads. That finally motivated me to switch to Firefox plugins that re-layout old.reddit.com to be usable on mobile. Thanks Reddit for the much improved free web experience.
I've recently learned that Twitter can actually be quite good for building genuine connections online, but it takes a very conscious effort and a lot of diligence
Ironically enough, to me what it bothers me the most on twitter is how bad and slow its front-end is. Sure, I'm not a fan of having to use an account, but if twitter at least had a nitter instance, like literally the same front-end, I would have way less problems with that.
While it is unmaintained now due to the API changes, Libreddit (reddit frontend) is still working for me. Granted, I self-host it, and I'm the only user so I never hit the rate limit, but no issues at all, save for some of the changes reddit has made (namely the new share links)
The repository says at the top in a HUGE FONT that "Libreddit is currently not operational" and the website just shows a oneliner saying Germans are not allowed to read that page. The issue tracker talks of forking and stuff. Doesn't feel too welcoming or functional.
But in actuality it works just fine? Is the message simply wrong when you plug in your own api key and stay in the free tier of reddit's API?
twitter and facebook have mostly been garbo for me, what i would like to know is where are the interesting mathematicians and software engineers posting now? or have they had enough too. i suspect that may be the case.
> API restrictions effectively killed alternative frontends, so I simply don't look at Reddit posts anymore.
They recently did a poll to users, asking which UI you use most. I put old reddit because it is. I cannot understand how in what? 6+ years they developed new reddit and still don't have true feature parity? This tells me they don't have their priorities in line, and they want to IPO to boot.
Personally I think some websites don't really have any need to become publicly traded companies, I rather they become profitable and not controllable by the whims of tech illiterate investors.
Well the “experts” among us here, WaPo, and the NYT predicted Twitter would surely collapse after firing their SREs and admin that were crucial to keeping the servers running. Any day now Twitter will collapse and all of us will be saved. Surely
Here's a challenge: find an article from either wapo or nyt which actually predicted a sure collapse. And I mean a collapse as you said rather than issues with operations. (which they had many of since the takeover) I may have missed one if it exists, but I'd bet they didn't publish anything that certain.
They just had a very high-profile event involving deepfake porn of one of the world's most popular musical artists. They appear to have belatedly responded to this by shutting down all searches of that famous artist's name. This does not suggest an organization that has the capacity to quickly or effectively manage the systems they are running.
The reason why all adspace isn't priced equally is because of tracking either done by the seller of the adspace or the buyer of the adspace. This has been the case for hundreds of years. The buyer wants to make sure that their ad spend is reaching the maximum amount of people who are likely to end up in an conversion.
But it also seems bad for customer acquisition to close off twitter. None of us outside the organization know if the cost is offset, but this is certainly not the typical SV playbook.
Dear customer, your system is too old to run 20 third party browser fingerprinting libraries in parallel with OS window manager and GUI toolkit re-implemented in Javascript. Please use our service on a recent enough device capable of browser fingerprinting.
After reading about the person running HN threatening local government officials maybe none of us should be using any server owned by HN either.
If we use servers owned by Twitter/X does that mean we identify with the political ideologies of whomever owns it servers.
As it happens, there is no need to touch any server owned by KF when using nitter.poast.org. So you should be safe.
Maybe we should revoke Section 230 and require that server owners take legal responsibility for the behaviours of the people who use them. That would spell the end of Twitter/X. Then we would not have to use Nitter instances. Problem solved!
Wow, I did not know that. It is just an instance that seems to work better than all the others I tried.
There was a submission about KF a while ago and it summoned an army of impromptu commenters that literally took over the thread, suppressing any negative commentary. Interesting PR strategy.
TBH, I do not use Twitter much at all. It's only when I'm checking something someone submitted to HN. Would be nice if people stopped submitting "tweets". There is rarely anything worth reading in them. Often it's just someone sharing a URL. Why not submit the URL instead.
This is just an instance shutting down, not all of the Nitter instances. Sort of a deceptive title.
The important part is the linked GitHub comment from the primary maintainer (and owner) of the Nitter project. To save readers a click
Source: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983#issuecomment-191...
The way I interpret this comment is that all public Nitter instances are at risk of becoming inoperable (at their current scale).
> (and owner) of Nitter.
I would say that Nitter as a whole is not owned by anyone, that person is the owner of one of the Nitter instances, in addition to being the primary maintainer of the project as you correctly stated.
I agree with the second part of your comment about all instances being in danger. It is unfortunately a common problem faced by many privacy-respecting frontends (Nitter, Libreddit, Proxigram, Piped etc)
6 replies →
I counted 10 instances recently going down on the status page. There is at least a correlation, probably a cause.
This is one of the long time running instances shutting down, linking to the primary nitter author saying it's the end for all instances eventually. And providing insights from the status page.
If they don't get new guest accounts, they're all going to shut down withing 30 days. It's just left over accounts and caches giving you the impression everything is fine.
Don't forget the rolling DoS herds of scrapers having no more ways to do stuff on their own, which are now trying to use the remaining instances - killing even more.
I shouldn't have to paste this here, but: "If nothing changes, all remaining instances will go down eventually: Instances rely on guest accounts, which are valid for a certain time and of which you need a ton to run a public instance. The API for this got taken down and it doesn't look like a fluke this time."
It's unfortunate that this mistaken comment is top voted.
"If nothing changes, all remaining instances will go down eventually: Instances rely on guest accounts, which are valid for a certain time and of which you need a ton to run a public instance. The API for this got taken down and it doesn't look like a fluke this time."
Except half of the instances are rate limited, so unless you know the username or tweet you are looking for, good luck searching for anything.
Oh, does it mostly affect searching?
99% of the time I touch twitter, it's to go to a specific tweet or timeline.
2 replies →
Good to hear. I only follow specific users via nitter (via Feedbro extension)
The submitted title was "Nitter Is Dead". We changed it to the article title overnight, but I've since changed it to a representative sentence from the text.
nitter.cz and nitter.net are having issues and being rate limited.
If all Nitter instances get shut down, that's another reason for people to stop putting information into the Twitter/X walled-garden.
Nitter has had the effect of a pressure release valve, for the people who object most to Twitter/X.
Without the Nitter compromise, more people will stop linking to Twitter/X threads, indulging people who still post there, etc.
I'm with you that this is disappointing, but folks who use these sorts of tools tend to be a bit naive about the impact of them going away. It's a little silly, to be honest. Best numbers I could come by is X does something like 100B impressions/day and x.com saw 1.2B visits in the month of December. Will some people stop seeing X posts on Nitter? Sure, maybe. Will it matter to X? I doubt it.
It's created a reverse eternal September. The masses stay confined to one place. Other places can flourish with the old school smaller community kind of feel and quality. Let twitter live in its current state if it means other places won't be taken over by influencers and other bullshit.
30 replies →
Exactly. Even the reddit blackouts etc did nothing really - sure a few people left in a huff and all that jazz, but Reddit is still trucking along happily. The only time I've seen the "eff it, we're leaving!" thing actually work was with Digg v4.
10 replies →
> Twitter/X walled-garden
I think the MIME type should be `X-Walled-Garden/Twitter`
Internet media types (previously known as “MIME types”) with “X-” prefixes are now discouraged.
3 replies →
Don't despair. I've never heard of this Nitter, and I'm living quite a successful life.
I think leftists who are losing their minds over Elon Musk's Twitter are a loud minority. If Nitter goes down, nothing at all will change. Twitter will continue to thrive and people will continue to use it and link to it.
I hate that Twitter is a walled garden but I understand why it is like that today as the well has been poisoned. To be honest I gave it try and it looks like today Mastodon/Bluesky are worse and Twitter better due to the migrations.
i agree.
Redirecting proxy for Nitter instances (alternative)
https://twiiit.com/
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances
I am quite sure the people who use Nitter or otherwise detest Mysterious Twitter X are a vocal minority of people.
Comparing traffic, pre sale, of logged in twitter users vs traffic generated by those without accounts would give insight into what percentage of users have to take action to continue to use twitter normally.
I spent a 1-2 minutes googling and could not come up with numbers though.
I know I am part of the percentage of people that used to read twitter without an account, or at least not logged in, and now read twitter a trivial amount.
I do not think that people without account are minority.
3 replies →
I use Twitter, and I detest it. It's mostly spam.
This actually came up in a conversation yesterday, funnily enough: I'm mostly using Twitter because I'm curious as to how much worse it's going to get. So far, I've seen them allow NSFW paid-for advertisements, doxxing of well-known figures, daily crypto mention farming spam (with highly suspicious, easily-detectable patterns, spread across ~10 accounts per day), obvious engagement bait to benefit from ad-revenue sharing, fake interaction spam, and plenty more.
As an excerpt, the @support account on Twitter is completely dead, too -- if I remember correctly, the last reply to an issue was around August / June of last year. So clearly they don't have the staffing needed to support... well, the support, and they seem to have issues admitting that.
That becomes even more clear when you look at the spam on the platform: obvious spam patterns are completely ignored, with reports going to the wayside, and crypto / NFT spam being left up to victimize someone who doesn't know what it really is. It's quite grotesque.
Even though a lot of people may use the platform, quite a substantial amount of people also speak out about how much worse Twitter has got since the acquisition -- while I have nothing against Elon Musk, I find it quite amazing how badly the platform seems to be doing ever since he's been at the helm.
2 replies →
This is disappointing because often times people link to threads on Twitter but if you’re lucky enough to not get a login wall, the full thread wont be visible without logging in. (Which I’m not going to do)
I really wish people would just stop linking me to twitter (or better yet, stop using it altogether).
It's a terrible site though and calls to disallow submissions from there (in comments here) were common going back well before Musk took over, so the Twitter dislike originated independently of anyone's views about him.
Dislike is not priority or let say common denominator. Problem is that X/Twitter cannot be viewed without login. This was not the case before.
2 replies →
It sucks. I don't want to use twitter but it's where people post. Nitter fulfilled my lurker only use case.
Same.
If we're lucky this will discourage HNers from linking to Twitter at all.
Especially those stupid blog-like formatted ones.
1 reply →
Why not make an account if you want to read it?
I refuse to login to twitter for ethical reasons. If someone links me to a tweet I assume it’s because they thought I’d find it interesting. It’s a thoughtful act which deserves a little bit of effort on my part, so I’m willing to change the domain to see it. I’m not willing to login though. It’s a principle thing.
3 replies →
Not the OP but: because I've never wanted to post there and as far as I'm concerned there's no compelling reason I should need one and I'm so offended by Musk and his attempt to force me to get one that I would rather not read it than let him succeed.
I can happily just not read the tweet. There’s no FOMO if the pool of worthwhile posts is getting smaller, not larger
1. Don’t want to give Twitter their personal phone number
2. Twitter SMS system can’t deliver to personal number on my network so can’t create account.
3. Banned from Twitter already.
4. Hate Elon.
5. Ethics (various reason)
6. Privacy
7. A lot of work to read a hot take
8. Social media is addictive. The site gives you crack when you log in.
9. Chinese Firewall (and in some occupied lands it may be a crime to use Twitter)
10. Too many logins for shit already.
11. NSFW bot accounts trying to chat you up
4 replies →
Why make me create an account if I want to read e.g. announcements of government organizations? Many of these publish only to Twitter and don't have an RSS feed.
Twitter can't both be the de-facto successor of RSS and a walled garden enforcing signups for read-only users.
Having to make an account to read a website sounds idiotic.
Why should twitter be special in that regard?
It's not so you're essentially promoting the idea that we should have to make an account to read any website, which is idiotic.
4 replies →
I just want to run a headless browser that logs into my socials periodically and scrapes the stuff I want from the account I follow and puts it into a less addictive format that provides an upper limit on my possible exposure and engagement. I’m happy to run it locally from my device. Ideally it redirects links to socials I come across too. Where is such a thing?
This was the dream of RSS, but it went against the long-term business interests of the corporations hosting content, so it has since largely faded away
I literally reached this discussion thread via the RSS feed for HN.
It’s out there. Social networking sites with a vested interest in monopolizing your attention don’t use it. So I don’t use them.
2 replies →
A lot of news sites still support RSS. Could be that not very many regular people understand RSS or want to use it, aside from podcasts.
I started using RSS again recently for this reason. I use it for for facebook, twitter, hackernews, etc. Feedbro extension supports public facebook profiles. Nitter clones like https://farside.link/nitter/elonmusk/rss still work.
2 replies →
[flagged]
2 replies →
You may want social media to be pipes, not platforms.
Convince the government to forbid the business model in which most of users are not paying customers but a product offered to advertisers. Then, social platforms will not care if you use whatever client you desire.
Big Social shareholders don’t want it, though. Being a double-sided market is addictive, and no one can compete with them if they capture the market by not charging money.
Another future was possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid...
It's too bad the silofication of the 2010s killed it off.
> Convince the government to forbid the business model in which most of users are not paying customers but a product offered to advertisers
I like broadcast TV and radio (especially radio while driving) and think that most Americans would object to their removal.
Just look at the uproar over a few NFL games being unavailable on broadcast TV for a hint as to how well such a ban might go.
2 replies →
New issue is AI. Even sites with no ads will want limits on scraping / apis / composability.
This can be done with little AWS Lambda scripts that periodically scrape (or API) whatever sites you want and e-mail you results. All the credentials to login to whatever sites can be personal/dedicated to your instance (so no real API limits), and the usage will almost certainly fall into the AWS free tier since it's only for you.
The ideal install workflow would be to have a repo of AWS CloudFormation templates to automate the installation of the lambdas for different sites in your account. Anyone can open an AWS account, and using CloudFormation is a few fields, and a button click.
Also, if the scripts are developed properly, they are runnable locally. A sane developer will run them locally during development, and then test deployed before releasing.
With an AWS IP and a bot usage pattern they’ll surely ban your account pretty quickly or put you in front of a CAPTCHA. I wish it was as easy as a small script. Without anti-bot techniques, sites would be overflown by scraping bots. Try to scrape a Cloudflare protected site, for example. They’re really good in figuring out if you’re human or a bot. IIRC they even fingerprint your TLS handshake or cypher suite, which ultimately made me give up with headless Chrome and Puppeteer even after proxying through my residential IP, spoofing user-agent and screen size and rate limiting. Unfortunately, there’s no way to distinguish good bots for personal usage from bad bots.
In theory, anything is possible with months of developer work. The trouble is, there are billions of people addicted to social media. There aren't many widespread solutions to scrape it. Whenever a scraper becomes even remotely popular, Facebook takes action against it, as accessing posts outside the walled garden is a violation of their terms of service. Currently, I am using a combination of Feedbro and Nitter to scrape all the accounts I want to follow. They currently work with Facebook and have not been blocked.
1 reply →
im reminded of an ipad app 10 years ago that did roughly this, creating a magazine like interaction with your twitter, google reader, etc.
Oh yeah, Paper.li, right? https://web.archive.org/web/20120204055823/http://paper.li/
Unfortunately they've shut down at some point, it seems (thus my linking to archive.org instead of their actual domain).
Flipboard
https://www.macrumors.com/2010/07/21/flipboard-a-social-maga...
1 reply →
This is what I made for myself at https://www.bulletyn.co - regular email digests of content from Reddit, HN, RSS feeds, etc. It's helped me significantly cut down the amount of time I spend on Reddit particularly.
I had been planning to add Twitter before the API changes...alas.
You can generate an RSS feed of any twitter user using RSS Bridge:
https://rss-bridge.org/bridge01/
I tried that earlier.
"Message: Missing configuration option: twitterv2apitoken"
I want the vision that Rabbit is selling, a headless browser that periodically scrolls through my socials and have AI assemble all entries into a readable digest. I would settle for manually scrolling through my timetime to a screen recorder that OCRs all the text and removes the fluff.
That sounds like a case of be the change you wish to see. Such a project sounds rather substantial, not only initially but also in upkeep. Might want to be more specific, such as "does this exist for my favorite social network called <insert network here>?"
Get different socials, is about your only option at this ppoint.
I wonder if Youtube will ever do the same with Invidious by requiring an account for people to view videos.
Sure, it might seen unthinkable for this to happen in 2024, but give it more 5 or 10 years and I could see this being something acceptable to the eyes of the average user. I don't like the direction the internet is going :\
Oh yeah, I see it as inevitable. I'm blown away that YouTube is still accessible without an account. It's only a matter of time, though, I'd wager. I never thought Twitter would require an account to view its content.
It's not the same site, but it's the same company: one thing that caught my attention lately is those little messages nagging you whenever you access Google without being logged in. And... those sorta passive aggressive behavior always start like this. Like, "Oh, why don't you log in? It's good for you, log in!", and as the time passes that behavior just gets more and more hostile towards the user until you end up reaching twitter/instagram levels.
5 replies →
Why would they want to lose out on the additional ad revenue of not-logged-in users? As long as they manage to generate ad impressions, I don't think they care all that much.
The point being: archive with yt-dlp while we still can.
Yes, assume every video you watch and like is going to get deleted in a week or month or year, or whatever. We don't know the timeline but it's really not a question of "if", just when.
4 replies →
> I don't like the direction the internet is going :\
Haven't read "The Internet Con" yet but apparently Cory Doctorow has some ideas what can be done about this direction.
> We can – we must – dismantle the tech platforms. We must to seize the means of computation by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users to leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission. Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and enduring annihilation of the platforms. The Internet Con is the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet. [1]
[1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/01/bookmaker/
I don't think so, with other sites giving out free video content. If they all did...
Maybe this is a good moment to reconsider the acceptance of X links on HN. If users without accounts have no way to read the content, why redirect people there en-masse?
Yes. Please disallow X/Twitter links and stop forwarding traffic to that cursed user-hostile site.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39154536
For example:
https://farside.link/_/twitter.com/nasa
The above service redirects to Nitter which still appears to be working.
Nitter currently relies on the mass generation of guest accounts, a weird anonymous form of account that was only supported by old versions of the Twitter app. Creation of them was totally disabled today, so every nitter instance will be dead in under 30 days (when they expire). Scrapers apparently also relied on this, as every public nitter instance was being hammered by scrapers earlier. Instances will probably shut down quite soon unless someone finds another way to create tens of thousands of accounts in an automated fashion for free.
2 replies →
Websites like Quora, Instagram, TikTok, and now X, work against the idea of an open Web. Content is increasingly concentrated into separated silos. But I understand why it's happening: People who don't have an account can't receive personalized ads.
FB, Linkedin, Pinterest as well. All of these walled gardens are "built on the shoulder of giants", whose work pioneered the open internet.
Further, what isn't silos seems to be content chum whose main purpose is collecting the reader's email address.
Oddly the modern web seems to be driving me offline and back to books.
> FB, Linkedin, Pinterest as well. All of these walled gardens are "built on the shoulder of giants", whose work pioneered the open internet.
Very true. Using the openness when it’s convenient and actively shutting the door behind you, it’s one of the most morally reprehensible things that one can do in a shared ecosystem.
I don’t use TikTok much, but when I see a (web) link to content there it’s always publicly available.
For now.
> But I understand why it's happening
I'm not even mad at them that they want to pay the bills. What I find sad was the method they have used: capture community as big as possible and then sell the community. So many people and orgs fell for that. Now the 'squares' are closed. There is no public internet, just niches.
Yeah it's sad. I hope Musk reverses course for X. At least in showing threads, not necessarily for individual user feeds. Perhaps when the platform is in a better financial position.
The creator of the project left this comment an hour ago:
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1155#issuecomment-19...
(HN removed the deep link to the specific comment from the title)
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1155#issuecomment-19...
"Nitter is dead." on issue "nitter.net certificate expired on 15:08:30 GMT"
Has there been any guides about self-hosting Nitter and using your own personal account, rather than trying to generate a bunch of guest accounts?
I ask because while I no longer use Twitter, I have been using the RSS feature from Nitter to follow a few accounts that aren't available elsewhere. So if there's any way to keep doing that, I'd appreciate it if anyone has a solution. And I really don't want to login to Twitter anymore.
Keep in mind that Twitter might ban you for doing that. They really don't like anything that could be considered scraping (unless you pay them a lot of money).
Yeap, the Installion section of the Github Readme.md of Nitter. Docker based.
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter#Installation
They asked about using their personal account. The README does not mention this. And without a personal account, you won't have any luck with self-hosting this, as guest accounts don't work anymore.
Sadly, important content is sometimes still posted (only) in the form of Twitter threads.
Short of signing up for an account, is there currently a reasonable way of reading those?
Just accept that it's lost. Like tears in the rain, yada yada. Some people don't want permanent chains of information, they prefer sand mandalas that are broken after completion.
After all, it's just a big fake bullshit. There are “fabulous kids clubs” in school. There are “limited membership” snake oil selling and paper medal awarding companies. There are social network services relying on invites and other stuff to make public believe being there is something valuable. It is clear as day that Twitter is at the stage where it has to inflate usage stats by requiring sign-in, and hold user data hostage because it's one of the remaining ways to make some money. If people decide to have a nice chat in a building that is getting demolished without thinking about consequences, it's their choice, after all.
All historic MySpace data was thrown out at some point. Have people killed themselves over that? No, they simply forgot. And you will forget all that, too.
This is not about past content that is lost, this is about future content that is still being posted there.
Including things like info about security incidents that affect me.
At least I think most government authorities have stopped posting life safety information there.
1 reply →
What do you mean by important? If it's something related to public safety (civil defence for instance) then it's a real issue that you as a citizen should fight. For everything else you could just stop engaging and hope that enough others do for the content creators to get the message.
Unfortunately, waiting for them to ‘get the message’ is a losing battle. The main issue i find is that non-tech related folks just don’t care enough about this stuff to move to different platform.
Yeah, it's unfortunate as it took years for governments/municipalities/orgs etc. to start posting stuff to Twitter and embracing that modern "information pipeline" (as opposed to, at best, a rarely-updated website). Now it's taking years for them to adopt or figure out a self-hosted/self-owned alternative.
Often people who witness live event report what they witness on twitter. Like the boston massacre or Jan 6th attack had a lot of people reporting important eyewitness post right on social media
A classic example would be a description of the findings about some security bug or breach.
1 reply →
wget or curl.
And with that twitter is once again dead to me.. Not even by choice. The layout/UI is utter crap and my computer hates it. I refuse to use it. For a short time i was able to read things.. guess it's back to nothing again. lol
To be fair I was kinda surprised their create thousands of accounts strategy worked at all
What's frustrating about social media closing off public access is that, most of the time, they don't even do it correctly--instead of showing a dialog or a message to sign in to view content, they just straight up show an unclear, ambigous error message. Twitter and Instagram does this AFAIK.
Also a bit OOT but there is also something that I think needed to be said: search engines SHOULD be clear whether a content is accessible without account or not, whether a content is accessible is paywalled or not.
>search engines SHOULD be clear whether a content is accessible without account or not, whether a content is accessible is paywalled or not.
And HN.
Well, very good time we had. It was great experience with nitter,wish it stayed for years to come. Hope to see something like that for mastodon
A good example of the enshittification of Twitter:
Instead of improving their UI / loading times / privacy standards, they just cut all alternatives off.
Just like reddit.
The user needs are treated like a child would - If I can't see them they're not there.
My bet is if they won't find a new niche, administer themselves (much unwoke, such legal battles, wow) instead of adapting to the users' needs. Eventually, a better option comes along and Twitter falls into oblivion.
Maybe they get some political money along the way.
A real shame, I've been using Nitter to check lots of art accounts, but even with https://twiiit.com/ I find myself reloading it multiple times to find an instance that's not rate limited.
Would a self-hosted private instance of Nitter be an option to avoid rate limits, or are Twitter accounts being penalized for using any third-party API client?
You could, but you'd have to make your own personal twitter account. At that point you're using Twitter with extra steps.
For those who need timely access to information that is only available on Twitter, the account is unavoidable.
The benefit of extra steps is a client under user control, e.g. filtering, RSS, better threading and more.
2 replies →
yes but those extra steps make the difference. those extra steps are the entire point. The difference between using the blessed client and using a preferred client that previously accessed the platform via an API is those steps!
RSS!
Are there any services that make daily twitter digests out of lists that doesn't cost arm and leg in terms of API access? I've been running a pretty hacky google sheet script to parse nitter list rss on supported instances, but guess that's going to be DOA in the coming days.
X/Twitter is a gross network. It’s like posting links to 4chan.
It's just like the fediverse, what you see depends on where you hang out around. I can easily find extremely bad corners of the fediverse but again, that's not representative
I wish a map existed. I'd like to see the bad corners.
2 replies →
Leave 4chan alone. 4chan compared to Twitter is Heaven
Dunno who you followed, but my little corner of twitter is not gross at all. A lot of smart people, doing cool things, and linking to interesting stuff.
AFAIK you can't curate stuff in 4chan by following/muting/blocking, so it's more like reddit or HN than twitter.
I don’t follow anyone on Twitter or even look at it. Content from there just feels slimy. Usually if someone posts a link, it’s something popular or viral, and that means the comments section will be filled with all kinds of crap. Right now I prefer Threads.
So a place on the Internet that's still fun? It's sad you're so serious that you're grossed out by that.
You might be from the Tumblr side of the tracks, a place of humorless, distributed Orwellian purity testing and virtue signalling where people sublimate their depression and anxiety disorders by trying to police and cancel each other online while pretending they're making the world a better place. That's way less gross than just having a good time. :D
Is there anything preventing a public Nitter instance operator from just creating a few hundred normal user accounts? Phone verification?
Terrible title, can someone please fix that?!
Thanks for fixing!
While browsing website on Android devices, avast is showing a popup of malicious website detected.
Unsurprising that Twitter continues these decisions, just means I interact with it even less
Great, now I will miss patio11, and....
Oh that's the list of all the value I find on Twitter anymore.
Thank for your service comrade.
What a pity. I used their API to bridge my Twitter posts to my Slack instance.
Looks like this is the end
Jim Morrison style or Seth Rogen style?
Sad. Used to browse since it was so nice and easy. Strangely they didn't accept one off donations only monthly. Musk has dismantled left control over Twitter but this is a side effect.
Uninstalled Reddit app it was battery draining plus slow.
HN title got changed for a third time. Hilarious.
Avast is complaining that this website is detected as malicious??
Any alternative?
Not exactly the same thing, but https://threadreaderapp.com/ will allow you to read threads (but not replies) if you come upon a link you can't see.
Edit: I guess that only works if someone has already requested the thread to be unrolled...
The Epoch Clock
On one hand, this is unfortunate since X always directs me to a login page, and Nitter was the only way I could view whatever gets posted nowadays. On the other hand, the cynical side of me is thankful that I have no more desirable means to see the contents of posts on X.
Edit: a similar thing happened with Reddit and Teddit(?). API restrictions effectively killed alternative frontends, so I simply don't look at Reddit posts anymore. I am aware of old.reddit.com, but in the case of Reddit I preferred the alternative frontends not only for no-JS compatibility, but also a (possibly false) sense of privacy
I'm inclined to have the same wishes.
There's a weird world of outrage about twitter ... on twitter by people who keep providing content for twitter. I don't get that.
The further downside being that all the alternatives I've dipped my toes in, the content is pretty much similar to twitter and all the alternatives are offering are various back end type differences, but the same content. So personally I'm not particularly happy with those either.
People are working through their grief, knowing that a utility that is essentially the modern postal service was sold to someone who is essentially the modern Hearst.
22 replies →
> the content is pretty much similar to twitter
I disagree. I find Mastodon to be much more like the Twitter of '08 that we all loved.
It's like watching over the shoulder of a stranger as they go about their day. But you're welcome there! You can say hi and the stranger is happy to have you.
It's real people sharing their weird hobbies. The often-boring minutiae of their daily life. Their feelings and hopes and dreams.
I've made friends. I feel like I know people. I love it.
> I don't get that.
It's the same enshittification we're always talking about now. Something you once enjoyed strategically turns to shit once it believes people are too locked in and docile to leave.
1 reply →
Yep, it will be easier to cut the X habit off. I'll miss Nitter, but I'll be happier in the long run.
I was a Reddit Apollo user, and it was easier to wean off of Reddit when I had to use their horrible app or their website. Even using old.reddit has been painful.
I lurk Reddit for local news without ever logging in. They recently started restricting anonymous users to a limited amount of comments on long threads. That finally motivated me to switch to Firefox plugins that re-layout old.reddit.com to be usable on mobile. Thanks Reddit for the much improved free web experience.
Interesting because the content I get on X is far, far more valuable than HN + Reddit + Facebook combined.
It’s the only place you can follow subject matter experts and get their real time thoughts.
I think people on HN just don’t know how to use Twitter?
If you want to use it effectively, you have to utilize lists. Curate your own lists or find someone you respect and follow their lists.
If someone is posting things you don’t enjoy then remove them.
Frankly, if X is causing you to be angry/depressed then a big part of that is on you.
43 replies →
I've recently learned that Twitter can actually be quite good for building genuine connections online, but it takes a very conscious effort and a lot of diligence
I'm sure that could be said for Erowid or any number of sites with a discussion forum function.
5 replies →
Ironically enough, to me what it bothers me the most on twitter is how bad and slow its front-end is. Sure, I'm not a fan of having to use an account, but if twitter at least had a nitter instance, like literally the same front-end, I would have way less problems with that.
While it is unmaintained now due to the API changes, Libreddit (reddit frontend) is still working for me. Granted, I self-host it, and I'm the only user so I never hit the rate limit, but no issues at all, save for some of the changes reddit has made (namely the new share links)
The repository says at the top in a HUGE FONT that "Libreddit is currently not operational" and the website just shows a oneliner saying Germans are not allowed to read that page. The issue tracker talks of forking and stuff. Doesn't feel too welcoming or functional.
But in actuality it works just fine? Is the message simply wrong when you plug in your own api key and stay in the free tier of reddit's API?
7 replies →
It's been forked by a maintainer as redlib: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
1 reply →
Interesting, I thought they completely disabled the APIs
twitter and facebook have mostly been garbo for me, what i would like to know is where are the interesting mathematicians and software engineers posting now? or have they had enough too. i suspect that may be the case.
Reddit the non-profit frontends are still working (redreader for android is good).
Twitter, instagram etc. there's nothing even this reasonable.
Begs the question what will the future open web forum/discussion place be? Lemmy doesn't seem to have really hit the simplicity to attract users
I have not been to Reddit after they effectively shut down RiF.
I still use Reddit is Fun (RiF) with no problems. There's a ReVanced version, you provide with your API key and it works like it always had.
> API restrictions effectively killed alternative frontends, so I simply don't look at Reddit posts anymore.
They recently did a poll to users, asking which UI you use most. I put old reddit because it is. I cannot understand how in what? 6+ years they developed new reddit and still don't have true feature parity? This tells me they don't have their priorities in line, and they want to IPO to boot.
Personally I think some websites don't really have any need to become publicly traded companies, I rather they become profitable and not controllable by the whims of tech illiterate investors.
[flagged]
Well the “experts” among us here, WaPo, and the NYT predicted Twitter would surely collapse after firing their SREs and admin that were crucial to keeping the servers running. Any day now Twitter will collapse and all of us will be saved. Surely
Here's a challenge: find an article from either wapo or nyt which actually predicted a sure collapse. And I mean a collapse as you said rather than issues with operations. (which they had many of since the takeover) I may have missed one if it exists, but I'd bet they didn't publish anything that certain.
13 replies →
They just had a very high-profile event involving deepfake porn of one of the world's most popular musical artists. They appear to have belatedly responded to this by shutting down all searches of that famous artist's name. This does not suggest an organization that has the capacity to quickly or effectively manage the systems they are running.
Nitter is the only thing that made Twitter/X accessible without a goddamn account. Well, good bye, X.
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
> Ad revenue depends on tracking
No it doesn't. Surveillance revenue depends on tracking, but people have profitably sold ad space for hundreds of years without any tracking.
The reason why all adspace isn't priced equally is because of tracking either done by the seller of the adspace or the buyer of the adspace. This has been the case for hundreds of years. The buyer wants to make sure that their ad spend is reaching the maximum amount of people who are likely to end up in an conversion.
1 reply →
Half the utility of the "global town square" was that anyone can read it. I guess a town square requires an account.
Ads WITH tracking sell for a lot more.
1 reply →
[dead]
(If ad revenue is so important, maybe don't tell your advertisers to "GFY" live on stage.)
That was a reaction to the advertisers pulling out before that.
2 replies →
But it also seems bad for customer acquisition to close off twitter. None of us outside the organization know if the cost is offset, but this is certainly not the typical SV playbook.
Thanks, AI.
Just make a Twitter account and install an ad blocked
And you have to use the incredibly slow official front end. Seriously how much JS do you need to show 280 characters and some links.
Dear customer, your system is too old to run 20 third party browser fingerprinting libraries in parallel with OS window manager and GUI toolkit re-implemented in Javascript. Please use our service on a recent enough device capable of browser fingerprinting.
you won't be able to browse anonymously anymore
No
Good. Join X if you want to see X posts.
Alright. And if you like your walled garden, please stay there and don’t link to it from other sites.
No
This one still works
nitter.poast.org
I noticed not long ago they started requiring a user-agent string.
Top comment affirms that this is not an announcement as to all instances.
HN title was changed so as not to mislead.
This one still works. That's all I know.
per the linked page, its only a matter of time until all go down
I'm not touching a server owned by kiwifarms.
After reading about the person running HN threatening local government officials maybe none of us should be using any server owned by HN either.
If we use servers owned by Twitter/X does that mean we identify with the political ideologies of whomever owns it servers.
As it happens, there is no need to touch any server owned by KF when using nitter.poast.org. So you should be safe.
Maybe we should revoke Section 230 and require that server owners take legal responsibility for the behaviours of the people who use them. That would spell the end of Twitter/X. Then we would not have to use Nitter instances. Problem solved!
Wow, I did not know that. It is just an instance that seems to work better than all the others I tried.
There was a submission about KF a while ago and it summoned an army of impromptu commenters that literally took over the thread, suppressing any negative commentary. Interesting PR strategy.
TBH, I do not use Twitter much at all. It's only when I'm checking something someone submitted to HN. Would be nice if people stopped submitting "tweets". There is rarely anything worth reading in them. Often it's just someone sharing a URL. Why not submit the URL instead.
Care to elaborate for those not familiar with kiwifarms?
2 replies →