4.8 KiB
Nitter (WIP)
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, 58KB vs 784KB from twitter.com)
- RSS feeds
- Themes
- Mobile support (responsive design)
- AGPLv3 licensed, no proprietary instances permitted
Todo (roughly in this order)
- Embeds
- 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. This is is especially relevant now that Twitter removed the ability for users to control whether their data gets sent to advertisers.
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 most cases serves pages faster (eg. timelines 2-4x 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
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.
To compile the scss files, you need to install libsass. On Ubuntu and Debian,
you can use libsass-dev.
Redis is required for caching and in the future for account info. It should be
available on most distros as redis or redis-server (Ubuntu/Debian).
Running it with the default config is fine, Nitter's default config is set to
use the default Redis port and localhost.
Here's how to create a nitter user, clone the repo, and build the project
along with the scss.
# 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, HMAC key, https (must be correct for cookies), and
Redis info in nitter.conf, run redis-server --daemonize yes, then run Nitter
by executing ./nitter. You should run Nitter behind a reverse proxy such as
Nginx or Apache for security
reasons.
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
Note the Docker commands expect a nitter.conf file in the directory you run them.
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
Donating 
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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.