tl;dr: My nitter instance is up and running again, better than ever before!

So, nitter is a pretty awesome project. It's a frontend for twitter that doesn't require an account, is very lightweight, has simple and customizable themes, no ads or tracking, loads way faster, and doesn't lock NSFW posts behind an account.

Mr. Divorced Eel tried as hard as he could to kill off nitter. And unfortunately, he succeeded. The original author of nitter announced it was ceasing development because of all the effort becoming increasingly necessary just to keep the project functioning. I thought that was it, but I noticed PrivacyDevel's instance was still up. I'd seen it before in an issues thread back when NSFW posts were first account-locked. I remembered it used a different method for authentication, and indeed, it still worked.

So when I created my own nitter instance, I based it off PrivacyDevel's fork.

This worked great for a while... but again, the divorced eel himself saw to it that no fun is allowed. PrivacyDevel's instances (there were multiple just to be sure) started to get slammed with usage until eventually they weren't usable anymore. And eventually, much to my dismay, the method used by PrivacyDevel's fork of nitter no longer worked. Many accounts and posts could be browsed, but individual links would break.

This was the case for many months... I did my best to keep my fork updated with any more forks of PrivacyDevel's that tried to fix issues, but I couldn't keep it up. Eventually, I gave up...

...Until I noticed that a particular instance was still up and running perfectly fine.
Huh? How?

I didn't do anything at first, but it remained in the back of my mind for many months. What exactly did the owner of this instance figure out? And was their source code public?

One day, the curiosity sunk its fangs into me. I found the personal site of the instance owner, found their account on a site called GitDab, and to my surprise, I found her instance source! Wow!

She had numerous custom tweaks and changes for usability, including a custom auth method that still works in late 2024. I cloned her repo and toyed with it, trying to figure it out, but I couldn't... but now I was hooked. I was invested. I had to know how this worked.

It took me over a day of anxiously typing and re-typing a message to this person i havent talked to in over a year, who barely knows me... but I did it. I asked for help. And she was kind enough to show me exactly what I needed to make my instance work!

I finagled a bit and... lo and behold, my instance is working better than ever before now!!

I just had to put this out there. I'm super happy about this and it brings me no end of joy to see the instance work and work and... not stop working. It's been running without incident for about a week. And just today I even got videos working in it!

The only thing that bothers me is that nitter is published under the AGPL license, which basically means any forks must have their source code public. I haven't publicized my source code yet. I've been busy. I think I might after I get a break sometime soon...