Twitter front-end Nitter dies as Musk wins war against third-party services

Five@slrpnk.net to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 414 points –
Twitter front-end Nitter dies as Musk wins war against third-party services
arstechnica.com
72

That's not winning a war..that's isolating your garbage company further.

Apparently he just bought and trashed Twitter because that kid was tracking his plane

Would Swift be the next owner of Twitter then?

I don't think she is that rich. Is she ?

I mean, neither was he, and given that the Saudis bankrolled his purchase and he's apparently reduced the value of their investment by half, you have to wonder what he's giving them that has saved him from a one-way trip to a Saudi consulate.

I mean, you don't really have to wonder that hard. But still, somebody loses you multiple billions in an extended ketamine-fueled rampage, you start to wonder if you should make an example of them...

Man those articles suck especially the first one even with a hardened firefox and ublock

Why do people try to pretend Elon Musk isn't insanely rich? His net worth can easily be leveraged into 40 billion dollars.

Yeah... right.

If you believe this then you'd believe in almost anything.

Scapegoat excuse. Why would he admit that it was to destroy class awareness and cohesion, when he could simply blame a kid?

Taking the opportunity of being forced to buy it to create his very own propaganda machine.

"it's not me who's trapped with you, it's you who's trapped with the horrible smell of your own farts and diarrhoea"

It has been a while that Nitter shut down. Still a pity, a few artists posted only there

The only reason to still check Twitter is to see if they have moved off Twitter yet.

So many of my fave artists already left for Bluesky or they also post on tumblr. The reason to have an actual twitter account keeps dwindling by the day.

A while? I used nitter until like 12hours ago.

The brief explanation is that Nitter worked by creating "guest accounts", which were a leftover from when you used to be able to use the Twitter mobile app without an account. After creation, these accounts lasted for a month. The time since the ability to create these accounts was removed is nearing (has reached?) a month

Posted only on nitter? Isn't nitter only a frontend for twitter? I don't think nitter has their own backend, but I can be wrong.

Artists posted on Twitter, which people would access via Nitter

This service going down and me recently deciding to try to check in on whether some people I used to follow on Twitter had migrated elsewhere made me realize how much Twitter's basically isolated itself from the open web.

A part of me hopes this serves as a wake-up call for those that were still hovering between using Twitter and weaning off it using services like this, to reach out to those they follow and let them know, "Hey, if you think you're still posting publicly...You're not, only other people here can see this." For many people that may not matter, but for creators/influencers? I dunno, maybe network effect is enough that they feel the large audience there is plenty, but I'd think they might want as broad of a reach as possible, and a popular but limited view platform isn't necessarily that.

Much more importantly though are any government/critical services. They really need to be brought up to date, if they haven't been already, that the platform is no longer as publicly accessible as it may have once been. Also the same applies not just for Twitter but Facebook and the like as well, but that's another topic.

Yeah, I can't believe that governments and infrastructure services are still using it. I can, at best, see your single tweet, and odds are good I can't see the most recent. It's nuts that anyone would ever want to use that as a broad communication platform.

How come every 3 weeks there is a news that nitter is now dead, and then I go to the Nitter Instance Health Monitor, pick a random instance, and am still able to surf tweets?

I dont get it. Is this wishfull thinking or do people not understand that instances other than nitter.net exist?

EDIT: I gotta admit, there is a lot of red in the last days. But it is not completely gone. Yet.

Article text:

There are still some active Nitter instances, but they are expected to shut down in the near future as the remaining tokens expire. Three weeks ago, Zed wrote on GitHub that "Nitter is dead."

Well, that is sad and incontrovertible argument. I guess I should cherish it as long as I can.

Shhhh let them think it died 🤫

It did

Mostly, but I don't want Twitter to take further measures!

Like what? What's still alive will time out within a week or so, there's no keeping them around.

You'll hear about it thru the grapevine. I'm not talking about it on reddit sorry

Neither of us are on Reddit right now .

But ok, good to hear something will keep going.

Lol disregard my last comment about the Google News trick they made it worse. FFS

There needs to be a move to model more like Invidious where there is a database. Youtube's got a helluva lot more to index and it's managed. The account tokens thing was a bit unserious.

In the meantime if you need rss, try this:

https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=site:twitter.com/benjaminnorton

just swap out the name.

you have to paste the URL into an archive website lolz unless u want to login. very cumbersome & no retweets. i like having a retweet free RSS tho, no overlaps

also there are mastodon mirrors of twitter accounts and stuff that can be done

anyways, the site SUCKS. this should have been something to hold us over while people come to their senses and leave

The same shit as Reddit. Glory to Mastodon.

I think it's more winning the battle but losing the war for Twitter. It just ain't the same and probably never will be.

They want a free market. They want to sell their service across borders. They don't want law makers to limit what they can do.

And what's their service? A non-democratic system with many limitations and restrictions and they decide on a very detailed level what you have to do to use it.

And with it dying I think that's probably the last time I'll look at Twitter. If something isn't publicly available on something like Mastodon it isn't worth making an account to see.

I've enabled auto redirect from twitter to nitter and never bothered to disable the no longer working redirect. Hopefully people switch to some platform with open API access (or rather, a federated platform)

Events across the world have reduced my faith in corporations. Open-source, community-driven solutions are definitely the answer. Twitter has closed itself since it was acquired. Not to forget the Reddit api fiasco. With platforms closing themselves, they prevent the right to information. Anyone on the web should be able to access a microblogging site that plays (or played) such an important role in the world.

Arstechnica post has comments filled with how emergency services updates are posted on Twitter. We should all be part of the solution by promoting an open web that is not controllable by a singular entity. 

That being said, for a service like emergency alerts, it definitely should be hosted on a site like Mastodon. It even has RSS.

To make matters worse, I just read an article about how the Indian government might be deciding to block proton mail

Twiit (https://twiiit.com/) checks for nitter instances that still work and redirects you.

It's nice in theory, but I've had very little luck using it for the last few days.

I wouldn't be surprised if whatever instances it picks to send people to are soon afterwards rate limited because demand is too high relative to supply.

Well yeah, it's not a proper long-term solution. But making a twitter account with a burner email from Guerrilla Mail is surprisingly easy, I guess that will be the only option going forward.

The enshitification is very, very real. This is why the Fediverse is so important.

i can still access it through nitter.net (even if the cert is not working you can still use the 'thisisunsafe' method in chrome).

This is the best summary I could come up with:


An open source project that let people view tweets without going to Twitter.com has shut down, as Elon Musk's changes seem to have closed off all possible ways to access the Twitter network without a user account.

"Most Nitter servers were using a technique of generating loads of temporary tokens that were used for accessing the content, but that path is now blocked as well," the NoLog update today said.

"I conclude that it is possible to easily acquire thousands of guest accounts within just a few minutes by using proxies, and they are all usable from a single IP address without getting rate limited," the August 2023 post said.

I will also develop a service that fetches these continuously, and lets operators request guest accounts for their own instances without having to pay for proxies."

Pointing to a recent discussion on GitHub, today's update from NoLog said there may be "a way to spin up a personal Nitter instance with your own account to keep the interface you are used to, but there is no guarantee this will work long-term."

"Unfortunately regular accounts can only support a small group of users, so running a public instance this way is not feasible," the update said.


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