This Tool Makes Twitter More Readable

The Twitter sidebar filled with accounts to follow and trending topics is gone. As well as pop-ups asking you to turn on notifications, ads, and view counts for all tweets. It’s like a breath of fresh air, and perfect for viewing tweets without falling down the Twitter rabbit hole. Even better, it usually loads faster than Twitter itself.

Here’s how to set up your computer or mobile device to redirect any Twitter links you open to Nitter.

Install an extension or app

You can easily change any Twitter URL to a Nitter URL by simply replacing “twitter.com” with “nitter.net”, for example: instead of twitter.com/WIREDwould you type www.nitter.net/wired. This is of course tedious, so I recommend installing a tool that will do all the work for you automatically.

Nitter’s GitHub Page offers a list of extensions. For Chrome users, I recommend starting with Nitter redirect. Firefox users can check Redirect from Twitter to Nitter. Android users can install twitter2nitter. Mac Safari users, and iPhone and iPad users can install Redirect privacy (if you prefer the free option, there is Shortcut you can customize insteadyou just need to work a little to get it to work the way you want).

Once installed, any Twitter links you click should open in Nitter, not Twitter.

Does not work? Try another instance

Nitter sometimes overloads, resulting in error messages such as “Tweet not found” for tweets you know exist. In these cases, I recommend switching to a different “instance” of Nitter, which is essentially just another server running the service. Eat list of Nitter instances on the Nitter GitHub page, which is updated regularly. Copy one from the country you live in or just the one with the URL you like and then go to your browser extension or redirect app of choice. This should fix the problem in almost all cases.

Of course, there is always a chance that Twitter will try to shut down Nitter, as they have done with other third-party apps. However, this will be tricky because instead of relying on an API like these apps did, Nitter simply scrapes the Twitter website and anyone with the appropriate skills can quickly set up their own instance. However, if it stops working, we can always hang out on Mastodon instead.