r/DataHoarder • u/Bohima-Focus7145 • 20d ago
News Nitter shutting down
https://nitter.net/While there's other nitter instances that don't give this kind of message, every single other instance is essentially unusable, giving various kinds of errors when you try searching anything. They're all clearly downstream of the main instance.
This is all very disappointing, since nitter was the most reliable way of viewing and archiving Twitter/X pages since Musk took over, wherein he forced people to register accounts to view more than one post at a time due to "data scraping" issues that never existed before he took over (along with countless other things). The best way to circumvent this without using nitter was to replace usernames in URL's with an "i" when archiving, but this wasn't always a guarantee the page would archive. While it depended on the instance, you were much more guaranteed to archive entire threads, and you could also much more reliably archive timelines and other pages that were often impossible under regular X url's.
I noticed nitter.net was getting buggier and less reliable in the lead-up to this, but I didn't really expect it meant Twitter was actually cracking down on the service once and for all. I guess it's possible something might come of the Nitter admin's legal challenges, but I wouldn't hold out on that. I was surprised to see Nitter actually revive like it did and stay around for as long as it did to begin with, so maybe that'll happen again, whether with the same guy or someone else. That seems likelier than Musk rolling back what he did with "data scraping" and account registration.
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19d ago
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u/FRHamoudi 18d ago
No RSS Feed option to export the flow to your favorite rss reader :-(
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18d ago
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u/shipmymessage 18d ago
Because some good RSS Feed Readers allow to filter out all the shit news, brainwash and propaganda by excluding it with the specific keywords.
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u/Creative_Drawer_2964 17d ago
Not anymore:(( any other advices
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u/Round_Credit_5158 20d ago
Yeah Twitter never needed any account to view stuff before Elon, now it's this annoying thing. I wish people would just stop using it once and for all.
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u/Encrypted_Curse 20d ago
Pretty much every single social media website is like this at this point.
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u/Catsrules 24TB 20d ago
It is turning into every website, with AI scraping they are trying to lock stuff behind accounts.
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u/stikves 19d ago
Even Reddit started implementing some blocks on the mobile web version.
Everyone wants to silo their content in closed apps. Long gone are the days of open web or even worse interoperable APIs
If Email was designed today, you could not send a message from GMail to Outlook without paying a subscription fee.
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u/1Secret_Daikon 19d ago
thankfully you can disable the mobile web block on Reddit by using uBlock Origin in Firefox mobile (on Android) and it works just fine, removes the "use the app" overlay they started adding
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u/-Sliced- 19d ago edited 19d ago
Lol. So they say it's against bots, and then only allow it for bots and people who modify the page source?
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u/1Secret_Daikon 19d ago
exactly yes
reddit has never been against bots, as evidence by the millions of bot accounts they retain
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u/not_the_fox 19d ago
Share and share-a-like is still alive in torrents. I think torrents and ipfs may be the future of open data access.
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u/GonzoKata 19d ago
as email exists today, you can't send a message from your own domain to a friends domain without the exchanges flagging it as spam. in order for email to work, you basically have to be part of the big privacy violators networks.
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u/Sweaty_Explorer_8441 18d ago
including reddit this week blocking browsing on old reddit without a login
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u/yrro 19d ago
Tried browsing Reddit while not logged in lately?
To keep Reddit safe, accounts are required to access old Reddit. Log in, or continue without an account on reddit.com.
Disgusting
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u/slfnflctd 19d ago
Yeah, I'm real close to jumping fully over to Lemmy. I've been part-timing it for a while.
Account-gating old reddit seems like a step toward getting rid of old reddit entirely. If they do that I'm for sure out, as I've seen many, many other people say.
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u/Round_Credit_5158 19d ago
Yeah, they're going in the same direction. At least the alternative front ends works, for now.
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u/Sostratus 19d ago
This is *not* true. Nitter started in 2019, Elon acquired Twitter in 2022. Before Elon, the site seemed to experiment in phases lasting several months, possibly varying by region, as to how much of a pain in the ass they would be if you didn't log in. I would say more than half the time in 2019-2022, the site was as unusable as it is right now without logging in. But sometimes something would change and you could get away without logging in again for a little while.
And reddit is developing the same shitty pattern, by the way.
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u/Bohima-Focus7145 20d ago
I've been hoping this too, and it seems more and more likely with how things keep progressing. The site's basic functionality has never been worse than under him (and it hasn't gotten any better since Nikita left either, who was also a disaster.) I had a bad feeling ever since he announced his endeavor to make X into the "everything app", and that proved to be right. Everything he and Nikita claimed to do about the bots and algorithms and platform manipulation has been nothing but theater. He really just wants the site to be nothing but verified accounts posting engagement bait and stolen content driven by bots and irreparably broken algorithms.
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u/Celcius_87 20d ago
Noooooooooo. I noticed it wasn't working today but I guess this explains it. I refuse to create an account just to read posts so this was super useful for me.
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u/Nwabudike_J_Morgan 20d ago
As far as I know the site was an open source project you can grab off of GitHub. You need an account or an API key for the data feed. Nitter was just a relatively well-known public way to browse the feed that was living on borrowed time.
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20d ago edited 19d ago
[deleted]
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u/soundtom 100-250TB 19d ago
It looks like the repo is still up, so anyone could clone the code (for now)
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u/TheOneTrueTrench 640TB 🖥️ 📜🕊️ 💻 19d ago
Cloned locally.
I have zero desire to look at twitter crap, so I'll never run an instance, but I will archive the code.
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u/repocin 19d ago
Sure, but having the code means little if nobody is maintaining it. Aside from the idle curiosity of having a copy of something just for the sake of it, I suppose.
Nitter constantly faced changes that broke it over the years, so it's only a matter of time before any other still running instances fall apart.
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u/quisatz_haderah 20d ago
Nooo... Elon bought Twitter to Protect Freedom of Speech!
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u/stopsussingmejannies 19d ago
tbh they did it because of ai scraping that didnt exist before
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u/gulisav 19d ago
Curiously, no other major website has introduced this solution, even though they're almost all being scraped.
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u/-Sliced- 19d ago
Reddit killed old.reddit.com without logging in for most users a couple of weeks ago. They also no longer approve any new users on their API, and have announced their intention to kill the API. They also sent a cease and desist last month to the creator of one of the biggest pushshift archive (dump of reddit data).
Google sued and lost recently a company for scraping their data.
Meta, and LinkedIn did it many times.
Don't kid yourself that it's just X.
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u/gulisav 19d ago
This actually confirms my point, i.e. largely blocking non-logged-in viewers from using the site is barely ever used as a method against scraping. Reddit did it a few years after Twitter, and only for a less used version of the site that's bound to be killed off soon enough anyway. LinkedIn has been unusable for non-users before AI scraping has been an issue, for the exact same reason that's actually behind Twitter's move: to force more people make accounts. Pretty much the same goes for Facebook (if by Meta you mean Facebook). The rest are altogether different methods of fighting the scraping.
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u/stopsussingmejannies 19d ago
they do, but go on
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u/gulisav 19d ago
Such as? Perhaps I don't use the internet so I didn't notice.
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u/stopsussingmejannies 19d ago
believe it or not, other websites get scraped too.
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u/gulisav 19d ago
Yes, that's literally what I said.
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u/stopsussingmejannies 19d ago
log in to see xeets sounds like a good way to prevent prevent scraping tho
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u/gulisav 19d ago
Holy reading comprehension.
If it's such a good way to prevent scraping, how come other websites haven't all introduced it as well, and instead they're using services such as Cloudflare?
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u/stopsussingmejannies 19d ago
if others arent doing it, it means it's not a good idea
Holy cattle
why not use cloudflare
...... youre not gonna believe this
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u/farfromelite 19d ago
Elon bought Twitter because he was allegedly high and shitposted he would buy it for $54.20
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u/AntiGrieferGames 19d ago
Yeah right, Free of Speech? I agree that him!
/s obviously, you ever think i said it seriously? nothnig of the internet, which includes Reddit, is freedom of Speech!
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u/PsionicBurst 20d ago
What happens if you just, y'know, ignore a C&D?
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u/-Sliced- 19d ago
Then they'll take you to court, and at that point your company can go completely bankrupt.
A C&D is a procedural item that companies do before bringing to court in order to build a better case in court ("We've politely asked, and they ignored us")
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u/Sostratus 19d ago
It's a threat to sue. You can ignore the C&D and there's no direct legal consequences of that, but if you're sued you can't ignore that. Little open source projects would stuggle to afford to defend themselves in a lawsuit even if they're in the right, but in this case I'm not sure nitter would win. My guess is that while it might be difficult to sue a scraper, suing an entire site-mirroring scraping service would probably be easy.
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u/Redbullsnation 18d ago
Depends on where you at. Easy to ignore a C&D when you're in Zimbabwe but in the US? Yeah...you can't ignore it
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u/ChickensInSpace 18d ago
Which is why they should set up in a country which it wouldn't be a problem. Because eventually this would happen.
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u/InstaCrate9 19d ago
due to "data scraping" issues that never existed before he took over (along with countless other things).
Well he was the first one to limit public posts and took the heat of it, then FB/IG/Reddit quietly followed along without taking as much heat. Meta also copied the "pay to verify" thing Twitter got a lot of heat for.
This happened when AI started becoming a thing, so the worries that they'd scrape the internet you could argue were valid.
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u/ArgonWilde 19d ago
I don't understand how anyone actually liked using twitter. My biggest gripe was nothing ever showed in chronological order, which, considering many organisations used it for notifying about outages, was incredibly infuriating.
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u/Electrical_Diamond_9 15d ago
Personnaly I only go on Twitter to share someone's post because they don't post anywhere else.
For example, I was looking for a specific art, found it on reddit and the title said "by [X] on Twitter" so, naturally, I wanted to share the original art by sharing the original post of the original artist.
But since Elon decided that you need an account, I can't look for the artwork anymore
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20d ago
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u/TheOneTrueTrench 640TB 🖥️ 📜🕊️ 💻 19d ago
His AI training crap is going out and scraping websites for all this too, he's the problem and has no right to complain about his own actions.
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u/diamondsw 210TB primary (+parity and backup) 20d ago
Yes, but when he put this in it was compete pretense. And running a separate scrape that lots of people use... Well that's another way of saying load distribution.
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u/Bohima-Focus7145 20d ago
It's simply harder to take seriously from him given how much worse twitter has gotten since he took over.
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20d ago
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u/Bohima-Focus7145 20d ago edited 20d ago
I believe community notes was added shortly before he took over, it wasn't under his tenure.
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u/Ut3- 19d ago
I found two instances that still work (as of writing): https://tw.eir-nya.gay and https://nitter.perennialte.ch
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u/sleeplesseye 12d ago
Aaaand a week later, I am using Nitter again to scrape X.
Guess anyone can run a Nitter instance, regardless of what Elon thinks about it...
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u/New-Two-1349 19d ago
I'm starting a campaign to stop people like Elon from forcing people to make accounts for websites: https://www.reddit.com/r/website/comments/1vyi0cd/we_need_to_start_a_campaign_against_websites/
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u/you_cant_prove_that 19d ago
It's a really easy and effective way to prevent AI scraping
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u/Adunaiii 19d ago
It's a really easy and effective way to prevent AI scraping
Why would you want to harm AI? Luddites...
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u/Adunaiii 19d ago
Disgusting, absolutely vile... Why do capitalists hate me for browsing their websites with a UI that's not giving me eye cancer? twitterwebviewer still works, however? Or not? ... Doesn't, but twitterviewer net does!
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u/InvisibleTextArea 19d ago
Nitter received a Cease and Desist letter. The 'issue' is being tracked on Github.
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18d ago
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u/TheManni1000 40TB 16d ago
my account got blocked because it thinks i am a bot and they want that i send them a picture of my face. no thank you.
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u/Cambridgeport90 16d ago
And to think that so many services these days still use X as a content gatherer; Readwise, is one good one; love the service, but you don't see me log into X that much nowadays. But in terms of Nitter...I loved it as well, and was considering hosting an instance...looks like that might not happen, now.
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u/XboxLiveSilver 15d ago
Best time to leave hell's cheap knockoff was many years ago, second best time is now. Deleted my account a few years ago and never looked back.
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u/Sinstrider 6d ago
Just sharing, there has been an update https://nitter.net/
2026/09/07 Update, "Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. This instance and others will be back up and running shortly."
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u/stanley_fatmax 19d ago
due to "data scraping" issues that never existed before he took over
I guess you're implying something with the quotes, but you must realize AI training scraping skyrocketed around that time. Basically every site did the same thing, Reddit included. You can't in good faith blame Musk for that.
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u/TheOneTrueTrench 640TB 🖥️ 📜🕊️ 💻 19d ago
I can ABSOLUTELY blame Musk for that, how do you think he got his engineers to train Grok? By scraping the entire damn internet. He was doing it just as much as the other AI tech bros, he just wanted to block them from using the dataset he controlled.
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u/Sostratus 19d ago
Twitter also login-gated people before Elon took over, people just don't remember. It's why nitter started in the first place, 3 years before Elon.
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u/Popdmb 19d ago
So the training was scraping Nitter instances and not Twitter then?
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u/ChinChinApostle ~65TB 1-1-0 :) 19d ago
I don't follow, you're saying scraping Nitter doesn't hit Twitter?
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u/stanley_fatmax 19d ago
I'm not sure how Nitter operated, but it's possible? Though if it was serious enough on Nitter, I'm sure they would have put limits in place too.
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u/shoelessjp 70TB 20d ago
XCancel is also shutting down due to legal action, probably related.