Comment by perlgod | Hacker News Reader

Comment by perlgod | Hacker News Reader

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

"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."

Yeah, the number of extensions ("add-ons") available for Fennec is a joke. Someone on HN suggested that Firefox Nightly for Android has no such limitation.

Unlike uBlock, uMatrix, an add-on not available for Fennec, is purportedly for "advanced users" but I see in this thread people suggesting that to use extensions in Nightly, one needs to "log in". IMO, that conflicts with the purpose of using extensions to block unwanted egress traffic. IMO, if I was the type of user who "signs in", I would not be interested in "privacy" extensions.

IMO, all this hoop-jumping is due to unregulated online advertising. Without Google's online ad services profits propping it up, Mozilla would not be a feature-for-feature Chrome "competitor". Mozilla is on the same advertising treadmill with Google. Unless they assist online advertising, the organisation cannot survive. The less we rely on these ad-supported organisations, the better.

IMO, trying to control popular web browsers and "smartphones" is a waste of time. The amount of work to attempt to control them is insane and they are moving targets so the work never ends. I "block" advertising, telemetry and other unwanted traffic by proxying smartphone connection to the internet through a computer I can more easily control.

IIRC, someone on HN once compared smartphones to "kiosks". Even if one disagrees now, I think that is where these pocket-sized "personal computers" are headed. People may be forced to use them, but they will remain under the control of some other party.

Firefox supports (many) browser extensions.

On Android, no. Very few.

Nightly and Fennec allow you to curate extended lists, for the price of a Mozilla login.

Which is something like 1/3 "No". And 1/2 a middle finger to privacy for no good reason.

A fair amount of extensions are not distributed through the Mozilla add-on site.

I've considered hosting my own Nitter and Bibliogram instances but I have to wonder if that reduces their privacy veil a bit. Wouldn't the requests from those instances be coming from a single IP, thereby potentially allowing their respective services to still track you? (Sure, you're avoiding the analytics from those service's web front-ends or apps but that can probably mostly be achieved by disabling JS.) I've considered adding a VPN or TOR gateway between the nitter and bibliogram instances I host to make them harder to track.

I agree. If you're the only user of your instance, they can easily track you server-side by your IP address. You could mitigate this by routing your egress traffic (either from the individual device or network-wide, from your router) through a VPN.

It’s really not that much extra work to automatically rotate VPS IPs or VPN relays on an hourly or daily interval. Since most Invidious/Nitter guides don’t recommend doing this I guess it’s not very common.

Just remember that you’re still technically trackable via behavioral, configuration, or latency fingerprinting. Anonymity is a full-time academic endeavor, not a shell script one-liner.

For twitter to me, it's not even about privacy - the regular frontend without being logged in is unusable. My instances are hosted publicly but I don't advertise them. I guess if people fancy it they are free to check it out, but would prefer it not to end up on any lists: https://midas.rocks/

Iceraven supports extensions

In addition to iceraven (mentioned in another reply) there's also Kiwi browser, a chromium based mobile browser with extensions support.

Also, there's a web extension called Redirector that allows you to do these redirects in a much more generic way.

With firefox nightly you can install any extension you want with addon collections.

How do you host them?

I host everything from a server in my basement. Each local application gets a dedicated Rocky Linux VM on a proxmox hypervisor, with the VM/DNS/app configuration managed though a custom ansible framework that I've developed for my "homelab" over the years. Don't currently mess with containers.

My mobile devices have an always-on wireguard VPN back to my house so I can access everything while out and about.

Are you doing this behind a VPN?

It is absolutely not hilarious. It's a one time work. And worth it to use unatrix

1) sign in to amo, make your list.

2) touch somewhere 7 times front

3) enter your amo I'd

It's gg from there

Could you re-post your comment to show how it is easy? I searched for "unatrix" and "amo" and "list" and got 0 hits that would make it easy, or indeed make it hard as none (on the front page which is all I looked at) refer to firefox and/or android. To me, with no other information, this implies that it not actually easy for normal users and indeed it might therefore be hilariously hard. For example, should I search for these on github?

my guess is umatrix, addonsmozillaorg

Let me get on a computer in a few hours and write detailed (but quick) steps

saved me a lot of typing: https://old.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/p7mgec/guide_usi...

Thanks!

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