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Comment by fuckcensorship | Hacker News Reader

I’ve tried using sites like Nitter and Teddit but always give up due to the sporadically crippling performance issues. I’ve tried using different instances but any improvements seemed to be temporary. My guess is that most of the performance issues are from Twitter/Reddit. Is this true or am I just having back luck with the instances I choose?

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If you are using random instances run by hobbyist it will happen. Such instances come and go every week.

Try to use proper instances from projects like kavin.rocks, pussthecat, esmailelbob.xyz, bus-hit.me, vern.cc, tokhomi.xyz etc.

For eg., try https://nitter.kavin.rocks. It is one of the fastest instance and also hosts its CDN on Cloudflare.

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!

in libredirect, they added a feature where you can test the latency of each instances

In addition to this suggestion, another viable route is to self-host those applications you rely on and don't expose them to the world (so as to reduce load/attack surface). Using a VPN can allow you to access the applications privately/remotely.

e.g. I self-host the applications I rely on such as Teddit, Nitter, Bibliogram and Cloudtube and then use Wireguard to always remain connected to the network they are accessible on. I have also implemented identity-aware SSO[1] so I can expose those applications remotely to specific individuals.

[1] https://github.com/buzzfeed/sso

The problem with public instances is that they're constantly overloaded. Your best bet is to run your own.

I started running my own this week because the public instances are inconsistent.

Performance is better overall, but some things are still sluggish (teddit) because you're usually the only fetching data and nothing is cached.

Paired with Tailscale makes for a good combination too.

Teddit specifically has this unfortunate behavior where every referenced subresource is loaded before a response is returned: https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit/issues/248

Until that is resolved, libreddit (similarly self-hostable) performs much better.

Which is what I figured is the point, since it's libre. On the other hand doesn't that defeat the purpose of the privacy thing? If every request for ~one user's worth of traffic is coming from one proxy you can sort of identify one person that way.

> On the other hand doesn't that defeat the purpose of the privacy thing?

It depends - a lot of the privacy invasions go beyond just the IP address and also include browser fingerprints and on-page activity collected by malicious Javascript - these third-party frontends defeat that.

All (most?) of them also trivially supports using a proxy so you can selectively route them through Tor or some other proxy or VPN.

Heh, then who hosts that proxy? And might you want to self-host that if it gets overloaded? TOR of course makes sense here though.

My experience is that Nitter is faster than the official Twitter frontend

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