Nitter is shutting down

morrowind@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.world – 747 points – looks like X/twitter(?) broke something again Β· Issue #983 Β· zedeus/nitter
github.com

https://nitter.d420.de

Goodbye twitter I guess. There's no longer any way to see twitter things people send you without an account

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At this point I'm impressed by how much effort Twitter devs must've have put into making the site shittier and less accessible.

Not much, most of this is due to them closing down things. And I wouldn't blame the developers for the business decisions

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There's no longer any way to see twitter things people send you without an account

Thank God. Maybe news articles will stop embedding tweets in articles.

I don't know, at least in Finnish news I see constantly broken embeds with "view in Instagram/twitter whatever" no matter how closed those are... :(

You can still see Tweet embeds. And you can still look at the specific Tweet on Twitter. But you can't see any replies. Or sometimes just a few old ones.

By percent I bet the amount of people using nitter is miniscule, meaning Twitter spent a lot of time making sure a small amount of people can't access the tweets.

There was probably a large number of bots using the same method that nitter uses to scrape data.

I wish less people used Twitter. Like my city exclusively communicates through Twitter

They're not also locked into Facebook? It seems like far too many public services communicate through these non-public platforms (i.e. often more easily viewed or sometimes only viewable with an account).

To be fair, before all this nonsense, this is what made Twitter unique and important. Twitter was the one way through social media "the average Joe" could be heard on the public stage. No normal person is getting time on the news.

Because of its short format the message had to be simple and concise, which made it special in the social media space. Someone saying something about a current event and then the "semi-democratization" process of being shared and liked or whatever the mechanism was (never was a user), and that message then making it into the news media, was a good thing. It actually was an opportunity for normal people to have a voice. And not just for Americans but for people in other countries who have even less of a voice.

Which is why the current events are so ironic, all of that being ruined, in the name of the billionaire morons claim of "free speech platform." He couldn't even see the perspective I'm coming from because he has a path to the public stage.

https://youtu.be/CcSh2F8e__8

Normalize not caring about anything posted on TwitteX.

That would be great if other important people stopped posting important information there.

I thought about this recently with Instagram, when I got linked there as the 'official' information page for an event. I could see the post with the general information, but couldn't read the comments to see if any more information or clarifications had been posted.

That was an event, where the organizers obviously wanted as many people as possible to show up, and Instagram was doing them a disservice in that. I wasn't going to sign up to Instagram to view those comments. And my parents couldn't sign up to Instagram. It's too complex for them.

Twitter has been gone for the non-Nitter using general public for a while. So, at this point, if you're not a techy, where can you still publicly post information? TikTok, I think? YouTube, I guess. Mastodon would be an option, but it's verging on being too unknown for non-techies, as does BlueSky.

We've gone from a time where everyone and their mother could publicly announce things on the internet, to a pretty big vacuum.
It's going to be interesting what fills this space. Theoretically, even personal webpages might have a bit of a comeback.

As a public, we've gone back to the days when the internet was a techies platform.

The difference now is it's a techies platform Vs. a corporate platform.

The more convenient FOSS social media is, the less techie it will be, and the closer we'll get back to the more open internet for all.

Until then we have an open internet for techies alone.

I don't see the problem with mastodon, people without accounts can't reply, but it can still be used as a message board. It's not much different from linking to a wordpress blog.

Most things haven't moved over there from xitter. So if I want to follow an author, a band, an event, or even a theatre or other venue, I have to rely on bot accounts reposting from xitter, which assumes that I even know how to do that. It isn't something my mom will do without instructions, and even then it's not something she's likely to check or keep up with because it is not as intuitive.

The place does not have the followers to convince entities like I mentioned above to move there or upkeep accounts there. The TLA isn't out there posting bookings and upcoming events/cancellations on Mastadon.

If you're a customer, sure. But if you're a seller, it's about as handy for the basic "I need some form of web presence but don't wanna make and upkeep a website" use case, which facebook, instagram and twitter are increasingly failing at.

So, honestly these businesses go where the people are and Mastadon also doesn't have the userbase of xitter.or Facebook even in their decline. My kids school doesn't update delayed openings on Mastadon. Because most kids, and a whole lot of adults aren't on there.

Businesses weren't advertising on Facebook when it was "theFacebook.com". It took a while to gain a userbase that was beneficial to businesses and entities to post there and maintain accounts.

My kids school doesn't update delayed openings on Mastadon. Because most kids, and a whole lot of adults aren't on there.

They don't have to stop posting there. They can do both.

They could, but I pretty much guarantee they won't because most school admins have never even heard of mastadon.

Yeah, for those viewing a link, it definitely works. I meant that it's too unknown for the non-techies that would want to publicly post something.

Which isn't to say, they've never heard of it, but well, if you're not excited about technology, it's likely at least an hour of work, to figure out how everything works. If they know people who are already on such a platform, they're more willing to invest that much work.

I wish I could find the article, but when Musk first started breaking shit and locking everything down, local meteorological accounts realized people could start missing important public information like tsunami and earthquake warnings, and they had no other way to reach the public than through Twitter.

Twitter being accessible only via direct links to tweets is still not an acceptable solution, because how would I know what the URL is for the latest Icelandic volcano warning (for example)?

Honestly, let's bring geocities back (not exactly in that form). Anything that isn't a throwaway post on social media goes there, and you can post links to it from all the social platforms for reaching a broader audience. Then there's a place for getting the most up to date information about an event, that doesn't require making an account, and the person putting the event on doesn't have to make sure posts across multiple platforms are updated with the same new information.

Mobilizon is the Fedi version of Facebook groups/Meetup.

I'll have to check that out. I help run a secular humanist group and we've been trying to get away from Facebook for event planning. More than a few of our members (myself included) aren't on Facebook and/or aren't active there anymore. Might be a good alternative.

Yes I'm starting to migrate a local organization as well. Currently we are on Meetup. I just added us on Mobilizon. I am only advertising publicly for Mobilizon but people can still find us on Meetup if they look there. They just added a Meetup integration also so it's fairly effortless.

Unironically Facebook is fairly reliable for what you're describing. It nags you with a login popup regularly, but beyond that everything important is readable even without an account.

For me, after scrolling just a bit, it always pop up asking me to log in and no longer lets me scroll on the page anymore. It happens to me on both mobile and desktop.

It's really annoying when trying to look at events or business pages.

Huh. I don't think, I've ever seen a public post on Facebook, but that's probably the case, because I've rarely ever intentionally clicked on a Facebook link...

Not really. There's a lot I don't see and can't access without having a FB account. It's been like that for years.

So, at this point, if you’re not a techy, where can you still publicly post information? TikTok, I think?

TikTok or any such other crap is not publicly.

It takes like, $0 and a cup of coffee at most to start a simple page in neocities for a simple announcement. Heck, in the absolutely simplest cases available you can literally upload your own announcement (a picture, a PDF or smth) to ufile.io and just pass around the link to that.

I've never once used Twitter, Instagram, or anything of the sort. I get by just fine without it. I learn about events the old fashioned way: Word of mouth, and posters hung in public spaces. Many places still use email blasts as well. It's a bit head scratching for me to read these comments hailing Twitter as some sort of irreplaceable necessity in life.

Well, I'm not saying that it's a necessity. Usually, it's not a necessity to hold or attend those events in the first place.

But that does not mean that people don't deeply want it. I've been part of the orga team for a larger event before and that was our biggest concern: If anything happens that makes it impossible to hold the event, how in the fuck do you tell people to not come?

We did have a whole homepage specifically for this event and, to be fair, the answer was still generally that you don't. People won't subscribe to your RSS feed or regularly check the webpage. Unless a catastrophe happens, you have to keep to the time and place. But if we could reach even just 20% of people in case of a catastrophe, that would have still been massively helpful.

I wish people would just abandon X. Nitter was just extending the inevitable. They don't want any of us, only fascists. Let them have their own place and leave the rest of us out of it. Better for law enforcement if all the wannabe terrorists are all in one place anyway.

With Tesla’s stock price dropping 12% the person who might be forced to give up Twitter is Musk. His purchase was secured with Tesla stock.

Plus if it goes bankrupt he won't be in control of it from what I gather. People seem way too addicted to it to leave though.

Dang nitter was getting better too. Can’t say I’m surprised though with the way X has been going

If Twitter succeeds in becoming a super app. Wouldn't they then become a "platform" in EU terms? Thus requiring them to interoperate?

Isn't there a requirement for number of users as well? It's not really growing right now

taps side of head

Can’t fall under EU gatekeeper regulations if you don’t have users

Man, I mixed Nitter and Ninite and was in absolute horror

Whats Ninite?

It's a website that lets you select many apps you use in a daly basis and makes a single installer for them all. Very useful if you're always formatting your pc

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Windows crap that Linux distros have had for literally decades.

Ouch, I cut myself on your edge 😒

I was edging, but this comment pushed me over the edge to completion. Thank you.

all the xbox kids are mad that their spyware OS is falling behind the latest decade+ in modern computing.

How are those docker containers in windows again? A fucking tragedy?

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Now, I have to make a Xhitter account to see some comics. Some one donate me some copium.

I tried to create one recently but there is now a fucking gauntlet of captchas and puzzles you have to solve to create an account.

Same goes for Google now.

it still could be made working with using real logins for scraping which can be a bit illegal but if you do it on your personal instance it would be more than enough. I'm not sure, maybe nitter already supports this instead of guest tokens?

There's nothing illegal about breaking Twitter terms of service. You might get banned, but that's it.

That would be in it in ideal world but Twitter can sue you for damages as you explicitly agree with ToS in most countries especially US. There's enough precedence when it comes to "login" scraping in the US that you'd most likely lose (though probably not a massive payout)

Twitter is unlikely to bother with small non-commercial scrapers but I wouldn't risk attaching any tracable info even for small personal projects.

Yes I believe it could, though we'll see if the devs are willing to keep supporting it

I didn't use Twitter for a decade but occasionally still read my feed until fuckface took over, and then deleted it. But the other day I wondered if someone I knew of who was palliative is still alive so I googled his Twitter, and for some reason they had mercy and let me see he is indeed still living, albeit really incapacitated. So thanks for not being shitty for one second Twitter, and now I hope you die off as a platform and are replaced by the fediverse.

What's with the misinformation. This comment is from August 2023. Nitter is still going strong.

The link leads to a comment from yesterday. You can't get guest accounts anymore, so it's a matter of time until all Nitter instances break.

What the shit is/was Nitter? Sorry I can't seem to keep up.

A way of reading twitter posts without needing to go to twitter. Particularly useful since you now need an account to see twitter posts.

Thanks, I guess I never tried reading a twit post to learn of the issue.

It was also helpful for getting links to Twitter pics and vids to embed here.

It's a private front-end service. So you can see Twitter posts without logging in or giving them your data. They obviously don't like that.

I am certain much of the Nitter use is to access 18+ stuff, and if the artists want to keep their incomes protected, they'll go to Fanbox or Fansly when their users can't use Nitter for easy wankbait.

Oh no

Edit: Jesus people, /s Y'all are dense sometimes.

everyone got your "sarcasm". you're the one being dense here. Nitter was a useful tool for those who have left twitter but needed to access information posted there. It didn't benefit Twitter in anyway, so there was 0 downsides in using it.

the fact that you make fun of a useful community tool shutting down is why you're deservedly being downvoted to hell

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