6 ms·

There's two distinct Nitter use cases I need to replace. 1. Someone drops a link to Twitter. Twitter hides threads and throws items in some weird non-chronolog

• andy99 3y ago
  Right, all the "just don't use it" comments miss the point. I used Nitter specifically because I don't use twitter, so I could see the contents of a link that was being posted or discussed. I suppose a solution could be "ignore a large swath of posts and links and discussions" which is basically what I do, but sometimes it's nice to have the option to look at them. Same as if you don't use MS Word, someone might still occasionally send you a word document and it's nice to have a way to open it without having to install Word.
  • toomuchtodo 3y ago
    +1. Need something like archive.today/.is for Twitter so you can rip and archive the content that might not live elsewhere. Grab it, stick it in Wayback Machine, return a Wayback url.
    • madamelic 3y ago
      +1 on Reddit as well. 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.
      • ben_w 3y ago
        For the moment, old.reddit.com is sill useful. For the moment.
        • pimlottc 3y ago
          It’s dying a slow death through neglect. Image posts don’t work correctly, image comments don’t show up, and the dirent comment links generated from www don’t work on old
          • apercu 3y ago
            Still better than logging in, using the new web app or downloading the app. 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.
          • hnick 3y ago
            There's also a thing lately where link targets posted on New Reddit (I assume, since mine aren't doing this) are all lower cased, while the link text is correct as you typed. This breaks the links for some sites. In addition to the issues with underscores getting extra slash-escapes.
      • thaumasiotes 3y ago
        > Reddit doesn't have login walls yet There isn't one on the root directory, but Reddit has plenty of login walls.
        • dpassens 3y ago
          On New Reddit. I haven't seen any on Old Reddit yet.
          • thaumasiotes 3y ago
            There's not a difference. If a subreddit requires you to be logged in, then it requires you to be logged in.
    • pogue 3y ago
      The EFF just recently wrote an article with instructions on how to persevere & archive your own tweets on the Wayback Machine, but it involves exporting your own backup and uploading it to them. Since the API is completely cut off from Twitter, there is no official way to backup other people's accounts. 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-account https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/01/save-your-twitter-acco...
      • toomuchtodo 3y ago
        If the scraping model is impaired due to aggressive countermeasures, end game are browser extensions that scrape as users view the site and ship scraped data back to a processor, similar to recap the law (uses an extension to scrape the PACER legal database and ship digital artifacts to the Internet Archive). Care will need to be taken around potentially sensitive data that could be shipped if users are logged in. https://free.law/recap https://free.law/recap
        • pogue 3y ago
          Oh, that's a very cool project! How successful has it been? If it wasn't for Sci-hub that would be a great idea for the scientific publishing world as well.
          • toomuchtodo 3y ago
            Very successful. Millions of court filings extracted and indexed, and a crucial component in driving down PACER costs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24086570 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-veterans-legal-services-program-v-united-states/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4214664/52/15/national-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085158 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/federal-circuit-affirms-limits-on-how-government-uses-pacer-fees https://news.bloomberglaw.com/white-collar-and-criminal-law/...
  • PaulHoule 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • wl 3y ago
      If the content we wanted was on Mastodon, we would not be having this conversation. Your comment is deeply unhelpful.
      • PaulHoule 3y ago
        [flagged]
        • ben_w 3y ago
          You're looking at a vase and seeing two faces side-on. "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?
          • PaulHoule 3y ago
            It's like asking a Christian if he can see the devil.
        • wl 3y ago
          The issue isn't me posting Twitter links here or elsewhere. It's what to do when others do.
          • PaulHoule 3y ago
            [flagged]
            • kps 3y ago
              Much as I dislike login walls, Mastodon still doesn't respect `:prefers-color-scheme`, so they're not my friends either.
  • carlosjobim 3y ago
    Why don't you make a twitter account and install a duplicate web browser that you only use to open twitter links (and other crap that you don't want polluting your normal browser)?
    • xigoi 3y ago
      I don’t want the company to have any information about me.
      • carlosjobim 3y ago
        That's why I suggested you use a burner browser.
        • MilaM 3y ago
          You also need a burner phone number. Otherwise it will be difficult to get an account.
          • carlosjobim 3y ago
            I didn't know you needed a phone number for twitter. Yeah, then it's difficult.
        • smaudet 3y ago
          These systems are completely losing propositions. My data is worth $$$$, my time is worth $$$, and I have to spend $$-$$$ in order to safely interop with them? 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.
      • UncleOxidant 3y ago
        I also don't want to give them any traffic.
    • amenhotep 3y ago
      Spite, personally.
• fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I’d also vote for 3) the user interface is fast, responsive, and not total garbage inflicted with man boy ego whim randomly mutating a decade of questionable product management decisions
• prvc 3y ago
  In addition to a chronological feed, Nitter provided pagination and link de-obfuscation. Would be nice to get that back somehow.
• prmoustache 3y ago
  1) Ask people to send screenshots of the tweets instead of links. I think this has naturally been happening a lot more over the years anyway and people will just get used to do that. 2) I guess those people will slowly realize they have lost most of their audience anyway.
  • apercu 3y ago
    Right? (#2), I can't be so far in the minority to just not be willing to bother with Twitter. There is really very little content that will compel me to have a bad time consuming it. Is it 1 out of 10? 2 out of 10? More? Even if it's just 10% that's still significant. Just my $0.02 of course.
  • promiseofbeans 3y ago
    Kinda sad that we have to send screenshots since it hurts accessibility, but I guess that's less of an issue with local OCR on most devices these days.
    • schiffern 3y ago
      Imagine the conversation just a few short decades ago... "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??
  • g-b-r 3y ago
    You should ask people to send a textual copy before a screenshot, OCRs are not nearly as conveniently accessible and effective to justify requiring them
• speps 3y ago
  For 1: replace twitter.com with vxtwitter.com.
• 8note 3y ago
  For 2, you might want to send them an email asking them to post said content elsewhere. 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?
• godelski 3y ago
  > I need an unfucked UI. 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.
• creer 3y ago
  Might archive.something eventually work on twitter? (To allow quotes and fixed views for use within HN discussions?)