Parasitter

Twitter and Youtube via RSS with privacy

In this new version, Parasitter no longer depends on Invidious. Click on this link if you want to go to the old version using Invidious (not updated anymore).

Parasitter allows you to follow your favorite Twitter and YouTube accounts with full privacy using rss feeds in order to gather the latest content from your favourite accounts and builds a beautiful feed so you can read them. Parasitter is written in Python and Flask and uses Semantic-UI as its CSS framework.

Parasitter is possible thanks to several open-source projects that are listed on the Powered by section. Make sure to check out those awesome projects!

Index:

• Features
• Security
• Privacy
• Self hosting
  • Test it!
  • Update
• Powered by
• Donate

Features:

• No JavaScript.
• Uses RSS feeds (could be expanded to more social networks)
• Follow Twitter accounts.
• Follow Youtube accounts.
• Save your favourite Tweets.
• Save your favourite Youtube videos [Coming soon!]
• Tor-friendly.
• Terminal-friendly.
• Easy 1 minute self-hosting deploy.

And many more to come!

Security

Only the hash of your password is stored on the database. Also no personal information of any kind is kept on the app itself, if a hacker gets access to it only thing they could do would be to follow/unfollow some accounts.

I always recommend self-hosting, as you will be the only person with access to the data.

Privacy

Parasitter cares about your privacy, and for this it will never make any connection to Twitter or Youtube on the client. We make use of rss feeds to fetch all the tweets from your followed accounts. If you want to use a specific Nitter instance you can replace it on the file app/routes.py.

The only things the database stores are:

• Hash of the password
• Username
• List of followed users
• List of saved posts

This data will never be used for any other purpose than offering the service to the user.

The Parasitter server connects to Google (Youtube) in order to gather all the necessary data. Then it serves it (proxied through itself) to the client. This means that as a client, you will never connect to Google - the Parasitter server will do it for you. So if you want to set up a Parasitter server I recommend you to set it up on a remote VPS so you don't share your IP with Google or use a VPN on the server.

Important note: The client never connects to Google / Youtube however, the server does in order to gather all the necessary things!

Self hosting

Test

You can test this new version.

IMPORTANT: Connections to googlevideo will be made to stream the videos. It is recommended to use a VPS server or a VPN to preserve your privacy. This version is intended for a remote server.

1. Install python3, pip3, python3-venv (optional) and git.
2. Clone this repository:
   • git clone https://github.com/pluja/Parasitter.git
3. Navigate to the project folder:
   • cd Parasitter
4. Change to this branch:
   • git checkout dev-indep
5. Prepare a virtual environment and activate it:

   Python lets you create virtual environments. This allows you to avoid installing all the pip packages on your system.

   • python3 -m venv venv
   • source venv/bin/activate

   Now you are inside of the virtual environment for python. All instructions wiht [env] indicate that must be done inside the env if you decided to create one. From now on, you will always need to start the application from within the virtual env.

6. [env] Update pip
   • python3 pip install --upgrade pip
7. [env] Install the required libraries:
   • python3 pip install -r requirements.txt

     Use sudo or, preferably --user, if not working.

8. [env] Initialize and prepare the database.
   • flask db init
   • flask db migrate
   • flask db upgrade

   If you get "No such command db", try running source venv/bin/activate again.

9. [env] Run the application.
   • flask run

   You can optionally use flask run --host 0.0.0.0 so you can use Parasitter from other devices from the same network using the host device's IP address and port. ¡Test it from a smartphone!

10. Go to "http://localhost:5000/" and enjoy.

Updating to new versions:

IMPORTANT: Before updating to new versions, it is recommended to always export your data on Settings>ExportData. A major version update could have changes on the whole database and you may be forced to remove and reset the database!

1. Navigate to the git repository (the one you cloned when installing).

2. Pull new changes:

   • git pull

3. Install new packages (if any):

   • pip install -r requirements.txt

   It may be that there are no new packages to install. In that case, all requirements will be satisfied.

4. Update the database:

   • flask db migrate
   • flask db upgrade

If you experience any error in this step, it might be that there were changes on the database. You can solve it by exporting your data, deleting and resetting the database. Run rm -rf app.db migrations and then flask db init. Then run step 5 normally.

6. Done! You are on latest version.

See CHANGELOG for a list of changes.

Powered by:

• Nitter
• youtube-dl
• Flask
• SQLAlchemy
• Semantic-UI
• requests-futures
• microblog
• Video.js
• My fork of youtube_search

Donate 💌

Testing with a public instance will soon be needed, and I will need to set up a server for this. If I want that Parasitter to go public and host some users I will need a (relativelly) good server and this is somehow expensive for me. So any contribution will be really welcome!

This project is completelly Open Source and is built on my own free time as a hobby. So if you like it, you can buy me a coffee!

• Bitcoin: 3EjaWjtsHz4WpbVL5Wx8Xg6MfyRRnKYj4e
• Monero: 83hinYmUkMH2ANgdhxRupmakzLwN26ddePrLQvZv4E3Q1CWjq7MDzsKRcPqLPQwTvG3DdujyaxbKbMsf9VKVAmphMhsfndc