8 ms·

Nitter: Alternative Twitter Front-End

274 points by ducktective 5y ago

User23 5y ago
I’m a little sad to see this on the front page, because even though it’s just a matter of time before Twitter nixes this workaround for their recent user hostile change, it might have otherwise lasted a bit longer.
- Tiberium 5y ago
  Nitter has existed for roughly 2 years already and I think Twitter knows about it even without this HN post :)
foresto 5y ago
Quick and dirty bookmarklet that will replace twitter links on the current page with equivalent nitter links, or if already on a twitter page, redirect to nitter: http://ix.io/3wSM http://ix.io/3wSM To use: Create a browser bookmark with its URL field set to the contents of the above ix.io page. Then, when on a page with twitter links, click your new bookmarklet before clicking the links. Title bar text will briefly say what the bookmarklet did.
jchw 5y ago
When Nitter first came around, it was incredible. It really goes to show just how easy it would be for Twitter to provide a fast and accessible version of their site if that was their goal. Too bad it isn’t and Nitter instances will forever run into rate limiting.
- userbinator 5y ago
  Ditto for YouTube - I remember being able to watch videos on it 10 years ago, with even older hardware and software, and the site was far more responsive than it is now. Yet it seems if you tell the average web developer that those sites should be accessible with software and hardware from that era, or even older in the case of Twitter (rendering short snippets of text and some small images doesn't require the latest technology, seriously), they'll become confused or indignant, or try to use some absurd argument to justify it. Twitter and YouTube are great examples of a lot of the disturbing trends in web development today. Whatever it is, it's not "progress"! I don't "contribute" to either one, nor do I have an account; I just go there to read or watch what others have contributed.
- sysadm1n 5y ago
  > how easy it would be for Twitter to provide a fast and accessible version of their site if that was their goal You can spoof your useragent to a mobile handset and visit https://mobile.twitter.com/ https://mobile.twitter.com/ if you like a more bare-bones Twitter interface.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    Yes, but as of last December (I believe Dec. 15), it still required JS to be turned on.
- Acrobatic_Road 5y ago
  >Too bad it isn’t and Nitter instances will forever run into rate limiting. Not if you run your own for yourself.
- leephillips 5y ago
  Page says “Uses Twitter's unofficial API (no rate limits or developer account required)”. What is this unofficial API?
  - terafo 5y ago
    I would guess that it's some kind of reverse-engineered internal API that official apps use.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
    It means using the "guest token" (gt) for sending GraphQL queries. The gt is public and is distributed via the twitter.com public web page. The gt is the same for every member of the public. To see the gt, read the contents of twitter.com For example, using Chrome chrome view-source:mobile.twitter.com Ctrl-F gt= or curl curl https://mobile.twitter.com|grep -o gt=[0-9]* To retrieve tweets three steps are required: 1. retrieve the "guest token" (gt), 2. retrieve the "REST ID" (rest_id) for the twitter.com user and 3. submit a GraphQL query to retrieve the user's tweets. Javascript provided by Twitter in the twitter.com can do these three steps automatically (but this requires using a Javascript-enabled browser), or it can be done without a browser, e.g., with a different scripting language (personally I use the shell). For example, some folks use Python: https://pypi.org/project/twint/ https://pypi.org/project/twint/
    - littlestymaar 5y ago
      Wow! But there must be some kind of IP based rate limiting or something, right? At least for DDoS protection even if it's not intended to prevent scrapping.
  - jchw 5y ago
    Never have I been more happy to be wrong. It used to be impacted by rate limiting quite a bit, but it looks like the situation has improved, probably due to this unofficial API.
- zedeus 5y ago
  The old rate limit errors were false flags caused by a bug in the API token parser. Nitter instances have yet to run into a real rate limit.
  - jchw 5y ago
    I see. Thanks for the information.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
Old discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21849744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21849744
- dang 5y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: Nitter: Alternative Twitter Front-End - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21849744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21849744 - Dec 2019 (38 comments)
argvargc 5y ago
Could this be used as a base to fork the existing ecosystem away from centralised control and back to its users? Say using decentralised storage and a synched side chain?
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  You can definitely follow Twitter users. There's BirdsiteLive, a Twitter->Fediverse bridge which allows following Twitter accounts by reference from Mastodon (or any other Fediverse server). I'm using that to follow a small handful of users. https://github.com/NicolasConstant/BirdsiteLive/blob/master/INSTALLATION.md https://github.com/NicolasConstant/BirdsiteLive/blob/master/... Nitter also supports RSS, so you can follow Twitter accounts in your feedreader. What you can't do in either is reply back to Twitter profiles. BirdsiteLive sets the bridged toots (equivalent of tweets) as private, which on Mastodon renders as unsharable.
- 0-_-0 5y ago
  That would be amazing. Even an opt-in system that automatically mirrors your tweets to Mastodon or something would be useful.
- ruined 5y ago
  twitter ratelimits nitter servers, so you'd need every individual user (or a good portion of users) running a personal server and then you'd have to collate the data somehow. and at that level of effort it would be easier to just convince people to use mastodon.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    It can work as a migration path for those on the fence, and that could still work in a decentralized manner. Example: I run a Mastodon instance on communick.com. I am thinking of running a nitter instance AND a secondary instance of Mastodon (or Pleroma) that acts as twitter mirror. I can then let users of the main communick instance to follow people on twitter, but still keeping them inside the Fediverse. The idea gets a bit more complicated if we want to make it two-way bridge, but I believe that can be done with a bit of Pleroma's MRF magic. The beauty of this solution is that it does not require any change from those that have no interest in moving out of Twitter, but it does break the garden walls.
debarshri 5y ago
Is it just me who thinks UI/UX of the web app feels like MySpace?
- Lammy 5y ago
  I choose to interpret this as praise and hope that was intended :)
ruined 5y ago
privacy redirect is a browser extension that can automatically redirect twitter links to the nitter instance of your choice. it also handles youtube->invidious, instagram->bibliogram, reddit->teddit, and more firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-redir... chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-redirect/pmcmeagblkinmogikoikkdjiligflglb https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-redirect/p...
- clircle 5y ago
  Nice! I'll give this a shot.
- karlzt 5y ago
  There's also 'UntrackMe' for Android: https://fedilab.app/wiki/untrackme/ https://fedilab.app/wiki/untrackme/
- gizdan 5y ago
  It's a shame Mozilla butchered Firefox mobile, cos this still doesn't work on it.
  - ffmobile 5y ago
    This is a funny comment to read from Firefox Mobile. Works fine for me.
  - syrrim 5y ago
    Werks on my machine. There's an anal process to enable it, and I think it only works in beta/fennec, but it works.
  - the_third_wave 5y ago
    It does work on Firefox Android but the extension is not part of the default set. You need to use a version of Firefox that supports Custom Add-on Collections like a Nightly build or the F-Droid Fennec build. Once you've got this installed you need to enable the debug menu by tapping the Firefox logo on the 'About Firefox' screen five times (see [1] for more info), add the Firefox ID and repo name for a repo with the required extension in the 'Custom Add-on collection' section and install the extension the normal way. Luckily the author of PrivacyRedirect has created just such a repo [2] which you can you to install the extension without the need for a Firefox ID (which I do not have and do not want, I'm still waiting for an easy way to run a Firefox auth/sync server on my own hardware) or having to create such a repo yourself. Once installed you'll quickly find out the 'More options' page - on which you can configure which servers are used for redirection - does not appear. Fortunately the actual URL is entered in the location bar, it just doesn't open the page. Simply press the button, then close the 'Settings' page using the arrow on the top-left of the screen, then select the location bar (which should now contain a moz-extension: URL) and press enter on the keyboard. The extension works fine, at least for me, on Firefox Developer Nightly on Android. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extension-support-in-firefox-for-android-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio... [2] https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect/issues/140#issuecomment-776325477 https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect/issues/140#...
superkuh 5y ago
The ability to get RSS feeds of twitter users and twitter keyword searches from nitter is the only reason I still pay attention to that ecosystem at all. It took a long time to find a semi-stable nitter mirror but things have been running smoothly for almost a year.
RenoCommenter 5y ago
This might be a shot in the dark, but: is there a Twitter "frontend"* that is as clean/compact as HN or even old.reddit? I get it was made with phones in mind, and that its primary use case is real-time news and short messages from influencers, but, as someone who primarily consumes social media on a desktop and whose interactions with the platform consist of reading tweets from niche accounts, i've found the way Twitter displays conversations to be -much- worse than what we have here on HN. *I use "frontend" quite liberally here, i mean, honestly maybe a browser plugin that shrinks a tweet to half its size, indents replies much like HN comments are indented, and loads more tweets in a single page, maybe that would be enough to make Twitter 90% more pleasant to use.
- djhn 5y ago
  Tweetdeck offers a great interface and it's also an official client run by Twitter. Better information density. I have 20+ different columns with different focuses or "priorities".
- hobo_mark 5y ago
  There certainly are. I quickly wrote one 'mvp' for myself and it is the primary way I interact with twitter since several years, but it does the bare minimum I need and I never had time to clean it up and publish it (also I do not know whether anyone would pay for a cleaned up, purely chronological twitter feed with configurable filters?)
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    Probably wouldn't pay for it. Release it as open source.
alpb 5y ago
If anyone's trying to tame their twitter, I'd recommend `refined-twitter` chrome extension and `tweak-new-twitter` extension. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tweak-new-twitter/kpmjjdhbcfebfjgdnpjagcndoelnidfj https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tweak-new-twitter/... These two significantly help me remove useless features (e.g. Trends, Moments, recommendations) and even stuff like retweets which I mostly don't care about.
zigradett 5y ago
It's fun how it works the first three times, then less fun when it complains about being "rate limited" on the fourth time.
- zedeus 5y ago
  Any rate limit errors are false flags caused by bugs, they aren't related to load or real rate limits
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    I'm not sure why this is down-voted despite it being posted by what looks like the original developer according to their username: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
    - zedeus 5y ago
      I have no idea, maybe "false flag" was too incorrect? You're right, I am.
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
        "False flag" is pretty close to loaded language these days. "Spurious error" would probably be a better term. Thanks, BTW, amazing tool.

274 points by ducktective 5y ago

I’m a little sad to see this on the front page, because even though it’s just a matter of time before Twitter nixes this workaround for their recent user hostile change, it might have otherwise lasted a bit longer.

Tiberium 5y ago
Nitter has existed for roughly 2 years already and I think Twitter knows about it even without this HN post :)

foresto 5y ago

Quick and dirty bookmarklet that will replace twitter links on the current page with equivalent nitter links, or if already on a twitter page, redirect to nitter: http://ix.io/3wSM http://ix.io/3wSM To use: Create a browser bookmark with its URL field set to the contents of the above ix.io page. Then, when on a page with twitter links, click your new bookmarklet before clicking the links. Title bar text will briefly say what the bookmarklet did.

jchw 5y ago

When Nitter first came around, it was incredible. It really goes to show just how easy it would be for Twitter to provide a fast and accessible version of their site if that was their goal. Too bad it isn’t and Nitter instances will forever run into rate limiting.

userbinator 5y ago
Ditto for YouTube - I remember being able to watch videos on it 10 years ago, with even older hardware and software, and the site was far more responsive than it is now. Yet it seems if you tell the average web developer that those sites should be accessible with software and hardware from that era, or even older in the case of Twitter (rendering short snippets of text and some small images doesn't require the latest technology, seriously), they'll become confused or indignant, or try to use some absurd argument to justify it. Twitter and YouTube are great examples of a lot of the disturbing trends in web development today. Whatever it is, it's not "progress"! I don't "contribute" to either one, nor do I have an account; I just go there to read or watch what others have contributed.
sysadm1n 5y ago
> how easy it would be for Twitter to provide a fast and accessible version of their site if that was their goal You can spoof your useragent to a mobile handset and visit https://mobile.twitter.com/ https://mobile.twitter.com/ if you like a more bare-bones Twitter interface.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  Yes, but as of last December (I believe Dec. 15), it still required JS to be turned on.
Acrobatic_Road 5y ago
>Too bad it isn’t and Nitter instances will forever run into rate limiting. Not if you run your own for yourself.
leephillips 5y ago
Page says “Uses Twitter's unofficial API (no rate limits or developer account required)”. What is this unofficial API?
- terafo 5y ago
  I would guess that it's some kind of reverse-engineered internal API that official apps use.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  It means using the "guest token" (gt) for sending GraphQL queries. The gt is public and is distributed via the twitter.com public web page. The gt is the same for every member of the public. To see the gt, read the contents of twitter.com For example, using Chrome chrome view-source:mobile.twitter.com Ctrl-F gt= or curl curl https://mobile.twitter.com|grep -o gt=[0-9]* To retrieve tweets three steps are required: 1. retrieve the "guest token" (gt), 2. retrieve the "REST ID" (rest_id) for the twitter.com user and 3. submit a GraphQL query to retrieve the user's tweets. Javascript provided by Twitter in the twitter.com can do these three steps automatically (but this requires using a Javascript-enabled browser), or it can be done without a browser, e.g., with a different scripting language (personally I use the shell). For example, some folks use Python: https://pypi.org/project/twint/ https://pypi.org/project/twint/
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    Wow! But there must be some kind of IP based rate limiting or something, right? At least for DDoS protection even if it's not intended to prevent scrapping.
- jchw 5y ago
  Never have I been more happy to be wrong. It used to be impacted by rate limiting quite a bit, but it looks like the situation has improved, probably due to this unofficial API.
zedeus 5y ago
The old rate limit errors were false flags caused by a bug in the API token parser. Nitter instances have yet to run into a real rate limit.
- jchw 5y ago
  I see. Thanks for the information.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

Old discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21849744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21849744

dang 5y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: Nitter: Alternative Twitter Front-End - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21849744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21849744 - Dec 2019 (38 comments)

argvargc 5y ago

Could this be used as a base to fork the existing ecosystem away from centralised control and back to its users? Say using decentralised storage and a synched side chain?

dredmorbius 5y ago
You can definitely follow Twitter users. There's BirdsiteLive, a Twitter->Fediverse bridge which allows following Twitter accounts by reference from Mastodon (or any other Fediverse server). I'm using that to follow a small handful of users. https://github.com/NicolasConstant/BirdsiteLive/blob/master/INSTALLATION.md https://github.com/NicolasConstant/BirdsiteLive/blob/master/... Nitter also supports RSS, so you can follow Twitter accounts in your feedreader. What you can't do in either is reply back to Twitter profiles. BirdsiteLive sets the bridged toots (equivalent of tweets) as private, which on Mastodon renders as unsharable.
0-_-0 5y ago
That would be amazing. Even an opt-in system that automatically mirrors your tweets to Mastodon or something would be useful.
ruined 5y ago
twitter ratelimits nitter servers, so you'd need every individual user (or a good portion of users) running a personal server and then you'd have to collate the data somehow. and at that level of effort it would be easier to just convince people to use mastodon.
- rglullis 5y ago
  It can work as a migration path for those on the fence, and that could still work in a decentralized manner. Example: I run a Mastodon instance on communick.com. I am thinking of running a nitter instance AND a secondary instance of Mastodon (or Pleroma) that acts as twitter mirror. I can then let users of the main communick instance to follow people on twitter, but still keeping them inside the Fediverse. The idea gets a bit more complicated if we want to make it two-way bridge, but I believe that can be done with a bit of Pleroma's MRF magic. The beauty of this solution is that it does not require any change from those that have no interest in moving out of Twitter, but it does break the garden walls.

debarshri 5y ago

Is it just me who thinks UI/UX of the web app feels like MySpace?

Lammy 5y ago
I choose to interpret this as praise and hope that was intended :)

ruined 5y ago

privacy redirect is a browser extension that can automatically redirect twitter links to the nitter instance of your choice. it also handles youtube->invidious, instagram->bibliogram, reddit->teddit, and more firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-redir... chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-redirect/pmcmeagblkinmogikoikkdjiligflglb https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-redirect/p...

clircle 5y ago
Nice! I'll give this a shot.
karlzt 5y ago
There's also 'UntrackMe' for Android: https://fedilab.app/wiki/untrackme/ https://fedilab.app/wiki/untrackme/
gizdan 5y ago
It's a shame Mozilla butchered Firefox mobile, cos this still doesn't work on it.
- ffmobile 5y ago
  This is a funny comment to read from Firefox Mobile. Works fine for me.
- syrrim 5y ago
  Werks on my machine. There's an anal process to enable it, and I think it only works in beta/fennec, but it works.
- the_third_wave 5y ago
  It does work on Firefox Android but the extension is not part of the default set. You need to use a version of Firefox that supports Custom Add-on Collections like a Nightly build or the F-Droid Fennec build. Once you've got this installed you need to enable the debug menu by tapping the Firefox logo on the 'About Firefox' screen five times (see [1] for more info), add the Firefox ID and repo name for a repo with the required extension in the 'Custom Add-on collection' section and install the extension the normal way. Luckily the author of PrivacyRedirect has created just such a repo [2] which you can you to install the extension without the need for a Firefox ID (which I do not have and do not want, I'm still waiting for an easy way to run a Firefox auth/sync server on my own hardware) or having to create such a repo yourself. Once installed you'll quickly find out the 'More options' page - on which you can configure which servers are used for redirection - does not appear. Fortunately the actual URL is entered in the location bar, it just doesn't open the page. Simply press the button, then close the 'Settings' page using the arrow on the top-left of the screen, then select the location bar (which should now contain a moz-extension: URL) and press enter on the keyboard. The extension works fine, at least for me, on Firefox Developer Nightly on Android. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extension-support-in-firefox-for-android-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio... [2] https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect/issues/140#issuecomment-776325477 https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect/issues/140#...

superkuh 5y ago

The ability to get RSS feeds of twitter users and twitter keyword searches from nitter is the only reason I still pay attention to that ecosystem at all. It took a long time to find a semi-stable nitter mirror but things have been running smoothly for almost a year.

RenoCommenter 5y ago

This might be a shot in the dark, but: is there a Twitter "frontend"* that is as clean/compact as HN or even old.reddit? I get it was made with phones in mind, and that its primary use case is real-time news and short messages from influencers, but, as someone who primarily consumes social media on a desktop and whose interactions with the platform consist of reading tweets from niche accounts, i've found the way Twitter displays conversations to be -much- worse than what we have here on HN. *I use "frontend" quite liberally here, i mean, honestly maybe a browser plugin that shrinks a tweet to half its size, indents replies much like HN comments are indented, and loads more tweets in a single page, maybe that would be enough to make Twitter 90% more pleasant to use.

djhn 5y ago
Tweetdeck offers a great interface and it's also an official client run by Twitter. Better information density. I have 20+ different columns with different focuses or "priorities".
hobo_mark 5y ago
There certainly are. I quickly wrote one 'mvp' for myself and it is the primary way I interact with twitter since several years, but it does the bare minimum I need and I never had time to clean it up and publish it (also I do not know whether anyone would pay for a cleaned up, purely chronological twitter feed with configurable filters?)
- edgyquant 5y ago
  Probably wouldn't pay for it. Release it as open source.

alpb 5y ago

If anyone's trying to tame their twitter, I'd recommend `refined-twitter` chrome extension and `tweak-new-twitter` extension. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tweak-new-twitter/kpmjjdhbcfebfjgdnpjagcndoelnidfj https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tweak-new-twitter/... These two significantly help me remove useless features (e.g. Trends, Moments, recommendations) and even stuff like retweets which I mostly don't care about.

zigradett 5y ago

It's fun how it works the first three times, then less fun when it complains about being "rate limited" on the fourth time.

zedeus 5y ago
Any rate limit errors are false flags caused by bugs, they aren't related to load or real rate limits
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  I'm not sure why this is down-voted despite it being posted by what looks like the original developer according to their username: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
  - zedeus 5y ago
    I have no idea, maybe "false flag" was too incorrect? You're right, I am.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      "False flag" is pretty close to loaded language these days. "Spurious error" would probably be a better term. Thanks, BTW, amazing tool.