LibRedirect – Redirects popular sites to alternative privacy-friendly frontends
44 comments
·June 22, 2025patchtopic
time to get rid of the freeloaders with Anubis? https://anubis.techaro.lol/
bmacho
A web extension is an unnecessary security risk. A userscript will do it just fine.
edit: one of my previous attempt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35229211
I actually have made it extensible, with closely coupled source of rules and domains; but then I lost it Edge forgot all my userscripts :(
londons_explore
User scripts have super wide permissions. For example a user script scoped to YouTube.com can make payments from any cards you have saved in Google pay.
And most user scripts are so long a typical user won't be able to spot a couple of malicious lines amongst 10k lines of minified webpacked libraries.
bmacho
> And most user scripts are so long a typical user won't be able to spot a couple of malicious lines amongst 10k lines of minified webpacked libraries.
Exactly!
That's why you should use 3 lines for it instead, that are
- inspectable
- not updateable by the Chinese/Russians
- written by you anywaydanielspace23
what's up with the random racism in this comment?
rvnx
You also have to weight the benefits versus the "risk".
For example, if you use FreeTube with SponsorBlock to improve your privacy and block ads, in fact you are sending to Cloudflare 100% of your YouTube watch history, and to SponsorBlock ("sponsor.ajay.io").
With Piped instances it's even worse, essentially escaping Google's tracking just to give our data to random strangers.
If you are worried, just run a second Chrome session with NordVPN and uBlock Origin in a loose jurisdiction and browse YouTube unlogged.
It's easy, simple, and you have the benefits of an audited platform and that reasonably legally confirm they don't store logs unless the court forced them: "we never log their activity unless ordered by a court never log their activity unless ordered by a court", but for that, the court has to find you as a user, which can be very complicated in practice.
So much better than random strangers.
hashiyakshmi
>If you are worried, just run a second Chrome session with NordVPN and uBlock Origin in a loose jurisdiction and browse YouTube unlogged.
If you actually did this you would know that it works for all of a week or two before YouTube stops letting you watch videos until you login.
heavensteeth
SponsorBlock doesn't send video IDs to the server.
lvass
Terrible advice. Not only youtube will precisely fingerprint you, nordvpn/tesonet/oxylab will also get data on you.
HK-NC
I'm happy to give my watch history to some unknown in exchange for never ever seeing an ad.
latexr
> If you are worried, just run a second Chrome session with NordVPN
I feel like I’m on YouTube already.
It’s not like they are free of criticism either.
eviks
The extension links to 50+ services, your script - to 1. Do you now suggest that every single user should figure out how to do it properly and replicate the extension in a script for no better alternative (you could instead spend part of that time reading the extension code and using your private copy)
bmacho
I don't think that not having all the services is a problem. On the contrary, I think it is an advantage for userscripts, that those only have the redirects a user explicitly adds.
Tho I probably should've demonstrated first that it is possible, before advocating for it. The script I linked indeed only works for one website. Multiple websites with multiple rules, each with a list of instances (that often go offline for a time, so it is worth keeping them around, and make switching easy) indeed complicates it a bit.
eviks
So what exactly is the advantage of having to code all the rules yourself for every service you want to use??
> complicates it a bit
a bit of an understatement
johnisgood
Proxigram? I doubt I could run that on Android.
kelvinjps10
I love this extension
4ad
I want the opposite, an extension that will redirect all crappy frontends to the canonical sources (which work better and I am logged-into, I can comment, etc).
fmbb
Don’t almost all of them show a link to the source anyway?
null
hsbauauvhabzb
Do any of these YouTube extensions retrieve videos in a way which is unassociated with my IP? I’d really rather not get my google account banned, or my searches rate limited. These aren’t happening now, but I believe they will in the future to the point where I actively avoid using any tooling from my home connection, and vps’ seem to be blocked by YouTube already.
v5v3
VPNs are not blocked by YouTube.
Neither is viewing YouTube using Tor Browser.
pimeys
If you have a dynamic IP at home, run it in your homelab and access it through Tailscale everywhere. I highly doubt YouTube will block the whole IP block for home users.
hsbauauvhabzb
That doesn’t solve the issue of my google search traffic and fingerprint from coming from the same source as yt-dlp.
Razengan
How long before browsers disable these kinds of in-user-favor workarounds?
Like Apple removing the "Disable JavaScript" menu option from Safari and moving it into Developer Tools, which can be detected by websites before you can disable JS >:(
reddalo
I think the real question is: should we keep using browsers that are developed by ad companies? And the answer is no, we should just use Mozilla Firefox.
progval
Mozilla is an ad company now: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-t...
v5v3
We should all use Tor browser alongside Firefox.
Download today people https://www.torproject.org/download/
anthk
X.com works bet with lightbrd.com instead of xcancel with captchas.
jorvi
I have never seen an xcancel captcha..
pndy
Neither do I - just the usual "verifying your request" screen: https://i.ibb.co/MyWRVtFj/xc.jpg
mslansn
Which is a PoW CAPTCHA, but a CAPTCHA nonetheless.
HelloUsername
lightbrd also needs cloudflare captcha
bdhcuidbebe
Farside extension, 847 stars: https://github.com/benbusby/farside
Using venrable farside.link
https://sr.ht/~benbusby/farside/
Why use your offering?
imiric
This comment could've been phrased better, but Farside does have an important feature that LibRedirect lacks, which is automatic instance selection based on reachability. Instances routinely fail and new ones are added, so automating that aspect instead of requiring manual instance selection by the user is a powerful feature.
Anyway, thanks for mentioning it!
MallocVoidstar
Using Farside means the initial redirect goes through Farside, so they are capable of knowing what videos you're watching, what tweets you're looking at, etc. You have to trust them not to monitor this. Using a client-side extension means only the instance you use knows this.
imiric
It's a Go project that seems trivial to self-host. By your logic we shouldn't trust any of the instances of the alternative services either since anyone could be monitoring their use as well.
iLoveOncall
Maybe for the fact it as 4 times as many stars on GitHub if that's what you care about?
Overall it works but the problem lies in instances that tend to die-off pretty fast. There were homebrew "hubs" solely providing redirects out of pure kindness to many big sites and services but now it seems it's hard to find one that works without being blocked/rate limited. Big sites and services fight back, which isn't really surprising.
Privacy Redirect was prob the first extension that introduced this idea. It did the job as well but up until bad-actors figured out they can redirect people to their dangerous sites.