Ask HN: Nitter officially declared "over" today – alternatives?
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?
358 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadWhat is the recommended/preferred fork for self hosted using your own account?
If something is particularly newsworthy, it'll appear elsewhere in pretty short order IME, often it originated elsewhere in fact.
At least the important/urgent stuff was going out through the emergency alert system.
- messages on the fm radios
- sms broadcasting
A bit like my national government seems to be run via WhatsApp…
In an emergency situation, if twitter was the only rapid source, I'd have to go look there. This is partly why I said elsewhere in this thread that avoiding twitter isn't practical for everyone. The chances of such an emergency where I am is pretty remote. If any of my local politicians are listening: if there is something that important and you can't reliably provide information somewhere instead of (or as well as) twitter, rest assured that even if I voted for you last time I won't the next!
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.
Reddit doesn't have login walls yet but it has way too much information stored within their walls to not have a backup / non-social-media way of extracting it. It's infeasible to have Reddit blocked because it's UI is intended to be addictive like all social media but also be able to extract information from it.
For the moment.
It's not like 95% of the content is any good anyway. You have to dig deep into a niche to really get any value, and the last few years, less and less. Of course, I haven't logged in for 3-4 years so maybe I'm missing something. Doubt it.
There isn't one on the root directory, but Reddit has plenty of login walls.
Plus mobile sometimes refuses to show some things.
old.reddit still works though.
But archive.today uses scraping and all sorts of tricky methods to bypass paywalls. I honestly don't understand why Nitter can't just stay logged out and rotate IPs. Although I'm sure that gets pricey when other people are accessing it constantly.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/01/save-your-twitter-acco...
https://free.law/recap
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24086570
> I'm the director of Free Law Project. For the case mentioned in the article we actually did a full expert testimony figuring out roughly how much per page it'd cost to run PACER using AWS GovCloud and a handful of other assumptions. It was...half a ten thousandth of a penny per page
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4214664/52/15/national-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085158
> Government’s PACER Fees Are Too High, Federal Circuit Says
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/white-collar-and-criminal-law/...
There was a gaming message board where someone wrote a browser extension that would back up all topics someone visited in the background while they were reading them. It became important for archiving as much content from those forums as possible as the forum was in the process of shutting down.
"Twitter won't let me read content people post on it"
"Try posting it on Mastodon"
"If it was on Mastodon we wouldn't be having this conversation"
"Whatever, you don't share anything from Twitter anyway"
Can you see the vase yet?
Twitter/FB don't understand just what a terrible value proposition and complete waste of time they represent. I'm happy Ediot Mashbrains has been bleeding money for the damage he's caused.
2) I guess those people will slowly realize they have lost most of their audience anyway.
"We perfected OCR! Blind people can read!"
Yay! Awesome.
"Yeah, and soon we can route around damage when the capitalism growth mandate breaks hyperlinks!"
Yaa— wait what??
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?
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.
>To sign up, users must pay a $5 sign-up fee, meant to prevent the creation of spam accounts. Further, users can only post a limited number of “casts” on Farcaster apps, which are tied to packages called storage units. Storage units, which go for $5 a piece, grant a user 5,000 casts, 2,500 reactions, and 2,500 links or photo posts within a one-year period.
(some shady website)
Yeah, that will surely make millions of users to sign up /s
Should we stop linking to all information on all of these platforms because some of the information is undesirable to some people?
Do you allow others to poison your well like that? If so, that strikes me as easily exploitable.
Also, the idea that this sort of content is inherently dangerous doesn’t hold water. I’m not going to become a white supremacist because Twitter showed me a racist tweet. Information and ideology is not inherently dangerous.
There's been enough work that suggests a close link between exposure to propaganda and getting funneled in to increasingly more radical material, e.g. [1].
Particularly regarding Twitter, it's noticeable that it's not just one racist tweet that gets shown to you when you deliberately click on one - the space below will be filled with similar kind of content, and you can see a marked increase of far-right crap on your algorithmic timeline as well, with every little interaction you have with far-right content.
It was bad before Musk, but since his takeover it's gotten really really bad.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/29/276000/a-study-o...
This line of thinking doesn’t make sense to me. Furthermore, bad ideology and its ideologues won’t go away simply because we individually stop looking at them.
I quit Twitter after 12 years when they started censoring the site search. I was trying to research QAnon wackos and it turns out that the search box had been neutered.
It’s one thing to tell people what they can post, it’s another to tell me what I’m not allowed to read (that is allowed to be posted).
Fuck censorship.
And?
I trust people to be intelligent enough to make their own decisions. If seeing an incredibly (or even mildly) racist tweet suddenly makes them proverbially goose-step around their home, they already were going to. One, ten, or hundred posts won't make them racist unless they were already predisposed to those ideas. In a healthy mind, viewing alternative views may broaden their view which might include disagreeing with their previous opinions.
If viewing a gay marriage doesn't make you gay, neither does seeing someone complain about other races or LGBT people. I am on 'your' side politically but the opinion that all conservative opinion should be extinguished or somehow that it is inherently harmful because you disagree with is just as bad as conservatives saying the same about your opinion.
There is no harm in reading and understanding other's opinions. All sides need to understand that. It only crosses into the need for 'deplatforming' when they are making implicit or explicit threats against a person or a group of people.
"I think <x> race is less likely to be successful due to <x, y, z>" is not a bad opinion. It may be wrong, but it isn't hurtful beyond maybe to someone who is too sensitive. "I think <x> race should be exterminated" is beyond the line and shouldn't be allowed to be posted publicly.
This is a great line that probably pisses off almost everybody. Love it.
Those are all very different things. Only Facebook is somewhat similar in that it has an algorithm that surfaces emotionally engaging content.
> I’m not going to become a white supremacist because Twitter showed me a racist tweet.
How about if it showed you 50 racist tweets? If repetition and exposure didn't have any effect on our behaviour then there would be no advertising market and no one would bother to spend vast sums on political campaigning.
> Information and ideology is not inherently dangerous.
How about misinformation? As an example, I'd say the rise in anti-vaccination activity is an example of inherently dangerous information that has been spread primarily through social media.
That is intentionally and maliciously obfuscating the issue by equating social media (Google, Facebook, Tumblr) with infrastructure hosting (Cloudflare, GoDaddy, and Dreamhost).
Those two types of companies are very different and should be regulated very differently.
> Should we stop linking to all information on all of these platforms because some of the information is undesirable to some people?
Um, yes?
Links to social media vaporize regularly. If it isn't worth the effort to pull and host onto a less ephemeral medium, was it really worth sharing at all?
For example, should a male convict who identifies as a woman be incarcerated in the female prison estate or the male one? There's not really room for several models of sex and gender in answering that question, as there's a single choice to be made with two mutually exclusive options.
One model per space. For example, the answer to "given how much testosterone is now in their body, which gender sports team should this F2M person be on?" is different to "which do we need to screen them for, testicular cancer or cervical cancer?"
> For example, should a male convict who identifies as a woman be incarcerated in the female prison estate or the male one? There's not really room for several models of sex and gender in answering that question, as there's a single choice to be made with two mutually exclusive options.
Four[0] options, if you think outside the box.
Ideally, I would have my prisons set up with enough guards that this doesn't matter. As I don't live in the ideal world, I would also have a[0] trans estate for those who have begun but not yet completed transitioning, and those who have completed a transition would be in whatever the new gender is.
[0] or +1, if M2F != F2M while transitioning
I assume your activity mean you must be filtered in a bucket that shows you those things, because I never encounter such tweets in my timeline.
Most twitter users like it, and didn't even attempt to move to another platform.
I personally tried substack notes, mastodon and bluesky, and none of them bring 0.1% of the activity and interesting things that used to happen on twitter.
Now twitter is less interesting than before, but it still the only candidate that is worth my time. Even reddit is slowly becoming meh.
I'm certain that the new generation, however, is creating their own wonderland in a place I'm not active in. That's how we got twitter started, it's usually the young that stir those things.
Maybe I am misreading your post, but why does it matter if people behave in a certain way en masse, when the majority of the personal impact is based on personal behavior.
I wish Chrome would just let me have the damn button. I'm not a five year old.
0.0.0.0 platform.twitter.com
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?
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38825520
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.
It wasn't advertisers, it was apple, they'd been delisted from the app store, and getting rid of the NSFW material was part of the deal that apple would allow them back with.
https://twiiit.com/
to find independent nitter servers that can show tweets of the few academics I still want to follow.
Now Twitter might soon break also these small third party servers but for the moment, they still work.
Either Twitter opens back up or segments trickle off the platform.
I used nitter only because it loaded faster and displyed raw cronological order.
Life existed before Twitter was created. You can do it.
I’m not saying there’s a solution that’s good either or there needs to be a good solution. It’s a private business and there are all sorts of shitburger private businesses building golden walls around important content only available on their crappy platform and there’s no alternatives other than submit to their exploitation or remain ignorant in the world of subjects that are important to you.
But it would be nice if there were alternatives between brutal exploitation and unrequited ignorance. But heading over to mastodon or whatever doesn’t help you read “important thread about X discovery” or whatever since the content is singular and only exists on twitter.
Personally HN is the only social media like platform I use, and I have no interest in maintaining the energy levels to participate in the others. I’m just a passive observer of specific pieces of content in those platforms.
I see this being said a lot, even by some of my own contacts who insist on occasionally sending me links to things on twitter¹, but I'm not convinced there is really much of worth on there that isn't available elsewhere. What is uniquely on there that I might possibly care about isn't, IMO, worth being associated with or exposed to the rest.
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[1] I used to use nitter to view such things, but stopped that many moons ago and ask if they have any other source, or if it is a joke maybe download/screenshot and forward that way.
You might have a tiny bit of friction in discoverability but it isn't hard to spread the word when it is about local agencies/administrations.
I'd love if they would set up some ActivityPub something under their own domain that I could subscribe to :/
some examples are the european commission and frenchgov mastodon instances:
https://social.network.europa.eu
https://social.numerique.gouv.fr
I am pretty sure other countries are doing the same or are considering it. Also many NGOs have a fediverse presence.
I actually wish the UN had acquired twitter as a global public good than baby man boy.
It's ok for people to say, "I like how it was before."
People that create twitter accounts do so because they want reach. They want to be able to publish freely, to the internet, to share ideas, information they have, memes, whatever. But now, their reach is limited to other twitter accounts. Their voice is no longer public on the internet.
Twitter has some inertia that will carry this new model for now, there's a lot of twitter accounts, so many that most people won't know the difference at first. But as time goes on and people want to make things public and people slowly stop posting twitter links everywhere because they're useless (only useful to people with twitter accounts, so why share them outside of twitter in the first place) and every reference to something on twitter becomes a screenshot, people will look for alternatives to broadcast their thoughts.
Twitter is supposed to be a website where people can share ideas. You need an account to share ofc, but it's still supposed to be a website, you go there and read things. That's not possible anymore. Reading what someone has to say is only "using it" in the most tenuous sense. Using twitter is posting to it. People being able to read what you say is the whole point. They think they're forcing the whole world to get twitter accounts, but what they're really doing is forcing twitter users to share their ideas in more than one place, it's not going to turn out good for the company in the long run.
Is this necessarily true? At this point, I would figure that people who continue to publish on Twitter are aware of its restrictions and continue to communicate there with that knowledge. If anything, one could argue that trying to access Twitter content without an account is what's actually inappropriate here, as posters can no longer trust the guarantees of the platform.
> Twitter is supposed to be a website where people can share ideas.
Twitter used to be a website where people can share ideas. Twitter currently is a website where people can share ideas with other Twitter users. If you post on Twitter now with the intention of being truly public on the internet, I'd say you're using the wrong tool for the job. Whether that's a good business decision or not is irrelevant; the fact is that Twitter has changed its purpose, and users should update their expectations accordingly, however they see fit.
Your point about other users potentially not understanding the change is well-taken, and some of the other comments in this thread prove it (like a city's police department communicating exclusively via Twitter), but trying to make an open platform out of one that's fundamentally not (anymore, at least) seems like the wrong way to solve the problem.
Sorry, my public officials seem to be using it as an official communications platform. For many people, it is in fact mandatory.
>You can find content elsewhere online.
Not if someone sends you a link to a twitter thread and you can only see the first tweet without logging in. You can only see that content right there.
> I have an account that I use solely for reading. The overwhelming number of similar comments actually makes me want to use it more.
This attitude will make you fit right in there.
Oof
I don't believe that anyone but Elon Musk use twitter as its only communicatuon platform.
Also: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/ (which includes a news section)
I said "only" and you moved it to "primary".
Proving it to be his only source is likely impossible to do, but also has little value (do you want to learn the latest news now or in a weeks time when secondary sources catch up?)
Aside from that, critical information is not exclusively posted on Twitter, although it used to be "locked" behind a radio or a TV receiver. An online account is not the insurmountable hurdle that you paint it as.
You could get user tracking added by a company called Nielsen but they actually paid you a small sum for your data.
I think this is quite different.
I didn't use Twitter for the better part of the last decade and don't feel like I missed anything important. Idem with Facebook that I haven't touched in over ten years. If I cared enough about defeating trackers I could spin up a personal Nitter instance with a pseudonymous account, otherwise I see it as the price to pay to have access to such a large volume of information instantaneously, and I would rather be tracked by private interests than by the government.
I also find it frustrating when any organization, government or otherwise, only publishes information on restricted channels, but that is nothing new.
Then we agree :)
Why is it surprizing? What's there to understand? It's web. Twitter used to be a decent web citizen, and allowed you to read its posts like you would read web pages. I don't want an account on Mastodon; yet I can read content posted to Mastodon. I don't want an account on Bluesky; yet I can read content posted to Bluesky. Twitter used to be like that, and we got used to it, and now it's not, and it's infuriating.
There is content on Twitter that is not available anywhere else. It frequently breaks news faster than any other source, and there are many high profile posters who use it as their only broadcast source. Some memorable examples include the FTX and OpenAI fiascos.
The website isn't stellar, but it is functional. Lists are a great feature to separate content into custom feeds.
Maybe there will be something in the future that can serve as an alternative, but there is none currently.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[0] The site desperately trying to be known as Χ
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
I'm also eyeing https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/trab-tweet-reporter... for rapid block+report of the crud that accumulates on various posts, and pondering how much hassle it would be to port to firefox.
I haven't actively been on Twitter since July, but after he essentially removed the majority of moderation staff after he bought the place, reporting people is basically a non-working feature anyway. I remember getting a notice on someone I reported 3 months after the fact.
Click drop down, click report
Tab x 3, Down x 5, Tab, Enter, Tab x 2, Enter
That reports a user or tweet as spam and blocks them. Currently.
Reporting was never that effective anyway but if something gets -enough- reports it seems to help, so I don't mind the extra keypresses.
https://docs.rsshub.app/
FYI: That's not official, nitter.net was, and there are other instances of Nitter that still work.
https://status.d420.de/