4 ms·

This is just an instance shutting down, not all of the Nitter instances. Sort of a deceptive title.

by pard68 3y ago

koito17 3y ago
The important part is the linked GitHub comment from the primary maintainer (and owner) of the Nitter project. To save readers a click Guest accounts have been removed, they weren't just led to believe that. With real accounts getting rate limited immediately and likely banned, I don't see any path forward for Nitter. Source: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983#issuecomment-1913362376 https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983#issuecomment-191... The way I interpret this comment is that all public Nitter instances are at risk of becoming inoperable (at their current scale).
- mastazi 3y ago
  > (and owner) of Nitter. I would say that Nitter as a whole is not owned by anyone, that person is the owner of one of the Nitter instances, in addition to being the primary maintainer of the project as you correctly stated. I agree with the second part of your comment about all instances being in danger. It is unfortunately a common problem faced by many privacy-respecting frontends (Nitter, Libreddit, Proxigram, Piped etc)
  - koito17 3y ago
    I really meant to say "owner of the Nitter project", but you are nonetheless correct about ownership of Nitter instances. I have edited my post.
    - drewdevault 3y ago
      It's also factually incorrect to suppose that this person owns the Nitter project, too. There's no CLA so the copyright is held in common by all of the contributors. Free software projects don't have owners, they have maintainers, and the maintainers are a social construction rather than a matter of property law.
      - plg94 3y ago
        But zdeus is the 'owner' of the nitter project on Github. That's their official word for it, even though it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the legal concept of (copyright) ownership. And then there's 'owner' in the software dev sense, i.e. the one that ultimately decides which direction the project takes, what patches to merge etc. is sometimes referred to as "product owner".
      - mistrial9 3y ago
        sometimes yes, but not always, no
      - gunapologist99 3y ago
        This seems factually incorrect, but in a nuanced way. The copyright owner of a code is the one listed as such. In cases of multiple contributors, each owns the copyright to their individual contributions. For projects with shared contributions, it's more accurate to say each necessary part has its own copyright owner, rather than a common ownership. Free software projects do have copyright owners, which can be entities like non-profits or companies. This ownership is crucial for legal standing in copyright infringement cases, except for public domain code, which isn't copyrighted. It's wise to have a Contributing.md or similar, stating that contributors affirm their creation is original, free from patent issues, and they agree to license their contribution under the project's terms. Without such agreements, there's a risk contributors might withdraw their code, claiming it wasn't licensed under the project's terms, potentially leaving gaps in the project. Simply hosting code on a site with a common license doesn't automatically apply that license to your code unless you explicitly agree to it.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        > the maintainers are a social construction rather than a matter of property law. Property law itself is a social construction of exactly the same kind. A single person or group owning a FLOSS project is also a typical, almost universal case. There's always the person or team, and the canonical repository, that represents what "Emacs" is, or what "sr.ht" is, etc. In practice, for everything except legal issues, this is the same as legal ownership.
- riedel 3y ago
  I counted 10 instances recently going down on the status page. There is at least a correlation, probably a cause.
nubinetwork 3y ago
Except half of the instances are rate limited, so unless you know the username or tweet you are looking for, good luck searching for anything.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  Oh, does it mostly affect searching? 99% of the time I touch twitter, it's to go to a specific tweet or timeline.
  - nubinetwork 3y ago
    I don't know for sure, I've been watching a couple accounts that have been dormant for a while, but several instances have broken search, so maybe the account pages are cached. Edit: I just checked an instance and it seems to have tweets from the past minute or two, but if the backend accounts that drive them are getting banned, it's probably gonna tank in the upcoming weeks.
  - Truth_Wins_0x0 3y ago
    [dead]
- geor9e 3y ago
  Good to hear. I only follow specific users via nitter (via Feedbro extension)
proctrap 3y ago
This is one of the long time running instances shutting down, linking to the primary nitter author saying it's the end for all instances eventually. And providing insights from the status page. If they don't get new guest accounts, they're all going to shut down withing 30 days. It's just left over accounts and caches giving you the impression everything is fine. Don't forget the rolling DoS herds of scrapers having no more ways to do stuff on their own, which are now trying to use the remaining instances - killing even more.
amatecha 3y ago
I shouldn't have to paste this here, but: "If nothing changes, all remaining instances will go down eventually: Instances rely on guest accounts, which are valid for a certain time and of which you need a ton to run a public instance. The API for this got taken down and it doesn't look like a fluke this time."
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lapcat 3y ago
It's unfortunate that this mistaken comment is top voted. "If nothing changes, all remaining instances will go down eventually: Instances rely on guest accounts, which are valid for a certain time and of which you need a ton to run a public instance. The API for this got taken down and it doesn't look like a fluke this time."
Astraco 3y ago
nitter.cz and nitter.net are having issues and being rate limited.
dang 3y ago
The submitted title was "Nitter Is Dead". We changed it to the article title overnight, but I've since changed it to a representative sentence from the text.

This is just an instance shutting down, not all of the Nitter instances. Sort of a deceptive title.

by pard68 3y ago

This is just an instance shutting down, not all of the Nitter instances. Sort of a deceptive title.

The important part is the linked GitHub comment from the primary maintainer (and owner) of the Nitter project. To save readers a click Guest accounts have been removed, they weren't just led to believe that. With real accounts getting rate limited immediately and likely banned, I don't see any path forward for Nitter. Source: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983#issuecomment-1913362376 https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983#issuecomment-191... The way I interpret this comment is that all public Nitter instances are at risk of becoming inoperable (at their current scale).

mastazi 3y ago
> (and owner) of Nitter. I would say that Nitter as a whole is not owned by anyone, that person is the owner of one of the Nitter instances, in addition to being the primary maintainer of the project as you correctly stated. I agree with the second part of your comment about all instances being in danger. It is unfortunately a common problem faced by many privacy-respecting frontends (Nitter, Libreddit, Proxigram, Piped etc)
- koito17 3y ago
  I really meant to say "owner of the Nitter project", but you are nonetheless correct about ownership of Nitter instances. I have edited my post.
  - drewdevault 3y ago
    It's also factually incorrect to suppose that this person owns the Nitter project, too. There's no CLA so the copyright is held in common by all of the contributors. Free software projects don't have owners, they have maintainers, and the maintainers are a social construction rather than a matter of property law.
    - plg94 3y ago
      But zdeus is the 'owner' of the nitter project on Github. That's their official word for it, even though it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the legal concept of (copyright) ownership. And then there's 'owner' in the software dev sense, i.e. the one that ultimately decides which direction the project takes, what patches to merge etc. is sometimes referred to as "product owner".
    - mistrial9 3y ago
      sometimes yes, but not always, no
    - gunapologist99 3y ago
      This seems factually incorrect, but in a nuanced way. The copyright owner of a code is the one listed as such. In cases of multiple contributors, each owns the copyright to their individual contributions. For projects with shared contributions, it's more accurate to say each necessary part has its own copyright owner, rather than a common ownership. Free software projects do have copyright owners, which can be entities like non-profits or companies. This ownership is crucial for legal standing in copyright infringement cases, except for public domain code, which isn't copyrighted. It's wise to have a Contributing.md or similar, stating that contributors affirm their creation is original, free from patent issues, and they agree to license their contribution under the project's terms. Without such agreements, there's a risk contributors might withdraw their code, claiming it wasn't licensed under the project's terms, potentially leaving gaps in the project. Simply hosting code on a site with a common license doesn't automatically apply that license to your code unless you explicitly agree to it.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      > the maintainers are a social construction rather than a matter of property law. Property law itself is a social construction of exactly the same kind. A single person or group owning a FLOSS project is also a typical, almost universal case. There's always the person or team, and the canonical repository, that represents what "Emacs" is, or what "sr.ht" is, etc. In practice, for everything except legal issues, this is the same as legal ownership.
riedel 3y ago
I counted 10 instances recently going down on the status page. There is at least a correlation, probably a cause.

nubinetwork 3y ago

Except half of the instances are rate limited, so unless you know the username or tweet you are looking for, good luck searching for anything.

Dylan16807 3y ago
Oh, does it mostly affect searching? 99% of the time I touch twitter, it's to go to a specific tweet or timeline.
- nubinetwork 3y ago
  I don't know for sure, I've been watching a couple accounts that have been dormant for a while, but several instances have broken search, so maybe the account pages are cached. Edit: I just checked an instance and it seems to have tweets from the past minute or two, but if the backend accounts that drive them are getting banned, it's probably gonna tank in the upcoming weeks.
- Truth_Wins_0x0 3y ago
  [dead]
geor9e 3y ago
Good to hear. I only follow specific users via nitter (via Feedbro extension)

proctrap 3y ago

This is one of the long time running instances shutting down, linking to the primary nitter author saying it's the end for all instances eventually. And providing insights from the status page. If they don't get new guest accounts, they're all going to shut down withing 30 days. It's just left over accounts and caches giving you the impression everything is fine. Don't forget the rolling DoS herds of scrapers having no more ways to do stuff on their own, which are now trying to use the remaining instances - killing even more.

amatecha 3y ago

I shouldn't have to paste this here, but: "If nothing changes, all remaining instances will go down eventually: Instances rely on guest accounts, which are valid for a certain time and of which you need a ton to run a public instance. The API for this got taken down and it doesn't look like a fluke this time."

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lapcat 3y ago

It's unfortunate that this mistaken comment is top voted. "If nothing changes, all remaining instances will go down eventually: Instances rely on guest accounts, which are valid for a certain time and of which you need a ton to run a public instance. The API for this got taken down and it doesn't look like a fluke this time."

Astraco 3y ago

nitter.cz and nitter.net are having issues and being rate limited.

dang 3y ago

The submitted title was "Nitter Is Dead". We changed it to the article title overnight, but I've since changed it to a representative sentence from the text.