Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
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Question for those knowledgeable about alternative web protocols (gopher, gemini, etc): Would it be possible to create a tool that translates http sites to those formats, on demand? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

We all know how awful most modern websites are in terms of bloat, javascript and tracking. Not only that, but designing and maintaining web-browsers has become such a gigantic undertaking (almost the size of an operating system), that only a few companies have the resources to do it (google and mozilla, and mozilla might not hold on for much longer).

These alternative protocols offer a minimal set of features, and are trying to get back to what the web should've been: static content with images, text, and links, with local applications filling the void for anything more complicated than that.

Lets say I wanted a privacy-friendly way to view a page on a news site. I could:

Copy the URL of the page
Open some tool, (or website, anything), paste that url.
It converts the content in the url to the necessary privacy-friendly alternative format, and I can view it with my gopher/gemini browser (or even maybe a markdown viewer).

I know there are a few html -> markdown converters that can do the last step.

Does anyone know if this would work?

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[–] spankmonkey 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The fact that there was a shift in who dominates browser share from Netscape to Internet Explorer to Chrome suggests that the amount of complexity is going to encourage a market monopoly as long as someone breaks the standards in a way that gives them a small advantage. I don't know if the alternatives would have a different outcome, as they may be simple now, but bloat may be inevitable.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Makes sense, although it'd be nice for privacy-oriented people to have this thin-layer that converts any site into a de-bloated version that they can view safely. As far as I know, there isn't any tool that even provides this option right now.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

It’s a complicated problem. The biggest privacy issues come from the use of JavaScript, but most of the time sites use JavaScript heavily and become unusable when it’s disabled. Other sites will straight up not let you access them without JavaScript.