Privacy respecting frontends
There’s no secret that there are big privacy issues related to all big tech and there are little we can do about it when there are no alternatives that either are good enough or the audiance are usually too small.
What we can do though, is to use alternative frontends that at least will strip all the bloat including scripts and other nasty, heavy and scary things that these services use as your payment method.
All the requests go through the server the alternative frontend is hosted on. This means that your IP never will be exposed to Google/Facebook.
Another great part of it being open source is that those services can be selfhosted, which means there are plenty of servers to chose from.
Today I found Teddit. I’ve been using old.reddit.com 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 bullet points:
- 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 - Youtube frontend
- Nitter - Twitter frontend
- Bibliogram - Instagram frontend