Less annoying frontends

There are a lot of reasons to find alternative frontends for stuff like Reddit, YouTube etc. Some of them is privacy related, other are pure annoyances. I try to do my best to avoid big tech and here are some tips to browse crappy services in a nicer way.

With a open source alternative frontend we can at least strip the ads, scripts and other nasty things like cookies following you around the web. Of course, everything isn’t possible to get around since you’re still using their service on their servers.

Another great part of it being open source is that those services can be selfhosted, which means there are plenty of servers to choose from.

Reddit

Today I found Teddit. I’ve been using old Reddit since the “new” ugly verison of Reddit released. With Teddit we have the benefit of using Reddit with a nicer layout (like old Reddit) and with no JS at all.

In the repo we can see these features:

• No JavaScript or ads
• All requests go through the backend, client never talks to Reddit
• Prevents Reddit from tracking your IP or JavaScript fingerprint
• Lightweight (teddit frontpage: ~30 HTTP requests with ~270 KB of data downloaded vs. Reddit frontpage: ~190 requests with ~24 MB)

Other services

• Invidious - frontend for Youtube
• Nitter - frontend for Twitter
• Bibliogram - frontend for Instagram