Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns

319 pointsposted 13 hours ago
by Cider9986
(codeberg.org)

113 Comments

MostlyStable

8 hours ago

The not needing an account is obviously not minor, but honestly, the UI is just better, by a lot. I made a twitter account a while ago using one of those throw away email address sites, so I have an account that I don't care about that I can use for twitter....but the experience just sucks. I don't know how any stands it, even if they don't mind needing an account.

ronsor

6 hours ago

The UI/UX is the main thing. I technically have an X-Twitter account that I rarely use, but loading plain HTML with a bit of JS beats loading a whole SPA experience just to read a post.

silverwind

6 hours ago

Yeah, the UI is the real and only reason to use Nitter. It's a very similar situation with old reddit.

throwaway27448

30 minutes ago

The only reason to use nitter is that for whatever reason twitter allows it access to its api. The UI is terrible and completely irrelevant.

OtomotO

3 hours ago

Since a couple of weeks they force you to login to use old.reddit.

My visits have dropped by about 95%

Leonard_of_Q

2 hours ago

Use Redlib [1] or one of the other alternative Reddit frontends.

[1] https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

atrus

an hour ago

At that point though, it's like why. Reddit is, well, trash. It's barely worth visiting without an account, and if you're going to make me jump through hoops to visit, it's time to accept the message of "we don't want you here" and go somewhere else.

throwaway27448

28 minutes ago

I've been making money from reddit, and for about a decade and a half and at this point, why bother? It's basically drained and what remains is of zero value.

utopiah

3 hours ago

Shows the true cost of surveillance capitalism.

throooooo

8 hours ago

Seriously. The UX/UI on Twitter has always been a dumpster fire.

ksenzee

7 hours ago

Eh. It was pretty great in 2008, when I used my spotty cell service to tweet road trip updates by texting 40404. O tempora, o mores, etc. etc.

notpushkin

5 hours ago

Haven’t had that luxury in Russia. Though being a script kiddie I’ve set up a shortcode just for myself (there were these “paid content SMS as a Service” thingies that forwarded SMS text to an HTTP endpoint you provide).

embedding-shape

an hour ago

Didn't have that luxury either, but at one point, "Twilio" was the star and poster-child of startups, with their "Guerilla marketing" and completely fresh and new roles of "developer advocates" so of course everyone and their mother had been to at least one Twilio meetup, or your local meetup with a "developer evangelist" from Twilio. Lots of us built our first SMS-capable service as a "Forward this SMS to this HTTP endpoint", I too did the SMS-to-Tweet thing as the US number didn't accept my SMSes (or wasn't available, or something).

encom

2 hours ago

All of the WWW was better in 2008. Unironically. We've all been frog-boiled into this current hellscape.

moron4hire

34 minutes ago

There was a brief moment when smartphones first came out but the rest of the world's companies weren't taking them seriously yet that was a truly brilliant time and ever since then it's been nothing but downhill.

charcircuit

4 hours ago

The X app loads posts much faster than these sites, so I find the app has a better UI.

bluecalm

6 hours ago

I think it's great. My feed is people posting tech/AI news, scientific publications, videos of rockets and self-driving cars, things made with coding agents etc. It's full of people who do meaningful work as well and you can see who they are. Dark mode, ability to easily copy images, link to posts, see posts of interesting people by going to their profile. On top of that the feed algorithm is open source and actually sane. What else would I want?

It's by far the best designed social media site out there. I know it's a low bar but still.

embedding-shape

an hour ago

> On top of that the feed algorithm is open source

Do you genuinely believe what is public is exactly what's deployed? If so, what makes that belief justified?

UqWBcuFx6NV4r

6 hours ago

Yes well if your taste in content is “elon musk” then I imagine that your experience is fantastic.

jasonvorhe

2 hours ago

I'm a nostr user first and X is lurk only but I seldomly see anything by or about Musk and so does everyone else I speak to who actually uses it.

I suspect this has become more of a meme by Mastodon/Bluesky users than anything real.

Hammershaft

2 hours ago

I understand you can still tailor a good experience, but if you create a fresh X account the density of Elon Musk posts is genuinely absurd. There's no way he isn't putting his thumb on the algorithm to boost his reach.

Also the density of pure hate & ragebait by mask-off fascist accounts! It shocks me how much of that I saw unprompted right away after making a new account recently.

TitaRusell

an hour ago

The Dutch PM for some reason uses X (or his PR agents do). There is always a lot of impotent homophobic rage coming from the retweets. It is all very sad.

But that's the US first amendment for you.

coldpie

44 minutes ago

The US first amendment has nothing to do with what a private company chooses to host on their platform. That content is there because the users and owners of the platform want it to be there.

grosswait

an hour ago

No different than an uncurated Reddit profile. You’ll get bombarded with garbage until effort is placed into the curation.

jasonvorhe

an hour ago

Weird, we must have very different definitions of "fascists".

btreecat

5 hours ago

It can't suck all that much if you're not willing to give it up.

Dylan16807

4 hours ago

It sounds to me like they did give up on using the builtin UI.

pronik

2 hours ago

I might cut into my own flesh right now, but the funny thing about that XCancel shutdown is that while the website is down, the RSS feeds still work. Almost like they've just been required to shutdown the visible website and they complied with exactly that.

embedding-shape

an hour ago

Isn't Twitter archived by Library of Congress or something similar? Can't remember the exact details, but maybe something (enforced by law even perhaps?) is depending on those feeds with punishment sufficient enough for Elon to actually listen. Or they don't actually realize those are still online, and there is some lone engineer trying their best to never raise any attention to it and we just made their day a lot worse...

arjie

8 hours ago

Yeah, but most of these will fall. I used to use one or two of these to scrape my friends' posts because I stopped using Twitter and they'd inevitably all disappear in time. It's like chasing the latest TPB. In the end, I just logged in a headless browser and told an agent to fetch daily.

Leonard_of_Q

2 hours ago

The solution is to run your own instance, create a few accounts for it to use and put it behind a reverse proxy with basic auth. Hand out logins to a few people and it will remain useable. If you put your instance out in the open it will sooner or later end up temporarily blocked - I tried this for a few years, same results every time - but smaller instances remain useable.

It isn't hard to run an instance, just park it next to your SearXNG [1], Invidious [2], Redlib [3],PeerTube, ... instances.

[1] https://github.com/searxng/searxng

[2] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

[3] https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

embedding-shape

an hour ago

> It's like chasing the latest TPB.

What do you mean? TPB been online and at the exact same URL (give or take some days/weeks around raids) for like two decades, and still has the same URL today. Might not be the same group, but not sure what "chasing" you're referring to?

sampullman

7 hours ago

That's true, but TBP has been going pretty strong for over 2 decades. It can be hard to totally shut something down, if people want it.

noduerme

7 hours ago

Sadly, the music selection has fallen off a cliff, and the rest is in a sharply downward spiral... in one sense this is because the music industry finally settled on a streaming model that most people are willing to rent, and it's also because the new generation has been brainwashed or trained out of storing their own files.

conradfr

3 hours ago

Soulseek is working fine.

But to be honest I never found TPB (or rarbg etc.) really useful for music.

tosti

5 hours ago

It's also because it's difficult to add your own magnet links.

tancop

4 hours ago

It's also because torrents are a bad fit for music. The whole protocol is designed for throughput and reliability on big downloads like movies and games, not fast start on 2MB files you don't need to split with today's broadband.

A lot of uploaders still zip everything so you can't download one song out of some album. And the discoverability is shit because DHT doesn't let you ask peers for all their torrents so you need to run a server that index multiple trackers or look things up manually.

The only alternative is Soulseek where it's a direct connection model instead of hash based. That means there are no stable IDs to get a file if the original uploader is down and users can send you anything they want like troll audio or malware.

If we want people to start pirating music again we need to make the UX as good as Spotify. That means no explicit downloads, when you click play the app gets the file from a peer, saves it to a cache then starts playing and seeding automatically. Songs and albums should be content addressed in a global namespace instead of living on trackers, and there should probably be a reputation system. I think something based on iroh blobs for content and atproto for discovery can work.

Cider9986

7 hours ago

Wdym "chasing the latest TPB"? Isn't 1337x and others better and offer a complete alternative?

Twitter is different there's many stories that are only there.

papyrus9244

5 hours ago

> Isn't 1337x and others better and offer a complete alternative?

The best way is always private trackers. They're easy to get into, easy to keep (if you're a serious and honest person), malware free, high quality content, great community, etc.

troupo

5 hours ago

> The best way is always private trackers. They're easy to get into

If they were easy to get into, they wouldn't be good

papyrus9244

5 hours ago

It's as easy as buying 1 month of seedbox for around 10 bucks.

troupo

4 hours ago

Buying a seedbox doesn't get you into a private tracker. It's a download client.

mitxela

4 hours ago

mid tier trackers partner with seedbox providers who give them kickbacks for referrals, in exchange for an account

troupo

4 hours ago

So. Easy to get into is: "some unspecified mid-tier trackers may or may not give out accounts to some unspecified seedbox providers".

It's probably easier to lurk in r/trackerinvites (or whatever it's called) hoping to snatch an invite

mitxela

4 hours ago

Yep it's not easy. Easy was a lie. The best are actually curated public trackers. TPB is not curated.

troupo

4 hours ago

Sadly, curated public ones are also harder and harder to find (for obvious reasons) :(

someonebaggy

7 hours ago

Switching torrent sites every time one gets taken down.

But why wouldn't you?

stavros

2 hours ago

I made a small service that will redirect you to a working one:

https://github.com/skorokithakis/detour, running on https://twit.0r.cx.

Just replace x.com with twit.0r.cx.

Example:

https://twit.0r.cx/Stavros/status/2096184846993314184

0points

2 hours ago

    // ==UserScript==
    // @name                   Twitter Alternative
    // @description
    // @match                  *://*.x.com/*
    // @namespace              TwitterRedir
    // @run-at                 document-start
    // ==/UserScript==
    window.location.replace("https://twit.0r.cx" + window.location.pathname + window.location.search);

raffael_de

5 hours ago

oh, that's great. i thought the project is dead.

how would you (EDIT: publicly) host such a nitter instance while avoiding the risk of legal consequences?

since old.reddit (EDIT: on mobile) is closed for visitors without an account it would be great if there was also a neddit project.

mitxela

4 hours ago

You just host it and if you're not big they don't notice you. Nitter is legal btw.

code_duck

4 hours ago

Like some other things reddit tells visitors, they're basically lying, or at best, being inconsistent. I've tried old reddit here and there in the past month or so and sometimes it says I need an account for "safety", other times, it doesn't.

phrotoma

4 hours ago

old.reddit still works anonymously for me. maybe an a/b test?

embedding-shape

an hour ago

It's regional, in some countries they force logins, in others not. In some countries, r/all isn't available at all on mobile for example, you get redirected regardless of how you try to access it, but seemingly work in other countries.

raffael_de

4 hours ago

possible that they just changed it for mobile.

wanderingpixel

5 hours ago

for personal use you can just host one on your internal network

corvad

10 hours ago

I guess X never heard of the Streisand effect...

noduerme

7 hours ago

Elon has bought immunity to that. Streisand's flaw was that she gave a shit. Elon has unlocked the kinda reverse-Streisand that Trump has, where their popularity actually feeds on the effect.

0xDEAFBEAD

3 hours ago

The internet peanut gallery will whine about literally everything under the sun. At a certain point I can see why some people would want to harness that energy for their advantage. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em and all that.

encom

2 hours ago

Elon Derangement Syndrome is real, like the Trump equivalent.

slig

33 minutes ago

It's worse. Elon was very well praised by the same people, Trump was never liked.

noduerme

21 minutes ago

To be fair, it's possible that he changed, rather than that everyone who now hates him did.

klntsky

6 hours ago

Is there something like a balancer that redirects me to an instance that is not down?

DavCreator

3 hours ago

xxcancel.com (just add an x to xcancel.com) will redirect you to a working instance!

netniuq

4 hours ago

The LibRedirect browser extensions lets you configure a list and quickly hot between, but it doesn't check whether they are up before redirecting you to one of them iirc

https://libredirect.manerakai.com/

stavros

4 hours ago

I mean, I was just thinking of writing one in a few lines, so there will be one in a few minutes.

Abimelex

an hour ago

Hot take: All those instances keep the service relevant giving it more reach than necessary. Just shut it down. Cancel Twitter and jump on the BlueSkye or Mastodon train.

jasonvorhe

an hour ago

Nah, I like my freedom of speech, thanks.

swyx

7 hours ago

> How to obtain many sessions easily (public instances) The easiest way is to buy them here: https://hstockplus.com/accounts/twitter-x-accounts?sortBy=pr...

> This way, you relay the account register process to the seller. These tokens are sold in the format username|password|2fa_code|cookies (including auth token, id and ct0), which makes it very easy and convenient for us to use.

is this legit? this sounds extremely shady. maybe an ad?

mitxela

4 hours ago

No way to know if that particular site is legit without trying it, but account buying and selling on internet gray markets is very normal and the prices quoted are reasonable.

Yes, you have to give up all your personal data and submit to anal probing to get an account on a sillycon valley service, but a bad actor just has to pay $10 in bitcoin to get a thousand of them.

miningtcup

6 hours ago

I know the guy and it does work, and it's not an ad. Accounts from that website are used on shitter.thepixora.com. The website is extremely sketchy though, he recommends that you don't give it more than a dollar at a time.

agnosticmantis

10 hours ago

Any user scripts that automatically redirect to a working instance?

netniuq

4 hours ago

Not a user script, but the LibRedirect extension does most of that already

https://libredirect.manerakai.com/

I think it doesn't check whether the chosen instance is up before redirecting, but switching to another one if that one is down is a single click.

shellwizard

6 hours ago

I've got a simple redirect made in the redirector add-on for Firefox and Chrome. X.com -> random nitter instance

someonebaggy

7 hours ago

Will this list automatically update as instances hit rate limits or break for other reasons? Some public instances only have one account to log in with, some have thousands and use residential proxies.

add-sub-mul-div

10 hours ago

We could stop thinking of them as walled gardens we're trying to get into and start thinking of them as quarantines for the Eternal September population.

delichon

10 hours ago

> quarantines for the Eternal September population

Hacker News actually has a way to do this quarantine, a version that only counts votes from accounts created before 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/classic. About a decade after Eternal September started, but not bad.

defrost

10 hours ago

FWiW as an aside, it appears to count votes from December 2008 accounts (as just tested using this 2008-12-26 account).

So that's at least strictly before 2009.

mitxela

6 hours ago

The vote count is just the normal vote count, so I guess only the ordering is different?

defrost

6 hours ago

It is, isn't it .. serves me right for breezing through that too quickly.

If there's something magical going on, the ordering would be the only real distinction possible.

Apparently the original (still the same?) dates back to the OG PG days:

Ask HN: who knows about this - "http://News.YCombinator.com/classic"? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1832884

  It's what the frontpage would look like if only the votes of users who joined in the first year counted. I made it to check if the site is declining. In practice it's usually just a slower-changing version of the frontpage.

  ~ pg

bananaflag

8 hours ago

Wow that's very interesting but it only works for the front page (and also only changes the order not the numbers), not for each comment page.

Maybe we should have a setting "count only votes before date yyyy-mm-dd" but this would probably make the site too dynamic (?) and consume a lot of resources.

randallsquared

8 hours ago

Decade and a half, really. Eternal September was 1993 or 1994, right?

kamma4434

6 hours ago

With or without the original interface, twitter is still a dumpster fire

alex1138

7 hours ago

What do we want the web to look like? Lock everything down behind logins, in the name of 'security' when the real goal is nyeh nyeh nyeh you can't see anything, sign up so we get more user metrics

Petersipoi

11 hours ago

Awesome. Let's all start using this on HN so we end up with a bunch of broken links in a few years

dadoum

10 hours ago

They would become links with only a wrong domain, so I am not very worried about that personally.

mitxela

6 hours ago

It would be cool if libredirect could redirect a broken frontend instance to a working one.

bigbadfeline

9 hours ago

> a bunch of broken links in a few years

Who cares, by that time the originals and their copies would be a lot less worthy of viewing.