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Nitter (WIP)

Build Status

A free and open source alternative Twitter front-end focused on privacy.
Inspired by the invidio.us project.

  • No JavaScript or ads
  • All requests go through the backend, client never talks to Twitter
  • Prevents Twitter from tracking your IP or JavaScript fingerprint
  • Unofficial API (no rate limits or developer account required)
  • Lightweight (for @nim_lang, 36KB vs 580KB from twitter.com)
  • RSS feeds
  • Themes
  • Mobile support (responsive design)
  • AGPLv3 licensed, no proprietary instances permitted

Todo (roughly in this order)

  • Embeds
  • Caching + archiving tweets/profiles
  • Simple account system with customizable feed
  • Json API endpoints
  • Emoji support (WIP, uses native font for now)

Resources

The wiki contains a list of Nitter instances and a list of browser extensions maintained by the community.

Why?

It's basically impossible to use Twitter without JavaScript enabled. If you try, you're redirected to the legacy mobile version which is awful both functionally and aesthetically. For privacy-minded folks, preventing JavaScript analytics and potential IP-based tracking is important, but apart from using the legacy mobile version and a VPN, it's impossible.

Using an instance of Nitter (hosted on a VPS for example), you can browse Twitter without JavaScript while retaining your privacy. In addition to respecting your privacy, Nitter is on average around 15 times lighter than Twitter, and in some cases serves pages faster.

In the future a simple account system will be added that lets you follow Twitter users, allowing you to have a clean chronological timeline without needing a Twitter account.

Screenshot

nitter

Installation

To compile Nitter you need a Nim installation, see nim-lang.org for details. It is possible to install it system-wide or in the user directory you create below.

You also need to install libsass to compile the scss files. On Ubuntu and Debian, you can use libsass-dev.

# useradd -m nitter
# su nitter
$ git clone https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
$ cd nitter
$ nimble build -d:release
$ nimble scss
$ mkdir ./tmp

Set your hostname, port, page title and HMAC key in nitter.conf, then run Nitter by executing ./nitter. You should run Nitter behind a reverse proxy such as Nginx or Apache for better security.

To build and run Nitter in Docker:

docker build -t nitter:latest .
docker run -v $(pwd)/nitter.conf:/src/nitter.conf -d -p 8080:8080 nitter:latest

A prebuilt Docker image is provided as well:

docker run -v $(pwd)/nitter.conf:/src/nitter.conf -d -p 8080:8080 zedeus/nitter:latest

To run Nitter via systemd you can use this service file:

[Unit]
Description=Nitter (An alternative Twitter front-end)
After=syslog.target
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple

# set user and group
User=nitter
Group=nitter

# configure location
WorkingDirectory=/home/nitter/nitter
ExecStart=/home/nitter/nitter/nitter

Restart=always
RestartSec=15

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then enable and run the service: systemctl enable --now nitter.service

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Contact

Feel free to join our Freenode IRC channel at #nitter, or our Matrix server. You can email me at zedeus@pm.me if you wish to contact me personally.