"If nothing changes, all remaining Nitter instances will go down eventually"

[pard68]

This is just an instance shutting down, not all of the Nitter instances. Sort of a deceptive title.

[koito17]

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.

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).

[proctrap]

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.

[amatecha]

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."

[lapcat]

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."

[nubinetwork]

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.

[dang]

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.

[Astraco]

nitter.cz and nitter.net are having issues and being rate limited.

[neilv]

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.

[xwowsersx]

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.

[lucb1e]

> Twitter/X walled-garden

I think the MIME type should be `X-Walled-Garden/Twitter`

[HackerThemAll]

Don't despair. I've never heard of this Nitter, and I'm living quite a successful life.

[martin82]

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.

[hn1986]

i agree.

Redirecting proxy for Nitter instances (alternative)

https://twiiit.com/

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

[Dalewyn]

I am quite sure the people who use Nitter or otherwise detest Mysterious Twitter X are a vocal minority of people.

[Me1000]

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).

[add-sub-mul-div]

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.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

It sucks. I don't want to use twitter but it's where people post. Nitter fulfilled my lurker only use case.

[mvdtnz]

If we're lucky this will discourage HNers from linking to Twitter at all.

[s1artibartfast]

Why not make an account if you want to read it?

[npunt]

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?

[throwaway84846]

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

[strogonoff]

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.

[ipv6ipv4]

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.

[justnotworthit]

im reminded of an ipad app 10 years ago that did roughly this, creating a magazine like interaction with your twitter, google reader, etc.

[npilk]

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.

[flexagoon]

You can generate an RSS feed of any twitter user using RSS Bridge:

https://rss-bridge.org/bridge01/

[maxglute]

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.

[lucb1e]

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>?"

[rsynnott]

Get different socials, is about your only option at this ppoint.

[hexage1814]

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 :\

[amatecha]

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.

[qaziquza]

The point being: archive with yt-dlp while we still can.

[ephbit]

> 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/

[graphe]

I don't think so, with other sites giving out free video content. If they all did...

[smoldesu]

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?

[toastercat]

Yes. Please disallow X/Twitter links and stop forwarding traffic to that cursed user-hostile site.

[defrost]

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

    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.

[cubefox]

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.

[bogomipz]

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.

[yreg]

I don’t use TikTok much, but when I see a (web) link to content there it’s always publicly available.

[timeon]

> 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.

[intelligencesec]

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)

[promiseofbeans]

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1155#issuecomment-19...

[lapcat]

"Nitter is dead." on issue "nitter.net certificate expired on 15:08:30 GMT"

[sphars]

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.

[MallocVoidstar]

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).

[_ache_]

Yeap, the Installion section of the Github Readme.md of Nitter. Docker based.

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter#Installation

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

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?

[ogurechny]

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.

[tjpnz]

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.

[eek2121]

wget or curl.

[HereIGoAgain]

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

[Havoc]

To be fair I was kinda surprised their create thousands of accounts strategy worked at all

[burgerrito]

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.

[InCityDreams]

>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.

[tortoise_in]

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

[dmichulke]

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.

[unnervingduck]

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.

[walterbell]

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?

[DistractionRect]

You could, but you'd have to make your own personal twitter account. At that point you're using Twitter with extra steps.

[maxglute]

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.

[deadbabe]

X/Twitter is a gross network. It’s like posting links to 4chan.

[mardifoufs]

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

[Astraco]

Leave 4chan alone. 4chan compared to Twitter is Heaven

[LAC-Tech]

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.

[shrimp_emoji]

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

[Wingy]

Is there anything preventing a public Nitter instance operator from just creating a few hundred normal user accounts? Phone verification?

[martin_a]

Terrible title, can someone please fix that?!

[martin_a]

Thanks for fixing!

[chandamama]

While browsing website on Android devices, avast is showing a popup of malicious website detected.

[genevra]

Unsurprising that Twitter continues these decisions, just means I interact with it even less

[Macha]

Great, now I will miss patio11, and....

Oh that's the list of all the value I find on Twitter anymore.

[hsuduebc2]

Thank for your service comrade.

[renewiltord]

What a pity. I used their API to bridge my Twitter posts to my Slack instance.

[proctrap]

Looks like this is the end

[dylan604]

Jim Morrison style or Seth Rogen style?

[kopirgan]

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.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

HN title got changed for a third time. Hilarious.

[chandamama]

Avast is complaining that this website is detected as malicious??

[hackerlight]

Any alternative?

[jayknight]

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...

[dools]

The Epoch Clock

[koito17]

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

[duxup]

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.

[AstroJetson]

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.

[dinvlad]

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

[hexage1814]

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.

[sphars]

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)

[globalnode]

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.

[twelvechairs]

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

[superhumanuser]

I have not been to Reddit after they effectively shut down RiF.

[Tenemo]

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.

[giancarlostoro]

> 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.

[monero-xmr]

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

[Kenji]

Nitter is the only thing that made Twitter/X accessible without a goddamn account. Well, good bye, X.

[burkaman]

> 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.

[simonw]

(If ad revenue is so important, maybe don't tell your advertisers to "GFY" live on stage.)

[nateglims]

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.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

Thanks, AI.

[matt3210]

Just make a Twitter account and install an ad blocked

[wffurr]

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.

[ekianjo]

you won't be able to browse anonymously anymore

[Astraco]

No

[paul_funyun]

Good. Join X if you want to see X posts.

[xigoi]

Alright. And if you like your walled garden, please stay there and don’t link to it from other sites.

[Astraco]

No

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

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.

[rc_mob]

per the linked page, its only a matter of time until all go down

[nubinetwork]

I'm not touching a server owned by kiwifarms.