Can’t believe it’s Christmas!
Been quite a while since my last post, and some changes have been made so I decided to take some time to make another one.
A lot that has happened over the last year with privacy instances, as they have been under heavy attack by their centralized services.
Nitter is Back!
Fortunately, there are a lot of smart and creative people involved with doing their best to make it continue working, and because of that, the tux.pizza Nitter instance is back! (For the most part). The official instance, nitter.net, has been working for some time now, however I never got the chance to set Nitter back up as it only now works on a specific branch and requires generating loads of temporary “Guest” accounts to bypass the extremely restrictive API limitations imposed earlier this year. Thanks to a service called Twitterminator, I was able to do just that.
Invidious is Improved
Invidious had been getting slower over the past few months until it would stop responding due to the amount of traffic it was getting. Unfortunately, Invidious is a single-core application, and because of this, 1 core was getting all of the load and it was working as hard as it could. To help mitigate this issue, Invidious now runs multiple replicas/processes so the performance is WAY better, and it’s much more pleasant to use 😄.
About a month ago, I experimented with enabling proxying for the Invidious instance, which allows you to watch 1080p since proxying the traffic directly through my server is required to watch in that quality. The difference with proxying being on is that my server will grab the video contents from YouTube, then stream it to you directly. The only issue which this is the bandwidth requirements, and when I had turned it on for a test, Invidious started pulling 180GB/traffic PER DAY! I will be purchasing a VPS just to handle the video traffic due to the bandwidth requirements, as my current VPS would not have enough bandwidth to last a month at that rate. However, if I am able to enable proxying, it would allow using the DASH player to have higher quality videos like 1080p, and provide the ability to watch livestreams.
New Service: Whoogle
A new service has been introduced, this time it’s Whoogle. Whoogle is a highly configurable proxy for Google’s search engine. If you want to use multiple search engines at once, continue using SearxNG. Otherwise, if you prefer just Google’s search engine, try Whoogle to search without those nasty trackers!
More Services on the Way
I will be working on a major migration sometime in the next few months in things go to plan, to switch away from using TrueNAS Scale for kubernetes to a proper kubernetes platform like Rancher or Talos Linux. In the meantime, I won’t be opening any more services that require persistent data like accounts (Vaultwarden, Vikunja) to prevent adding more time to the migration. I will write a post about the downtime and maintenance window when it is decided.
A Special Thanks
Every so often, from people like you reading this right now, I get a message or email thanking me for hosting these services. It’s my pleasure to do it, and it only further validates the reason that I do it. For people to use them and to spread privacy to everyone. So, thank you for these kind messages, they mean a lot 😀.
Unfortunately hosting these services does take a lot of time and money, and I do this in my spare time. If you use these services and get value out of them, please consider sending a donation my way. I would also encourage you to donate to the frontend project developers, as it takes even more effort developing and maintaining them, and I thank the hard working people who are developing these privacy frontend projects. You can find their project pages by clicking Source for each project over on the Services page.
Enough from me, now get back to your holly jolly! 🎄🐧
