Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns

Let's get one thing straight: the takedowns were supposed to be a funeral, and instead we got a revival. The Codeberg instance list maintained by mv12star is the raw pulse of the Nitter ecosystem, and right now it's showing more green checkmarks than before the legal assault. That's not just a nice stat — it's a direct middle finger to the idea that you can litigate a decentralized project into the ground. The pattern here is as old as the internet itself: Streisand effect meets architectural resilience. Nitter is essentially a scraping frontend, which means it runs where the scrapers run. When Twitter/X targeted the big, well-known instances, the operator community just spun up smaller, quieter, harder-to-hit ones. The URL is the only point of failure, and a URL is just a line of text that can be rewritten anywhere. This is the eternal whack-a-mole that platforms with strict ToS will never win: you can't send a legal demand to a project that lives on everyone's homelab. But let's not get too smug. The fly in the ointment is that instance lists themselves become attack surfaces. The Codeberg wiki, the tracking tools, the "join the list" pages — those are the centralization points that a determined adversary can target. As long as the community relies on a curated registry to find working servers, the registry is the throat to cut. The recent spikes in new instances are healthy, but they're also reactive: every surge in count corresponds to a wave of instances getting thrashed or pivoting domains. The bigger question is whether this cat-and-mouse game is sustainable long-term, or if it's just entropy in motion. Running a Nitter instance is a thankless task — you eat the bandwidth costs, you absorb the legal risk, and you get zero credit except a tiny line on a wiki page. Yet people keep doing it because the alternative is handing your reading habits to a billionaire's ad machine. That's the real fuel here: not hating Elon specifically, but refusing to let any single corporation dictate how you experience the public web. So pour one out for the instances that died, and welcome the new ones rising from the ashes. The list at the Codeberg repo is living documentation that resilience in open source isn't about never breaking — it's about how fast the community patches, forks, and redeploys. The bird may be dying, but Nitter just keeps molting into a new skin. Source: https://codeberg.org/mv12star/shitter/wiki/Instances