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Comment by yoavm | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by "how"? The code is freely available, you can spin it up at will too in just a few minutes. When they disappear, sometimes it's because the maintainer doesn't want the headache, and sometimes it's because a they're threatened to remove it.

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I guess I never bothered reading the code so for whatever reason I assumed it required some extraordinary circumvention to host it that isn't very accessible

what you're saying, if I understand correctly, is that self-hosting this is trivial then

so does that mean I could run my own local instance and never get it taken down since traffic would be negligible? why do people opt to host these for others over teaching how to run your own for example?

Because it isn’t magic, there’s still Twitter auth required https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/src/auth.nim

Every individual running their own instance would be the equivalent of every individual having their own Twitter account, which defeats the purpose.

We need a multiplexer in front of all these instances. One that works like a load balancer, health checking the individual instances and adding/removing them from the pool automatically. That would allow people to create new accounts, serve their own instance and attach them to the muxer.

That's https://xxcancel.com/

And https://twiiit.com/

No, neither of those do what I said. These are just redirectors but you need an extra step and once you've been redirected you're on that site for the remainder of your session. Furthermore, I've been redirected to unhealthy instances frequently from them.

Well, not totally. It's read only, which changes how people engage. It also lets you control ordering and presentation. It also lets you hide ads.

> what you're saying, if I understand correctly, is that self-hosting this is trivial then

Yes. It comes encouraged.

> so does that mean I could run my own local instance and never get it taken down since traffic would be negligible?

Yes, unless the other end forbids it and really cares about controlling clients. If they do and manage to detect that you are using alternative client they could block based on that. In times where that happens and there are client devs who care, it becomes a cat-and-mouse.

Yes all of that. I think it's unwise to share details here, because X's anticircumvention team are reading HN.

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