Twitter front-end Nitter dies as Musk wins war against third-party services

It has been a while that Nitter shut down. Still a pity, a few artists posted only there

This service going down and me recently deciding to try to check in on whether some people I used to follow on Twitter had migrated elsewhere made me realize how much Twitter's basically isolated itself from the open web.

A part of me hopes this serves as a wake-up call for those that were still hovering between using Twitter and weaning off it using services like this, to reach out to those they follow and let them know, "Hey, if you think you're still posting publicly...You're not, only other people here can see this." For many people that may not matter, but for creators/influencers? I dunno, maybe network effect is enough that they feel the large audience there is plenty, but I'd think they might want as broad of a reach as possible, and a popular but limited view platform isn't necessarily that.

Much more importantly though are any government/critical services. They really need to be brought up to date, if they haven't been already, that the platform is no longer as publicly accessible as it may have once been. Also the same applies not just for Twitter but Facebook and the like as well, but that's another topic.

How come every 3 weeks there is a news that nitter is now dead, and then I go to the Nitter Instance Health Monitor, pick a random instance, and am still able to surf tweets?

I dont get it. Is this wishfull thinking or do people not understand that instances other than nitter.net exist?

EDIT: I gotta admit, there is a lot of red in the last days. But it is not completely gone. Yet.

Guess I won't be opening any twitter links anymore 🤷

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The same shit as Reddit. Glory to Mastodon.

I think it's more winning the battle but losing the war for Twitter. It just ain't the same and probably never will be.

A major German party (SPD) decided to quit using Twitter a few weeks ago.

They want a free market. They want to sell their service across borders. They don't want law makers to limit what they can do.

And what's their service? A non-democratic system with many limitations and restrictions and they decide on a very detailed level what you have to do to use it.

Really trying to spez things up huh? Bold move Cotton.

And with it dying I think that's probably the last time I'll look at Twitter. If something isn't publicly available on something like Mastodon it isn't worth making an account to see.

That's Xitter's last dying gasp, for me. I have only accessed it through Nitter for many months now.

Just switch to mastodon.

https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps/nitter_ynh/issues/42 So maybe running a private instance still can work.

Lol whos using Twitter ?

Events across the world have reduced my faith in corporations. Open-source, community-driven solutions are definitely the answer. Twitter has closed itself since it was acquired. Not to forget the Reddit api fiasco. With platforms closing themselves, they prevent the right to information. Anyone on the web should be able to access a microblogging site that plays (or played) such an important role in the world.

Arstechnica post has comments filled with how emergency services updates are posted on Twitter. We should all be part of the solution by promoting an open web that is not controllable by a singular entity. 

That being said, for a service like emergency alerts, it definitely should be hosted on a site like Mastodon. It even has RSS.

To make matters worse, I just read an article about how the Indian government might be deciding to block proton mail. 

all the value is gone, its not worth it anymore anyway

The enshitification is very, very real. This is why the Fediverse is so important.

i can still access it through nitter.net (even if the cert is not working you can still use the 'thisisunsafe' method in chrome).

This is the best summary I could come up with:

An open source project that let people view tweets without going to Twitter.com has shut down, as Elon Musk's changes seem to have closed off all possible ways to access the Twitter network without a user account.

"Most Nitter servers were using a technique of generating loads of temporary tokens that were used for accessing the content, but that path is now blocked as well," the NoLog update today said.

"I conclude that it is possible to easily acquire thousands of guest accounts within just a few minutes by using proxies, and they are all usable from a single IP address without getting rate limited," the August 2023 post said.

I will also develop a service that fetches these continuously, and lets operators request guest accounts for their own instances without having to pay for proxies."

Pointing to a recent discussion on GitHub, today's update from NoLog said there may be "a way to spin up a personal Nitter instance with your own account to keep the interface you are used to, but there is no guarantee this will work long-term."

"Unfortunately regular accounts can only support a small group of users, so running a public instance this way is not feasible," the update said.

The original article contains 729 words, the summary contains 205 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

That pungent musk of Musk.

haha, just the title alone, can't be bothered...haha