With all of the various user and developer-hostile changes introduced to Twitter over the past year, the importance of a user-friendly alternative frontend for Twitter is greater than ever. After using public instances of Nitter for a while, I wanted to try hosting my own instance. I thought it would be as simple as enabling a service in my NixOS configuration: { services.nitter.enable = true; } Unfortunately, the only builds of Nitter that currently work are taken from a feature development branch which introduces changes both in build-time dependencies and runtime dependencies.

While watching the implosion of Twitter in real-time over the past week, I noticed more and more people in my Twitter feed sharing links to their Mastodon accounts. During that time, https://instances.social was posted to Hacker News as a tool to help people find a Mastodon instance to register with. My initial experience with this was quite poor. Mastodon's onboarding story needs so much work. Still can't pick a server. Tried https://t.