Suggest a Frontend

Requirements

1. Open Source
2. Enhances Privacy over main site
3. Can be self-hosted. So, It's Decentralized
4. Using it is really hard without automated redirections

Good Examples

• Nitter
• Invidious
• Libreddit
• SimplyTranslate

Bad Examples

• PixivMoe - It wasn't meant to be an alternative private frontend in the first place
• Startpage - It doesn't require automated redirections. Just set it as your default Search Engine ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Plus, there's already an extension for it.
• Old Reddit - It attempts to track/fingerprint you.
• Pinafore - It's a full featured web app for Mastodon, not a frontend
• Soju - It's just a website that gives you samples of Spotify songs, not a frontend. If you want to use it, just visit their website and paste the spotify link you want to get a sample of.
• Imginn - There are many trackers on the website, not private at all.

Why forking Privacy Redirect?

Privacy Redirect hasn't been maintained since 6/12/2021. Many instances are hard coded. Some should be removed as they became offline and many others should be added. Many Pull Requests were left pending and waiting. So we stepped in. Later, we started improving it further by adding new features and frontends.

Disclaimer : Even though we forked from Privacy Redirect. Libredirect is ahead of the main project with several improvements and new features. The Project is independent now.

Why all those permissions?

Let's examine them one by one:

• webRequest, webRequestBlocking: To block http requests or redirect them. For example, to redirect to Invidious before it can reach YouTube's servers.
• storage: To save LibRedirect's settings permanently.
• Clipboard.writeText : To write the original link to the clipboard while using Copy Raw. This permission is used to only write data. LibRedirect does not read the data in your clipboard.
• cookies: To apply settings across multiple instances. Note that we also use localStorage. Those options are disabled by default though.
• menus: For adding some buttons to the Context menu :
• 
• <all_urls>: LibRedirect is dynamic and customizable. The targets e.g youtube.com, twitter.com are written in Regex and are too complicated to be hard-coded in the manifest. Ex: search Regex. Furthermore, we also need to access the instances sites to inject some localStorage variables.
• privacy: To know if the browser uses First-party isolation. This is important for creating cookies that the Tor Browser will accept. We only read and don't modify any privacy setting.

Where the hell are those instances coming from?

Almost every frontend project has a list of public instances. Examples: Invidious' official instances list, Nitter's official instances list. For frontends that don't have an instance list, we use our own, which you can find under src/instances. We fetch those lists using an automated python script. This script gets triggered every 3 days. We don't intercept nor modify the lists outside of removing urls that are not valid (the structure is not that of a url) and removing trailing slashes. They're not our responsibility: they're the projects maintainers'.

Why not using a single reputable instance?

LibRedirect is just a tool. We're not here to choose for you. It's your own choice. The default setting selects all instances except those using Cloudflare, but you can change it yourself.

We can't know which instances are reputable for you and which aren't. Every person has a different point of view. LibRedirect should follow your point of view, not ours.

Chrome Web Store?

We can't publish it to the Chrome Web Store as it requires Manifest v3 and we use Manifest v2. You can still install it manually. We are planning to adopt Manifest v3 in Firefox as they will support the feature LibRedirect needs. If other browsers support Mozilla's policy, you might see LibRedirect in the Chrome Web Store.

Why not Manifest v3?

Read this: https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect/issues/45#issuecomment-1059010144

What is Unify Settings?

This feature copies locally-stored settings such as theme, language, etc. across instances to make using multiple instances easier. It does not support private/incognito mode.

To use it, visit one of your selected instances where you already have settings saved. Press "Unify Settings" in the popup menu or use the keyboard shortcut Shift+Alt+U. This will copy the settings from the current instance to all your other selected instances.

Unify Settings may behave differently for different frontends, as it depends on how each frontend saves settings. For example:

• Piped saves settings in local storage, which unifies predictably across instances.
• Libreddit saves settings as individual cookies, which unifies predictably across instances.
• Nitter saves settings as individual cookies, but only saves settings you change from an instance's default. This means unifying settings can behave differently depending on which instance you unify from. Saving certain settings requires unifying from specific instances, and some settings combinations may require unifying from multiple instances.
• Invidious saves its settings in a cookie with a nonstandard URL (.<domain> instead of <domain>), so instances fail to consistently load unified settings..