{"id":113913,"date":"2024-02-27T22:03:07","date_gmt":"2024-02-27T20:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/prohoster.info\/blog\/novosti-interneta\/prekrashhenie-sushhestvovaniya-nitter-svobodnogo-alternativnogo-frontenda-k-twitter"},"modified":"2024-02-27T22:03:07","modified_gmt":"2024-02-27T20:03:07","slug":"prekrashhenie-sushhestvovaniya-nitter-svobodnogo-alternativnogo-frontenda-k-twitter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prohoster.info\/en\/blog\/news\/prekrashhenie-sushhestvovaniya-nitter-svobodnogo-alternativnogo-frontenda-k-twitter","title":{"rendered":"The End of Nitter, the Free Alternative Frontend to Twitter","gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"text"}]},"content":{"rendered":"
The last publicly available instance of Nitter has become inoperative. The Nitter project developed a free frontend for accessing X.com\/Twitter without enforcing JavaScript, analytics, trackers, and third-party services. On January 31, the issuance of tokens used in Nitter for accessing content on X.com was halted. On February 26, the lifetime of the last issued tokens expired, leading to a complete shutdown of Nitter. <\/p>\n
After being acquired by Elon Musk, Twitter (now rebranded as X) began implementing a series of technical and organizational measures aimed at aggressively monetizing a platform previously considered unprofitable. Changes included the introduction of chargeable information for each account (limits were set for different types of accounts \u2014 10,000 for holders of the paid 'blue checkmark', 1,000 for regular users, and 500 for new regulars); developer accounts were moved to a paid category with limits suitable for mass data extraction (scraping); and information was no longer provided to users without accounts. <\/p>\n
As a justification, it was publicly stated (2023-07-01) that these were 'temporary emergency measures' related to the fact that automated data scraping by bots was degrading service quality for regular users. Prior to this (2023-04-19), there were insinuations directed at Microsoft, suggesting that the company was illegally using Twitter data to train AI. Later (2023-11-17), the introduction of limits was justified by Musk\u2019s promised fight against bots. <\/p>\n
Nitter was a software project designed to protect Twitter users from surveillance, who do not post messages but only read materials, by providing them with an alternative site for viewing Twitter that requires neither an account nor enabled JavaScript. Such software essentially acts as a scraper and intermediary, which instead of saving data in a database, sends it directly to the end user (nevertheless, some service data is cached in Redis). <\/p>\n
Thus, the Nitter software: <\/p>\n
technically represented exactly the type of software that the Twitter management declared an active fight against;\n
was one of the few actively developed software tools for accessing data hosted on Twitter, which made it appealing to use as a module for scraping in a narrower sense \u2014 collecting data bypassing official interfaces for this purpose;\n
public instances of Nitter themselves became objects of scraping, leading some instances to implement their own version of CAPTCHA (1 additional POST request, specific to that particular instance).\n
As a result of analyzing workarounds to continue operating under the new conditions, RSS and some entry points on syndication.twitter.com were discovered, providing information to unaffiliated users in JSON format, and used for integration with other social networks. For a time, Nitter accessed information through these interfaces, but then they were also shut down. After that, a method was found to use 'guest accounts' that had reading privileges. One type of 'guest accounts' was intended for use on Internet of Things devices with limited browsers. <\/p>\n