Parasitter

Twitter via RSS with privacy

Parasitter allows you to follow your favourite twitters without Twitter even knowing it. Parasitter uses Nitter's rss feed in order to gather the latest tweets from your favourite accounts and builds a *twitter-like* feed so you can read them. We will never connect you to Twitter so your privacy is safe when using Parasitter. Parasitter is written in Python and Flask and uses Semantic-UI as its CSS framework.

Index:

• Features
• Security
• Privacy
• Self hosting
  • Install
  • Update
  • External access
• Powered by

Features:

• No JavaScript.
• 0 connections to Twitter.
• Uses RSS feeds (could be expanded to more social networks)
• Follow Twitter accounts.
• Save your favourite Tweets.
• Tor-friendly.
• Terminal-friendly.
• Easy 1 minute self-hosting deploy.
• No need for domain, runs locally.
• 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. We use Nitter's rss feed to fetch all the tweets from your followed users. Images are also loaded from nitter. If you want to use a specific Nitter instance you can replace it on the file app/routes.py.

It is always recommended to set up a self-hosted instance. It is quite easy and conveninent and will give you full control over your data. The only data that is stored on the Database is:

• Hash of the password
• Username
• Email (we won't send you any mails so you can make up the mail) - This is for future versions.
• List of followed users
• List of saved posts

Self hosting

Install

1. Install python3, pip3 and git.

2. Clone this repository:

   • git clone https://github.com/pluja/Parasitter.git

3. Navigate to the project folder:

   • cd Parasitter

4. [Optional] 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.
   If you don't mind about that, you can jump to step 5. and ignore everything about "[env]".

   • 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.

5. [env] Update pip

   • pip install --upgrade pip

6. [env] Install the required libraries:

   • pip3 install -r requirements.txt

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

7. [env] Initialize and prepare the database.

   • flask db init
   • flask db migrate
   • flask db upgrade

8. [env] Run the application.

   • flask run

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

Updating to new versions:

See CHANGELOG for the list of changes.
NOTE: Updating will never delete your database, your following list will not be erased.

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. Done! You are on latest version.

External access:

Coming soon..

Powered by:

• Nitter
• Flask
• SQLAlchemy
• Semantic-UI