ladder, the opensource and selfhosted 12ft.io and 1ft.io alternative reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 2containers1cpu · 2023-11-06 09:37 If there is a \[Pay\]wall, you better bring your own [Ladder](https://github.com/kubero-dev/ladder)! It is now a week since 12ft.io has been gone, and I don't expect to be back soon. Having [1ft.io](https://1ft.io) as a good working alternative helps. But I'm not so confident using it. So I [asked last week](https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/17joa0p/searching_s elfhosted_alternative_for_12ftio/) if there is a selfhosted alternative to [12ft.io/](https://12ft.io/) or 1ft.io but could not find a satisfying one. Therefore I decided to build it by myself. It is still in early development but I would like to share it with you. Ladder is written in Golang and it is available as a single binary or a docker container. It is released under the GPL-3.0 License. You can find the source code here: https://github.com/kubero-dev/ladder It comes with a dynamically loaded ruleset, which applies modification to the original site. The Ruleset is very basic at the moment but I will add more rules in the future. (Contributions are very welcome!) The rest works the same as all the other services. Just put the url in the url field and hit enter, and watch the magic happen. I've added some extras: It has a very minimal API to fetch the data as JSON or even RAW HTML. Another not intended side effect is that it removes all CORS headers and most ads. This makes it easy to use it as an API Proxy for other services you might want to integrate into your site. I would love to hear your feedback and ⭐ the project is highly appreciated. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ChickenMcRibs · 2023-11-06 09:57 Looks promising. Will try soon ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 8-16_account · 2023-11-06 12:02 Looks cool. I might give it a try. What's the difference between this and 13ft? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 2containers1cpu · 2023-11-06 12:17 I did try 13ft. But it misses several points. The ladder applies custom rules to inject custom code and modify the origin website. It rewrites (most of) the links in the origins HTML to avoid CORS Errors. The ladder uses Golangs fiber/fasthttp, which is significantly faster than Python. Several small features like basic auth ... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 8-16_account · 2023-11-06 12:20 Sweet, definitely seems like the better choice then ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 2containers1cpu · 2023-11-06 12:56 Very interested in your feedback. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lomo85 · 2023-11-06 13:03 Hey, that is great! I just installed it on docker, and it seems to perform as well as the [12ft.io](https://12ft.io) site. Unfortunately it doesn't work for most paywalls I encounter, but that was already with the [12ft.io](https://12ft.io) site, is there a possibility to make this better? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- sliced_emu · 2023-11-06 13:07 Deployed this in my k8s homeland. Doesn’t seem to work for ft.com, any rules I should add? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 2containers1cpu · 2023-11-06 13:35 Hi Yes, The ruleset is pretty empty yet. Hope to get some PR's soon It will need something like this for this Domain and then load it with the environment variable RULESET (Path or URL) [https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/master/src/ js/contentScript.js#L256C36- L260C47](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls- chrome/blob/master/src/js/contentScript.js#L256C36-L260C47) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 2containers1cpu · 2023-11-06 13:36 The ruleset is pretty empty yet: [https://github.com/kubero- dev/ladder/blob/main/ruleset.yaml](https://github.com/kubero- dev/ladder/blob/main/ruleset.yaml) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- chandz05 · 2023-11-06 13:42 Wow I was just looking for a 12ft alternative last night. I will definitely try this out on my Unraid ---------------------------------------------------------------------- samaritan1331_ · 2023-11-06 15:04 You should probably add that as an edit to your post or you'll get a 1000 comments mentioning this. Haha. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- wasimaster · 2023-11-06 15:26 Great! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- wasimaster · 2023-11-06 15:28 This is better (I am the author of 13ft) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- sriks08 · 2023-11-06 15:30 There is also this old project https://www.php-proxy.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- reddittookmyuser · 2023-11-06 16:13 What's the benefit of this over the ublock lists? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- OpieDontPlayThat · 2023-11-06 16:16 Just installed via docker composer. Great project! Thank you for putting this together ---------------------------------------------------------------------- JackDostoevsky · 2023-11-06 16:21 Work is very slow this morning so I think i'll give this a try! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cd109876 · 2023-11-06 16:32 I'm sure they have different formatting for rules but "bypass paywalls clean" extension has a ton of sites! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lomo85 · 2023-11-06 16:32 NZZ is a good start :D Would love to have it work for BAZ as well, but my knowledge for website stuff is minimal. What could i read to get familiar with it? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- tharic99 · 2023-11-06 16:39 How does this compare to [Bypass Paywalls]( https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean)? Also, looks like you got some publicity already! https://boingboing.net/2023/11/06/ladder-a-self-hosted-alternative-to- paywall-hopping-sites.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 2containers1cpu · 2023-11-06 16:45 Doesn't seem to be maintained anymore. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- sliced_emu · 2023-11-06 16:46 Neat, I’ll try this out. Thanks! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 2containers1cpu · 2023-11-06 17:27 Thx ... good idea :D ---------------------------------------------------------------------- BillGoats · 2023-11-06 23:16 Genuinely curious: This and every other ladder I tried didn't work for any of the major Norwegian news sites. Some DOM elements disappear, but the only a paragraph or two from the article will be readable. That's pretty much how it looks with no ladder as well, because the entire article is never fetched unless authenticated. It's interesting to hear how this model might be bypassed due to SEO, but it doesn't seem to apply here. Does this mean that Norwegian news sites are sharing much less with bots and crawlers? Furthermore, if I was technically responsible for the integrity of these walls, I'd be talking to Google and other crawler farms about some kind of auth header (like an API key) that would grant them exclusive access through the back door. Why isn't something like that implemented already? It baffles me that capitalism hasn't universally solved such a seemingly trivial problem. (Not that I mind!) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MuffelMonster · 2023-11-07 04:30 Installed, tested it, already love and will keep it. Good luck with the rules ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MuffelMonster · 2023-11-07 04:31 nzz works, tested it ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MuffelMonster · 2023-11-07 06:46 Some possible ideas: - change docker compose, so the ruleset is stored on a drive I can access, change and test new entries. - dynamically load the default ruleset and add the possibility to add own rules in a second file. This would be handy for testing first and then moving the data to the core program. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- rvansoest · 2023-11-07 07:26 It works great and really fast. Thx! Found a few site that don't seem to work https://www.ad.nl/ https://www.limburger.nl/ https://www.rd.nl/ [https://www.nd.nl/](https://www.nd.nl/) ​ the first two do work through [archive.ph](https://archive.ph). not sure if the last 2 are passable. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- suddenlypenguins · 2023-11-07 09:10 Check out web attestation - basically corperations will be able to enforce who can use the web based on their browser/hardware. I magine something like this could be used to eventually stop anything like ladder from working. https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api- sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/2/ The github issues for the attestation spec is amsuing: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment- Integrity/issues?q=is%3Aissue ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dabamas · 2023-11-07 09:57 Thanks for sharing, I've spun it up on my server however with Medium articles/pages I'm getting `error code: 1010`. Anyone got a working rule for Medium? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 2containers1cpu · 2023-11-07 10:43 Not yet ---------------------------------------------------------------------- opulent1986 · 2023-11-14 06:07 There’s a bunch of 12ft.io alternatives here https://thesmallbusinessblog.net/12ft-ladder-alternatives/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CrimsonMika · 2023-11-14 10:32 I feel like you need to be a coder to understand Github, it's extremly confusing for most researchers without a coding background...