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.
The way I interpret this comment is that all public Nitter instances are at risk of becoming inoperable (at their current scale).
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)
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.
"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."
99% of the time I touch twitter, it's to go to a specific tweet or timeline.
Edit: I just checked an instance and it seems to have tweets from the past minute or two, but if the backend accounts that drive them are getting banned, it's probably gonna tank in the upcoming weeks.
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.
It doesn't help that they have started placing content from more obscure subreddits onto people's front pages seemingly randomly, so people wander into places and have no idea what the culture is they are contributing to and add content which is wildly out of place.
To get subject matter discussion which is reasonable I have been wandering back to bespoke forums, which isn't necessarily bad, but they still have a lot of issues. A lot of other content has moved to discord, but I won't get into how I feel about that.
Some Reddit metrics might've hardly noticed the blips, but if they had metrics for early-Reddit qualities, such as for smart (or clever) comments, helpful information, humor, or goodwill... I suspect those would be bad. Where they're not bad might be non-frontpage subs that are still cruising along with their earlier communities. But those communities started in earlier Reddit, and I suspect that today would not have started there.
I think the MIME type should be `X-Walled-Garden/Twitter`
Redirecting proxy for Nitter instances (alternative)
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.
But I strictly follow python developers, bsd people and retro computing enthusiasts. None post any politics.
I think any social media platform can be good/bad just like people in general, it all depends who you interact with.
I really wish people would just stop linking me to twitter (or better yet, stop using it altogether).
At this point, submitting screenshots of a thread you like would unfortunately be more accessible. Shocking that we have to say that about static text content, but here we are in 2024...
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
Twitter can't both be the de-facto successor of RSS and a walled garden enforcing signups for read-only users.
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.
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.
Free culture and open internet activists lost this battle
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.
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.
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.
If you suggest to apply the same model to social media (where they don’t get to know about a single thing about the user, strictly one way ads) then I’d be totally for it.
However, I don’t think they’ll find this model profitable enough (advertisers like to target), and because charging users is easier with social media compared to radio broadcasting the barrier to start doing that is lower.
That is, disallowing profiting from PII and only allowing one-way ads in social media, while difficult to enforce will also mean they start charging users anyway. So why not skip that model altogether.
Local broadcast models don’t work on global scale anyway.
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.
But there is no aggregation - each user runs their own instances. For any site the offers an API, the API would need to have breaking changes to disable this, or block access from AWS.
It's easy to make work for a developer like crowd (very little time to write). It would work for most developers just fine, and could, with more considerable development time, be good for anyone.
Distributed guerilla social media deconstruction.
Unfortunately they've shut down at some point, it seems (thus my linking to archive.org instead of their actual domain).
I had been planning to add Twitter before the API changes...alas.
"Message: Missing configuration option: twitterv2apitoken"
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 :\
There is a single TOS and privacy agreement for all Google services. If you “just” log in to Chrome to synchronize history because “it's convenient”, you also allow everything else, including AdSense and other all-across-the-web tracking. By formally becoming a client, you lose most of legal protections against indiscriminate data collection.
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]
I use a redirection extension to prepend "https://farside.link/_/" to certain domains. https://twitter.com/nasa
…becomes:
The underscore adds an interstitial redirection page, so you can press Back to try another instance.
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.
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.
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1155#issuecomment-19...
(HN removed the deep link to the specific comment from the title)
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.
Short of signing up for an account, is there currently a reasonable way of reading those?
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.
Including things like info about security incidents that affect me.
At least I think most government authorities have stopped posting life safety information there.
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.
And HN.
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.
The benefit of extra steps is a client under user control, e.g. filtering, RSS, better threading and more.
AFAIK you can't curate stuff in 4chan by following/muting/blocking, so it's more like reddit or HN than twitter.
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
Oh that's the list of all the value I find on Twitter anymore.
Uninstalled Reddit app it was battery draining plus slow.
Edit: I guess that only works if someone has already requested the thread to be unrolled...
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.
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.
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.
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.
What I now see are people with demented political opinions about women and American politics. It sucks.
What do you learn from 280 characters at a time?
I mostly follow L7+ SWEs, creators of popular tech like dynamoDB, and professors in AI/systems/DB/PL. The ones who tried to move to sites like mastodon eventually came back, or are now using twitter much more than these alternatives. There's been more top SWEs and professors especially in AI and systems sharing content there.
Noticed as well that twitter is also more optimistic about tech than HN, especially with subcultures like e/acc, learning/building in public, etc.
That has been my experience as well. Easily. I learned a ton about LLMs, open source projects, growth hacks, marketing tips, a lot of great from the trenches lessons. Best site on the web.
I have no use case for anyone else’s “real time thoughts”. Neither does almost anyone else.
Twitter’s one trick is FOMO for news junkies.
Also, it's easy to see bad in everything, and then all we see is bad. But there're good things to find as well, it's just a matter of what we focus on..
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?
Correct.
Also, I forked it with some OAuth spoofing and have been maintaining it there: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
Like I mentioned, I've been running my own private instance and I've never hit the rate limit so it's been working fine for me.
And I don't know about any API key. AFAIK, Libreddit uses the publicly available JSON, no need for a key (hence why it's read-only). Since it's still working for me, those JSON endpoints must still be available, just highly rate limited now
Curious which website do you mean? The official instance is not online anymore. And I'm not aware of an official libreddit website.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.