In an RSS feed, a tweet containing only a GIF and a quote-retweet will not have a title and will thus will have no link to that tweet

[pin-grid-array]

The title is confusing but basically the problem is this:

User A writes a tweet. Let's call this tweet R.

User B quote-retweets tweet R and inputs only a GIF in their tweet (with no additional text). Let's call this tweet S.

In the RSS feed of User B, the entry for tweet S does not have a title, which means that entry does not have a link to the nitter website version of tweet S. (When looking at the body of the entry of tweet S, the URL of tweet R is displayed. This is expected and is not a problem.)

Looking at my feed reader's source code, I can see the URL of tweet S is in fact there, just without anything between the <a> and </a> tags. So actually, the link to tweet S is effectively invisible and unclickable.

[pin-grid-array]

I finally found a live example of this occurring and was able to look at the RSS feed code before the relevant tweet containing the GIF dropped off the feed.

Here is the RSS feed. Take a look at what is currently the 3rd most recent entry, which has a pubdate of Thu, 21 Sep 2023 15:22:24 GMT. Notice how there is no text between the <title></title> tags.

My feed reader uses what is between those tags as the title of the entry. Normally, the reader puts that title text between <a> and </a> tags to link to the nitter website version of that tweet. But in this case, there is no text between the entry's <a> and </a>, so in the reader there is no title for this entry.

The <a href=""> does correctly contain a link to the nitter website version of that tweet, which was taken from the URL between either the feed's <link> and </link> tags or its <guid> and </guid> tags. But because there is no text between <a> and </a>, there is nothing for the user to click on to get to that website.

[zedeus]

This is essentially #988 and by extension #132. Thank you for the example though, didn't know #988 was still an issue.