Twstalker.com as a Twitter alternative front end | Hacker News Reader

Twstalker.com as a Twitter alternative front end

twstalker.com

35 pointsaragonite18 comments

The page has a prominent banner linking to a page that promises being able to access private twitter/IG profiles, but tries to steal credentials.

Proceed with caution.

Yeah this seems to be pretty sketchy, which is disappointing because I've been looking for an alternative to nitter since it went down. It's a shame that a lot of the content creators I follow use twitter to post updates and schedules and that without nitter you can't view posts in chronological order. Does anyone know an alternative to viewing twitter feeds without an account? I made an account (no vpn, no tor) but it immediately got banned and asked me for a phone number/legal identification.

There are none. The best we can do is ask people to also post on open platforms.

Related (sort of): with the demise of nitter and increased tightening of Twitter's API, I'm wondering if anyone here would be interested in helping build a more robust mirror service to feed into ActivityPub instances like bird.makeup.

bird.makeup works "okay-ish" in the sense that it manages to get the most popular Twitter accounts, but for the smaller ones it takes a long time to refresh (days) and it seems like it can not handle any more people using it.

This project has indeed potential to be super useful, just at this point seems super sketchy:

- There is invisible footer with ton of SEO spam, after "All Rights Reserved © 2024 twstalker.com" (the copyright sign is made by font awesome, what is, in short, wrong as well). - It tries to load images directly from twimg.com, what is commonly blocked on any third-party site by most privacy protecting browsers, so you to see images on this "privacy protecting" site you have to (ironically) switch off tracking protections. - CSS is half baked: it starts with syntactically invalid includes of the Roboto font from google fonts (what could be also considered tracking). Because it does not load due invalid syntax, and because it is used as `body { font-family: Roboto !important; }`, page is rendered in default (most probably serif) font. No generic font family fallback as well as !important are red flags. - There is Google Tag Manager. - Everything is loaded from various CDNs. - "Terms of service" page [1] has title "Barack Obama @BarackObama , Twitter Profile - twstalker.com".

[1] view-source:http://web.archive.org/web/20240318085735/https://twstalker.... lines 256-307 [2] https://twstalker.com/pages/terms

Their privacy policy https://twstalker.com/pages/privacy doesn't make any sense:

> How do we protect your information?

> We use regular Malware Scanning. We do not use an SSL certificate We only provide articles and information.

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to offer RSS feeds. Still, it looks like it really does let you view tweets and profiles without being logged in, so I may well use this.

It doesn't render quote-tweets correctly for some reason. The original tweet's text is replaced with the quoting one's.

RSS is the only alternative social media feed front end I've ever wanted. I was sad to see "no RSS feed found" when I loaded this into Feedbro. Nitter still works at least.

The name seems to cut off on mobile. I see twstalke.

Desktop as well

Yeesh! It needs a toggle for a dark theme. Was not expecting so much blinding white.

I’m a fan of all these EFF projects, but this one’s name is terrible. Why would they put stalker in a name?

I’m gonna email them asking to reconsider the projects name.

I don’t think this is an EFF project, is it? The submitter is just using their Twitter account as an example.

I'm not seeing anything that indicates that this is an EFF project? Just the link here is to the EFF account specifically for some reason...

How do you figure it's an EFF project?

Sorry! I used that link just as an example of how twstalker.com/[username] shows the tweets from @[username]. I should probably have used something like https://twstalker.com/paulg that would have made this fact more obvious.

Agree about the name, it's quite well done and could be a decent alternative for xitter submissions on HN (else IMO they should just not be allowed anymore). They don't seem to say who they are, there's just a contract form https://twstalker.com/pages/contactUs

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