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Why all this?

On the economic interests behind Elon Musk's X algorithm – and why an open-source countermeasure became necessary in the interest of an ethical digital community.

The problem: the algorithm serves profit, not you

Since Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter in October 2022, the platform has changed fundamentally. What was once a chronological stream of text messages is now an algorithmically controlled attention market – with clear economic winners and losers.

How the algorithm favours video content

💰 Video advertising is up to 10× more valuable than static ads. Longer dwell time from videos means more ad revenue for X Corp.
📺 X Premium subscribers who post video content receive a share of ad revenue from their videos – a direct financial incentive for Musk to algorithmically favour video.
📉 Text posts, scientific articles, in-depth analyses are systematically distributed less widely – not because they are less relevant, but because they generate less money.
🔒 External links are throttled: posts linking to news articles or websites outside X reach significantly fewer users than posts without links, according to multiple investigations.
"Internet freedom means nothing if the visibility of information depends on whether it makes money for someone."

The result: anyone sharing factually valuable but video-poor content on X – doctors, scientists, journalists, critical citizens – systematically loses reach. Public discourse is no longer ordered by relevance, but by profitability.

The consequence: information distortion at scale

This is not a neutral phenomenon. It has concrete social consequences:

In short: if you don't produce video, you barely exist algorithmically.

The countermeasure: open source, chronological, neutral

What this project does

This system is built on Nitter, an open-source Twitter mirror that delivers content without algorithm, without advertising and without tracking. On top of that we automatically collect the posts of accounts that certain users follow – and display them purely chronologically.

Nitter is open source (GitHub: zedeus/nitter) and runs self-hosted on our own infrastructure. No data leaves the server. No advertising. No profiling.

The ethical dimension: community over corporate interest

Why this is a social question

Social media is today the most important public space for societal discourse. When this space is controlled by the economic interests of a single individual – in a way that systematically renders certain content invisible – that is not a technical question. It is a democratic one.

Open-source tools like Nitter are the community's answer: transparency instead of black box, chronology instead of manipulation, self-determination instead of dependency.

We invite everyone to use this system, contribute to it, and run their own instances. The source code is freely available. The idea behind it is simple: information belongs to everyone.

This project runs on a private server and has no commercial interests. RSS feeds are sourced through a self-hosted Nitter instance. All collected data remains on the local system.

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