Nitter is a read-only front end for Twitter

Technology@lemmy.ml – 260 points – 1 years ago

Since Twitter was bought by the world's biggest manbaby I've been using Nitter to avoid giving them any traffic/analytics/etc.

Full list of Nitter instances here: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

I don't really grok products like this.

If you have a fundamental disagreement with a platform, continuing to engage with it, even through a condom, is still perpetuating it. It's maintaining that platform as still important and integral, and a place that others should continue to engage with. It's telling advertisers that it's still a place that's worth their money to maintain a presence on. It stymies the momentum in shifting to an alternative; why put the effort into a new service if people are still seeing your posts?

It's like pirating Windows instead of moving to a different OS. You're still perpetuating the MS hegemony and telling software developers that Windows is the platform they need to develop for.

The analogy of simply choosing different software doesn't apply here. Because I can switch my os or calculator app. Those choices don't depend on other people. Sadly, we still depend on being able to read content that other parties we care for still publish on Twitter even though I disagree with it as a to. Maybe they do or dont care. I can disagree with Twitter and like my influencers. For that, something like nitter is a good step in the direction. I want to move. As muchas I'd like to snap my fingers and have everyone into my network of personal choice. It cannot happen.

Sadly, we still depend on being able to read content that other parties we care for still publish on Twitter even though I disagree with it as a to. Maybe they do or dont care. I can disagree with Twitter and like my influencers.

As somebody who still has to check Reddit from time to time because of the vast amount of content there, I totally see your point. But don't influencers nowadays use everything possible? If you don't like Instagram, follow them on Tiktok/Youtube, if you don't like Twitter, follow them on Threads.

I'm sure influencers do, but over half the xevelopersyi like to follow on Twitter all created Mastodon accounts but never post to them. They all still only post to Twitter.

I used influencers as an example, that's true that they're everywhere. But there's many communities I follow that don't care about Twitter politics, and they got little interest or even information to consider moving elsewhere.

Sure it does. They will stop posting to twitter when people stop reading it.

I developed something like this, so maybe I can answer. It was a browser extension that let people bypass the old twitter login wall. It had many thousands of users until Twitter started walling themselves off this summer.

I was inspired to make it in the most American way possible -- someone I know was in a school that got locked down due to a shooter threat (ended up being a false alarm). The police and news agencies were live-tweeting the updates, and their partner didn't have a twitter and couldn't read them without making a fucking account that very moment, wondering if their partner was even alive. I directed them to nitter, but they're not very into tech, and replacing the URL was just intimidating for them at the moment.

I found the whole experience so grotesque that that very evening I made an extension that lets you press a button to dismiss the login modal and keep scrolling (just a few css changes, or about 30 lines of code).

My two cents: Though I don't personally use it, the fact is Twitter does have a lot of valuable stuff on it. Same goes for other large platforms -- google results are now worthless without adding "reddit" to the search, for example. These companies are bad, but there's so, so many things to care about, and people can't care about all of them. Tactically, that makes consumer-driven change very difficult.

I'm not sure what kind of organizing we need to start doing to take back the internet from these big platforms, but whatever it is, I think it has to reckon with our past mistake of giving a few companies ownership of most of the internet, which means it has to go beyond just stopping to use them. These few platforms have the last 10 years of the internet currently walled-off, and they plan on charging rent on that forever. That's shitty. We should try to stop them from doing that, if we can.

Meh, while I totally get what you're saying I think there's something to be said about these stepping stones between dying closed source platforms and developing FOSS platforms. Especially since most content people are used to and want to engage with is on said platforms. Not everyone wants to jump onto new platforms with learning curves, but this is an in-between for the people gaining awareness.

That, and having a fundamental disagreement with the way a platform is run or what telemetry they harvest doesn't mean I don't like the content there. Social media has been a constant battle between the owners, the content creators, and the regular users. At the end of the day people use it for community and connection, even if venture capitalists are hell bent on destroying their product.

You're looking at it from the perspective of somebody who disagrees with Twitter as a company and a product.

I just hate their shitty UI.

If you have a fundamental disagreement with a platform, continuing to engage with it, even through

No it doesn't.

It's telling advertisers that it's still a place that's worth their money to maintain a presence on.

Advertisers typically want people to actually see their ads. That doesn't happen with Nitter.

The unfortunate reality is that hundreds of millions of people continue to use Twitter. So long as the fucking President is on there, among others, so must we be. Important conversations happen there that drive the direction of our country and the world. So while I wish I could close my eyes and pretend they aren't, that's just not reality.

I think it would be better to think of it like a cigarette patch

The goal is to lower your activity to your assumed essentials, and eventually stop entirely when you start replacing it in your daily activities.

It makes it easier for people either on the fence or just not entirely comfortable with trying something new.

That's a good analogy, it's also way easier to describe this than fully explain Mastodon and the fediverse. If somebody's looking to quit Twitter but they're on the fence because they're like "but I still need the info even if I don't actively participate" you can just say "hey here's an alternative until all that info can move, at least you won't be directly supporting them and won't be further contributing value by being tempted to participate" rather than "well all that stuff will move eventually"

I thought the same thing when some (talented and well meaning) individuals recently put out tools/procedures to access Reddit in a more clean way.

Nah. I don’t need to be an absolutist — I’ll load up a page if some search shows me that’s the only place to get what I’m looking for — but spending time to make undesirable websites more accessible for myself isn’t something I plan to do.

What's Twitter? Do you mean X?

I thought they were talking about that blue one with the f on it, no? Is it the little shovel dude one?

Pretty sure its hanging on by a thread due to all the changes Musk keeps making

I use the LibRedirect for various sites and half the time it either doesn't load Tweets or it comes up with a page that Nitter was flagged for serving illegal content.

To be fair on the second one, IIRC, that instance was flagged for being used to access illegal content hosted on Twitter, which was already publicly available. It was an automated report and the site was inmediately taken down because of it.

There was of course no action against Twitter.

This is precisely what I was thinking. It happened a few times and later it worked again. I think it's just happening because it's not Twitter. It's just a redirect site so it's literally the same exact content.

Anyone want to setup a nitter instance called Xitter? There are plenty of domain name available right now, such as xitter.io, xitter.tech, xitter.blue, xitter.ceo, etc. Hurry up before squatter got them!