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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.
Arducius-
Fairly sure ChatGPT is talking nonsense. Looking at the code, nitter looks to be calling Twitter APIs, just it's using the internal ones used by the website front-end rather than the official documented ones intended for 3rd party integrations.
That means it could break at any time but because so much of Twitter is implemented in JavaScript in the browser/app it will always have to have an API underneath that of some form which can always be reverse engineered
rhowe
But don't twitter have API fees now? And why wouldn't they just revoke nitter's API key?