Seems related, so I’ll share here. I wrote an “awesome” list of privacy-focused front-ends[1] for a variety of services. Haven’t been updated in a while, but I figured it’s still valid.
[1]: https://sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/awesome-privacy-front-ends/
I just found out about an Android app where you can set up custom redirects for any links, OS-wide: https://github.com/TrianguloY/URLCheck
It's a little finnicky to set up, but I'm enjoying it so far. It goes beyond alternative frontend redirects. You can strip URL params, check domains against a blacklist, and choose native apps to open links that match a pattern.
Redirector[1] makes it easy to set up your own redirects. I prefer that.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/
A web extension is an unnecessary security risk. A userscript will do it just fine.
edit: one of my previous attempt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35229211
I actually have made it extensible, with closely coupled source of rules and domains; but then I lost it Edge forgot all my userscripts :(
the privacy stuff is fine(if not a bit suspect since we're still relying on the goodwill of the instance hosts to not be sketchy) but for me the biggest benefit for these third party front-ends is that my crappy laptop isn't constantly being pushed to the limits of it's capabilities just so I can read some gosh-darn text.
And reddit is not even close to the worst offender in that regard. Seriously, when did displaying words on a screen become so resource intensive???
Nobody is setting up "privacy-friendly" frontends to track browsing data that they couldn't otherwise get without access to Google's/Twitter's/etc. logs? Because I think they are.
tis is great for what it solves i don't wanna see ads, i don't wanna load 10MB of js just to read a tweet or watch a 2-min clip. redirecting to piped or nitter makes total sense. but what i would appreciate more is either selfhost or at least rotate through known good instances. currently it just serves half the intent. i don't often check who's running what. if you're gonna use it seriously, current assumption is the routing target instances is always up, clean and fast. some are slow as hell, some die without notice and a few probably log everything. currently also many of the list is dead out
Removing telemetry from daily tools feels like taking back a little control every time.
Any good YouTube options (including self host)? I’ve tried a few and they always seem to be down more than up.
Farside extension, 847 stars: https://github.com/benbusby/farside
Using venrable farside.link
https://sr.ht/~benbusby/farside/
Why use your offering?
I love this extension
thank you so much brother, the info is very helpful.
Proxigram? I doubt I could run that on Android.
At a glance, it does not seem like they fixed the main issue with what they forked: Not being able to set up arbitrary targets.
I run my own instances for a few of the services they redirect to, and need to be able to point to these.
The YouTube alternatives always lag and are bad, unfortunately. I don`t know why.
The best way to watch YouTube videos is actually to download them with yt-dlp then watch with mpv later.
It would be nice to have a containerized host of all these services to have them easily on hand as needed. One more task for Claude to handle...
This is just going to normalize adware / phishing. These front ends can show ads or ask for users personal information.
Redirecting people from trusted sources to these other sites is very risky and opens up opportunities for malicous people to exploit this. That's not even considering this extension is compromised or purchased and these dangerous permissions that it has are used against you.
I want the opposite, an extension that will redirect all crappy frontends to the canonical sources (which work better and I am logged-into, I can comment, etc).
Do any of these YouTube extensions retrieve videos in a way which is unassociated with my IP? I’d really rather not get my google account banned, or my searches rate limited. These aren’t happening now, but I believe they will in the future to the point where I actively avoid using any tooling from my home connection, and vps’ seem to be blocked by YouTube already.
X.com works bet with lightbrd.com instead of xcancel with captchas.
How long before browsers disable these kinds of in-user-favor workarounds?
Like Apple removing the "Disable JavaScript" menu option from Safari and moving it into Developer Tools, which can be detected by websites before you can disable JS >:(
Looking under the hood, some of these things seem like they might be moving your data from one place that might not have your best interests to another place that doesn't seem to have a revenue mechanism?
Take for example nitter - it says its using an unofficial twitter API. I'm assuming this means its using one of these third party services that provide an API to something that doesn't necessarily have an API or has limited access thereto.
If privacy is the purpose, this seems to be missing the point.
"privacy friendly". Now there's a modern euphemism.
time to get rid of the freeloaders with Anubis? https://anubis.techaro.lol/
Overall it works but the problem lies in instances that tend to die-off pretty fast. There were homebrew "hubs" solely providing redirects out of pure kindness to many big sites and services but now it seems it's hard to find one that works without being blocked/rate limited. Big sites and services fight back, which isn't really surprising.
Privacy Redirect was prob the first extension that introduced this idea. It did the job as well but up until bad-actors figured out they can redirect people to their dangerous sites.