Using Nitter for Twitter RSS Feeds
Posted on February 17, 2023 by Aywren
Update: As of Jan 2024, Nitter.net is no more. RIP Nitter. :(
While I have moved to Mastodon for my social media interactions (and I love it), I’m still holding on to my old Twitter account simply because there are some accounts that I follow for news and updates. After a little research, I’ve found a free alternative – using Nitter to subscribe to Twitter accounts as RSS feeds.
While this isn’t a new or novel concept – Twitter to RSS feed – I’ve been looking into it for a while, and have had a hard time finding resources that still work to convert feeds or that provide a way to do this without a fee. For example, my normal feed reader – Inoreader – provides the option to follow Twitter accounts as a feed, but only if you pay for the premium account.
While some companies and news providers are moving to Mastodon – props to MassivelyOP! – and there are some bots that copy tweets from official accounts like the FFXIV news account – there’s still a lot of news that I don’t want to miss out on. So, my goal was to find a way to view this information without needing Twitter.
Note: This does not take the place of app notifications. If you still want to be notified in real time, then this won’t be helpful to you.
Nitter to RSS
Here comes Nitter – “a free and open source alternative Twitter front-end focused on privacy and performance”. If you want to view Twitter content without needing to go to Twitter, this is a great option.
It also acts as the middle-man that takes a Twitter account feed and turns it into an RSS feed.
In my case, Inoreader wouldn’t accept the feeds made by Nitter – I wonder if that’s because it’s smart enough to realize I’m trying to by-pass one of its paid features. So, I looked into a different feed reader that was free and would accept Nitter RSS.
This turned out to be NewsBlur. I’ve never used the site before, but it’s free and it did what I needed it to, so it’s now become my source of Twitter feed info.
How To Do It
- First, go to the Twitter account and check out the URL. What you need is the last part of it. As an example, I’m going to subscribe to Valheimgame as an RSS feed.
- Then go to Nitter search – the magnifying glass icon in the header – and search for that account by name.
Clicking this gives you the URL for the Nitter version of that account.
A shortcut here – if you noticed:
https://twitter.com/Valheimgame
….simply becomes…
https://nitter.net/Valheimgame
So just replace “twitter.com” with “nitter.net” and you got it.
- Take this Nitter URL and paste it into your feed reader. I don’t know which readers do or do not accept this (Inoreader doesn’t), but I’ve used NewsBlur here.
And there you have it – the Twitter feed in your RSS feed reader! You can just come back to the reader whenever you want to check if there’s news to be had. No more having to rely on a Twitter account! Plus, you don’t have to be a follower if you don’t want – just add new feeds as you see fit.
Note: I noticed that NewsBlur popped an error during this process sometimes. I tried the URLs repeatedly, and it would often randomly accept them even after it errored out. Sometimes, I had to re-copy from the URL bar and paste again for whatever reason. No matter, I did get it to accept all of my feeds in the end. I just had to be persistent.