Add a home timeline for followed accounts

[FIGBERT]

This PR introduces a cookie-based system for following Twitter users via Nitter. Followed accounts are stored in a cookie (à la Teddit), and displayed at the base path.

• New Routes
  • home.nim
    • Served at the base path (/)
    • Shows a search box (as before) if the user is not following anybody
    • If the user is following anyone on Twitter, it instead shows a timeline. There's an additional tab available to list the users you are following (similar to the current lists.nim view).
  • follow.nim
    • Includes two routes, served at /follow/@name and /unfollow/@name
    • Similar to the /enablehls route, navigating to these pages modifies a cookie and then redirects the user back to the referrer.
    • As expected, the /follow/@name route adds a user to the following cookie and /unfollow/@name removes them.
• New Preferences
  • following
    • The following cookie, in the new "Timeline" section, is a comma-separated list of usernames to follow.
    • Exposing it directly through the /settings route enables users to quickly and easily transfer instances while keeping their list of followers.

[acarasimon96]

Hey there, I tested this PR last night and it works flawlessly. There are a couple suggestions to improve the UX of your work:

• Add unfollow buttons on each account in the following tab, which could help Nitter users with large numbers of accounts in their home feeds. If possible, adding a bulk unfollow feature would be nice too, preferably without the use of JS.
• The following accounts textbox in settings should be bigger. I find it too small if one has lots of followed accounts in their home feed.

Other than that, it looks good to me. I haven't checked if the RSS feature works with this, but it would be useless for feed readers that don't support using cookies while fetching feeds anyway. I really hope that this PR gets merged soon, given that Nitter hasn't had any new shiny features in a long time.

[acarasimon96]

Just a quick update: the home feed suddenly stopped showing tweets when I'm following at least 20 accounts. This is caused by the 500-character limit for search queries, which was explained in #310, and there is no way to work around that at this time.

[Salastil]

A lot of merge conflicts because of the recent spat of commits in the master branch, enough of them that I can't really fumble my way through dealing with them.

[acarasimon96]

@Salastil You can try testing this PR with my fork Nitter FT. This feature is already merged in that repo with the latest wave of commits, and currently it works for me just like during Zed's hiatus.

[FIGBERT]

I'm working on bringing this up to date with master – glad to have Zed back!

[zedeus]

Before this feature can be added to Nitter, I need to finish rewriting all the parser code to be more efficient, and add support for multi-user timelines with more than the ~20 users limit. Work has already begun on this, see 111927a and cdf49dc. For the 20 user limit problem I already implemented a prototype solution a while back, distributing usernames into buckets efficiently to minimize amount of requests, but the main problem was how to merge results and support pagination efficiently.

[FIGBERT]

Rebase successful!

[Salastil]

Mind rebasing this again since commits seem to be more cosmetic changes to themes after the Feb 11th breakage?

[FIGBERT]

Rebased again, @Salastil. @zedeus how is work going on the other features that need to be implemented before merging this?

[Salastil]

/home/nitter/nitter/src/views/profile.nim(16, 12) template/generic instantiation of `buildHtml` from here
/home/nitter/nitter/src/views/profile.nim(33, 46) Error: undeclared identifier: 'username'

Seems to be throwing an error when building.

[FIGBERT]

Thought I caught all the uses of Profile... oh well. Updated, should compile now.

[FIGBERT]

Poke! @acarasimon96 @Salastil @zedeus – what's the outlook on merging?

[PAI5REECHO]

@FIGBERT I gave this a try using 3056d7c to build a Docker image. Accessing any profile just completely times out for me:

/src # curl -si http://localhost:8080 | head -n 3
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
content-type: text/html;charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 3606
/src # curl -i http://localhost:8080/elonmusk
...

[FIGBERT]

@PAI5REECHO: I just rebuilt the image from the same commit with Docker, not experiencing any timeout issues with profiles.

I believe this is ready to continue.

[HookedBehemoth]

Works pretty well on my instance.
The only issue I noticed is that with long names the un-/follow button moves down.

[nickelswitte]

Hello,
is there any chance of this being merged in the future? I would love to have this feature :)

[aquova]

I've checked out this branch for my own instance, and everything seems to be working well. The only limitation is that the feed ceases to work if you have >20 accounts followed, as noted.

[Salastil]

The timeline seems to be stepping on the toes of error reporting, the current fracas over the search API being deprecated caused the instance to get rate limited. The instance got rate limited but this error is only visible if you pull up a new private instance with no timeline.

[Salastil]

@FIGBERT Going to need a rebase again since the graphql changes break it from compiling.

[ButteredCats]

Hi,

I'm very new to doing things on Github and interacting with other people's work so I apologize if this is against the norm or I did it in a weird way. I wanted to have this feature on Nitter so instead of waiting around I decided I'd take a crack at making it work myself: https://github.com/ButteredCats/nitter/tree/graphql_follows

I'm no expert coder so hopefully I merged everything correctly but it's currently up and running on my instance: https://nitter.catsarch.com

[HookedBehemoth]

Awesome!
From a quick test, it seems that 25 accounts is the limit there now.

[ButteredCats]

What list of people are you using? I'm up to a list of 39 trying to test this and everything works for me, including trying it as a multifeed on other instances.

This is the list I'm using:
ZestyLemonss,accelldraws,kherspurrs,DaHeckSaJerry,maiathoustra,EvenSteven_H,softfuzzymike,pinkpoffinz,SaneFurryStrug,GlasssShine,goobysart,rolo_stuff,crabula1,uefa,cnn,foxnews,cnnbrk,CNNPolitics,ABC,abc_es,CBS,BBC,zeitonline,Gazzetta_it,DiarioAS,elmundoes,swissteam,FlySWISS,Marca,swissinfo,equipedefrance,LeTemps,FuW_News,WSJbusiness,SkyNewsBiz,APBusiness,SkySportNews,PeterbiltMotors,HISTORY

[zedeus]

Unless the behavior has changed recently, Twitter silently cuts off the search query at 500 characters so it may seem like it works but it doesn't include all of the accounts.

[ButteredCats]

Ah, my understanding of the problem was that the feed stopped showing up entirely. My bad.

I don't think I have anywhere near the skills or familiarity with the code to do anything about that myself but if any changes get made I'd be happy to help test them out.

Regardless, for the forseable future I plan to have this feature on my instance despite the limitations.

[anyone00]

Ah, my understanding of the problem was that the feed stopped showing up entirely. My bad.

That's true, before it was showing nothing when your list exceeded the limit, I don't know the hiding was happening in nitter or twitter side though.

[zedeus]

Twitter side, the new GraphQL endpoint trims it while the old ones returned nothing.