-
I asked ChatGPT and it reckons web scraping and caching:
Nitter is an alternative front-end for Twitter that provides a more privacy-focused and lightweight experience compared to the official Twitter website. It operates by scraping Twitter's public data rather than using Twitter's official API. Here's a simplified explanation of how Nitter works:
Web Scraping: Nitter uses web scraping techniques to fetch data from Twitter's public pages. Web scraping involves parsing and extracting information from the HTML of web pages.
Privacy Enhancement: Nitter focuses on user privacy by removing tracking elements, scripts, and other components that may be present on the official Twitter website. This results in a faster and more privacy-friendly experience for users.
Caching: To reduce the load on Twitter's servers and improve performance, Nitter implements caching. This means that once it fetches data from Twitter, it stores that data locally for a certain period. Subsequent requests for the same data can then be served from the cache instead of fetching it again from Twitter.
Twitter has an api so you got to nitter.net/whatever, nitter pass the "whatever" into the api call and get the data for the tweet back and present it to you without all the bloat/adverts/tracking etc of the twitter pages.
Of course this means that nitter could potentially be adding their own bloat/adverts/tracking etc - either already or in the future.