My Twitter Replacement

Spoiler: It’s Nitter.

I made my last post to Twitter today (at least until the situation changes):

Link to the post – not embedded because Twitter

To elaborate on that (in order of preference):

RSS: I’ve subscribed to RSS feeds for longer than I can remember, and check my feed reader multiple times a day.

Mastodon: I’m currently active at @jessedyck@mstdn.ca. Much like Twitter, I don’t expect to post much, but may from time to time.

Instagram: Mainly architecture and dogs. But I’m starting to follow a few local accounts there too, replacing some gaps since Twitter went offline.

Enter Nitter

Unfortunately not everyone that I followed on Twitter is available in other places, which has been the main reason to stick around this long.

I’m now using Nitter to proxy specific Twitter feeds into my RSS feed reader. Nitter’s been around for a while and was primarily built to fix Twitter’s bloated website, but it also creates RSS feeds for each account. It uses the ‘guest’ API key, so for the time being it’s safe from being shut down. But I fully expect it will get blocked at some point – this is a stopgap measure.

From everything I’ve read about Nitter, the instances out there are unreliable and slow. Thankfully it’s not difficult (for a web developer with access to a Docker host) to set up an instance behind a reverse proxy. So that’s what I’ve done.

Twitter → Nitter → RSS → NetNewsWire

Now, the few remaining Twitter accounts I want to follow will land in my feed reader!