Nitter is not dead post

posts/nitter-is-not-dead.org

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+#+title: Nitter is Not Dead
+#+date: 2024-03-10
+
+A quick one for you all today.
+
+The maintainer of Nitter said, not long ago, that [[https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1155#issuecomment-1913361757]["Nitter is dead."]]. This isn't totally inaccurate, as Twitter/X has shut down huge swaths of their public API, especially ones Nitter relied on, making it very, very difficult to properly run a public instance. But private instances are still viable with a bit of tinkering.
+
+The first step is cloning down the Nitter source code using Git. You'll then need to checkout the =guest_accounts= branch, and optionally build the Docker image for it. The important piece is ensuring you're running that branch's code wherever you're deploying.
+
+Next, you'll need some tokens to feed into Nitter. Thankfully, someone has already written some Python to do this for us, which you can find [[https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983#issuecomment-1914616663][here]]. Fill out the username and password, then run it. This will return a few JSON payloads, but the one you want is at the very end (you will also want to convert the single quotes to double quotes). Create a new file alongside your =nitter.conf= file named =guest_accounts.json= with the JSON in an array:
+
+#+begin_src json
+[
+    {
+        "user": {
+            "id": 123,
+            "id_str": "...",
+            "name": "...",
+            "screen_name": "..."
+        },
+        "next_link": {
+            "link_type": "subtask",
+            "link_id": "next_link",
+            "subtask_id": "SuccessExit"
+        },
+        "oauth_token": "...",
+        "oauth_token_secret": "...",
+        "known_device_token": "...",
+        "attribution_event": "login"
+    }
+]
+#+end_src
+
+Finally, run Nitter! Make sure you have a Redis instance setup for it for caching, and you should be good to go. You can add as many accounts to the =guest_accounts.json= file as you need, which Nitter will cycle through as needed to spread out the requests and rate limiting. Using a proxy is probably also recommended, but it's likely Twitter/X is blocking many of those at this point.
+
+I expect Twitter/X to eventually crack down further on this, but for the time being we can continue to enjoy the nicer and more privacy concious interface Nitter provides.