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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.
Saved 72% of original text.
Realistically, the thing was always living on borrowed time.
I could have believed that Twitter and Reddit might have been okay with alternate third-party platform-native clients, but not third-party Web frontends.
It isn’t so much a front end as a privacy-enhancing proxy service. You can’t participate, you can only consume. If our governments are going to conduct their interactions with us on fucking Twitter, we need services like this. Or we need our states to stop neglecting our need for online infrastructure and punting to capital interests.
Well, in theory, it actually wasn’t. Nitter doesn’t use the official Twitter API, which you can easily block access to, but rather uses the webpage API. Blocking access to the webpage API requires blocking access to the whole webpage without user login, which no one expected would ever happen for a service which’s main use is to publicly announce things.
Well, and then came the great scraping to feed the LLMs + the questionable sanity of Musk, which meant Twitter did actually block public access to the webpage.
Hopefully, this ends up being good for the fediverse - if you have to log in to view posts, you’re probably much less likely to create an account, and maybe just a little bit likely to at least just creep on mastodon posts…
Twitter dies as Musk wins war against own service
That’s a shame, but fortunately I see fewer and fewer twitter links being posted these days anyway
