As some of you might reckon, I ran a number of privacy-friendly services, front-ends for big tech platforms: the already defunct Nitter for Twitter/X, Jouwbuis for Youtube, Redlib for Reddit and Koekel/Searx for search engines. But no more. It has become way too much of a constant cat and mouse game and the instances had more issues than they were actually available for use.
This will free both some time and mindspace on my side, that I like to throw at the Fediverse and actually building stuff that is the future, rather than fighting big tech that won't be around anymore in a couple of decades. It has been a wild ride - but the time has come to step up and do the right thing - contributing towards humanity, rather than wasting it on ductaping the shit of big tech gazillionares together.
There are some alternatives:
- Reddit/Redlib: list of public instances - can be selfhosted relatively easy, including on OpenBSD
- Youtube/Jouwbuis: Piped (list of public instances, can be selfhosted through Docker), Cloudtube (official instance, can be selfhosted on OpenBSD, docs), Invidious (list of public instances, can be selfhosted). The most sustainable model is to use a client - in order to prevent Youtube blocking due to too much concurrent traffic. A good client for Android is PipePipe and Yattee for Apple devices. The latter one does need some configuration.
- Search: SearXNG (list of public instances, can be selfhosted), Whoogle (list of public instances).
Thank you for the fish - and hoping we'll meet again in a brighter future without big tech silos.