this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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For those not aware nitter is an opensource twitter frontend which has no ads or javascript.

Now it also bypasses the rate limits and other restrictions.

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[–] communication@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Amazing! I can't wait to read about how they solved this. The devs were coming up with some very creative solutions the last I looked.

Great work to all the contributors!

[–] harry_h0udini911@lemmy.fmhy.ml 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Just phenomenal work; how could they even scrape data? When Musk restricts the API.

[–] l3mming@lemmy.fmhy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Don't need API access to scrape data. That's the whole point of scraping - you're indistinguishable from regular traffic. Nitter could even impersonate a Google search crawler if they want.

[–] nullishcat@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

I could be wrong but when looking at the changed code, it still uses a token, specifically on this line. It's possibly using user routes instead of the actual paid API, but it's hard to tell without knowing twitter's API in depth. Also it's not possible to get everything just by web scraping, especially after they locked everything behind logins. AFAIK the most you can do is impersonate search crawling and get singular tweets or profile bios.