Show HN: TwitterToNitter. A bookmarklet that makes reading on Twitter easier | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: TwitterToNitter. A bookmarklet that makes reading on Twitter easier

github.com

90 pointsmg46 comments

I'm using libredirect, i never see the original frontend and it works like a charm.

I recently found out that you can just click "log in" and then click the "X" in the top left to close the modal, without actually logging in.

Previously I was using this bookmarklet:

javascript:(function()%7Bdocument.querySelector("html").style%5B'overflow'%5D %3D 'visible'%7D)()%3B

Yay, the two-click solution is awesome!

That is what I like about HN! You post a one-line-of-code solution for something and someone comes up with a way to get rid of even that one line!

I put that info in the repo now.

Fantastic. I don't have a twitter account and it's really annoying to open a link and find out twitter thinks it's adult content (often not really) and get a login page. Or just scroll too far into the replies get hit with a login.

cannot believe twitter web ux is as bad as it is

feel like it's half not their fault (scrolling is hard to customize in the DOM), half mostly of their fault (you can use columns to make infinite-scroll interfaces less neurologically grating), and half totally their fault (giant dom hierarchy that ruins my ram, loading recirc before content, zero confidence when ctrl-clicking something whether it will actually open in a new tab)

The reason it's hard to customize scrolling is probably that it worked perfectly well in the first place. The solution is to stop messing with it.

I often feel like every advancement in web UI is a downgrade. In other words, bring back <blink> and <marquee>.

Nitter provides superior UX even though it takes 10 times longer to load. Think about that, I’m waiting 15 seconds because that is more enjoyable than Twitter’s native interface. No nags, no autoplay videos, no repeated clicking to see a single thread, reasonable amounts of whitespace.

10 times longer sounds abnormal. Try self-hosting and it may even load faster.

Nitter is an excellent alternative. The only thing stopping me from 100% using it, as I have for Reddit->Libreddit and Youtube->Invidious is the lack of some sort of timeline. I tried setting up an RSS feed for it, but I mostly use Twitter to follow artists I like, and it wasn't easy to browse. Fortunately, there is a pull request for this feature (https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/pull/363) but it's been sitting for a while.

You can separate users with commas on nitter to get a chronological timeline: https://nitter.net/ID_AA_Carmack,PeterZeihan

Otherwise you can get RSS links from nitter and add them to the browser extension Fraidycat, I'm not 100% happy with it but it's decent to follow RSS links in a sort of timeline kind of way:

https://fraidyc.at/

That Fraidycat app is really very interesting. Thanks, I am going to try that out.

The existence of something like nitter demonstrates 2 things:

1. There is massive demand for the product Twitter has on offer.

2. Twitter is utterly incompetent at capitalizing on that demand.

This has been true more or less for Twitter’s entire existence.

I used to use a Nitter redirect extension, but whatever Nitter instance I was using was unbearably slow. I've now been using https://github.com/MaySoMusician/breakthrough-twitter-login-... . It seems to work fine (if login wall is your gripe with Twitter).

Mildly off-topic, but...

One minor annoyance I have with one of the "open" Nitter hosting sites I use to follow Twitter accounts is that Nitter seems (at least on iOS) to save bookmarks with the original twitter URL instead of the Nitter one I'm currently viewing, and I then have to manually edit the bookmark URL to correct it...

Does anyone know if it's possible to control this (with an option?) if I were to host Nitter myself (open source I guess, but still)?

The bookmarked URL is under the control of your browser. Could you provide more detail?

Looks like it's a Safari "issue", in that the HTML has: <link rel="canonical" href="originalURL">

in the main page, and Safari uses that, rather than the actual page, I guess by design.

Doesn't seem to happen in Firefox on MacOS or Linux.

I’ve been wanting to make a browser extension that does this for multiple sites.

Besides Nitter, what other options exists out there for sites such as Reddit or Instagram?

for reddit there's teddit.net

for instagram there was bibliogram.art which unfortunately shut down recently due to instagram's tactics

What did IG do?

Ip block all datacenter ip address ranges effectively

Privacy Redirect: Redirects Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and more to privacy friendly alternatives.

https://addons.mozilla.org/ja/firefox/addon/privacy-redirect...

Thanks!

There's also an extension called "alternative frontends", which does that and even more[0]

[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alternative-fronte...

Given count of 7 users, are you perhaps the author ?

I use a share screen shortcut in iOS to do something similar.

Very simplistic, but here’s a link if anyone would find it useful: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/ac27cb797ddc479784f22631d69...

It’s pretty easy to host your own Nitter instance too (I do) if you want to avoid the rate limiter errors.

This does negate some of the privacy from Twitter advantages, especially if hosted in your home network. Of course nitter also has the privacy from instance operator question, and your two options are basically to use a small list of instances you trust or such a large pool of instances that the instance operator has very little to link together

Here is the same code, except you can just drag and drop the code into your bookmarks bar:

https://locserendipity.com/Nitter.html

What a great idea!

Edit: Please note that this will only work for desktop browsers

The instructions provided in the README (about manually bookmarking a bookmarklet link) reflects the careful process that has to be followed to use bookmarklets on mobile browsers. The instructions to drag and drop this bookmarklet (or even long press and copy the link destination) will fail for anyone who's not using a traditional desktop/laptop form factor computer system.

Thanks! I have added that disclaimer.

Yes, I would like to add that to the repo's readme, but Github's Markdown does not support JavaScript links:

https://github.com/github/markup/issues/1592

I wish this was a browser extension so the redirection could happen automatically! Would probably function similar to [1].

[1]: https://github.com/Jdhaimson/smilealways

I prefer bookmarklets for a few reasons:

Compatibility: Bookmarklets work on all devices. Deskop, iOS and Android.

Security: I can easily read and understand the code. They only run when I invoke them. While extensions have access to everything you do an any page, bookmarklets only have access to the page where you invoke them.

Flexibility: They are easy to change. For example in this one, I will probably update the array of Nitter instances regularly.

Usability: I can organize them just like my other bookmarks.

Sharing: I can put the bookmark in just a line of text in a text file with an explanation. As I did here. No need to dabble with extension repositories of Firefox and Chrome, as you would have to with extensions. I don't even know how it would work for other browsers.

They are great for us developers who can vet every line. But extremely dangerous for non technical users.

Except for the random choosing of instances it's easy to do with Redirector:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirector/ocgpenf...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/

Userscripts don't work too well for this, because you have to either check all links everywhere or delay redirection to only after you reached the page.

I use "nitter redirect" for firefox.

I actually don't like it, I spend more time on twitter now

I use Privacy Redirect: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-redir... It also works for Invidious and Bibliogram, but I only use it for Nitter.

There was also this from the other day.

LibRedirect: Redirect YouTube, Twitter, Instagram to privacy friendly services

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32916318

Tampermonkey scripts combine well with this kind of thing, IMO; I use bookmarklets for stuff I only want to happen on command (https://maya.land/bookmarklets/readable/) and Tampermonkey to automatically or conditionally invoke bits (https://maya.land/user-scripts/hypothesis/)

You can just use any of the twitter/website redirector browser plugins to forward https://twitter.com/[X] to https://farside.link/nitter/[X]

Tip of the day: Replace "Reddit" with "Reveddit" of any Reddit.com URL to get access to an archive of deleted comments/accounts [assuming archived in time before deletion]

it would be easier if twitter just ported itself to Secure Scuttlebutt or the myriad other p2p/dweb projects.

The reality is that Twitter will never do that. They have absolutely no reason to.

Regulation could give them a reason to, but there's a conflict of interest when the controlling interests in government would prefer to ask the FBI to suppress inconvenient speech[0] on the dominant platforms.

0: https://www-bbc-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.bbc.com/news/...

it was a joke.

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