Detecting and reporting malfunctioning, incorrect or defunct instances

[tghe-retford]

First of all, thank you for providing an invaluable service to deal with both a diversion around the increasing walls that Twitter is placing up for non-registered users and to route around the consistent rate limiting that the official Nitter instance is implementing.

I am using Farside to keep track of a number of Twitter accounts and my query is whether Farside could be made more intelligent to detect instances.

I have noted three different issues with four instances:

• birdsite.xanny.family and nitter.domain.glass have Nitter instances that do not display any tweets for an account but otherwise appear to work fine.
• nitter.actionsack.com should be replaced with n.actionsack.com as the URL appears to have changed. You are still served a generic redirect page and I suspect Farside sees the site as active despite the URL being incorrect.
• nitter.autarkic.org is no longer a valid domain but displays a page from the domain address owner so again, I suspect Farside sees that site as active despite the domain being defunct.

So my query based on the three issues I describe is whether Farside can be improved to remove the instances that are not retrieving and showing tweets, are showing a generic redirect page as the URL has changed or are showing a domain owner page as the domain has expired? Or if not, if there could be an easy and automated way to report such instances?

[benbusby]

Hi, thanks for submitting this report. I've noticed this as well, and have been considering some possible solutions.

One approach would be to have an optional, additional validation step for certain services such as Nitter. An extra step to make sure that at least one tweet appears on the web page would likely be sufficient. I believe this would solve all three of the mentioned issues, but I think it would also be a good idea to restrict marking instances as valid if they return anything < 300 for a status code (currently it marks anything returning a status code < 400 as valid, which is why some sites that redirect are still appearing).

Like I said, I've noticed (and been bothered by) this as well, so I'll try to push a fix soon.

[sergeevabc]

@benbusby, your service keeps redirecting Reddit to a broken Libreddit's instance at reddit.invak.id. Please, do something about it.