The project is cool. The de-crapified interface is nice (no weird JavaScript loading, no nags to login, t.co). But that also makes me think that the hosted version (nitter.net) is pretty doomed, since it directly undermines Twitter commercially.
If anyone from Nitter is currently around, pure curiosity question -- what are the hosting costs/usage numbers for the current public instance?
Whenever I see projects like this that are just public, and designed to be available across large regions, I'm always curious what the logistics behind them are. Big companies talk about their infrastructure, and tiny blogs talk about their infrastructure. I don't hear a lot from people in the middle.
I mean, I see the installation instructions, but is this just running on a single VPS? Are you setting up multiple servers and trying to load-balance between them or anything?
It doesn't take much to run Nitter really, the nitter.net instance is currently sitting at 310 MB of memory and the CPU requirements aren't too bad. It's running off my dedicated home server with fairly low specs (i3-8100) tunnelled through a cheap VPS to bypass firewall restrictions. It hasn't crashed or (to my knowledge) experienced severe slowdowns despite the huge traffic increase today. Invidious's story is a bit different as the main instance load balances between 10 VPS instances.
Regarding usage stats I don't have any accurate numbers, but the database that stores preferences has 30k rows.
But to tweet, you need a Twitter account. And as I recall, Twitter pretty much demands verification through a mobile account. Do virtual mobile accounts typically work for it?
I've used Twilio numbers for this purpose in the recent past. Those work 100% of the time so far (assuming the number hasn't already been used).
Many services seem to run checking on whether a number is really a mobile number or not. VK (the Russian social network) for one example is a zealot about that and won't let any Twilio numbers through. And Instagram is a lot tighter (better at fake account creation detection) on authentication than Twitter but you can still sign up for Instagram with just an email account in most cases.
To get the individual user information for a Twilio number, given the short duration they might be attached to a given account, I highly suspect you have to go through Twilio for that info. That is, Twilio is likely to be the sole source for information on which account is attached to what number at a point in time. Obviously any consequential government authority in the US can then get that from Twilio, assuming the required judicial merchandise is presented.
I'd be curious though to know if eg Twitter security sends a request over to Twilio (perhaps in a case of an account abuse investigation), if they'd cough up information very willingly. That I don't know. It's a certainty the government can get at it, however. The best bet is to do nothing illegal using a Twilio number, and to assume if a big external service provider (Twitter, Facebook, et al.) needs to get details for some legal reason, they will.
Yes, but I do have some far future plans about utilizing the "Login with Twitter" authentication method to let people use the API on their behalf, which would allow making tweets etc.
The horrible interface is probably the main reason why I never got into Twitter. It's very hard to follow stuff, bercause it gets sorted in (for me) useless ways. Plus the fact that even generally interesting people retweet (or even tweet) some cringeworthy stuff.
If change/remove User-Agent header and disable Javascript, then can read single tweets and threads easily at mobile.twitter.com. No need to block anything.
It essentially emulates browser requests, "unofficial API" is just a fancy term for web scraping + using required parts of the public API where guest tokens work (ie. fetching video info, cards and polls).
Are the Republican political account names randomly generated?
When it shows who retweeted something on a political thread they had comical derogatory names. Is that something you actually spent time on or is that user generated content
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/8836cf51e8a6b385e1ac0a...
The project is cool. The de-crapified interface is nice (no weird JavaScript loading, no nags to login, t.co). But that also makes me think that the hosted version (nitter.net) is pretty doomed, since it directly undermines Twitter commercially.