2023-01-14
Distraught and worn out by a recent psychic battle, the techno-mage lowers her blade and sits before a dusty ancient machine. The corpse of a cyber-piglin lies nearby in a pool of digits and blood, its head blasted into the void of the analog nowhere. She digs her fingers above her right brow and pulls out a greasy cable, plugs the connector into the computer and opens the lid. The screen comes to life in a dim crackle. A tiny blinking symbol of a salt water fish followed by a string of text appears: "Welcome, techno-mage-649." The girl wipes her hands on the plaid robe decorated with sewed on patches with handwritten references to mandoc pages on cyber-warfare, incantations and system management, and lights an incense lamp hanging around her neck. She runs her index finger down the side of the display and whispers a short blessing. Finally her hands slowly land on top of the computer's keys and the eternal fan purs in response.
As time ticks on, the commonality dictates the path of decadence. More and more souls are let into the world of digital overabundance, but are quickly captured and walled-off in meticulously constructed gardens of pleasure and ignorance, preventing them from ever noticing the world outside the fence. But in trenches far beyond these shiny walls, communities of free people, armed with keyboards and seemingly forbidden knowledge, devote their time to a neverending war on the soul-sucking monsters in an effort to free both the people and information.
I have previously introduced the reader to a selection of alternative front-ends to three popular services. As someone, who uses these services, it sometimes feels as if they were commonplace, but there's always one, who hasn't yet been introduced to a free method to their favorite past-time. The more information that exists about these services, the more people will learn about it. And every rescued person is another victory for freedom.
I invite you to try the following front-ends, share the word, host them yourselves and if you can, donate to your favorite project or instance. Freedom has its costs, but it should never be you and your data. These projects let you browse content of commercial services, use no javascript (and are thus compatible with your favorite text-browser) and respect your privacy.
I do not mean to review the services themselves, since they are very user friendly. This is a selection of various instances, but should you want to learn more about the projects, see references at the bottom.
In a previous article I have written about invidious. Since then I've been introduced to CloudTube, which is a more modernized take on a simplified video watching service. I was introduced to it by h3artbl33d, who hosts an instance at: jouwbuis.nl
I am also aware of tube.cadence.moe, which is hosted by the project itself, but there are many more - such is the power of free software. You too can run your own instance of any of these services.
Last time I talked about teddit and the instance teddit.net. I'm a big fan of teddit, but I've been slowly gravitating towards libreddit.
h3artbl33d hosts a libreddit instance at r.cybernuk.es
One of the subjectively worst examples of services offering collaborative spaces is the wiki service fandom. I could dedicate a whole article to why I hate it and why it is a disgrace to both its content creators and readers alike. Alas, I invite you to ditch the fandom domain and use a clean interface provided by the breezewiki project.
The main instance at breezewiki.com is currently down for maintanence, but the website is up and links to two other instances:
As is tradition, for both CloudTube and libreddit, all you have to do is replace the original domain in the url with the domain of the instance of your choice. ie:
For breezewiki, take your favorite instance and append the link like so:
https://wutangforever.fandom.com/wiki/killahpriest https://bw.vern.cc/wutangforever/wiki/killahpriest
Visiting the homepage of a breezewiki instance however offers a search option, where you can enter the name of your desired wiki and a query. Once you are within the front-ended wiki, you can use the local search like you would on fandom.