Yotter: Twitter and Youtube with privacy

Yotter allows you to follow your favo­rite Twit­ter and YouTube accounts with full privacy using rss feeds in order to gather the latest content from your favou­rite accounts and builds a beau­ti­ful feed so you can read them. Yotter is writ­ten in Python and Flask and uses Seman­tic-UI as its CSS frame­work.

Yotter is possi­ble thanks to seve­ral open-source projects that are listed on the Powe­red by section. Make sure to check out those awesome projects!

Index:

• Featu­res
• Privacy and Secu­rity
• Self hosting
  • Install & Test
  • Update
• Powe­red by
• Donate

Featu­res:

No Ads. No JavaS­cript. Mini­ma­list. Search on Twit­ter and Youtube. Zero connec­ti­ons to Google/Twit­ter on the client. Follow Twit­ter accounts. Follow Youtube accounts. Save your favou­rite Tweets. Tor-friendly. Termi­nal-brow­ser friendly. Easy 2 minute self-hosting deploy.

And many more to come!

Privacy

Connec­ti­ons

Yotter cares about your privacy, and for this it will never make any connec­tion to Twit­ter or Youtube on the client. Every request is proxied through the Yotter server; video stre­a­ming, photos, data gathe­ring, scrap­ping, etc.

The Yotter server connects to Google (Youtube) and Nitter in order to gather all the neces­sary data. Then it serves it (proxied through itself) to the client. This means that as a client, you will never connect to Google – the Yotter server will do it for you. So if you want to set up a Yotter server for privacy reasons I recom­mend you to set it up on a remote VPS so you don’t share your IP with Google or use a VPN on the server.

If you don’t mind expo­sing your IP making requests to Google then you can set it up where­ver you want. Even with this method you will avoid all trac­kers, ads, heavy-loaded pages, etc.

Your data

The only things the data­base stores are:

• Hash of the pass­word
• User­name
• List of follo­wed users
• List of saved posts

This data will never be used for any other purpose than offe­ring the service to the user.

Others

If you want to use a speci­fic Nitter instance you can replace it on the file app/routes.py.

Secu­rity

Only the hash of your pass­word is stored on the data­base. Also no perso­nal infor­ma­tion of any kind is kept on the app itself, if a hacker gets access to it only thing they could do would be to follow/unfo­llow some accounts.

I always recom­mend self-hosting, as you will be the only person with access to the data.

Impor­tant note: The client never connects to Google / Youtube howe­ver, the server does in order to gather all the neces­sary things!

Self hosting

Test

You can test this new version.

IMPOR­TANT: Connec­ti­ons to google­vi­deo will be made to stream the videos. It is recom­men­ded to use a VPS server or a VPN to preserve your privacy. This version is inten­ded for a remote server.

1. Install python3, pip3, python3-venv (opti­o­nal) and git.

2. Clone this repo­si­tory:

   • git clone https://github.com/pluja/Yotter.git

3. Navi­gate to the project folder:

   • cd Yotter

4. Prepare a virtual envi­ron­ment and acti­vate it:

   Python lets you create virtual envi­ron­ments. This allows you to avoid insta­lling all the pip packa­ges on your system.

   • python3 -m venv venv
   • source venv/bin/acti­vate

   Now you are inside of the virtual envi­ron­ment for python. All instruc­ti­ons wiht [env] indi­cate that must be done inside the env if you deci­ded to create one. From now on, you will always need to start the appli­ca­tion from within the virtual env.

5. [env] Update pip

   • python3 pip install—up­grade pip

6. [env] Install the requi­red libra­ries:

   • python3 pip install -r requi­re­ments.txt
     

     If you get errors, try running source venv/bin/acti­vate again of use—u­ser option.

7. [env] Initi­a­lize and prepare the data­base.

   • flask db init
   • flask db migrate
   • flask db upgrade

   If you get «No such command db», try running source venv/bin/acti­vate again.

8. [env] Run the appli­ca­tion.

   • flask run

   You can opti­o­nally use flask run—­host 0.0.0.0 so you can use Yotter from other devi­ces from the same network using the host devi­ce’s IP address and port. ¡Test it from a smartp­hone!

9. Go to «http://local­host:5000/» and enjoy.

Hosting on a server:

SOON

Upda­ting to newer versi­ons:

IMPOR­TANT: Before upda­ting to newer versi­ons, always export your data on Settings>Export Data. A major version update could have chan­ges on the whole data­base and you may be forced to remove and reset the data­base (only when running locally)!

1. Navi­gate to the git repo­si­tory (the one you cloned when insta­lling).

2. Pull new chan­ges:

   • git pull

3. Install new packa­ges (if any):

   • pip install -r requi­re­ments.txt

   It may be that there are no new packa­ges to install. In that case, all requi­re­ments will be satis­fied.

4. Update the data­base:

   • flask db migrate
   • flask db upgrade

If you expe­ri­ence any error in this step, it might be that there were big chan­ges on the data­base struc­ture. You can solve it by expor­ting your data, then dele­ting and reset­ting the data­base. Run rm -rf app.db migra­ti­ons and then flask db init. Then run step 5 normally.

6. Done! You are on latest version.

See CHAN­GE­LOG for a list of chan­ges.

Powe­red by:

• Nitter
• youtube-dl
• Flask
• SQLAl­chemy
• Seman­tic-UI
• requests-futu­res
• micro­blog
• Video.js
• My fork of youtube_search

Donate

This project is comple­telly free and Open Source and will always be. I am dedi­ca­ting my free time to build it so if you like it, you can buy me a coffee!

• Bitcoin: 3EjaWjtsHz4WpbVL5Wx8Xg6MfyRRnKYj4e
• Monero: 83hinY­mUkMH2ANgdhx­Rup­makzLwN26d­dePrLQvZv4E3Q1CWjq7MDzsKRcPqLPQwTvG3D­dujyaxbKbMsf9VK­VAmphMhsfndc
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