Service Update #2
Time for another services update. :)
Sometime today or tomorrow the server will be down for a couple hours for a database migration, and then a physical server migration (Doing some consolidation and upgrades). I’ll try to post ahead on my Twitter when that happens.
Troddit Shutdown
So, effective July 1st (Yeah this post is late) Troddit was shutdown, due to the ongoing price hikes of the Reddit API. It didn’t appear that too many people used it, but I’m still sad to see it have to go. Unfortunetely I don’t want to keep it up and risk racking up a huge balance using my Reddit developer API key. It was a nice alternative to the official Reddit site that would let you login to your account.
Nitter is Broken
UPDATE: Nitter is now working! There were some commits made to the project that now allow you to search for usernames and view profiles. You can’t search for invidual tweets, but if you are using Libredirect, it should redirect you to the desired tweet. Thanks to the awesome people at the Nitter project, go give them your support! https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/
Twitter recently stopped allowing you to view tweets without an account. This broke Nitter due to how it scrapes tweets. Looks like Twitter have uplifted that restriction, however Nitter funtionality is not restored. No telling if it will work again. I’ll keep it up for now, but I may end taking it down depending on where the project goes.
Libreddit & Invidious on watch
UPDATE Libredit has currently stopped working. No matter how many times I change the IP, it gets ratelimited within minutes. I’ve observed this with almost every other Libreddit instance, they are all currently ratelimited. Looks like Reddit has crippled their anonymous API endpoints. They may need to create a public scraper like how Nitter does it. If you want to support their work, head over to https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit
So currently Libreddit and Invidious still work, however there is no telling when they will both stop working. Libreddit currently uses “anonymous” API endpoints to scrape unauthenticated, but with how Reddit sleazily implemented their API pricing, there’s high reason to believe they are going to shutdown those API endpoints. It would appear that the Libreddit developers are working on being prepared for that with different methods of obtaining information, but for now it appears to still work perfectly fine.
It would apper that Invidious servers have started being blocked by YouTube. For one, the Invidious team was recently contact by the YouTube Legal team for erroneous claims of being in violationg of the YouTube API (It doesn’t use the YouTube API, see https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/3957 ), but it looks like YouTube has been limiting the access of whoever runs an Invidious server, making it so they can’t scrape YouTube content. (Probably an IP blacklist on the Invidious server itself).
Thankfully, mine is not blocked (yet lol) and is still completely usable. Part of that may be due to the fact that I don’t allow proxying video content, and also my server itself runs on a VPN whos IP can quickly be changed. I made the decision to not proxy video traffic after much thought but I decided it would be best to keep that option off as I don’t have the bandwidth to handle a lot of people proxying video content at once, and it would make the experience for other users and other services heavily dimished due to the bandwidth hogging. Invidious already uses more than 70% of the bandwidth for all my services combined.
New Services!?!?
So I’ve decided to finally open submissions for a couple services… Vaultwarden and Vikunja! I need to do some migration on a server (Combining two servers into one to get rid of an old server) so I’m going to open account creation sometime next week, to avoid potential issues. To start out and to avoid spam, accounts will be created upon request, using a form (Self hosted and privacy respecting, of course), which you can signup for here.
Also want to mention a site I’m hosting called Monero Subscription Code Generator. This is a code generator for a recently created project called Monero Subscription Wallet. (https://github.com/lukeprofits/Monero_Subscriptions_Wallet ). This wallet allows you to, at a specific interval, pay to an address for subscription purposes.
Alternatives?
With the continuing downfall of privacy frontends, we may have to actually start going to alternatives! I believe this is going to be a good thing.
Instead of just relying on these services to do good things, and “protest” when they don’t, I believe it is ideal to simply stop using them.
That certainly is not always an easy thing, but here are some potential alternatives!
YouTube alternatives include PeerTube and Odysee, or just hosting videos yourself (if you’re an uploader). Wouldn’t recommend Rumble due to their invasive requests of information on signup. A great Reddit alternative is Lemmy. An instance I would recommend is monero.town Twitter alternatives include Mastodon and Nostr.
If you’d like me to host a new service, feel free to let me know!
Thanks
tux.pizza services now get a whopping 2.5 million requests per day! 80% of that comes from the Invidious instance.
Thank you to all the people who send me kind messages simply because I host these services for people. It means a lot and is very encouraging to see!
If you enjoy my content, feel free to donate. I do this entirely in my free time, so anything is appreciated.
I recently created a new Matrix space for people to engage about privacy, security, selfhosting, Monero, GrapheneOS, etc…. If you’d like to join, the address is https://matrix.to/#/#tuxpizza:tux.pizza