// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue
On 24 August 2026, cease and desist letters were sent by X Corp. demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project's repository.
UPDATE: Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.
A free and open source alternative Twitter front-end focused on privacy and
performance.
Inspired by the Invidious project.
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ETH: 0x24a0DB59A923B588c7A5EBd0dBDFDD1bCe9c4460
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SOL: FF5bheiD5AqPEdc3eyjymJ8AoMRF1hS78Ht6FiSZZF1t
$Nitter: 4fSxCKc91ELQYVdv3tmHW8R15KoALPwEngyoQe1Xpump
ZEC: u1vndfqtzyy6qkzhkapxelel7ams38wmfeccu3fdpy2wkuc4erxyjm8ncjhnyg747x6t0kf0faqhh2hxyplgaum08d2wnj4n7cyu9s6zhxkqw2aef4hgd4s6vh5hpqvfken98rg80kgtgn64ff70djy7s8f839z00hwhuzlcggvefhdlyszkvwy3c7yw623vw3rvar6q6evd3xcvveypt
The wiki contains
a list of instances and
browser extensions
maintained by the community.
It's impossible to use Twitter without JavaScript enabled, and as of 2024 you
need to sign up. For privacy-minded folks, preventing JavaScript analytics and
IP-based tracking is important, but apart from using a VPN and uBlock/uMatrix,
it's impossible. Despite being behind a VPN and using heavy-duty adblockers,
you can get accurately tracked with your browser's
fingerprint, no
JavaScript required. This all became
particularly important after Twitter removed the
ability
for users to control whether their data gets sent to advertisers.
Using an instance of Nitter (hosted on a VPS for example), you can browse
Twitter without JavaScript while retaining your privacy. In addition to
respecting your privacy, Nitter is on average around 15 times lighter than
Twitter, and in most cases serves pages faster (eg. timelines load 2-4x faster).
In the future a simple account system will be added that lets you follow Twitter
users, allowing you to have a clean chronological timeline without needing a
Twitter account.
To compile Nitter you need a Nim installation, see
nim-lang.org for details. It is possible
to install it system-wide or in the user directory you create below.
To compile the scss files, you need to install libsass. On Ubuntu and Debian,
you can use libsass-dev.
Redis is required for caching and in the future for account info. As of 2024
Redis is no longer open source, so using the fork Valkey is recommended. It
should be available on most distros as redis or redis-server
(Ubuntu/Debian), or valkey/valkey-server. Running it with the default
config is fine, Nitter's default config is set to use the default port and
localhost.