In the past few weeks I came across several links to ‘Nitter’, each on different domains. Nitter, it turns out, is a web front-end to see Twitter without Twitter being able to track you.

It shows you public Twitter pages, after stripping out tracking and JavaScript etc. You can’t login through it, or see the things that depend on your own Twitter account (like DM’s and private lists), nor post through it. It is merely a way to see the Twitter site while wearing surgical gloves.

Twitter has been fighting third party apps for its services because it threatens their tracking and advertising, so they want to keep you inside their walled garden. Which is why they closely guard who and what has access to their API. Nitter doesn’t use the API, so Twitter doesn’t have their hands on the off-switch.

This is useful for seeing some of the things others link to, like the increasingly annoying habit of tweets being added to ‘journalism’. (“Politician x said something and Twitter wasn’t having it”)

It is also very useful that it provides RSS feeds for all Twitter content (users, #, and search terms).

You can run your own instance, and there are browser plugins that redirect any Twitter link you follow to a Nitter link replacement.

For now I found a Dutch instance (on this list), and will see if adding some RSS feeds through them is workable.

My public Twitter profile seen through Nitter