Public Nitter instance shutdown¶
On 26th January 2024, Twitter discontinued the creation of guest accounts, used by Nitter instances to fetch content from Twitter, via their API. This placed enormous strain on all public Nitter instances caused by an influx of scraping traffic from rate limited crawlers, essentially simulating a DDoS attack (Figure 1).
In response, some public instances implemented CAPTCHAs as a stopgap measure to manage the situation and avoid being rate limited. However, this solution is only temporary, given that all guest accounts expire after about a month.
Efforts to find a long-term solution have mostly hit a roadblock. Although a potential workaround using authorisation tokens from standard accounts has been developed, this is mostly impractical for public instances due to the volume of accounts required and the complexity with automating account creation.
As a result, the Nitter project is effectively moribund, considered to be dead by the project's main developer. Without a viable solution, public Nitter instances are either going private or shutting down entirely once their guest accounts expire.
Registrations closed for Nitter instance
Due to limitations of the Cloudflare Zero Trust free tier, registrations are currently closed.
Registrations may be reopened in the future as spaces open up from pruning users who have not accessed the instance in a while.
In the meantime, please look into accessing other instances instead (or even helping out by setting up your own).
Similarly, the perennialte.ch Nitter instance will go private once the guest accounts being used expire on 21st February 2024.
To manage access to the private instance, a login system using Cloudflare Zero Trust is being considered. However, the number of users will be limited to 25 and an email address will be required to receive a one-time password (using an alias email is recommended). Contact me to request access if you are interested.