There are only two big instances that work any more, everybody is aware of them including twitter, and they exist only because twitter allows them as a safety valve for upper middle class people who believe that political consumption is a thing that works.

By the grace of Musk, a few thousand* 1) nerds who don't register on any invasive social media and 2) libs with the admirable self-control not to spend all day on twitter yelling about twitter, get a tiny trickle of nitter that can be cut off at will.

Meanwhile, we're on ycombinator.com.

Boycotting is not a thing that works under monopoly (especially with "free" products.) Monopolies boycott you.

-----

[*] I'm making this up, it could literally be hundreds, not even thousands. I don't think nitter has a sane caching strategy, and if it were more than a few users the servers would catch on fire.

Although I wouldn't be surprised at all if it turned out that the last nitter instances were being run from "X" headquarters as a project to track and study individual behavior (When do nitter users join X? When people quit X, do they still use nitter? When do people who have X accounts use nitter to conceal what they're looking at? Which accounts are especially popular for nitter users? What are the political opinions and demographics of nitter users, etc...). Or instead of X, it could be feds doing the same thing.

If so, they would have plenty of processor and the real user numbers could be tens or hundreds of thousands.