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"If nothing changes, all remaining Nitter instances will go down eventually"
- chandamama 3y agoWhile browsing website on Android devices, avast is showing a popup of malicious website detected.
- intelligencesec 3y agoThe creator of the project left this comment an hour ago: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1155#issuecomment-1913361757 https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1155#issuecomment-19... (HN removed the deep link to the specific comment from the title)
- proctrap 3y agoLooks like this is the end
- dylan604 3y agoJim Morrison style or Seth Rogen style?
- smoldesu 3y agoMaybe 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?
- defrost 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39154536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39154536 I use a redirection extension to prepend "https://farside.link/_/" to certain domains. For example: https://twitter.com/nasa …becomes: https://farside.link/_/twitter.com/nasa https://farside.link/_/twitter.com/nasa The underscore adds an interstitial redirection page, so you can press Back to try another instance. The above service redirects to Nitter which still appears to be working.
- MallocVoidstar 3y agoNitter 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.
- londons_explore 3y agoI'm gonna guess that these guest accounts might be the reason 'usage is at an all time high' according to musk, but seems to be falling according to everyone else.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoAlternative hypothesis: he is lying about usage.
- toastercat 3y agoYes. Please disallow X/Twitter links and stop forwarding traffic to that cursed user-hostile site.
- koito17 3y agoOn 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
- loceng 3y ago[flagged]
- sphars 3y agoWhile 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)
- lucb1e 3y agoThe 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?
- sphars 3y agoI think that message was to let users know it's basically on it's last legs and could 100% stop at anytime. When the API changes started, most all of the instances ran into rate limits due to the number of requests. But it works just fine until that rate is hit. 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
- pard68 3y agoThis is just an instance shutting down, not all of the Nitter instances. Sort of a deceptive title.
- koito17 3y agoThe 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. Source: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983#issuecomment-1913362376 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).
- mastazi 3y ago> (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)
- koito17 3y agoI really meant to say "owner of the Nitter project", but you are nonetheless correct about ownership of Nitter instances. I have edited my post.
- drewdevault 3y agoIt's also factually incorrect to suppose that this person owns the Nitter project, too. There's no CLA so the copyright is held in common by all of the contributors. Free software projects don't have owners, they have maintainers, and the maintainers are a social construction rather than a matter of property law.
- Me1000 3y agoThis 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).
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoIt sucks. I don't want to use twitter but it's where people post. Nitter fulfilled my lurker only use case.
- HereIGoAgain 3y agoSame.
- mvdtnz 3y agoIf we're lucky this will discourage HNers from linking to Twitter at all.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoIt'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.
- timeon 3y ago
- Kenji 3y agoNitter is the only thing that made Twitter/X accessible without a goddamn account. Well, good bye, X.
- neilv 3y agoIf 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.
- Dalewyn 3y agoI am quite sure the people who use Nitter or otherwise detest Mysterious Twitter X are a vocal minority of people.
- timeon 3y agoI do not think that people without account are minority.
- echelon 3y agoThey just aren't the ones posting on the platform.
- timeon 3y agoI have misunderstood you/OP. In this case you are right. I was commenting from perspective of someone that do not have account but came across the twitter links on sites like HN.
- Tanoc 3y agoI'm struggling heavily to find the traffic statistic that I read a year or so ago, but it said that point seven to point nine percent of all Twitter traffic came from Nitter. Considering that at the time there were three different third party front ends that is no small amount, I think somewhere around thirty million visits daily.
- davorak 3y agoComparing 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.
- maxglute 3y agoAre 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.
- Macha 3y agoGreat, now I will miss patio11, and.... Oh that's the list of all the value I find on Twitter anymore.
- hackerlight 3y agoAny alternative?
- jayknight 3y agoNot exactly the same thing, but https://threadreaderapp.com/ 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...
- erulabs 3y ago[flagged]
- simonw 3y ago(If ad revenue is so important, maybe don't tell your advertisers to "GFY" live on stage.)
- cubefox 3y agoThat was a reaction to the advertisers pulling out before that.
- burkaman 3y ago> 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.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoHalf the utility of the "global town square" was that anyone can read it. I guess a town square requires an account.
- charcircuit 3y agoThe 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.
- walterbell 3y agoWould 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?
- DistractionRect 3y agoYou could, but you'd have to make your own personal twitter account. At that point you're using Twitter with extra steps.
- fragmede 3y agoyes 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!
- dinosaurdynasty 3y agoRSS!
- walterbell 3y agoFor 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.
- TylerE 3y agoIf timely is the key criterion isn’t sticking a caching layer in the middle the opposite of helping?
- walterbell 3y agoTransparent, deterministic, user-controlled caching and filtering > black-box Twitter display algos that change unpredictably.
- sphars 3y agoHas 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.
- _ache_ 3y agoYeap, the Installion section of the Github Readme.md of Nitter. Docker based. https://github.com/zedeus/nitter#Installation https://github.com/zedeus/nitter#Installation
- SushiHippie 3y agoThey 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.
- MallocVoidstar 3y agoKeep 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).
- cubefox 3y agoWebsites 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.
- bogomipz 3y agoFB, 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.
- klabb3 3y ago> 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.
- yreg 3y agoI don’t use TikTok much, but when I see a (web) link to content there it’s always publicly available.
- timeon 3y agoFor now.
- timeon 3y ago> 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.
- npunt 3y agoI 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?
- lucb1e 3y agoThat 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>?"
- throwaway84846 3y agoThis 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
- Havoc 3y agoTo be fair I was kinda surprised their create thousands of accounts strategy worked at all
- matt3210 3y agoJust make a Twitter account and install an ad blocked
- ekianjo 3y agoyou won't be able to browse anonymously anymore
- wffurr 3y agoAnd you have to use the incredibly slow official front end. Seriously how much JS do you need to show 280 characters and some links.
- ogurechny 3y agoDear 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.
- Astraco 3y agoNo
- deadbabe 3y agoX/Twitter is a gross network. It’s like posting links to 4chan.
- LAC-Tech 3y agoDunno 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.
- deadbabe 3y agoI 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.
- mardifoufs 3y agoIt'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
- ipaddr 3y agoI wish a map existed. I'd like to see the bad corners.
- CaptainFever 3y agohttps://mapstodon.space/@comeetie/109354079049037380 https://mapstodon.space/@comeetie/109354079049037380
- mardifoufs 3y agoIt's weird to say but the "worst" parts (as in, questionably legal content and not just controversial content) in my experience has been in non English speaking instances. But just think of basically any community and they have a mastodon spin off, especially they have been deplatformed somewhere else.
- tortoise_in 3y agoWell, 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
- genevra 3y agoUnsurprising that Twitter continues these decisions, just means I interact with it even less
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y agoSadly, 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?
- eek2121 3y agowget or curl.
- tjpnz 3y agoWhat 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.
- alligatorplum 3y agoUnfortunately, 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.
- rc_mob 3y agoOften 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
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y agoA classic example would be a description of the findings about some security bug or breach.
- rsynnott 3y agoThat’s largely on Mastodon; security-Twitter was one of the first communities to migrate.
- 3y ago
- hsuduebc2 3y agoThank for your service comrade.
- hexage1814 3y agoI 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 :\
- qaziquza 3y agoThe point being: archive with yt-dlp while we still can.
- amatecha 3y agoYes, 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.
- ipaddr 3y agoIt's surprising how much gets removed often by creators or youtube.
- amatecha 3y agoThat too! If I go to my old "Favorites" playlists (or whatever they're called), something like 3/4 of the content is gone! Sad stuff.
- TylerE 3y agoThe vast majority of content is essentially ephemeral. I don’t tend to go back and rewatch random videos from years ago.
- globular-toast 3y agoNot just videos. If you find something useful or enjoyable and want to ensure future access you need your own copy.
- paul_funyun 3y agoGood. Join X if you want to see X posts.
- renewiltord 3y agoWhat a pity. I used their API to bridge my Twitter posts to my Slack instance.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- kopirgan 3y agoSad. 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.
- dools 3y agoThe Epoch Clock
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoThanks, AI.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoThis 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.
- rc_mob 3y agoper the linked page, its only a matter of time until all go down
- nubinetwork 3y agoI'm not touching a server owned by kiwifarms.
- vwkd 3y agoCare to elaborate for those not familiar with kiwifarms?
- nubinetwork 3y agoNo, you can read the Wikipedia article yourself.
- DoItToMe81 3y agoKiwifarms is an absurdly slandered e-gossip forum. poast is a rival community. The poster has no clue who runs what.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoWow, 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.
- burgerrito 3y agoWhat'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.
- InCityDreams 3y ago>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.
- rvz 3y ago[flagged]
- dmichulke 3y agoA 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.
- HereIGoAgain 3y agoAnd 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
- promiseofbeans 3y agohttps://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1155#issuecomment-1913361757 https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1155#issuecomment-19...
- lapcat 3y ago"Nitter is dead." on issue "nitter.net certificate expired on 15:08:30 GMT"
- martin_a 3y agoTerrible title, can someone please fix that?!
- martin_a 3y agoThanks for fixing!
- chandamama 3y agoAvast is complaining that this website is detected as malicious??
- Wingy 3y agoIs there anything preventing a public Nitter instance operator from just creating a few hundred normal user accounts? Phone verification?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoHN title got changed for a third time. Hilarious.
- unnervingduck 3y agoA real shame, I've been using Nitter to check lots of art accounts, but even with https://twiiit.com/ https://twiiit.com/ I find myself reloading it multiple times to find an instance that's not rate limited.
- exectechlead 3y ago[flagged]