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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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It's going to get even harder as Nitter instances die off.

What's happening to them?

I'm really glad now that I have an old school account that doesn't need my phone number. All these loops one has to jump through are anoying.

People are being dramatic, they periodically go down but come back up again after a while, I never had to rotate between more than 2.

I guess there's some arm's race between nitter and twitter. For a while it even looked like nitter won, and twitter won't be doing any more fuckery, but they must have changed something again.

Nitter is probably actually dead this time. (Zedeus is the primary maintainer, and has never called it dead before)

The last way left in was a guest-account system used by an old version of the Twitter Android app. Nitter was hanging on by creating thousands of these rate-limited guest accounts using a network of proxies.

Twitter shut down guest account creation 5 days ago. Guest accounts expire after 30 days, so some instances might keep going for a little while, but will all be dead within a month.

People are not being dramatic. There was indeed an arms race, but twitter just shut down the functionality core to nitter. The dev behind nitter has given up and declared nitter dead. The instances still working will stop working soon.

Oh damn...