10 ms·
Alternative privacy-respecting front ends for popular services
- i67vw3 5y agoI personally use every single one from the list except for Imgur one. Will start using it. I would like if the redirection is done directly from browser without an extension (opt-in).
- technonerd 5y agorimgu is another one that popped up around the same time imgbin started commits. Supports a little bit more out of the box, galleries with comments and albums. But the both are VERY new projects https://codeberg.org/3np/rimgu https://codeberg.org/3np/rimgu
- 3np 5y agoAuthor here. It was a funny coincidence, I had this in the back of my mind for a year or two, being annoyed by the imgur interface getting worse and worse. Then just after I finally got around to making and publishing it, I discovered that imgin had been started almost the same day! We talked briefly about potentially merging them but for now they live independently. rimgu still has more functionality, I think, but more alternatives are never a bad thing.
- stavros 5y agoI had the opposite idea: https://imgz.org https://imgz.org
- 3np 5y agoI see you already accept BTC. Some ideas: Integrate lightning payments To prepay on per-image basis. Using lnurl you can then use it for auth and don’t even need to have users register accounts!
- stavros 5y agoThat sounds interesting but is not worth the work for the zero people who will use it.
- stinos 5y agoI tried a number of times already through Privacy Redirect and I really want to like it, but it just doesn't cut it mostly speed-wise. E.g. teddit takes about twice as much time to load subs as reddit does, and that's already not exactly fast, and especially with Invidious servers are down often. Just wondering if other also have issues, perhaps this is location-based?
- technonerd 5y agoteddit loading slow is a known problem, it loads everything on the backend before sending to the user. https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit/issues/248 https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit/issues/248
- endisneigh 5y agoI don’t think it’s fair to use these. These sites cost money to run - I understand the desire to preserve privacy but in effect this site is just showing you how to mooch.
- StockHuman 5y agoI don't think it's fair these sites editorialize content but avoid the repercussions of not editorializing away human trafficking rings (for example), or how they dodge billions in taxes around the world. If a paid tier offered no ads, tracking or similar anti-features, you'd have a point. Since even paid offerings can't give up profiling and data sharing, it's perfectly fair to get that experience from the free data they choose to serve instead of a 402 payment required.
- endisneigh 5y agoYou can also just not visit those sites if you don’t want to be tracked. Whether the companies dodge taxes isn’t really relevant - blame your government for allowing it. People are certainly entitled to not be tracked, but not to indulge in services for free without payment, tracking or ads. Ironically, using these services without paying or submitting to trackings or ads and these companies not paying taxes both violate the principal of “not paying your share”
- StockHuman 5y ago> Ironically, using these services without paying or submitting to trackings or ads and these companies not paying taxes both violate the principal of “not paying your share” That is my point, yes; we are already past that point of paying one's fair share as a legitimate concern. I don't owe such a consideration for fairness to an entity that doesn't honour the same to me.
- tomthe 5y agofair points, but the internet allows unseen concentration and economies of scale. The existence of some services prevents the upcoming/use of others and thus I am basically forced to use some of these services (e.g.: Twitter, Whatsapp), if I want to keep my standard of living that I had before a lot of stuff moved there (Events that are organized only on Facebook come to my mind).
- dartharva 5y ago>Whoogle >Google search result frontend without Javascript, ads, cookies and tracking. Tor and HTTP/SOCKS proxy support Isn't Startpage the same?
- vngzs 5y agoVery similar. Startpage tries to learn as little as possible about its users (which I believe, after seeing their error page). It sends searches to Google on users' behalf and returns results without personalization. In Whoogle's case, Google can still track the searches you send to it. With Startpage, only Startpage can track them in detail - and Google only in aggregate.
- clairity 5y agonote that startpage has been (partially) owned by system1, an adtech company, since 2019: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Startpage.com https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Startpage.com
- dredmorbius 5y agoThere's a Startpage alternative that I've seen referenced numerous times but can never remember. Do you happen to know it?
- clairity 5y agosearx or qwant? there isn't an authoritative server for searx, so it can be hit or miss. qwant requires js, so i don't use it. i usually use duckduckgo, though my enthusiasm for it has been waning as it becomes more nakedly commercial.
- dredmorbius 5y agoIt might be qwant, if that's also a privacy proxy on top of Google / Bing. I'm familiar with Searx, that's its own decentralised search AFAIU.
- 3np 5y agoThis way more exhaustive list was on the front-page just the other day. https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29620275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29620275
- dheera 5y agoI really wish there was one for WeChat that worked and didn't get you banned. These days they try to detect these alternative front ends and unfortunately if you get banned on WeChat that basically means you can't buy food, buy groceries, buy train tickets, reserve hotels, buy flight tickets, raise money, or a million other things. What's worse, if you get banned on WeChat people might even reject you socially because they think you're upto something illegal. It's a horrid way to force everyone into using their official client. I used to run WeChat in a virtual machine and remote access it, but now I just use a different phone for WeChat because the stakes are too high.
- gigglesupstairs 5y agoInteresting perspective. Are you in China?
- dheera 5y agoNot at this moment, but sometimes I am, and I would consider living there long term at some point, so I don't want to screw up the possibility of a future there.
- gigglesupstairs 5y agoThat makes sense considering how omnipresent wechat is there.
- ZyanWu 5y agoJust out of curiosity, why would you consider living there?
- pydry 5y agoI wonder if it's possible to combine all of these in a single docker container.
- mawise 5y agoThese are great, but it's too bad they need to be so siloed. All of these applications are popular partly because they're on the _internet_ where we can link between things. I'm not likely to click a Medium link and then go find that item on my scribe instance (for example). It would be interesting to find something similar to how you can choose which application will open files of a given type on your desktop. You can choose if web links should open with Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. What if we had a layer where you could choose which "application" opened medium.com/* links or youtube.com/* links? _That_ would be an awesome resource.
- jsmith99 5y agoThat's already possible on Android at least. I have third party apps for Twitter, HN, Reddit, and YouTube that open automatically if I tell try browser 'open in app'. I'm sure with a few settings tweaks or an extension it's possible to open links in the selected app directly, even on desktop. The hard part is probably finding a frontend app that works with an unofficial API.
- 42jd 5y agoI use redirector which lets me set rules (as complex as you want) to redirect links. For example I have one that redirects a a all YouTube.com/* to piped.com/* See (also on chrome under same name): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/
- 3np 5y agoRedirector and Privacy Redirect, among others, can be used to rewrite the original links to your instance of choice. > What if we had a layer where you could choose which "application" opened medium.com/* links or youtube.com/* links? _That_ would be an awesome resource. I've been thinking about a unified squid-config or something like that - if the user trusts the TLS cert for these specific domains, it could be quite neat.
- novok 5y agoI also find them to be significantly slower than using the mainstream website and you get lower quality video streams often compared to the main youtube website
- flotzam 5y agoToo bad that there isn't one for TikTok yet.
- anaganisk 5y agoWhat wrong with existing tiktok ui, its minimal and actually is very good.
- yosito 5y agoAccording to the Exodus privacy report, there are 5 trackers in the TikTok app. https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/223238/ https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/223238/
- gigglesupstairs 5y agoTiktok is banned in India, a proxied seamless version would be good.
- anaganisk 5y agoWouldn’t that just be banned as well knowing the Indian govt. Forget govt jio and airtel do it in their own.
- beauHD 5y agoI'm all for self-hosting your own instance, but sometimes the installation can seem daunting. Take Nitter for example, from here: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter Here's how to create a nitter user, clone the repo, and build the project along with the scss. # useradd -m nitter # su nitter $ git clone https://github.com/zedeus/nitter $ cd nitter $ nimble build -d:release $ nimble scss $ mkdir ./tmp Hard to make sense of all that :/ What's 'Nimble' and 'scss'?
- atestu 5y agoThey could place the last 3 commands in a Makefile. Not very trendy I know…
- gumby 5y agoThe whole installation could have been a Makefile.
- juki 5y agoThe last three commands are the whole installation (`git clone` and `cd` would be required anyway). Adding a completely unnecessary dependency to a second build tool just to invoke tasks in the build tool they already use would be pretty silly though. They could just define a nimble task to do all three at once.
- 1986 5y agoAren't nimble and scss explained literally 2 paragraphs above, at the same link? > To compile Nitter you need a Nim installation, see nim-lang.org for details. It is possible to install it system-wide or in the user directory you create below. > To compile the scss files, you need to install libsass. On Ubuntu and Debian, you can use libsass-dev.
- gen220 5y ago`nimble` is the package manager for the programming language `nim` [1]. From [2], we can see that `nimble scss` simply generates the CSS files for the frontend. The benefit of OSS is you can answer these questions yourself with a bit of poking around! IMO this is a fairly standard installation process, maybe the fact that it's using Nim instead of a more mainstream language makes it look more daunting than it is. The only out-of-the-ordinary thing here, IMO, is `nimble build` instead of `make build`. [1]: https://github.com/nim-lang/nimble https://github.com/nim-lang/nimble [2]: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/nitter.nimble https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/nitter.nimble
- tantalor 5y agoAren't these just proxies? Wouldn't a VPN give you same protection?
- adg001 5y agoNot quite so. You have to account for javascript support or lack thereof, cookies, and other tracking techniques employed by popular services and generally absent on these frontends. VPN by themselves will only "hide" your IP address.
- 3np 5y agoApart from what others mentioned, other benefits include significantly reduced resource usage on the client due to only including the CSS and JS necessary to give a good user experience, without needing to configure adblockers etc on every client. You can also do funky stuff like tunnel different sites through different tunnels and share instances with other people.
- roywiggins 5y agoI switched to Nitter after Twitter started demanding you be logged in to even click on a profile from a tweet.
- als0 5y agoWould love one for LinkedIn profiles, but I don't think it's realistic given their behavior.
- goodpoint 5y agoHow effective are these tools at protecting your privacy?
- no_time 5y agoAssuming most sites do not use comprehensive browser fingerprinting, it's not any different from having a dynamic ip and wiping cookies periodically. In both cases, assigning this data to a unique identifier that can be later tied to your name is pretty hard. If your ultimate goal is avoiding this I'd actually advise against self hosting one of these solutions if you are planning it using alone. Either get more people to use your instance, making your usage "fingerprint" harder to correlate or use a service hosted by someone else for the same reason. The latter of course hinges on trusting the webmaster of that service.
- redman25 5y ago+1 for Libreddit. Reddit’s ui is terrible but libreddit provides a great alternative. Only trouble I’ve had with it is some videos missing sound on iOS.
- endisneigh 5y agoWhy not use old.Reddit or I.Reddit?
- gaius_baltar 5y ago> Why not use old.Reddit or I.Reddit? There are a lot of seemly intentional defects being added to these interfaces, I suspect as a strategy to force users to migrate to the new one. Galleries and some profile features are not supported, and it is (again intentionally) slowed down on mobile. Reddit jumped the shark already and the current state of affairs is an offense to the memory of Aaron Swartz. Problem is that a new mass migration (as happened in the Digg→Reddit) is way more difficult due to the inertia and amount of content available. I just hope that, when it finally happens, it would be to a distributed or federated system -- Lemmy.ml seems to be the most promising for now.
- nullwarp 5y agoThe gallery thing drives me nuts. It's so buggy on old reddit. Also links constantly come up with backslashes in them, probably some change in the new interface and they are just letting it be broken on the old interface. They are without a doubt just letting old reddit slowly fall apart until it's totally broken.