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Nitter: Alternative Twitter Front-End

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11–20 of 52 posts

Re: Nitter: Alternative Twitter Front-End

#11
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-redir...

chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-redirect/p...

Re: Nitter: Alternative Twitter Front-End

#12
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.

Re: Nitter: Alternative Twitter Front-End

#13
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.

Re: Nitter: Alternative Twitter Front-End

#14
post #3

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.

Page says “Uses Twitter's unofficial API (no rate limits or developer account required)”. What is this unofficial API?

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/

Re: Nitter: Alternative Twitter Front-End

#15
post #11

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-redir... chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-redirect/p...

It's a shame Mozilla butchered Firefox mobile, cos this still doesn't work on it.

Re: Nitter: Alternative Twitter Front-End

#16
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/... 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.

Re: Nitter: Alternative Twitter Front-End

#17
post #10
post #4

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?

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.

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.

Re: Nitter: Alternative Twitter Front-End

#18
post #15
post #11

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-redir... chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-redirect/p...

It's a shame Mozilla butchered Firefox mobile, cos this still doesn't work on it.

Werks on my machine.

There's an anal process to enable it, and I think it only works in beta/fennec, but it works.

Re: Nitter: Alternative Twitter Front-End

#19
post #10
post #4

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?

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.

It feels like there could be a way to automagically solve collation as part of decentralising the storage. If there were deterministic way to create the decentralised hash for example, and then it could simply attempt to load it before committing it on fail. The user could be provided a constant heads up on side chain synch.

Have never run a nitter server, so maybe this is not possible - but could one be included as part of a web client? Ie, user surfs to "twinitter.com", receives a nitter server that takes their twitter credentials and starts posting their activity to the new chain and optionally to twitter also. If the user supplies no credentials, the server would simply run like a user-led crawler, adding more data to the new chain in what could be presumed to be some kind of optimum fashion, as it would always be the content users of the dual chains were interested in.

Re: Nitter: Alternative Twitter Front-End

#20
post #11

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-redir... chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-redirect/p...

>instagram->bibliogram

no longer works.

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