Note on Twitter link sharing

Let's say that someone share a Twitter link. Curious, you open it to face this

Not so great. Of course it would be better if you were register to Twitter. The current situation is not what I would call a distracting-free experience.

A good solution for that is to use the Threadreader app:

But unless you have a good adblocker (e.g. uBlock Origin), you still wont have a distracting-free enough experience. Enter Nitter.

Nitter is a privacy friendly frontend to Twitter that yanks out all the code necessary to track your behavior. By the way, any Twitter post can be open with Nitter. Replace twitter.com with nitter.net to use it.

To showcase some numbers, let's see how Google Lighthouse compares Twitter, Threadreader and Nitter (higher is better):

or as raw data:

	performance	accessibility	best practices	SEO
Twitter	61	73	92	86
Threadreaderapp	48	80	69	83
Nitter	96	94	85	91

Now what? Should you ditch everything and use Nitter? I dont think so. If you send a link to someone who, you know it, is a Twitter user. Dont change anything. However, if you want to share a Twitter thread to a community or to a channel which could include non twitter user, please consider Nitter.

That's said Nitter is not quite famous yet. Meanwhile, you can redirect automatically all your Twitter link to Nitter by installing the browser extension Privacy Redirect by Simon Brazell. The source code is provided under GPLv3. This add-on is officialy available on: Firefox, Chrome and Edge. A fork is available for Safari.

Last thing, Nitter is hosted by a lot of different entities and so can you. If one instance fail you too much, you can remove it in the settings:

Of course, it is recommended to self host it. I didn't try it yet though.

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Another blogpost on the same topic reach the front page of Hacker News. Readi it there: The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter HN

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Tags: twitter, nitter, privacy, performance, accessibility, extension

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