Twitter RSS feed title behavior

[Starboy-Xo]

Today, when I started reading news through nitter's RSS feed feature, the titles of the feed shortened forcing me to open the link to read the full. Which uselessly wastes your time. Below is the picture that shows a 32 words title:

It used to look like this:

You should have removed embedding of the link in the title rather than shortening the title.

Therefore, it is requested to revert the settings back to the previously set title length. If easily possible, remove the links from the tweets that people enter inside their tweets voluntarily.

Best Regards

[Gummar]

Same issue except I still do want to see links in titles.

[zedeus]

This was introduced by @duxovni in #410 and requested by several others, e.g. #425. As usual I have no strong opinions here since I don't use RSS, but I can see arguments both for and against this change. On one hand the full title lets you read the tweets from an overview, while on the other hand the body is often just a copy of the title, which is quite redundant.
Pinging some people that may care more than I do, please voice your opinions if you wish: @Perflyst @TheFrenchGhosty @FireMasterK @acarasimon96 @jtagcat @FIGBERT @stemy2 @somini @goodtiding5 @mooons @sojusnik @votemp @tio-trom @Loki-L1130

[jtagcat]

I have been summoned. I would like to see as much content as possible, in the preview (no shortening).

• For me, this would make the item-to-open ratio much higher. AKA will the item in the feed be opened in a browser.
  • I would like to see quoted tweets and maybe even few replies in the content, as this would improve the ratio.
  • Main point here is saving time: if you go through fewty (today: 68) tweets or a few hundred a day, load times add up.
  • (instead of the description, I'd rather have my RSS reader (cough, Thunderbird, it has it's cons) display the full thing..)
• Filtering: My RSS client filters in and out some keywords, topics. (still in feed body)
• Full-text search (still in feed body)
  • So a week or a few months later, you think of x or want to refer / give credit to it.

To be that dick (386), I'll say that it's the RSS reader's job to shorten something. Though, I'm more than happy to keep it configurable. Under the instance's config¹, or URL parameter.

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Pinging some people that may care more than I do, please voice your opinions if you wish

Solid move. :)

On one hand the full title lets you read the tweets from an overview

Yeah, for tweets, this is quite useful. Most readers are built to show article-length content. (except stock Kindle(?))

Footnotes

1. I can spin up yet another instance with a small configuration change then, keeping all parties using my instances happy :) The breaking update Redis change is actually neat in that sense: the frontends can share the Redis instance (conflicts TBD). ↩

[acarasimon96]

Personally, I prefer having the titles in full (the previous behavior) because I like getting desktop notifications for new tweets by some Twitter accounts, which saves me a few clicks with having to open my RSS reader just to read tweets. However, I like how the mentioned behavior was implemented; I would agree with the above comments that 32 characters is too short. So I thought of some possible solutions to approach this:

• Allow disabling this behavior via URL parameters, e.g. https://nitter.net/twitter.rss?shorttitles=false
• Configurable maximum character count in nitter.conf (a value of 240 would disable title truncation completely)
• Increase the hardcoded maximum character count (I suggest around 70-100 characters)

By the way, thanks for the unexpected mention @zedeus!

[jtagcat]

a value of 240 would disable title truncation completely

0 (no tweet content?) or -1 should disable it, in case Twitter decides to do the 120→240 move or anything else funky.

[goodtiding5]

Hi @zedeus,

Thank you for asking my opinion.  I use nitter regularly and appreciate your contribution.

I have a personal tool that uses the RSS feature to re-post twits into Mastodon/Pleroma instances and I am using the full length 'title' content.  In this respect, I would agree with @acarasimon96 that if we could have a switch to keep the full length.

With full length, I can have a simple glance on the post and then decide if I want to open it or skip it.

Changing is always hard :-) Maybe we will get used to the shortened length, but for now, I would hope we have an option for full length title.

Thank you and Happy new year!

[somini]

@zedeus Thanks for asking, I do use RSS pretty much exclusively.

I agree with the OP that the abbreviation is a bit surprising, but there are requests for both alternatives, I think an option is warranted.

I wouldn't oppose switching the default to showing the full titles, and using the option to include the abbreviation. I don't have a strong opinion on the default value.

Having the option on the URL parameter would be ideal.

nitter/src/views/general.nim

Line 64 in b8a3ffb

link(rel="alternate", type="application/rss+xml", href=rss, title="RSS feed")

This would have to include a new option "RSS Feed (truncated)"

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Thanks for continuing to support nitter.

[ghost]

I am thinking that the Shortened title is great as it looks neat and also makes things elegant. I think that the Longer means it means messy while viewing in RSS while longer means both Title and Subject are of same context and occupies screen Space.

As @zedeus said it is just redundant.

But as others mentioned having both options would be great as people use what they want. Reverting and introducing new things makes much chaos better having both Options would be great.

[Starboy-Xo]

I have to read at least 300 articles after every 12 hours from various sources including nitter tweets to keep myself updated with current affairs for an upcoming examination. So, time is precious for me.
Reading full titles can help you decide whether it is worth spending your time reading it or not. It is an admitted fact that some tweets are filled with hashtags as well as links. Which makes them look ugly and unreadable sometimes. But on the positive side, you can get a glimpse by just reading out the title to decide whether to dive into this tweet or not.
As suggested by respected fellows above, it seems pertinent to have them both with an option to choose any for the readability convenience. So your dichotomous audience enjoy the feature at their convenience.

[sojusnik]

I wouldn't oppose switching the default to showing the full titles, and using the option to include the abbreviation.

Same here.

For me it's important, that the option switching between full and truncated titles should be adjustable by the end user and not on the server, f.i. by a dedicated feed or an appendix added to the default feed.

@zedeus, many thanks for caring!

[tapatianbeast]

In a RSS Reader like miniflux, a title shortened is totally awful
Please bring back the full title and improve the rss feature in aspects like retweets and replies

[zedeus]

Thanks everyone for chiming in, it seems there's a general consensus to show full titles by default, and let the user enable truncation some way or another. I haven't decided what way yet, but as a temporary remedy I've disabled the title truncation in 19a89b7, live now on nitter.net

[ghost]

Please notify us when you have made both options available.

[Starboy-Xo]

I haven't decided what way yet, but as a temporary remedy I've disabled the title truncation in 19a89b7, live now on nitter.net

Thanks a lot for this!

[ghost]

Please notify us when you have made both options available.

@zedeus Is it available now ?

Or you made the Help wanted tag beacause you can't make it to this issue.

[zedeus]

I haven't worked on it yet, I just marked it as help wanted to get opinions from people

[TheFrenchGhosty]

Sorry I completely forgot to answer you before:

Title shouldn't be shortened, it's the reader role to shorten it if needed.

[duxovni]

Sorry, I didn't realize this change would be so contentious ^^;

I'd still love for truncated titles to be available as an option; my ideal preference would be for it to be configurable instance-wide in nitter.conf, and then possibly overrideable on a case-by-case basis with a URL query parameter if that's something people want. In any case, I'm perfectly happy with full-length titles as the default behavior, as long as I can change that for my instance / my feeds.

My use-case: I use miniflux, but mostly page through all my articles individually, rather than looking at the overview list. With a full-length title, I need to scroll past the entire long title to get to the content; I can't just read the title, because that's often missing linebreaks that are needed for the tweet to be comprehensible. So I want a title that gives a brief preview and doesn't take up much space.

[ghost]

Is there any updates on the truncated version ?

[zedeus]

No, it's very low priority.

[freedit-dev]

https://docs.rsshub.app/en/social-media.html#twitter

https://rsshub.app/twitter/user/durov/readable=1&authorNameBold=1&showAuthorInTitle=1&showAuthorInDesc=1&showQuotedAuthorAvatarInDesc=1&showAuthorAvatarInDesc=1&showEmojiForRetweetAndReply=1&showRetweetTextInTitle=0&addLinkForPics=1&showTimestampInDescription=1&showQuotedInTitle=1&heightOfPics=150

Rsshub adds many parameters for user customizing, maybe nitter could learn something from that.

[vinkla]

I propose the addition of a feature that allows for displaying only the author's name in the post title, resulting in a cleaner and less cluttered presentation while eliminating repetitive content.

[Starboy-Xo]

I propose the addition of a feature that allows for displaying only the author's name in the post title, resulting in a cleaner and less cluttered presentation while eliminating repetitive content.

Then the name will look redundant which will create no appeal to see what is written inside.

[kontell]

Having the full tweet in the title is becoming more of an issue with the introduction of long form tweets. By default the title should be capped at the old 140/ 280 character limit (would personally prefer the title to be much shorter or changed to the username).

[faroit]

There are a bunch of accounts that use twitter to link to paper preprints, now copying the full abstract into the tweets.

https://nitter.net/_akhaliq/status/1673587527528374272

Having a lot of those, almost brakes my RSS client (Reeder).

[Starboy-Xo]

Seems like the RSS feed has been disabled. Sad :(

[braboobssiere]

I'm using nitter rss to update discord bot, is it possible to get it back? :(

[cmj]

Your best bet is to just find another instance that has RSS enabled
https://status.d420.de/

[mruac]

I propose the addition of a feature that allows for displaying only the author's name in the post title, resulting in a cleaner and less cluttered presentation while eliminating repetitive content.

Then the name will look redundant which will create no appeal to see what is written inside.

That's the downside of microblogs, the ability to write out a thought that requires no title.
I myself prefer no title, but in place of a title, have used the author's name and their action, eg.

• user RT'd (or 🔃)
• user replied (or 💬)
• user tweeted
• user quote tweeted (or 🔃💬)

After some time having an rss feed of each every microblog feed, I have realised how much cluttered it has made my RSS reader due to the frequency of "low value" posts and am now looking into creating "digests" instead to reduce the frequency of posts in my RSS reader.

I am surprised that people are relying on the title alone when some readers and notifications have the ability to preview the body as well.

As for a solution, as AI becomes more prevalent, maybe there could be feed parser (that's not within the scope of Nitter) that produces a new feed with a summarised title from the body using AI?