I often take a quick glance at my Jetpack stats when I log into WordPress. When doing so for Cultrface, I noticed someone had come from nitter.unixfox.eu which I’d never heard of before. I decided to check it and found something nifty: a stripped-down version of Twitter without all the JavaScript. It’s called Nitter and its creator, zedeus, says the project is focused on privacy:
It’s basically impossible to use Twitter without JavaScript enabled. If you try, you’re redirected to the legacy mobile version which is awful both functionally and aesthetically. For privacy-minded folks, preventing JavaScript analytics and potential IP-based tracking is important, but apart from using the legacy mobile version and a VPN, it’s impossible.
Using an instance of Nitter (hosted on a VPS for example), you can browse Twitter without JavaScript while retaining your privacy. In addition to respecting your privacy, Nitter is on average around 15 times lighter than Twitter, and in some cases serves pages faster.
The source code is available on Github if you want to investigate or play around with it and zedeus is planning on adding a system where you can follow Twitter users without needing an account. That would be awesome and I hope Twitter doesn’t try to stop it (because you know how Twitter can be if you create alternatives ways of accessing their product)
Update: Nitter is dead.