nitter.net is back

[zedeus]

I'm happy to announce nitter.net is finally back, hopefully for good this time.

I've merged the authentication replacement PR #1210 (replaced #985) after a bunch of fixes and updates, so there's no longer a need to use a different branch or one of the many forks floating around.

Hosting an instance now is difficult and expensive, but not impossible. For a small/private instance you can do it for free quite easily, but a large public instance is a different story. See this page, and feel free to reach out to me on Matrix if you have any questions regarding this. I won't be discussing it in public.

The long-term plan is to rewrite the source code in Go, as I'm no longer interested in using Nim. This isn't a small task, but building more features with the current state of things is painful. Before doing that I'll fix some feature parity issues, and work on some conveniences for instance operators. Stay tuned.

If you'd like to donate towards the future of Nitter (development and supporting new instances), please see the "Donations" section in the readme.

[mthmcalixto]

Happy about it all.

[SavSanta]

Hell yeah! Gonna have to reconfig my LiberaPay later today.

Altho curious to why rewrite in GoLang? Will that impact the previous small size and nim's javascript interop/compilation?
Also hope it cant be called Gitter ;D

[zedeus]

Nim is pretty much a dead language at this point, I've lost faith in it after having used it for 6 years. Go is a much better fit, and it's way more likely to attract future contributors. The nitter binary isn't particularly small, and with Go it'll at least be statically linked, making deployments a bit simpler. The name isn't changing.

[StyMaar]

Hosting an instance now is difficult and expensive

Can you detail what makes it expensive? You need lots of servers to make requests from different IPs or something like that?

[zedeus]

If you're interested in hosting a public instance I'd be happy to discuss this privately.

[j4ckxyz]

Any plans to support RSS feeds on it?

Also I have a raspberry pi, please can you direct me in the right direction to getting a private instance setup on my Tailnet? I’ve tried before but got very lost :)

[tapatianbeast]

Trying to install Nitter on a Raspberry 3B+ without Docker is a total pain, with tons of compilation errors. Would be awesome if there was a pre-built binary to use instead.

[lordkitsuna]

I feel like a ton of services that went go ultimately had performance problems and then went rust. Not to be the meme zealot but perhaps consider just starting with rust?

[SavSanta]

Ooof oh God no. He wants to further gain more contributors. Not to scare them off. If it was fine under Nim it'll prob be fine under GoLang

[zedeus]

I don't like Rust, so I'd rather not. Go has fixed a lot of the major issues affecting performance in the past (mainly related to the GC), and Nitter is only resource-intensive when it comes to parsing JSON and rendering HTML, so I'm not concerned, Go is fine.

[user451421541757324]

@zedeus I'm curious to know if you have considered using TypeScript (+ Bun): I recently started using it, and I love it. In its favor, I have almost abandoned PHP (my main language), JavaScript, and Python.

• TypeScript types and OOP are very helpful for writing good resilient code
• Bun
  • is fast: in my home tests, it's a notch below PHP (+ Swoole), which is the fastest interpreted thing I know
  • has a lot of stuff in the stdlib: a router for example and built in support for JSX
  • can produce a single executable for distribution with cross-compile

There is the potential to build a project without third-party packages.

Just my two cents, Go is a very good choice too.

[zedeus]

I write TypeScript for work, so I'd prefer to go with something different.

[cacfd3a]

I write TypeScript for work, so I'd prefer to go with something different.

On the other hand that also means you are more fluent/productive for a rewrite, and can also build on FxEmbed (formerly FxTwitter).

Did you start development yet?