Now however there is an official declaration on the site itself: https://nitter.cz/
Due to the reasons stated by Nitter itself on their repo, it seems unlikely there will alternatives.
Are there any currently?
It isn't just Twitter, it's every single website that's turned themselves into a login-walled "application".
Twitter's relative openness lasted a long time. It was open by default because it is a product built in 2006, when the idea of coralling people into walled gardens to show them ads didn't exist.
Apps built later take the concept of "walled garden" as a default feature. Slack , Discord, Snapchat, Tiktok, Telegram .... all largely closed off platforms. You can't see anything unless you're logged in.
1. Someone drops a link to Twitter. Twitter hides threads and throws items in some weird non-chronological order—assuming I don't get a login wall. I need an unfucked UI.
2. There are some content I can't get anywhere else that I follow through RSS. I wish these people would move elsewhere, but if they haven't by now, they probably won't ever.
I may just run a local instance with an account created for the purpose if that remains viable, but associating all that with a single login/IP address is something I'd like to avoid.
Another option (that also requires an account) is to use twitter⁰ itself with a browser extension that tweaks the UI.
My solution is the one I've been using for a _long_ time: simply don't go there. It has never been more than a novelty-gone-wrong, unless you count “a cesspool of humanity” as more, and as far as I know I've not missed out on anything significant. If you want me not to know what you have to say, say it on twitter⁰! Though I acknowledge that this is not an acceptable solution for all.
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[0] The site desperately trying to be known as Χ
This particular public square has been bought and fenced off. Ostensibly this is to drive more traffic to it.
Passively standing outside the fence trying to peek in is a lost cause. Find a new public square and convince as many people as you can to move. To do that, engage with those who moved, and create compelling reasons to go to the new public square.
FYI: That's not official, nitter.net was, and there are other instances of Nitter that still work.
While Nitter still worked at least people here could then post alternative links. Now that Nitter is dead, that's no longer an option.
And therefore people really should stop submitting Twitter links here. Instead contact the author and ask him to at least cross-post to some accessible platform. How hard can it be to cross-post to Mastodon, Bluesky or ... OMG, a website?
I'm also thinking about adding twscrape support to my https://github.com/mushroomlabs/fediverser and extend its mirrors to Mastodon servers, but to be honest I can not afford (money- and time-wise) to get into yet-another project without some minimal financial support.
https://nitter.poast.org/Kantrowitz/status/17581675175146582...
Twitter sucks. The "alternative" IMHO is to refrain from submitting links to "tweets" to HN. No one wants to visit Twitter.
The idea of "exclusive" content on the web is extremely difficult to accomplish. The internet is a giant copy machine.
The history of the web shows that popular websites lose popularity.
These mega-websites amassed considerable wealth during ZIRP-->COVID period. Now let them burn through it all desperately trying to stay popular.
Time to move on.
As others have noted, I think this is part of a larger trend. All websites have realized that data is power, data is money, and they don't want to share anymore.
I used to host both nitter and libreddit, now I host neither of them. I've simply given up on reading that data.
1. Create a Twitter account.
2. Stop using Twitter.
3. Use Facebook, Tumblr, or Mastodon for microblogging.
Twitter started requiring a login screen to view posts, but it's not the first website to do so. Pinterest and Instagram have done this for ages. We all hate it, but it's business.
I wonder why Tumblr isn't more successful than it is. It used to be a pretty well-known platform, and it's almost identical to Twitter, but while every celebrity seems to have a Twitter account, nobody seems to have a Tumblr account. Perhaps they do, they just don't tell anybody about it?
I wish Mastodon wasn't a thing. I believe federation is a terrible idea for normal computer users due to its non-obvious dangers, specially as more people will begin using Mastodon as if it were Facebook. I saw on Reddit that someone is building an open source, non-federated Reddit clone. That's what I think would have been better: an open-source, non-federated Twitter clone. Does anybody know of something like that, by the way?
For public accounts that are still using Twitter, definitely write appropriate representatives to request that they use more open means of disseminating important information. Twitter used to be the "public square", but its actively hostile behavior toward lurkers and non-paying members means that it no longer serves this purpose. In turn, public accounts that use Twitter aren't reaching as many people as they used to, and in time, will reach fewer and fewer people.
Stop consuming Twitter posts
$100/month and then $4000/month.
Nothing in between. And you can't just layer $100 packages for more API calls when you run out.
So the idea of being a 3rd party friendly API 2.0+ is just a joke because access is either too limited to be useful or to expensive to find out. Meanwhile their rate of internal innovation seems to have reached zero or slightly negative. What a joke the content is becoming more valuable than ever but what you can do with it is practically in decline.
The promises of Web 2.0 are dead and megacorps are killing them.
Adversarial interop is a digital human right and Elon is taking that away from us. Shame on him. If he can't run a business without stepping all over our API rights then he shouldn't be in business.
to find independent nitter servers that can show tweets of the few academics I still want to follow.
Now Twitter might soon break also these small third party servers but for the moment, they still work.
moreover requiring mobile number, at first for specific regions but then for everyone, was a deal-breaker which kept me off, and for good reasons in the long run (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31510865).
i would like to think that i am not the only one not using the platform all this time to get my news. to be fair i do get shared some links to tweets but at least until this debacle you could read them without too much trouble.
I'm glad I won't have to deal with people posting these off-brand Twitter links anymore.
Used Nitter for a while for the reason many do: to see that 1 tweet or thread that sounds interesting. Realized it either wasn't or was a little FOMO.
When I was a kid if you missed a good movie in theaters you had to wait years to see it on TV. I've started returning to that mentality. If it's genuinely good enough and interesting enough it will turn up somewhere eventually or I'll just miss out.
I can't number the people who have told me I must subscribe to AppleTV to watch some Ted show no one talks about any more. I always said: "No. It will turn up on some platform I use or come out on Blu-ray or I'll just never see it." For all I know it's on Blu-ray already. I forgot about it until just now it's been so long since I must watch.
Either Twitter opens back up or segments trickle off the platform.
I used nitter only because it loaded faster and displyed raw cronological order.
Life existed before Twitter was created. You can do it.
Such a shame, ~10 years ago it used to be tons of fun with some really good discussions in the mix.
But times are really changing I guess. And not for the better.
Twitter is good. IF you control your follows. Don’t follow more than 100 people. If someone pisses you off multiple times, unfollow.
If you don’t want ads, you have to pay. But this keeps the lean twitter org afloat. The ads are not intrusive
If you pay you get no ads.
All that said Twitter has gone off recently for me, the content not as good but I bet it’s because I broke my ‘never follow more than 100’ people rule and I get low quality tweets more often. I’ve also been clicking on dumber posts so it shows me more dumb stuff… I appreciate the Algo being rough in a way - it forces personal curation by myself
JUST MAKE AN ACCOUNT