[HN Gopher] Nitter and other Internet reclamation projects
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Nitter and other Internet reclamation projects
Author : decrypt
Score : 112 points
Date : 2021-09-26 12:14 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (drewdevault.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (drewdevault.com)
| jlpom wrote:
| I don't find gitlab/hub are user-hostile (the author runs a
| competing service). For other service, the answer is the
| fediverse, but author stopped publishing on mastodont (please
| continue).
| stinos wrote:
| _All of these services are more useful, more accessible, and more
| inclusive than their corporate counterparts. They work better on
| older browsers and low-end devices. They have better performance.
| They aren't spying on you. In short, they are rejecting the
| domestication of their users that the platforms they interact
| with have been trying to do._
|
| No matter how much I want to like and recommend these projects,
| mainly for those last 2 sentences, unfortunately the rest of
| picture this paints doesn't seem to be completely true for me:
| while Nitter for example is ok, I've tried to switch to e.g.
| Invidious so many times and in the end it's just a pain to use.
| Most of the time it loads slower, if it even loads, and every x
| days I have to try another server, etc. So in the end it is
| simply worse than the counterparts on those fronts, and I have
| the impression using e.g. youtube in private windows gives most
| of the other benefits as well.
| [deleted]
| WithinReason wrote:
| Firefox add-on to automatically redirect similar websites:
|
| Twitter -> Nitter
|
| Reddit -> Libreddit
|
| YouTube -> Invidious
|
| Instagram -> Bibliogram
|
| Google Maps -> OpenStreetMap
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/privacy-redir...
| throwaway-jim wrote:
| I'm using this for about a month now and the only problem is
| the default instances that are used are getting rate-
| limited/blocked; so you will have to find or host your own
| fresh instance.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| This is my experience as well. I've typically got to refresh
| the average linked tweet about 3-5 times before it cycles to
| a federated instance that can actually render the page.
| codemac wrote:
| This is one of the major problems with distributed /
| federated systems.
|
| The name itself (twitter, youtube, etc) is meaningful to
| users. These "default instances" need ways to distribute the
| compute & network load while allowing users to only remember
| "nitter".
|
| Are there any projects that address this? Would be curious to
| help.
| teitoklien wrote:
| It doesn't need a separate project , all it needs are
| hosters to just agree to be behind a load balancer
| together.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I spent a few days experimenting with recent open source p2p and
| anonymizing networks (tor and i2p). I'm impressed the thing still
| works well. Some networks became much smaller (kad and
| gnutella2), but given they're distributed/decentralized, they
| still work. SoulSeek is alive. Tribler allows to find torrents
| without needing trackers, it also adds a anonymization layer. I2p
| gives some intuitive names to hidden services while tor has never
| been so easy and fast to use.
|
| On the web, personal blogs and sites, planets and fora still
| exists. Neocities is incredibly cool. There are a number of
| alternatives to google and they're constantly improving.
|
| We still have IRC and a few newer services like xmpp and matrix.
|
| Ad blockers take some time to configure but work well and there
| are good interfaces for annoying services like youtube and
| twitter.
|
| The bad internet exists mostly for commercial, news sites and
| streaming services, but there are alternatives and there's enough
| people using them to keep them alive and sustainable. It is not
| like the good internet stopped existing, it is more like the bad
| internet became more popular.
| ghuin wrote:
| I like the idea of nitter and bibliogram but they are so
| unreliable that I always end up giving up on them.
| olah_1 wrote:
| These tools should be halfway homes for a decentralized
| alternative.
|
| For example, when you make an account on Nitter, maybe it lets
| you post to both Twitter and also to a decentralized protocol at
| the same time.
|
| Eventually, you can get most of your content straight from the
| decentralized protocol.
| wheybags wrote:
| Would be interested to hear about the user hostile features of
| github/lab? I've used both quite a bit and they seemed fine to
| me?
| mohanmcgeek wrote:
| Should have been disclosed: The author makes a competitor to
| GitHub/lab
| sevensor wrote:
| Everything social, anything that shames me for not engaging
| more with the platform, and poor user experience when using a
| browser that doesn't support Javascript.
| stavros wrote:
| I tried Invidious (it was very easy to set up with Docker
| Compose) but the UI looks terrible. At one point I wondered
| whether CSS wasn't loading, for some reason.
|
| I know OSS is "don't like it, don't use it", but why do designers
| rarely contribute? Spending an hour or two just adding proper
| spacing to elements would help immensely.
| daeluk wrote:
| OSS is not "don't like it, don't use it", OSS is "don't like
| it, change it!"
| Zababa wrote:
| It's not "why do designers rarely contribute?", it's that
| almost only programmers contribute. As to why, I have honestly
| no idea. These days I would say that it's the culture
| influencing new people, but I wonder how it started.
| WallyFunk wrote:
| > Medium et al, via an open source readability-as-a-service
| platform
|
| I usually throw Medium articles into Outline[0] for readability.
| There is also Archive.today[1] where the article is usually
| mirrored already. My only issue being that Archive.today could go
| down since it's expensive to run such a service.
|
| > Facebook
|
| > GitLab and GitHub
|
| As for Facebook, I think the only way such a frontend to that
| would work is to use a Facebook account to scrape walled garden
| content and present it externally to users. I'm not sure Facebook
| would like that however since it hurts their bottom line. They
| would probably code _against_ such tools, and then we have a
| whack-a-mole scenario.
|
| As for Gitlab & Github; I see no reason for a frontend since they
| don't hide things behind a login prompt and their UI is pretty
| intuitive (albeit a bit bulky and bloated).
|
| [0] https://outline.com/
|
| [1] https://archive.ph/
| raxi wrote:
| > As for Gitlab & Github; I see no reason for a frontend since
| they don't hide things behind a login prompt
|
| They do. Not at the Facebook scale, but they already started
| moving in that direction: unfolding issues with many comments
| requires login on GitHub, searching for code too - it does not
| prompt you to log in, in just brings 0 results to the unlogged
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| archive.today doesn't work if you use 1.1.1.1 for DNS. It's
| very peculiar to me that a service that helps the web be more
| open feels it necessary to _break_ the web by refusing clients
| who use a standards-compliant DNS.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28459600
| password4321 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28575855#28576302 (last
| week)
|
| [autoliteInline] The amount of cruft on the web just blows me
| away, whether it's a weather or real estate or recipe site. We're
| living in a world of shit.
|
| [wizzwizz4] Treat the crappy site as an API and make a better
| interface. Like the SimpleWeb project: [https://simple-web.org/]
|
| --
|
| Copied from the page, which features several projects in the
| "reclamation" category:
|
| * SimplyTranslate: A frontend for Google- and LibreTranslate (and
| in the future, potentially other Translation Engines as well)
|
| * SimpleerTube: A frontend for SepiaSearch and PeerTube
|
| * SimplyNews: _(No known Instances)_ A frontend for numerous news
| websites
|
| * FreeBay: _(Inactive)_ A frontend for eBay
|
| * PornInvidious: _NSFW!_ A frontend for xvideos.com
| Retr0spectrum wrote:
| A list of similar sites:
|
| https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends
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(page generated 2021-09-26 23:02 UTC)