What does HackerNews think of nitter-instances?

Yes, use a nitter instance.

https://github.com/xnaas/nitter-instances

Searching for twitter usernames isn't working, use the tweet search tab or type a twitter username on the end of the url.

If it says "This nitter instance has been rate limited" then choose a different one from the above list.

Also it's not entirely obvious that you expand a thread by clicking in the empty space to to right of the username on a post

Nitter is still working, although searching for users seems to have stopped working you can still use the tweet search tab or manually type a twitter username on the end of the URL.

List of nitter instances:

https://github.com/xnaas/nitter-instances

They unpredictably say "This nitter instance has been rate limited", you can try a few from the above list to find one that is getting less traffic.

Maybe try this? https://github.com/xnaas/nitter-instances

This might be interesting for you people: https://github.com/xnaas/nitter-instances ;-)

A cozy laptop sounds nice. I bet IRC is more than fast enough, surprised it didn't get a mention. Also, if you just want to read some text on the web as fast as possible, w3m might be worth a shot. I use it in TTY2 all the time to look stuff up. Browser CDN caches like Decentraleyes or LocalCDN might also be worth trying especially with the mnestic set up: you would only have to load certain JS bundles once per session.

>a dishonorable mention to twitter for being slower than Discord, we wish we were making that up

If you're just browsing Twitter, then the Nitter frontend (https://github.com/xnaas/nitter-instances) is way, way faster. Does not have algo-recs either, which could be positive. If you need to post, I assume you've tried spoofing user agent to mobile? This might help with bloated sites in general.