zedeus

I was misled by an individual who claimed to be helping the Nitter project pro bono with a team of lawyers. He made up a timeline of events that sounded mostly believable.

I have not given legal advice to any Nitter operators, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say?

Location: Anonymous, can provide via email

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Depends, open to travel

Technologies: Go, TypeScript, Node.js, Deno, Nim, Python, PostgreSQL, Redis, GCP, Docker, Terraform, Caddy, Linux/VPS infrastructure, REST, GraphQL, Shopify, AI/LLMs

Résumé/CV: Can provide via email

Email: [email protected]

I'm a senior software engineer with 8 years of experience, primarily focused on backend development, systems architecture, web scraping/reverse engineering, performance optimization, and infrastructure. I work best in small teams where I can operate autonomously and take ownership of difficult problems end-to-end.

I'm the developer of Nitter (https://github.com/zedeus/nitter), an open-source alternative frontend for X/Twitter that I developed and operated for 7 years. At its peak it served millions of users and had a large community around it. I maintained it through major changes to X's infrastructure, including reverse engineering, API usage, caching, performance optimization, anti-bot/WAF systems, and production infrastructure. It was ultimately shut down following legal threats from X.

Outside of Nitter, I've worked on internal logistics systems, APIs and integrations, cloud infrastructure, automation, and various other backend systems. I'm particularly interested in difficult technical problems where I can have substantial ownership, whether that's backend/infrastructure, data acquisition and scraping, developer tooling, or AI-related systems.

I'm anonymous here because of the nature of Nitter and the legal situation surrounding it. I'm happy to verify my identity privately and can provide my CV, GitHub, and additional details by email. Anonymity would not be a requirement after employment.

I'm open to full-time employment or contract work.

From the letter(s):

> X has documentary evidence that you are scraping X Data, circumventing X’s API access controls and rate limits, accessing X using X accounts and session tokens in violation of X’s rules, and republishing X Data to the public. X’s Terms of Service, Developer Agreement, and Developer Policy strictly forbid such conduct. See https://x.com/en/tos (“[C]rawling or scraping the Services in any form . . . is expressly prohibited.”). By your own description, Nitter “uses Twitter’s unofficial API” and routes all requests through your servers, and requires operators to supply real X accounts to function.

> Your actions constitute a flagrant breach of the contractual and legal obligations you agreed to when accessing the X services. Your actions also violate various state and federal laws, including, but not limited to, the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act (§ 143.001 and § 33.02) and the Lanham Act (15 U.S.C. §§ 1114, 1125).

Maybe you don't use it very often? For months before the recent chaos it was very reliable. The fact that it's working today is only because I fixed it, Twitter didn't change anything.

It's disabled on nitter.net to reduce load while this new solution is being tested. Check the instance list for updated instances, most of them have RSS enabled: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

Search, which is required for the multi-timeline feature, isn't implemented right now. I have a fix in the works using a legacy endpoint.

Broken link?

I have no idea, maybe "false flag" was too incorrect? You're right, I am.

Any rate limit errors are false flags caused by bugs, they aren't related to load or real rate limits

This isn't actually true, the "Instance has been rate limited" error was a false flag. It turned out to be a bug in the API token parser, found and fixed by a contributor. Nitter instances have yet to run into a real rate limit.

The old rate limit errors were false flags caused by a bug in the API token parser. Nitter instances have yet to run into a real rate limit.

Nitter supports lists the same way Twitter does. Example: https://nitter.net/NASA/lists/Astronauts

You can sort of create your own too (currently limited to ~25 profiles due to Twitter limitations), like this: https://nitter.net/SpaceX,elonmusk,ID_AA_Carmack

Inspired by Twint I created an alternative web client that relies almost entirely on web scraping. The parser is more complete than Twint's due to the different goals, supporting things like polls and videos properly. It's still work in progress but very usable with features like RSS and convenient profile search. https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

No content gets edited by Nitter except links being expanded and twitter/youtube links getting replaced (unless the user disables that)

It doesn't take much to run Nitter really, the nitter.net instance is currently sitting at 310 MB of memory and the CPU requirements aren't too bad. It's running off my dedicated home server with fairly low specs (i3-8100) tunnelled through a cheap VPS to bypass firewall restrictions. It hasn't crashed or (to my knowledge) experienced severe slowdowns despite the huge traffic increase today. Invidious's story is a bit different as the main instance load balances between 10 VPS instances.

Regarding usage stats I don't have any accurate numbers, but the database that stores preferences has 30k rows.

Yes there are various themes to pick from if you go to the settings menu, click the cog icon on the top right

It essentially emulates browser requests, "unofficial API" is just a fancy term for web scraping + using required parts of the public API where guest tokens work (ie. fetching video info, cards and polls).

Yes, but I do have some far future plans about utilizing the "Login with Twitter" authentication method to let people use the API on their behalf, which would allow making tweets etc.