Posts tagged with "social media"

2026-09-17 / tags: big tech, guides, meta, privacy, social media, spacexai

Just here to find a privacy frontend? Jump to the list of services.

Ever heard the phrase "have your cake and eat it too"? Social media companies love doing this. Thoroughly enshittified platforms like Reddit, YouTube, and Instagram gathered goodwill by offering a fun product to the public for free, then they leveraged the critical mass of people they attracted to shove ads down their throats once they were too locked-in^[1] with network effects to want to leave. Any time you browse a social media site, or especially a mobile app installed on your phone, these companies are collecting thousands upon thousands of valuable data points to construct a profile of who you are that they can sell to advertisers, whether or not you're logged in to an account.

Never let it be said that I begrudge people their choice of digital junk food. Today I will show you how to doomscroll without giving away your data.

Enter privacy frontends

Privacy frontends are a unique adversarial tool in the fight against big tech. They are web applications that access centralized social media services on behalf of users who want to avoid trackers and bloatware as they watch cat videos or peruse dank memes. In addition to avoiding data collection, users benefit from lighter resource usage and, much of the time, fewer technical issues. The downsides are that this tech goes directly against social media companies' business model, so they have a big incentive to go after them with whatever tactics they can, whether it's changing their code to be more difficult to work around or filing legal challenges, as X is repeatedly attempting with the Nitter project, to varying degrees of success (shout out to the Nitter project for refusing to take these attacks lying down).

Because of the adversarial nature of these projects, they are hosted in a decentralized manner in multiple instances. In computer^[2], an "instance" is jargon for an item that does the same thing as other items like it, as defined by its "parent", which it inherits from. In practice, this means that you'll need to find a list of instances for a particular privacy frontend you want to use, and pick from them depending on which is currently accessible, and any other criteria you'd like, such as where the server is located. Then, just navigate to that instance's URL in your web browser, and go bananas. A well maintained privacy frontend will have a list of instances available as part of its code repository, with a pointer to that list in the README (front page).

From there, you can use the frontend as a web application, starting from the home page and going where you'd like; or, you can find a link to the original social media site, copy the path (everything after the top-level domain, usually .com, including the first slash), and paste it at the end of the URL of the frontend's homepage.

Just as a quick demonstration, let's say I got a link from my buddy of an unfortunate typo someone made as they were getting mercilessly slaughtered online:

https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/zdo61b/killed_this_noob_at_chaos_elemental_today_pleae/

I definitely want to see what's going on there, but I don't want to give Reddit my birthday, social security, and first born child for the privilege. What's a girl to do? I'll have a list of projects for various services at the end of this post, but we can start with a privacy frontend for Reddit called Redlib. That page shows its README, which has a link to their instance list. I'm in the US, so I'll pick one of the US based ones, https://redlib.catsarch.com. Now I'll just copy the path from my original link (remember, this is everything after the top-level domain, usually .com, including the first slash) and paste it at the end of this one to get:

https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/2007scape/comments/zdo61b/killed_this_noob_at_chaos_elemental_today_pleae/

Now I can view this extremely embarrassing moment of some random gamer's career, enshrined in history, without giving up my identity. Pretty neat! Note also that many of these services have instances accessible via Tor hidden services, I2P, and Yggdrasil for extra layers of protection.

List of services

I'll try to keep this section reasonably up to date with new info, but I can't promise that it will be current at all times. That being said, if you know of something that currently works for a major social media site, is actively maintained, and isn't listed here (or if something listed here is broken), feel free to drop me a line!

• Gelbooru: Gelbooru-Go (instances)
• Reddit: Redlib (instances)
• Imgur: Rimgo (instances)
• Instagram: Kittygram (instances)
• Tenor: Mezzo (instances)
• YouTube: Invidious (instances)

2026-06-06 / tags: big tech, meta, quick reads, rants, social media, social movements

Note: This post is primarily aimed at participants in social movements.

I'm really tired of people thinking that posting their events, news, and writing only on Instagram and nowhere else is acceptable. It makes me angry. More importantly, it only includes that grouping of people who are both in Meta's good graces and actively choose to use their services.
Guess who can't fit in there? Mad people and all those who choose to prioritize their emotional and mental wellness over participation in the attention economy. Radicals whose speech has gotten them banned from the platform. And anyone who isn't interested in giving Meta personally identifiable information like an email address, phone number, and their behavioral data.
There are so many other options to disseminate information over the Internet and otherwise, and organizers are too comfortable ignoring the masses of people that can only be reached in other spaces in favor of what's easy and comfortable.
I happen to be in a position in my life where I have a lot of free time that I would love to spend going to community events and participating in building that I am not invited to because I choose to care for my Mad crip bodymind by not bending over backwards to get a second phone number to use for the billionaire-owned brain poison app.
I am not asking for people and orgs to move off of Instagram. I recognize that it is a powerful tool for outreach and engagement, and, in many ways, a necessary evil. I am, however, demanding that folks do the absolute bare minimum by publishing the details of your activity elsewhere as well. Or, alternatively, accept and sit with the fact that your allegiance to corporate social media as your only communications outlet is actively alienating people who want to build with you and, often, people you claim to be in solidarity with.
This post sponsored by my manic episode last year spurring me to stop using Instagram, which has considerably improved my overall wellbeing.