Ask HN: Nitter officially declared "over" today – alternatives?

[bookaway]

There were often "rate-limited" errors that hadn't completely prevented the site from being usable since the nitter people said the site would go down eventually.

Now however there is an official declaration on the site itself: https://nitter.cz/

Due to the reasons stated by Nitter itself on their repo, it seems unlikely there will alternatives.

Are there any currently?

[rchaud]

It's over.

It isn't just Twitter, it's every single website that's turned themselves into a login-walled "application".

Twitter's relative openness lasted a long time. It was open by default because it is a product built in 2006, when the idea of coralling people into walled gardens to show them ads didn't exist.

Apps built later take the concept of "walled garden" as a default feature. Slack , Discord, Snapchat, Tiktok, Telegram .... all largely closed off platforms. You can't see anything unless you're logged in.

[thom]

I mostly have the same attitude to this as I do to sites with ridiculously aggressive cookie popups… I don’t need to see the content, I can just go for a walk in the sun instead.

[flyinghamster]

Basically, I don't want to bother if it's lurker-hostile. Twixxer joins Facebook in the "closed silos" category.

[hiccuphippo]

I do wish some people mirrored their content to their own blogs because there's some interesting stuff there once in a while.

[forgotmypw17]

I'm the same way, with few exceptions.

The best part about it is that I've noticed a strong correlation between content quality and ease of access.

[wl]

There's two distinct Nitter use cases I need to replace.

1. Someone drops a link to Twitter. Twitter hides threads and throws items in some weird non-chronological order—assuming I don't get a login wall. I need an unfucked UI.

2. There are some content I can't get anywhere else that I follow through RSS. I wish these people would move elsewhere, but if they haven't by now, they probably won't ever.

I may just run a local instance with an account created for the purpose if that remains viable, but associating all that with a single login/IP address is something I'd like to avoid.

[prmoustache]

1) Ask people to send screenshots of the tweets instead of links. I think this has naturally been happening a lot more over the years anyway and people will just get used to do that.

2) I guess those people will slowly realize they have lost most of their audience anyway.

[prvc]

In addition to a chronological feed, Nitter provided pagination and link de-obfuscation. Would be nice to get that back somehow.

[andy99]

Right, all the "just don't use it" comments miss the point. I used Nitter specifically because I don't use twitter, so I could see the contents of a link that was being posted or discussed. I suppose a solution could be "ignore a large swath of posts and links and discussions" which is basically what I do, but sometimes it's nice to have the option to look at them. Same as if you don't use MS Word, someone might still occasionally send you a word document and it's nice to have a way to open it without having to install Word.

[8note]

For 2, you might want to send them an email asking them to post said content elsewhere.

Given that it's Twitter, there's not a ton of text or anything in what you're missing. If it's a blog post, you could see about them enabling RSS on it? If it's video content or something, they could put it on patreon with you paying them for it?

[godelski]

> I need an unfucked UI.

Preach. I need a UI where I don't have to click "Read more" to only find out there is one word missing. Then required to swipe back and repeat the process because someone used all 240 characters in several tweets.

This is literally what happens when your devs don't dog food. What an insane thing to do and with such an easy fix. It is just baffling. There's so many little things like this but I can't understand how this isn't just a few lines of code somewhere.

[creer]

Might archive.something eventually work on twitter? (To allow quotes and fixed views for use within HN discussions?)

[fnordpiglet]

I’d also vote for 3) the user interface is fast, responsive, and not total garbage inflicted with man boy ego whim randomly mutating a decade of questionable product management decisions

[speps]

For 1: replace twitter.com with vxtwitter.com.

[aftbit]

Yea I just don't read twitter content anymore. Same thing I did to facebook. There's some really good stuff on there that I miss, but it simply isn't worth it to me. Easy enough.

[Tommy430]

> There's some really good stuff on there that I miss

Tbh, same. I do miss getting some information about Windows betas pretty much, but other than that, I won't miss Twitter at all.

People need to publish more on more open and community driven solutions. Heck, even publishing information for a site that still works on older PCs is better than publishing information on Twitter.

[chris_wot]

It's the Great Tune Out. More people are joining this movement every day.

[spike021]

I don't understand.

There are some handy mechanisms you can use on Twitter to filter and curate what you get to see.

You can mute any word or hashtag you want.

You can create lists containing specific people or orgs you'd like to keep up with.

Occasionally something slips through the cracks but nothing is perfect.

With those mechanisms in mind though, Twitter is pretty hackable. You can get it into a state where you can still consume things you're interested in. And if you don't want to give ad impressions you can access it with a browser that can block ads.

[nonrandomstring]

What I find weird, is of all the things I totally ignore because of its corporate shitfuckery, Twitter is the one that should be the easiest to read. How in 2024 is it possible that I, using a text only browser without JavaScript, cannot read what are short text-only messages on what's really a jumped up version of NNTP?

With each passing day we regress technically .

[dspillett]

For the same reason given for Nitter stopping, it is unlikely that you'll find a public service like that. There are nitter-like options, including forks of nitter itself, that you can self-host to give a better UX, but with those you have to have a twitter⁰ account for it to login with.

Another option (that also requires an account) is to use twitter⁰ itself with a browser extension that tweaks the UI.

My solution is the one I've been using for a _long_ time: simply don't go there. It has never been more than a novelty-gone-wrong, unless you count “a cesspool of humanity” as more, and as far as I know I've not missed out on anything significant. If you want me not to know what you have to say, say it on twitter⁰! Though I acknowledge that this is not an acceptable solution for all.

--

[0] The site desperately trying to be known as Χ

[pogue]

In terms of a browser extension for Twitter, I highly recommend Control Panel for Twitter. It works as a browser extension as well as on some mobile browsers. It is highly customizable to filter out who/what you don't want to see and is fully open source if you feel the need to tweak.

It's updated regularly and the creator is highly active on Twitter to provide updates and answer questions - @ControlPanelFT

If you decide to use it, drop the guy a donation, they work hard on it!

https://github.com/insin/control-panel-for-twitter

[bloopernova]

Twitter became the defacto public square, so it's understandable that there's inertia for society to keep visiting.

This particular public square has been bought and fenced off. Ostensibly this is to drive more traffic to it.

Passively standing outside the fence trying to peek in is a lost cause. Find a new public square and convince as many people as you can to move. To do that, engage with those who moved, and create compelling reasons to go to the new public square.

[klabb3]

> Find a new public square and convince as many people as you can to move.

In particular, complain loudly to your local governments etc that (still) use Twitter for “quickly reaching the public” or whatever their remaining excuse may be, especially if that information isn’t accessible elsewhere.

The public square rhetoric was always a red herring. A distraction to fool people, including yours truly, although it’s been years since the illusion came falling down.

There is still a need for public spaces. I just don’t have any hopes about ad-tech corporations any more.

[godelski]

> Twitter became the defacto public square

I think people often miss this about social media. Private spaces can become public spaces. The same way you can lose a trademark if your product becomes associated with the general thing (which is why OpenAI failed to get a trademark). In a way too much success is limiting to the company's power, but that's probably a feature and not a bug in terms of protecting the public.

It's not like it is easy to navigate away from Twitter or any other major platform. Unlike traditional products you can't simply choose Pepsi if you are upset with Coke, or vise versa, because the product's utility (and product) is it's network. It also makes it very difficult to compete against as you can make an infinitely better UI/UX but if no one is on it you are missing the key product. So you only move to a ghost town in hopes that others will follow but if that doesn't happen quickly then it'll remain a ghost town.

[vehemenz]

Public-facing tweets are a huge part of Twitter's value proposition. Between this, removal of verification, and publish.twitter.com being broken, I wonder how many of the biggest outlets and organizations will continue to abide Twitter's decline.

[KomoD]

> Now however there is an official declaration on the site itself: https://nitter.cz/

FYI: That's not official, nitter.net was, and there are other instances of Nitter that still work.

https://status.d420.de/

[not_your_vase]

They work only for a few more days, till their account expires (30 days after creation). After that no more guest account creation is possible: each instance will go red one by one.

[Fischgericht]

I find it insulting that it is still allowed to submit "links" to Twitter posts on HN. It is a pervasion of the concept of "Links". You are teasing something that might be of interest that then can not be read by a majority of users.

While Nitter still worked at least people here could then post alternative links. Now that Nitter is dead, that's no longer an option.

And therefore people really should stop submitting Twitter links here. Instead contact the author and ask him to at least cross-post to some accessible platform. How hard can it be to cross-post to Mastodon, Bluesky or ... OMG, a website?

[seabass-labrax]

The honourable Court of the Fish has given its ruling, tipping the scales of justice towards linking to the open net on HN.

* the court could not determine the plaintiff's legal standing, as the plaintiff had no legs, however 'slopping' was considered an acceptable substitute to standing.

[joeframbach]

I have Tampermonkey scripts that delete Twitter entries from HN and anywhere else on the web. Seems to work well for me.

[redrove]

Would you mind sharing?

[rglullis]

The developer from bird.makeup is asking for donations of account tokens: https://www.patreon.com/posts/call-for-special-98167212

I'm also thinking about adding twscrape support to my https://github.com/mushroomlabs/fediverser and extend its mirrors to Mastodon servers, but to be honest I can not afford (money- and time-wise) to get into yet-another project without some minimal financial support.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Nitter was officially declared "over" yesterday. Why can I still use it today?

https://nitter.poast.org/Kantrowitz/status/17581675175146582...

Twitter sucks. The "alternative" IMHO is to refrain from submitting links to "tweets" to HN. No one wants to visit Twitter.

The idea of "exclusive" content on the web is extremely difficult to accomplish. The internet is a giant copy machine.

The history of the web shows that popular websites lose popularity.

These mega-websites amassed considerable wealth during ZIRP-->COVID period. Now let them burn through it all desperately trying to stay popular.

Time to move on.

[sva_]

I usually check this list: https://status.d420.de/

[INTPenis]

libreddit is suffering the same problem. Some instances are still working but they're probably switching outgoing IPs often to evade the ban hammer.

As others have noted, I think this is part of a larger trend. All websites have realized that data is power, data is money, and they don't want to share anymore.

I used to host both nitter and libreddit, now I host neither of them. I've simply given up on reading that data.

[based_gigachad2]

There's a fork of LibReddit called RedLib which should work better: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib?tab=readme-ov-file#libr...

[not_your_vase]

What are you looking for? If you want to be anonymous, your are SOL unfortunately. If you are looking for a less crappy browsing experience than Twitter, and Nitter filled that void, you can find forks which fetch content with your Twitter account. Setting up for local self hosting doesn't take a lot of minutes.

[mozman]

I used to use Nitter to view content without logging in, as I do not have a twitter account nor do I want one.

[pogue]

The question is whether or not they'll continue to develop Nitter just for people who want to run it locally. Twitter's page layout & functions get updated and changed CONSTANTLY. If someone isn't updating Nitter regularly it will become depreciated very quickly.

[alchemist1e9]

> you can find forks which fetch content with your Twitter account

What is the recommended/preferred fork for self hosted using your own account?

[Astraco]

Nitter has been abandoned by the developer and I don't have time to deal with Elon Musk's whims

[Tommy430]

Ah, can't wait for more login walls, oversized UIs, and more "Please Subscribe" crap. Thanks Twitter.

[ActorNightly]

There is enough decent resources on Twitter to warrant signing up IMO. I just avoid installing the app so I don't end up browsing it.

[matheusmoreira]

The alternative is the fediverse. Just drop twitter. Anything of value in there will eventually make its way outside anyway.

[theodric]

I simply have a Twitter account (linked to a purpose-specific @goatse.email account, if you must know) and I log into the app on my phone and the website on my computers. This allows me to see all the content I like. I appreciate the position of the folks who want to use a third-party client (Christ's sake, I'm the author of Twittirix, the unpopular, entirely unknown, and now-dead Twitter client for SGI IRIX) but engaging with reality-as-it-is rather than lamenting the inaccessibility of reality-as-I-wish-it-were is a supremely useful way of interfacing with the world.

[AlienRobot]

I think you have 3 alternatives:

1. Create a Twitter account.

2. Stop using Twitter.

3. Use Facebook, Tumblr, or Mastodon for microblogging.

Twitter started requiring a login screen to view posts, but it's not the first website to do so. Pinterest and Instagram have done this for ages. We all hate it, but it's business.

I wonder why Tumblr isn't more successful than it is. It used to be a pretty well-known platform, and it's almost identical to Twitter, but while every celebrity seems to have a Twitter account, nobody seems to have a Tumblr account. Perhaps they do, they just don't tell anybody about it?

I wish Mastodon wasn't a thing. I believe federation is a terrible idea for normal computer users due to its non-obvious dangers, specially as more people will begin using Mastodon as if it were Facebook. I saw on Reddit that someone is building an open source, non-federated Reddit clone. That's what I think would have been better: an open-source, non-federated Twitter clone. Does anybody know of something like that, by the way?

[dspillett]

> I wonder why Tumblr isn't more successful than it is. It used to be a pretty well-known platform, and it's almost identical to Twitter,

Twitter won over that and a number of other options on novelty, inertia, and notoriety, essentially. A mix of right-place-right-time, further luck, and network effects.

Tumblr did better than many alternatives, but eventually shot itself in the foot (well, was shot in the foot by its parent) when it alienated a chunk of the audience it did have by deleting a lot of content in order to appease potential advertisers.

[jsheard]

Tumblr used to be a lot more popular, but its collapse is usually attributed to them banning NSFW content. Not everyone was posting or viewing NSFW of course, but there was enough overlap in audiences to cause a cascade which ended with nearly everyone, NSFW or not, moving to Twitter.

It's a classic Yahoo acquisition fumble, they bought it for $1.1 billion and ended up selling it on to Automattic for just $3 million post-exodus.

[PaulHoule]

You could just run a Mastodon instance that doesn't federate.