this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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127
Predirect: A manifest v3 web extension with minimal permissions to automatically redirect popular sites to privacy friendly frontends (github.com)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/selfhosted
9 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

It supports both links and embeds and is available on firefox for android. List of sites is on github. I'm the main developer so you can ask questions.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

so this is similar to LibRedirect?
https://github.com/libredirect/browser_extension
https://libredirect.github.io/
check out this list of privacy frontends and see if you can implement any of them in Predirect

Also, I see that you only handle one instance for redirect. Either the default instance or custom instance.
Consider implementing multiple instances. Here is list of instances that LibRedirect uses:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/libredirect/instances/main/data.json
Here is a list of instances that Farside.link uses:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/benbusby/farside/master/services-full.json

Both LibRedirect and Farside still have to deal with the rate-limiting problem with Youtube and Reddit and I assume other sites as well. Invidious instance or Teddit instance can be rate-limited, resulting in video not playing or post not showing up.
If your extension does not distribute user traffic across multiple instances, then I assume that your chosen instances will get hammered into ratelimit even faster than other instances.
So consider thinking about solution for this.
One of suggestions that I like is to allow user to provide an URL to a list of instances.
That way, someone or some automated system can periodically compose a list of instances and users can "subscribe" to that list.

Also some useful links:
https://github.com/digitalblossom/alternative-frontends
https://github.com/pluja/awesome-privacy#social-networks-and-platforms
https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends
https://matrix.to/#/#alternative-frontends:tchncs.de

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Yes, Predirect currently chooses randomly from list of instances from farside/official(I'll make it updatable/refreshable in near future) or one custom instance (I'll also add editing list of custom instances in far future) [ofc if chrome store allows these two]. I didn't add libredirect/reddit due to ratelimiting problems and GotHub, anonymous overflow due to usability issues. I'll add search, maps in near future and also others. Predirect does distribute traffic by randomising instances so not an issue. Thanks for suggestions and contributions are welcome for any of these

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Is there any exception possible? On mobile I want to redirect everything to my invidious instance, but on my PC I want the same, except for youtube.de itself.

In short: redirect YouTube to invidious but not youtube.de 🤔

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The extension currently doesn't handle YouTube.de (unless it is redirected to YouTube.com) but you can choose your custom instance. I'll add more features soon

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It would be great if we could have a YAML config within the settings for all custom (or not) redirects. And if such lists were synced from some repo and then only locally sorted or trimmed by ..ping, for example. Something like:

  • source site RegEx to match:
    • redirect to this instance
    • or here's another one, maybe even with a different alternative frontend.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah I will add refreshable list of instances, custom lists probably not(extension stores has many restrictions on remote code loading)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Excellent stuff! Been looking for something like this and while I love greasemonkey it's a bit fiddly on Android so this is a great, much simpler, alternative!

[–] Rooki 2 points 11 months ago

Nice work!