from Hacker News

LibRedirect: Redirect YouTube, Twitter, Instagram to privacy friendly services

by kls0e on 9/20/22, 7:01 PM with 80 comments

  • by perlgod on 9/20/22, 8:48 PM

    Fantastic extension. I self-host Invidious, Teddit, Nitter, and Bibliogram and configured LibRedirect to use only my private instances. Unfortunately, the community instances are often either overloaded or down entirely. It's hard to imagine going back to the "real" sites...they are all so user-hostile.

    Since Android doesn't support browser extensions, I accomplish the same thing using the Bromite browser along with a handful of UserScripts to redirect youtube/twitter/etc to my private instances.

    Edit: Yes, I know Firefox for Android supports extensions, but the work required [0] to actually install any extension other than the handful "blessed" by Mozilla borders on hilarity. Firefox for Android seemed pretty good a few years ago, but at some point since then Mozilla has done a full redesign of the GUI and the whole thing now feels janky to me. I tried using it for a couple days and just couldn't bear it. My impression is that Mozilla is letting it languish.

    For simplicity, I use the exact same setup for all my family's Android phones (GrapheneOS with a persistent wireguard connection back to the house) and Firefox was just too strange for the non-technical people to use.

    In addition, GrapheneOS makes some pretty compelling arguments [1] against FF-based browsers.

    Lest anyone accuse me of being a Firefox hater, I do use it on the desktop.

    [0] https://www.ghacks.net/2020/10/01/you-can-now-install-any-ad...

    [1] https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing

  • by phpdave11 on 9/20/22, 9:04 PM

    I am using an alternative which doesn't require any additional browser extensions, but it does require that each client installs a custom root certificate.

    I have a split-DNS setup where I override the DNS entries for certain sites like reddit, twitter, and youtube so that they point to a local server. The local server returns privacy-friendly versions of those sites (e.g. spikecodes/libreddit).

    I use the root certificate to sign SSL certificates for those domains which will be trusted by each client on the network as long as they've installed the custom root certificate.

    That way, when I visit a reddit link from a google search, it automatically returns the privacy friendly version of the site, as long as the root certificate is installed.

    This is especially nice using when using iDevices, because those don't support native browser extensions.

  • by weberer on 9/20/22, 8:04 PM

    This is invaluable whenever someone links to a Twitter thread here and I don't want to spend the effort dodging sign-up modals and piecing together 30 fragments of what would just be a normal paragraph on any other site.

  • by Liquix on 9/20/22, 10:31 PM

    Users of Privacy Redirect and LibRedirect may find it worthwhile to check out farside [0]. The long lists of mirrors can be replaced with singular farside links (e.g. https://farside.link/libreddit) which will always redirect to working instances.

    [0] https://farside.link/

  • by therealmarv on 9/20/22, 8:06 PM

  • by daptaq on 9/20/22, 7:59 PM

    I've been using this for a while, and it works well but it also often redirects me to broken instances, which is not inherently that horrible (most of the time these are just hosted by people in their spare time with spare funds), but in that case I'd like to see automatic redirection and some memory that this host wasn't accessible, so the plugin should try to avoid it in the near future.

  • by Entinel on 9/20/22, 9:41 PM

    Didn't the devs behind bibliogram say they were done because of how aggressively Instagram tries to block these alternatives? Maybe I'm misremembering that

  • by rnhmjoj on 9/20/22, 9:09 PM

    I must do my usual shilling for privoxy here. You can implement the better part of this extension with a few privoxy actions:

      # redirect twitter to nitter
  {+redirect{s@https?://(mobile.)?twitter.com@https://nitter.eu@}}
  twitter.com
  mobile.twitter.com

  # redirect reddit to teddit
  {+redirect{s@https?://(www|old).reddit.com@https://teddit.net@}}
  www.reddit.com
  old.reddit.com

  # etc.

  • by jaimehrubiks on 9/20/22, 9:27 PM

    I've been using this for some time. I noticed that it works with Troddit, my favorite Reddit web client https://www.troddit.com/, you just need to go to custom and add it there.

    I use it mainly on Android with kiwi browser so I don't need to download apps

  • by anthk on 9/20/22, 8:59 PM

    Also: https://simple-web.org

    Usable even under Lynx/Links/Netsurf/Dillo.

  • by odysseus on 9/20/22, 9:10 PM

    Too bad it's not available for Safari yet, even though Safari supports porting in of Chrome extensions.

    There's a workaround though: Use Jeff Johnson's Stop the Madness Safari extension, and hit the redirects tab - screenshot: https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/support-safari.html#...

    (not affiliated with Jeff, just a happy customer of many of his apps)

  • by melony on 9/20/22, 7:45 PM

    Wasn't Bibliogram EOLed? Is there an alternative to it?

  • by triyambakam on 9/20/22, 9:18 PM

    I'm naive - what is not privacy respecting about using Wikipedia?

  • by TakeBlaster16 on 9/20/22, 8:21 PM

    I like the name! Could be stylized either LibRedirect or LibreDirect.

  • by wanderingmind on 9/21/22, 12:27 AM

    I'm sorry if I'm missing something. If its just a simple redirect, we can do this using a HTTPS Everywhere rule, which is available in Firefox in android as well. I use this to redirect reddit to old.reddit

  • by betwixthewires on 9/20/22, 9:15 PM

    There's also Redirector, a general purpose web extension that lets you redirect any URL with wildcards or regex, and ignore patterns as well. You can use it to do this, or anything else you want. Works on mobile too with Kiwi (a chromium fork with extensions support) and Iceraven (Firefox on mobile limits extensions you can install).

  • by ztcfegzgf on 9/21/22, 8:57 AM

    please note this needs the can-access-everything-you-do permission ( https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/permission-request-mess... ).

    so please make sure you understand the tradeoff, the risks involved.

    by not having to trust youtube/twitter/instagram to not store what you do on their website, you instead have to trust a random browser extension to not store everything you do in your browser on every website.

    (also, please do not use the it-is-open-source-you-can-read-the-source-code argument. no normal user is going to read and understand the whole source code, and repeat it for every update. at the end, you have to decide to trust it, or not)

  • by monopoliessuck on 9/20/22, 8:17 PM

    I've been using this[0] which works with regex patterns. It doesn't work on Firefox mobile, but then neither does OP's extension.

    0: https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector

  • by ghgr on 9/21/22, 6:57 AM

    Although the extension by default requires full access to all the websites you visit, in Chromium you can limit its permissions to a list of websites (for example twitter.com, reddit.com, etc.). Does anybody know if such a thing is also possible in e.g. Firefox?

  • by NackerHughes on 9/20/22, 7:41 PM

    How does this compare against the similar Privacy Redirect? https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect

  • by munro on 9/20/22, 11:05 PM

    Omg this is a wealth of alternative platforms, I didn't even know https://codeberg.org but it looks great

  • by atestu on 9/20/22, 9:09 PM

    Why does it need to access my data for all websites? Why not limit it to the websites it redirects?

  • by ta988 on 9/21/22, 2:52 AM

    On Android I use "untrack me" (available in f-droid). Extremely useful.

  • by honkler on 9/20/22, 8:30 PM

    I wish it could also redirect paywalled articles