nitter.net has disappeared

[thutt]

This isn't an issue with nitter software, but I'm getting the following:

Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site.
We can’t connect to the server at nitter.net.

When attempting to navigate to Twitter's user pages via nitter.net.

Comparatively, has the DNS registration disappeared? (The registration is valid until 2024.08.06, according to a whois lookup)

nslookup twitter.com

Non-authoritative answer: Name: twitter.com Address: 104.244.42.65 Name: twitter.com Address: 104.244.42.1 Name: twitter.com Address: 104.244.42.129 Name: twitter.com Address: 104.244.42.193

nslookup nitter.net

Non-authoritative answer: *** Can't find nitter.net: No answer

[zedeus]

nitter.net is unavailable because Njalla (domain vendor) suspended my account. I'm waiting for them to respond.

[awsms]

nitter.net is unavailable because Njalla (domain vendor) suspended my account. I'm waiting for them to respond.

Thx for the quick answer, I was a bit worried as the website hasn't been available for the whole day

[gigirassy]

Hope this gets resolved!

[stopmotio]

Any idea as to why they may have done that?

[lukefromdc]

We need to know if Twitter is whining to domain vendors about Nitter instances.

[retry-the-user]

in the meantime add 185.246.188.57 nitter.net to your hosts file and you can still use it

[lukefromdc]

That gets a login request on an otherwise blank/white page

[jrfondren]

That IP works. You can't, however, go to https://$ip/ as that'll cause your browser to send the IP in the Host: header, which means the server won't dispatch the request to nitter.net. You need to do something like add it to your hosts file.

[retry-the-user]

Do you people not read? "in the meantime add 185.246.188.57 nitter.net to your hosts file and you can still use it"

add to your hosts file

[jrfondren]

Someone without a relatively thorough understanding of webhosting will go to https://$ip/, get an error, and then conclude that the IP is wrong. Since the IP is wrong, why go to the effort of modifying a hosts file to something wrong?

Anything related to name resolution you'll just have to explain three times.

[stopmotio]

I was about to try the raw IP itself lol

[lukefromdc]

When using DNS over HTTPS in Firefox, /etc/hosts is ignored by the browser. I consider this a nuisance side effect of forcing any ISP surveillance to use raw IP addresses and look them up themselves (which automated snooping may not bother with) as it makes blocking things like Facebook, Google, and their embedded content more difficult.

[lukefromdc]

How do I stop Firefox from redirecting 185.246.188.57 to https://185.246.188.57 with DNS over https engaged? Also I finally got Firefox to at least show just the IP address in the address bar but got error 401 "authorization required."

Webhosting I know little about, BTW. EDIT: same with browsers, mostly I know how to block things like trackers and ad networks, and not to use Chrome for anything,.

[jrfondren]

1. use another nitter instance that's still up
2. use another browser that the hosts file works for (Brave is one)
3. use your own DNS server and change your router or your computer to use it. A DNS server is a likely component of anti-adware solutions that work outside the browser, like a pihole.
4. use a public/alternate DNS service that supports edits (I don't know of any)
5. clone nitter, add in a new feature to have it proxy requests to an existing nitter server, plug the IP into that, and then make a pull request to add this as a normal feature. This way people can hit localhost without having to duplicate the elaborate auth system that's required now
6. run nitter locally with your own twitter creds

[stopmotio]

Just disable DNS over HTTPS and give it another go

[jarrodmoldrich]

@lukefromdc In Firefox, I believe you can set network.trr.exclude-etc-hosts to true in about:config. You may have to add the relevant domains to network.trr.excluded-domains also, but I didn't need to.

[abhranil26]

Yeah added to hosts file on macos, and seems to be working with Chrome

[zedeus]

@lukefromdc @stopmotio someone filed a complaint to Njalla about unconsensual nudity being hosted on nitter.net, with a link that actually came from another instance. It's the first time I've ever gotten any semblance of a takedown request via Njalla, so I didn't think much of it when I got an email with the subject "Njalla: New Message", and the body just being a link, while traveling. A couple days later and one more email, they just suspended the account. I only found out when nitter.net became unreachable.

[zedeus]

These are the two emails I received prior to suspension:

Hetzner at least included plenty of information about the urgency and the full report information, until they gave up and suspended my account.

Njalla's handling of this is amateurish at best. Here's the actual support message:

A funny thing to note here is that the image link, which first points at nitter.it, is a /enc/ link which only gets created by Nitter if the instance admin enables base64 link encoding for media proxying. This is not enabled for nitter.net, so I know for a fact someone copied an image from another instance (presumably nitter.it), changed the domain, and sent a complaint to Njalla.

[lukefromdc]

@lukefromdc @stopmotio someone filed a complaint to Njalla about unconsensual nudity being hosted on nitter.net, with a link that actually came from another instance. It's the first time I've ever gotten any semblance of a takedown request via Njalla, so I didn't think much of it when I got an email with the subject "Njalla: New Message", and the body just being a link, while traveling. A couple days later and one more email, they just suspended the account. I only found out when nitter.net became unreachable.

That means they suspended your account without properly investigating the complaint.

There are a great many classes of dispute where innuendo and fake complaints about everything from copyright to CSAM are used to silence an opponent. Elon Musk may consider all of Nitter an opponent worthy of this-or it could be some chump doing it for laughs but that seems awful convenient to me.

Also, doing ANYTHING permanent and non-revocable because you didn't have staff on call to service all messages within 24 hours is very unreasonable.

[lukefromdc]

https://nitter.it/ does seem to be working, though you do have to click through an expired certificate warning. Given what Nitter is used for, I am assuming TWITTER is the host of any nonconsensual nudity found via any nitter instance.

[abacabadabacaba]

It's really funny that people here and on Hacker News hypothesize that Twitter is behind this. In fact, Twitter couldn't care less. If they did, they won't bother sending takedown requests, they would just block Nitter on their end, which should be easier for them and which is something they are entirely in their right to do. If you read TorrentFreak, you would know what a mess the situation with takedown requests is. That people receive requests to remove nonexistent URLs, or URLs on websites they have nothing to do with, is completely par for the course.

[justinclift]

@zedeus Might be time to create some backup domain names?

Wonder if it's also useful to use a registrar that doesn't roll over to random takedown requests too? (easydns.com springs to mind, but there are probably others)

[Sketch6307]

It's really funny that people here and on Hacker News hypothesize that Twitter is behind this. In fact, Twitter couldn't care less. If they did, they won't bother sending takedown requests, they would just block Nitter on their end, which should be easier for them and which is something they are entirely in their right to do. If you read TorrentFreak, you would know what a mess the situation with takedown requests is. That people receive requests to remove nonexistent URLs, or URLs on websites they have nothing to do with, is completely par for the course.

They've tried repeatedly to block nitter 🤣 if you don't know what you're talking about then don't talk

[Apachez-]

It's really funny that people here and on Hacker News hypothesize that Twitter is behind this. In fact, Twitter couldn't care less. If they did, they won't bother sending takedown requests, they would just block Nitter on their end, which should be easier for them and which is something they are entirely in their right to do. If you read TorrentFreak, you would know what a mess the situation with takedown requests is. That people receive requests to remove nonexistent URLs, or URLs on websites they have nothing to do with, is completely par for the course.

Twitter cares since Nitter is growing and making Twitter losing ad revenue and also losing possibility for Twitter to merge statistics with other sources and sell your information to others.

But going from these facts into some conspiracy theory that Elon Musk himself have an evil plot on how to shutdown Nitter well... is a bit far fetch to say the least. Could simply be verified if the URLs in question works when going directly to Twitter or not. If they are blocked going through x.com but not when proxied through Nitter (unless some cache at Nitter) then we can turn the conspiracy theory into a reality.

Workaround is to pick another mirror for now:

https://status.d420.de/

Other status for when the downtime started (depending on timezone in the night between saturday and sunday 13-14 january 2024):

https://updownradar.com/status/nitter.net

Regarding the domain itself what should be fixed is to use a:

• Proper registrar.
• Proper DNS-server hosting.
• Proper web-server hosting.

That is vendors who doesnt shit bricks due to some complaints but rather find out whats really going on and in this case the solution would probably have been to let nitter.net refresh its caches (for the case where the URLs have already been removed at the source which is Twitter/X) or if needed add these URLs to a blacklist in case Twitter itself dont block these.

[Apachez-]

@zedeus Might be time to create some backup domain names?

Wonder if it's also useful to use a registrar that doesn't roll over to random takedown requests too? (easydns.com springs to mind, but there are probably others)

Already exists, take a look at https://status.d420.de/ for mirrors and their status.

[animegrafmays]

Regarding the domain itself what should be fixed is to use a:

* Proper registrar.

* Proper DNS-server hosting.

* Proper web-server hosting.

That is vendors who doesnt shit bricks due to some complaints but rather find out whats really going on and in this case the solution would probably have been to let nitter.net refresh its caches (for the case where the URLs have already been removed at the source which is Twitter/X) or if needed add these URLs to a blacklist in case Twitter itself dont block these.

welcome to 2024. political pressure will make any of them snap. there is no such thing as a 'proper registrar' anymore. njal.la is just a proxy (we use them too but I'm definitely moving after this). we use porkbun which has been stable and in the event a friend had his domain taken they were not at fault and tried to help him recover it. epik was okay until they had their entire database leaked.

this is the same issue people right of center politically speaking have been fighting for the last 7 years. the walls are closing in on any and everything and it's only going to get worse from here

[abacabadabacaba]

They've tried repeatedly to block nitter 🤣 if you don't know what you're talking about then don't talk

If I worked at Twitter and my task were to block Nitter, the first thing I would do is to write a script that gets IPs of all Nitter instances, and adds them to a block list. The second, if Nitter started using proxies, would be to make a script that requests a random nonexistent ID through every instance, and block all IPs that happen to request the same ID from Twitter. Since Twitter hasn't done any of this, I conclude that they aren't really trying to block Nitter.

[nayr7]

Just yet another instance of why you should never use njalla.

[barelyprofessional]

njal.la reversed their idiotic decision?

nitter.net.             3600    IN      A       185.246.188.57
nitter.net.             36000   IN      NS      3-get.njalla.fo.
nitter.net.             36000   IN      NS      1-you.njalla.no.
nitter.net.             36000   IN      NS      2-can.njalla.in.
;; Received 170 bytes from 185.193.124.34#53(2-can.njalla.in) in 48 ms

I suppose they realized this might tarnish their reputation a bit. I'm still blown away that people recommend their lousy service as they do things like this time after time.

If the domain has been unblocked, please consider transferring to literally anyone else.

[zaee-k]

njal.la reversed their idiotic decision?

nitter.net.             3600    IN      A       185.246.188.57
nitter.net.             36000   IN      NS      3-get.njalla.fo.
nitter.net.             36000   IN      NS      1-you.njalla.no.
nitter.net.             36000   IN      NS      2-can.njalla.in.
;; Received 170 bytes from 185.193.124.34#53(2-can.njalla.in) in 48 ms

I suppose they realized this might tarnish their reputation a bit. I'm still blown away that people recommend their lousy service as they do things like this time after time.

If the domain has been unblocked, please consider transferring to literally anyone else.

Is there any alternative register which treats privacy and handles stuff more professionally than njalla?

[animegrafmays]

njal.la reversed their idiotic decision?

nitter.net.             3600    IN      A       185.246.188.57
nitter.net.             36000   IN      NS      3-get.njalla.fo.
nitter.net.             36000   IN      NS      1-you.njalla.no.
nitter.net.             36000   IN      NS      2-can.njalla.in.
;; Received 170 bytes from 185.193.124.34#53(2-can.njalla.in) in 48 ms

I suppose they realized this might tarnish their reputation a bit. I'm still blown away that people recommend their lousy service as they do things like this time after time. If the domain has been unblocked, please consider transferring to literally anyone else.

Is there any alternative register which treats privacy and handles stuff more professionally than njalla?

njalla isn't a registrar, njalla is a proxy. in this case njalla proxied a registration for nitter.net via Tucows. so Tucows was the registrar. 99.9999999% of the time njalla doesn't care about reports because they never make it to njalla. this time it did, because it was Tucows. and because they didnt receive a response they locked his account because the alternative is Tucows stops allowing them to proxy for third party users.

[barelyprofessional]

njal.la reversed their idiotic decision?

nitter.net.             3600    IN      A       185.246.188.57
nitter.net.             36000   IN      NS      3-get.njalla.fo.
nitter.net.             36000   IN      NS      1-you.njalla.no.
nitter.net.             36000   IN      NS      2-can.njalla.in.
;; Received 170 bytes from 185.193.124.34#53(2-can.njalla.in) in 48 ms

I suppose they realized this might tarnish their reputation a bit. I'm still blown away that people recommend their lousy service as they do things like this time after time. If the domain has been unblocked, please consider transferring to literally anyone else.

Is there any alternative register which treats privacy and handles stuff more professionally than njalla?

Maybe Incognet, but I don't have personal experience with their service, just it's well regarded by @jaw-sh and he's got a lot of experience with hosting websites people don't like.

You'll have issues with anyone who is reselling to anonymous registrants though, they take on more burden than the typical registrar. For most people, any accredited registrar is fine, though personally I like Porkbun as their pricing is good and they support hardware tokens for 2FA.

One to look out for in the future is NameCrane, which is still "Coming Soon", but will be an ICANN accredited registrar operated by Francisco of BuyVM. He's a good guy, but you'll still have to give over your personal information per ICANN.

njal.la reversed their idiotic decision?

nitter.net.             3600    IN      A       185.246.188.57
nitter.net.             36000   IN      NS      3-get.njalla.fo.
nitter.net.             36000   IN      NS      1-you.njalla.no.
nitter.net.             36000   IN      NS      2-can.njalla.in.
;; Received 170 bytes from 185.193.124.34#53(2-can.njalla.in) in 48 ms

I suppose they realized this might tarnish their reputation a bit. I'm still blown away that people recommend their lousy service as they do things like this time after time. If the domain has been unblocked, please consider transferring to literally anyone else.

Is there any alternative register which treats privacy and handles stuff more professionally than njalla?

njalla isn't a registrar, njalla is a proxy. in this case njalla proxied a registration for nitter.net via Tucows. so Tucows was the registrar. 99.9999999% of the time njalla doesn't care about reports because they never make it to njalla. this time it did, because it was Tucows. and because they didnt receive a response they locked his account because the alternative is Tucows stops allowing them to proxy for third party users.

Considering nitter.net has its nameservers delegated to Njalla, it doesn't take a genius to work out its registered to Njalla, skip Tucows and complain directly. I don't see anything that says whether it was Tucows or somebody complaining to Njalla directly.

[animegrafmays]

Considering nitter.net has its nameservers delegated to Njalla, it doesn't take a genius to work out its registered to Njalla, skip Tucows and complain directly. I don't see anything that says whether it was Tucows or somebody complaining to Njalla directly.

$ whois nitter.net
[...]
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: domainabuse@tucows.com
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.4165350123

lrn2dns

[justinclift]

Is there any alternative register which treats privacy and handles stuff more professionally than njalla?

EasyDNS (easydns.com). We (sqlitebrowser.org) use them, and for us they've been pretty good.

We're not really a target for abuse though, or at least we haven't been so far. :sweat_smile:

[barelyprofessional]

Considering nitter.net has its nameservers delegated to Njalla, it doesn't take a genius to work out its registered to Njalla, skip Tucows and complain directly. I don't see anything that says whether it was Tucows or somebody complaining to Njalla directly.

$ whois nitter.net
[...]
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: domainabuse@tucows.com
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.4165350123

lrn2dns

Learn to read

Name Server: 1-you.njalla.no
Name Server: 2-can.njalla.in
Name Server: 3-get.njalla.fo

If I want to take a domain down, why would I bother with the registrar when the registrant has been revealed to be a trigger happy reseller? All I'm saying is that you don't know Tucows was involved for certain.

I remember a while ago you were talking about becoming ICANN accredited for Poast. Whatever happened to that? Lost all the required money getting drunk while screaming at your users? I'm praying for your liver.

[zedeus]

Here's the super professional reply by Njalla:

My response:

[animegrafmays]

Considering nitter.net has its nameservers delegated to Njalla, it doesn't take a genius to work out its registered to Njalla, skip Tucows and complain directly. I don't see anything that says whether it was Tucows or somebody complaining to Njalla directly.

$ whois nitter.net
[...]
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: domainabuse@tucows.com
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.4165350123

lrn2dns

Learn to read

Name Server: 1-you.njalla.no
Name Server: 2-can.njalla.in
Name Server: 3-get.njalla.fo

If I want to take a domain down, why would I bother with the registrar when the registrant has been revealed to be a trigger happy reseller? All I'm saying is that you don't know Tucows was involved for certain.

I remember a while ago you were talking about becoming ICANN accredited for Poast. Whatever happened to that? Lost all the required money getting drunk while screaming at your users? I'm praying for your liver.

using a public issue to try to attack me, go back to kiwifarms. there's a reason nobody wants to deal with josh and his users and you are doing nothing but proving that right

[animegrafmays]

Here's the super professional reply by Njalla:

My response:

you can ask them for the official complaint presented to tucows. did they not forward it to you?

[zedeus]

No official complaint has been forwarded, this is all I got: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1150#issuecomment-1890855255

[animegrafmays]

if they wont give you the actual complaint and would suspend you instead I would migrate off. on fedi we have all had good results with porkbun. I will be moving our domains off njalla today because of this

[ghost]

seems like the site's back online as of now

[IdfbAn]

It's back! (for now)

[Apachez-]

Regarding the domain itself what should be fixed is to use a:

* Proper registrar.

* Proper DNS-server hosting.

* Proper web-server hosting.

That is vendors who doesnt shit bricks due to some complaints but rather find out whats really going on and in this case the solution would probably have been to let nitter.net refresh its caches (for the case where the URLs have already been removed at the source which is Twitter/X) or if needed add these URLs to a blacklist in case Twitter itself dont block these.

welcome to 2024. political pressure will make any of them snap. there is no such thing as a 'proper registrar' anymore. njal.la is just a proxy (we use them too but I'm definitely moving after this). we use porkbun which has been stable and in the event a friend had his domain taken they were not at fault and tried to help him recover it. epik was okay until they had their entire database leaked.

this is the same issue people right of center politically speaking have been fighting for the last 7 years. the walls are closing in on any and everything and it's only going to get worse from here

Then you will unfortunately have to look at how others does this.

For example Piratebay seems to currently use Namebright as registrar.

[animegrafmays]

again, njalla is a proxy. njalla registers (or maintains registration) on your behalf with registrars they work with. if njalla gets a complaint about your domain, in this case from tucows about CSAM on nitter.net they are legally obligated to forward it and follow up. njalla is charging people extra to act as a proxy so they dont have their info exposed. it's run by ex-or-current pirate bay people who seem to want nothing to do with it.

we had a run in with them in regards to tucows in 2021 and njalla assured me what happend with nitter today was not something that would ever happen so I've begun the migration process and suggested the ~8k people following me to do the same if they have any njalla domains

[Apachez-]

it's run by ex-or-current pirate bay people who seem to want nothing to do with it.

Does not compute... its runned by someone who want nothing to do with it?

Again, there are 3 parties here in the supply chain which you must choose carefully:

• Proper registrar.
• Proper DNS-server hosting.
• Proper WEB-server hosting.

[stopmotio]

What is "tucows"?

[animegrafmays]

What is "tucows"?

one of the oldest registrars in north america. in this case, njalla is acting as a proxy registering or maintaining registration for domains via tucows (tucows.com)

you can see this via whois nitter.net

[jaw-sh]

Have you discerned if this was Tucows or the NIC? Njalla says it was the responsibility of .ORG's NIC, but you're on .NET which is owned by Verisign, while .ORG is managed by the Public Interest Registry.

If you do find out, please let us know.

[zedeus]

Njalla has responded. Good ending I guess, but they clearly didn't enjoy the negative publicity.