Comment by omnibrain

I know that alternative frontends for reddit were a huge thing which I used to use before the api fiasco

There are still some alternatives but most of them now scrape or have extreme rate limiting from what I know.

They use redlib but If I remember correctly that's similar to libreddit but patched to work without api but still, its a very finnicky solution.

Like these solutions can work but I think at that point, just use a VPN but oh boy reddit detects those VPN's from what I know.

WOW UK censorship law is really something huh, can people living in the UK somehow vote to repeal that or something?

I was thinking on the scary part of as to what if many countries can seemingly connect together these pieces to genuinely have internet authoritarianism and what if they have such eggregious fees or just even a threat of it, have a little mixture of getting sanctioned if you try to move around it but damn, this is so weird, if they really want, they can genuinely escalate this more and more to block VPN's and more and more to effectively soft-lock a person from the internet. This needs to stop. Right now. Otherwise I am scared if what if multiple countries come together to stop something like tor nodes by somehow putting them in such a law. Once tor stops, all hell can break loose on the internet, its certainly possible, I never expected this but the only thing stopping UK censorship might be hopefully their incompetence of maybe not removing VPN's or this goose chase or just the fact that this is the beginning, not the end. They are testing how much they can get away with which is increasing a lot... This really made me pessimistic actually.

The only hope is that such websites can spring up more quickly than UK can take them down but what if UK sets a dangerous precedent by suing them, its definitely possible to track them down by the UK govt.

They say on their blog that https://bloat.cat/blog/updates-may-25/ that Redlib is the most resource-hungry service. The traffic figures run into terabytes a month

Some % of these could be for bypassing the UK as well

though I suppose that not even govt. can catch them,their Opsec is genuinely really good, they use monero for the servers and etc., its fascinating to see their Opsec be so secure.

Edit: I got so curious and found out that they run some servers on senko.digital which is in fact UK based but they won't still get much (I hope) because senko.digital supports monero so their opsec is secure but if they had slipped up, it wouldn't have been hard to see them being framed as they get terabytes of data and some % of data can help loop around UK censorship evil laws and they could've tried to frame him and senko being a UK company, it isn't hard to follow that they would've complied. But they use monero and I am sure that they use a vpn as well but it was certainly fun reading their Opsec and I think that its sort of perfect, I need to learn more from it actually.

So I guess its still possible to run websites without incurring the hefty fine in UK but its certainly very hard / borderline impossible and I just hope that this UK thing / similar things in other countries doesn't get any further and gets banned/repealed otherwise the internet might die.

Edit 2: maybe I gave them too much credit since either its saying Reddit is blocking redlib as always... when I try to click on any username or it just gives a flat out nginx 502 bad error... I really gave them too much credit but it was fun learning something about opsec.

I'm fairly mixed about it, personally.

Being able to inspect post and comment history allowed for finding people who are absentmindedly lying, or are otherwise intentionally and persistently abusive. I believe this was the whole original motivation about such a history being available, even.

On the flipside, it does lessen the potency of various avenues of abuse. Some people would get harassed and stalked thanks to this history feature for example, and it trivialized targeted information extraction too. It also allowed for petty censorship, i.e. some subs would auto-ban people who commented in various other subs.

One might also criticize it for being a minor bandaid over a gaping hole. Your username and user avatar you still carry across subs and are not autogenerated. This means that with sufficiently wide scraping, your posts are still perfectly correlatable, collectable, and subscribeable. Within subs, the same applies to your user flair. This has benefits, i.e. it allows you to block users who you identify as inherently malicious, but it also means that all the aforementioned benefits apply only in limited ways.

Trust requires the sharing of information, privacy requires the obfuscation of information - and so I think these concerns run contrary to each other, resulting in the many solutions of the world not committing fully to either, as they are extreme and unrealistic positions in isolation. Difficult world.