Laugh in nitter
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2021
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Privacy
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Does Nitter simply scrape the webpage or uses a set of proxy accounts to login to Twitter and fetch the content (either by scraping or using the Twitter API)? Because if the former is correct, then this is likely going to break Nitter too
looks like it uses the API, the about page says:
Uses Twitter's unofficial API (no rate limits or developer account required)
I'm not really sure what unofficial means here, but I'm guessing it's referring to Twitter's private APIs.
here's an issue on github:
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/351
another one:
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/379
From #351:
Nitter uses a combination of public and private Twitter APIs, using the credentials they use for their own web client, and guest tokens. Nitter instances do not talk to each other, and no html scraping is done. I hope that answers your questions.
The "rate limited" error messages you may see on some Nitter instances is due to a bug, they are not actually rate limited. The only rate limit that can affect a Nitter instance is IP-based, but it requires a lot of requests.
So weird that Twitter is ok with these stuff being "exploited" by third-party mirros. It feels like nitter is walking on thin ice. Hopefully twitter's not going to act on this
Anyway thanks for the insight
I've never need an account to view tweets and I do it once in a while. Hope it stays that way. I'll never create an account there.
Going the way of Insta and Facebook. Even less reason to head there!
Well, just Twitter sucking even more. Mastodon is way better imo