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Nitter is a read-only front end for Twitter
(nitter.net)
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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Technology
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I don't really grok products like this.
If you have a fundamental disagreement with a platform, continuing to engage with it, even through a condom, is still perpetuating it. It's maintaining that platform as still important and integral, and a place that others should continue to engage with. It's telling advertisers that it's still a place that's worth their money to maintain a presence on. It stymies the momentum in shifting to an alternative; why put the effort into a new service if people are still seeing your posts?
It's like pirating Windows instead of moving to a different OS. You're still perpetuating the MS hegemony and telling software developers that Windows is the platform they need to develop for.
I developed something like this, so maybe I can answer. It was a browser extension that let people bypass the old twitter login wall. It had many thousands of users until Twitter started walling themselves off this summer.
I was inspired to make it in the most American way possible -- someone I know was in a school that got locked down due to a shooter threat (ended up being a false alarm). The police and news agencies were live-tweeting the updates, and their partner didn't have a twitter and couldn't read them without making a fucking account that very moment, wondering if their partner was even alive. I directed them to nitter, but they're not very into tech, and replacing the URL was just intimidating for them at the moment.
I found the whole experience so grotesque that that very evening I made an extension that lets you press a button to dismiss the login modal and keep scrolling (just a few css changes, or about 30 lines of code).
My two cents: Though I don't personally use it, the fact is Twitter does have a lot of valuable stuff on it. Same goes for other large platforms -- google results are now worthless without adding "reddit" to the search, for example. These companies are bad, but there's so, so many things to care about, and people can't care about all of them. Tactically, that makes consumer-driven change very difficult.
I'm not sure what kind of organizing we need to start doing to take back the internet from these big platforms, but whatever it is, I think it has to reckon with our past mistake of giving a few companies ownership of most of the internet, which means it has to go beyond just stopping to use them. These few platforms have the last 10 years of the internet currently walled-off, and they plan on charging rent on that forever. That's shitty. We should try to stop them from doing that, if we can.