The death of privacy front ends?

https://tux.pizza/posts/service2/

by throwoutway • 3 years ago

83 62 3 years ago

tux.pizza

Given_47• 3 years ago

Ayo I just recently started using the tux.pizza Nitter instance as my main

userbinator2• 3 years ago

The recent WEI (aka user-agent discrimination) proposal might be the end-game of all this.

We shouldn't give up, but keep fighting to be able to use services with the software and hardware we choose. The whole "API" concept has always seemed like a power-grab since it was introduced.

bobmaxup2• 3 years ago

The whole "API" concept has always seemed like a power-grab since it was introduced

What do you mean? Do you mean a public, free API offered by these services?

userbinator2• 3 years ago

I mean the idea of promoting a separate "API" that you need to specifically request access to ("API keys") and possibly agree to other conditions, just to get the same information you'd already be able to with the "normal" way using a browser, but in a possibly slightly easier to parse format.

That's why I like to say that all sites already have an API: HTTP + HTML.

klardotsh5• 3 years ago

Unfortunately this shouldn't be surprising: especially in this time of purse strings tightening and every Enshittification-powered company trying to grind out the last bits of "value" out of their hostage base, companies are bound to take measures to enforce their moats.

Migrating to services where the data is free and not captive was always the only long-term solution.

Next up: rather than inventing technical solutions to work around walled gardens, we need serious legislative efforts to mandate data freedom. It should be possible to export 100% of one's data stored in a service like Twitter or Reddit in a reasonably-parseable format (a tarball of JSON as one possible example, or maybe a SQLite database, or whatever is appropriate) and import it to a new service. Data moats must end, or we'll be doing this same stupid dance every few years when the next MySpaceBookTokDit enshittifies and takes everyone's social data with it.

pavel_lishin• 3 years ago

Exports only help if new services support imports.

And some of those wouldn't be particularly helpful; @tags would lose a lot of meaning as you migrate, especially if others on the destination platform already have that handle.

klardotsh5• 3 years ago

@tags are just one of many features, and the lack of a matching user on the import side isn't a critical issue: a link back to the original post instead suffices.

And regardless, Twitter-alikes aren't the only thing worth considering. Exporting all of one's video data from YouTube, or all of one's comments from Reddit, or all of one's search history (and Google Voice texts, and Docs documents, and etc.) from Google are all usecases that fall under these data moats that are useful to be able to take with you and move to another service. There's probably more usecases I'm not even thinking of, but the point is that by exposing all the data by mandate, we don't have to be limited by the imagination of today, we have the data, we can build whatever future frontends and replacement services and etc. we want.

poisonborz• 3 years ago

Exports help always. Someone in the future could write a tool. Someone can finance writing a tool. AI could be used to create a tool.

veave• 3 years ago

Exports only help if new services support imports.

Of course I can understand why a service wouldn't want you to be able to post thousands of posts in a matter of minutes, or to fake timestamps, or...

The whole idea of massively importing stuff is complete nonsense.

kelnos3• 3 years ago

Fair-ish. Certainly some types of services have an incentive to allow you to import, as a way of making it easier to move to them. Like an email hosting service would want to make it easy for you to move your old emails to them when switching.

I could understand why a Twitter alternative might not want you to be able to import a ton of old posts at once. But this is why we need open standards and open source. Some random large Mastodon instance might not want to allow imports, but you should at the very least have the option to spin up your own instance, import all your old Twitter posts, and still participate in the ecosystem.

As others have pointed out, an @tag can still be useful by linking back to the original service. Or the importer can support a username mapping so it can rewrite names from the old service to names to the new service. Sure, all of this requires extra work, but it can be possible if people care enough.

Regardless, export functionality at the old service is the first necessary step. Even if there's no import on the other side now, someone might build one eventually. And even if that never happens, being able to archive your old data is useful by itself.

gochi2• 3 years ago

Regulations on data exports doesn't solve this problem at all, it just means an endless goose chase of exporting and importing. Additionally, we open people up to even larger data leaks if the entire export and import path isn't regulated. We already have a problem with this in regards to switching password managers.

Regulations on what data can even be collected will solve this problem, and negate the entire reason for using these front ends.

mindslight4• 3 years ago

Agreed that we desperately need privacy legislation that makes surveillance-based software much less prevalent. In addition, stopping this bundling of proprietary javascript clients with service hosting seems like straightforward antitrust action that doesn't even need any new legislation. Any action that a user can do through a web browser should be required to be made available as an API for programmatic access.

madeofpalk• 3 years ago

It should be possible to export 100% of one's data stored in a service like Twitter or Reddit in a reasonably-parseable format (a tarball of JSON as one possible example, or maybe a SQLite database, or whatever is appropriate)

You can do that. You've been able to download, directly from twitter, an archive of pretty much your entire account. It's not quite JSON - it's actually a .js file that declares a single variable, but it's close enough.

voxic11• 3 years ago

You can do the same with reddit. They give you a bunch of CSVs in a zip file.

mschuster913• 3 years ago

It's incomplete, though - my archive for my old accounts misses all media (including the profile of my long-deceased cats...), and it's a bit useless because while yes I could probably import it into some fork of Mastodon, that doesn't mean the "social web" still works as there is no federation between Twitter and Mastodon.

rolph• 3 years ago

data should be stored locally in the first place.

mschuster913• 3 years ago

Data moats must end, or we'll be doing this same stupid dance every few years when the next MySpaceBookTokDit enshittifies and takes everyone's social data with it.

Data moats haven't been a thing since GDPR passed and everyone implemented "data dump" features as a result.

The real problem is the lack of federation requirement. Say I'm a competitor to Facebook - what use has a potential customer of mine from an import feature when there is no way for my service to interface with the customer's Facebook friends?

fiddlerwoaroof2• 3 years ago

The GDPR data dump requirement is pretty lame: the user can’t specify a format, so a PDF scan of a printout of your data would qualify as a “data export”, even though it’s basically useless.

parentheses• 3 years ago

It's not just a privacy frontend. You're accessing content and services without helping the freely provided stuff be monetized. I get that you want to protect your identity. Then don't use these services or data. It's not public and not free - nor should it be.

Privacy is not piracy. This is piracy.

monkaiju• 3 years ago

Seeing as how this is hurting usage to the point that monetization is hurt, maybe they should actually just let the privacy-concious users be...

2Gkashmiri2• 3 years ago

RSS by its very nature is designed to not be restricted to the "way of presentation and ad earning of the producer".

Producer produces content and RSS syndicates it that can be read by clients IN WHATEVER MANNER OR FORM THEY DESIRE.

That's the whole idea of internet. Now, you go ahead and lament how this is piracy. Its not. YouTube provides RSS feeds. Same do other platforms so as long as they do, we can do whatever the hell we want with the feed

charcircuit• 3 years ago

That's the whole idea of internet.

No, the idea of the internet is to create a global scale network of computers.

YouTube provides RSS feeds.

Which links you to a webpage that includes ads to monetize the video, the RSS feed, and the rest of the site.

kelnos3• 3 years ago

But that's only if the producer wants to provide an RSS feed. While annoying, it's perfectly within their rights not to provide one.

That's the whole idea of internet.

I think it's very hard to assert that anything is "the whole idea of the internet". If you want to go back to its roots, the "whole idea of the internet" was to have a reliable military/government communications system in the case of nuclear war.

These days the internet means different things for different people, and no one person can credibly assert that any particular purpose is valid or invalid.

gochi2• 3 years ago

The article highlights several front ends most of which do not rely on the official RSS feeds provided by the service.

kelnos3• 3 years ago

"Piracy" is a bit of a strong denouncement. If someone puts something on the internet, and their server responds to your request for data with... y'know... the data, then the you can display that data however you want.

Certainly the server owners can try to do tricky things to make it so you can only display the data in ways they want you to display it, but there's no natural right that makes it morally or ethically wrong for you to display things how you want.

prmoustache• 3 years ago

No it is not.

oaththrowaway• 3 years ago

Surveillance capitalism is one of the most immoral things I can think of. Privacy and piracy are not only ethical but necessary

Santosh83• 3 years ago

Data is the life blood of AI algorithms. Hence the effort by Big Tech to silo their mega-platforms & impose WEI upon browsers so only their crawlers are able to scrap whatever data remains outside the silos. Its a race to the bottom and individual & smaller players are going to get crushed even before they can start.

hkt2• 3 years ago

The web is slowly being killed. The culprit? Capitalism.

Sorry, not sorry. Use Gemini, search with Marginalia, socialise with real people and reach your communities with email.

OfSanguineFire• 3 years ago

socialise with real people

I have some real-life, non-internet-based hobbies for which I come together with other people. All the rest of those people frequently talk about social media, online influencers, DRM-controlled streaming, and WhatsApp groups, and I’m the weirdo because I don’t follow any of that. In fact, it is socializing with real people that convinces me that the world will just go along with tech companies’ nefarious plans, and ultimately it may no longer be very feasible for us nerds to just drop out.

grrdotcloud• 3 years ago

My real friends use group text. Nothing fancy. Real names. Real numbers. No data collection. No cost.

Memes flow. Links get posted.

All is just a setup for the next IRL meeting.

I found the end of the internet in '99.

This is the last few sites that have a low bot ratio.

rpastuszak2• 3 years ago

[...] and reach your communities with email.

"office hours" / calls with random people where they can ask for advice, talk about their ideas (or just rant!) worked pretty well for me: https://sonnet.io/posts/hi

hkt2• 3 years ago

This is fantastic and I may just take you up on it if you're still doing it!

branon• 3 years ago

Teddit, my preferred Reddit frontend, still manages to have an updated frontpage, but clicking on anything gives HTTP 429 for several weeks now (I think, only use it intermittently).

If the frontends quit working though, I just won't go to those websites anymore.

askiiart• 3 years ago

I believe it's the same for Libreddit.

m463• 3 years ago

you can go to one of the many other instances running the teddit code

go to this link (at bottom of main teddit.net page)

https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit

and look under "instances"

just replace "reddit.com" with the instance name in your reddit url

I actually have a bookmark that does it automatically when I click on it.

javascript: (location.hostname="teddit.net")

or whatever instance you want

aquova• 3 years ago

While I wouldn't be surprised if it died soon, my personal Libreddit instance remains running perfectly fine, although it has a user count of one.

waithuh• 3 years ago

I think HN took the site down? While i understand the pain, i think a little bit of a surge shouldnt be able to take down a public instance host. Another reason, perhaps?

382• 3 years ago

site dead:

    > curl -v https://tux.pizza
    * Could not resolve host: tux.pizza
    * Closing connection 0
    curl: (6) Could not resolve host: tux.pizza

The death of privacy front ends?

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