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. You can read the full issue for the details (including how to generate guest accounts, which you’ll need later).

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.

Later in the week, a thread was started in the Rust subreddit titled “Rustaceans worth following on Mastodon?” and saw that quite a lot of people were registered on the Hachyderm Mastodon instance. After spending so long playing with the filters on https://instances.social to try to find an instance and coming away empty-handed, I decided to just bite the bullet and register an account on Hachyderm.