Could this be used as a base to fork the existing ecosystem away from centralised control and back to its users? Say using decentralised storage and a synched side chain?
You can definitely follow Twitter users. There's BirdsiteLive, a Twitter->Fediverse bridge which allows following Twitter accounts by reference from Mastodon (or any other Fediverse server). I'm using that to follow a small handful of users.
Nitter also supports RSS, so you can follow Twitter accounts in your feedreader.
What you can't do in either is reply back to Twitter profiles. BirdsiteLive sets the bridged toots (equivalent of tweets) as private, which on Mastodon renders as unsharable.
twitter ratelimits nitter servers, so you'd need every individual user (or a good portion of users) running a personal server and then you'd have to collate the data somehow. and at that level of effort it would be easier to just convince people to use mastodon.
This isn't actually true, the "Instance has been rate limited" error was a false flag. It turned out to be a bug in the API token parser, found and fixed by a contributor. Nitter instances have yet to run into a real rate limit.
It feels like there could be a way to automagically solve collation as part of decentralising the storage. If there were deterministic way to create the decentralised hash for example, and then it could simply attempt to load it before committing it on fail. The user could be provided a constant heads up on side chain synch.
Have never run a nitter server, so maybe this is not possible - but could one be included as part of a web client? Ie, user surfs to "twinitter.com", receives a nitter server that takes their twitter credentials and starts posting their activity to the new chain and optionally to twitter also. If the user supplies no credentials, the server would simply run like a user-led crawler, adding more data to the new chain in what could be presumed to be some kind of optimum fashion, as it would always be the content users of the dual chains were interested in.
It can work as a migration path for those on the fence, and that could still work in a decentralized manner.
Example: I run a Mastodon instance on communick.com. I am thinking of running a nitter instance AND a secondary instance of Mastodon (or Pleroma) that acts as twitter mirror. I can then let users of the main communick instance to follow people on twitter, but still keeping them inside the Fediverse. The idea gets a bit more complicated if we want to make it two-way bridge, but I believe that can be done with a bit of Pleroma's MRF magic.
The beauty of this solution is that it does not require any change from those that have no interest in moving out of Twitter, but it does break the garden walls.
