Nitter rebounds: community wiki lists more working instances than before the takedowns

More working instances than the ecosystem lost

A post titled "Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns" reached the front page of Hacker News on September 5, 2026, pointing readers to a community-maintained wiki as evidence that the Twitter-scraping front-end ecosystem has regrown rather than collapsed. The linked page lives on Codeberg, in the wiki of the "shitter" repository maintained by the user mv12star, and was last edited on September 3, 2026.

The before-and-after comparison comes from the Hacker News post itself; the wiki only tracks the current landscape. As of that latest edit, it counts 13 instances as working — 10 reachable on the regular web and 3 as Tor onion services — with another 8 listed as running but throttled by rate limits.

Six mirrors went dark, and were replaced by many smaller ones

The wiki's section for formerly active and taken-down instances records six that are no longer available: xcancel.com, nitter.poast.org, nitter.privacyredirect.com, nitter.tiekoetter.com, nuku.trabun.org and nitter.catsarch.com. xcancel.com had become one of the most-used mirrors in the ecosystem, which makes the recovery described on the page all the more notable.

What has replaced them is a noticeably flatter network. The working list is dominated by personal and hobbyist domains — nitter.kareem.one, nitter.meowing.monster, nitter.jaydenha.uk, x.n0g.xyz and similar — alongside three onion addresses that require a Tor browser. The large, centralized targets are gone; what remains is small, dispersed and, in three cases, anonymized.

The playbook: session tokens and takedown evasion

The wiki is candid about what it takes to keep a public instance alive now. Would-be operators are told to do two things before anything else: read a post about how to obtain many session tokens, and read one about how to escape DMCA and other legal complaints.

That framing reflects how the software has changed since the original Nitter, which depended on guest access that X withdrew in early 2024. The forks tracked on this wiki instead run on session tokens — credentials tied to real logged-in accounts — which is why instances keep tripping over rate limits and takedown notices, and why the surrounding documentation reads like an operations manual for a cat-and-mouse game.

Alongside the instances list, the wiki hosts guides titled "Creating session tokens" and "Evading DMCA reports — Templates and Gluetun," plus self-hosting instructions, reverse-proxy configurations for Nginx, Caddy, Apache and Cloudflare Tunnel, rate-limiting setups, and a catalogue of forks of the Nitter code repository. A companion repository, shitter-public-instances-customizations, collects configuration tweaks intended to improve the performance of public instances.

Nothing here is stable

The middle tier of the list is the cautionary note: eight instances are online but rate-limited, effectively one degraded session token away from joining the taken-down section. The counts are also a snapshot from a page edited two days before the Hacker News discussion, and lists of this kind churn quickly as tokens burn out, hosts give up, or new operators join.

The wiki's own guidance — half of it devoted to escaping legal complaints — indicates that pressure on instance operators has not let up, even as their numbers have grown.

Why it matters

The rebound is a textbook demonstration of whack-a-mole dynamics: removing six mirrors, including the most prominent one, produced more working instances than before, spread across a topology that is harder to target with single notices.

For users, Nitter-style front-ends remain one of the few ways to read X content without logging in, without JavaScript and without ads, which is why they are valued by privacy-conscious readers, embedders and archivists.

For X, the outcome suggests that enforcement pushes the ecosystem toward more dispersed and partly anonymized infrastructure rather than eliminating it — though the heavy reliance on session tokens means any individual instance can degrade or disappear at short notice.