Show HN: I reverse engineered X to Read Threads without Any Account as Articles
Hi fellow hackers,
I'm Ved, I came across the pain point of having a reader that could provide threads as articles after scrolling them many times and missing the context of the original info shared.
To solve my itch I decided to build a thread reader without Ads(all existing sol. were full of them), since X/Twitter API was very pricey, I did some reverse engineering to convert rendered X.com/twitter pages to an API and host it in a VM (which obv. was dead cheap).
All of your data is saved in LocalStorage. Including your comments and saved threads(there is a known issue with Linux and MacOS browsers i think).
Code is open-sourced at : https://github.com/vednig/unlaceapp
App is available at : https://unlace.app
There are two views inbuilt in app
https://unlace.app/?url=https://x.com/ianwcrosby/status/1872...
https://unlace.app/thread/ianwcrosby/status/1872724231999381...
Reverse Engineered X API is available at https://xapi.betaco.tech/x-thread-api?url=https%3A%2F%2Fx.co...
Meanwhile you can enter any twitter thread url on https://unlace.app to get a clean and read friendly article.
Here's the stack(if anyone's interested):
- NextJS
- FastAPI
- Selenium
That's all folks, looking towards a productive feedback session.
Interesting and much needed--I absolutely refuse to go to Twitter links anymore; why bother, they don't usually work unless you're logged in. So, I clicked some of the links and, at this time, they don't load in a reasonable amount of time, I assume due to the Hug of Death or whatever it is we call that here.
This one loaded: https://unlace.app/thread/ianwcrosby/status/1872724231999381..., but oddly it's duplicating the thread.
Very cool! I'm very impressed that Twitter hasn't detected your selenium usage, it seems like they're really trying to push people towards their paid API.
I made a similar tool, except it's a browser extension that lets you download threads as markdown (then it's up to you to dump them into a DB or train a model on them or whatever), I'd love to get your feedback https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/thread-to-markdown/... (firefox version also available)
Edit: Example output using tweet thread mentioned elsewhere in this post https://sharetext.io/c04b7c82
Great work! Can I chip in to support archiving unrolled threads to the Internet Archive and archive.today (it’s a trivial HTTP request to do so)? I asked threadreaderapp.com for this to radio silence.
https://unlace.app/?url=https://x.com/ianwcrosby/status/1872...
Doesn't load with Javascript disabled
https://unlace.app/thread/ianwcrosby/status/1872724231999381...
Does load with Javascript disabled.
Why one yes, the other no?
Thanks for sharing! Let me ask one quick question -- how do you host/deploy python backend (x-api)?
Status Update: Server is down, because of excessive requests. I'm trying to get it back up.
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