A central relay/proxy is even worse than your current approach. People are obviously free to set up their own Lemmy/Mastodon server if they want a relay.

Lemmy/Mastodon are quite heavy to set up if all you want is to proxy outbound connections. Just using any available proxy you have (which could very well be eg.: a SOCKS proxy set up on FoxyProxxy) is quite nimble and takes up at most a few kbs of RAM.

That said, for anonymizing the IP origin this only mostly works if enough people use the same general relays (basically the same principle as TOR, VPNs), which means this only becomes effective once enough people use this plugin that it becomes worthwhile to position such infrastructure.

Sending the current URL and directly from your own IP too is quite the privacy hurdle already. I’ve already posted on what kind of things could be done to improve this, but first, a notice.

Your README says in the Privacy section:

Does not track your browsing

On the current implementation, this should be changed to:

Enables unverified third parties to track your browsing data

As that honesty is quite important.

As for measures that could be taken to improve on this issue, I have three suggestions (I might Issue Tracker them to the codeberg later, if I can find my credentials XD)

• Set up a uBO-stye control pane that allows to set this on or off per-domain or per-site. Bonus points if it allows for per-site specific on which lemmy instances to use the same way as uBO’s “3p” Custom Rules does. This already prevents a number of undesirable use cases, such as automatically sending LAN / non-DNS names to third parties when they can’t really be searched for anyways.
• Anonimyzing assist: Allow for sending only the global context of the visited site (eg.: only the domain) instead of the full URL.
• Anonimyzing assist: Allow to cache requests to send them later / send them in batches, to avoid clock-based / timezone-based tracking attacks.
• Anonimyzing assist: Allow for the browser-specific request being sent through a proxy or relay, so that IP origin information is not leaked. (I think this only really makes sense for users not logged-in?)

Yeah. Interesting to think if there are ways to get around that problem.

At a first flance, perhaps a uBlockOrigin-style control pane with per-domain toggle, so that for example you can send the info only when browsing a specific domain (let’s say, a news site; that’d be interesting to find discussion in Lemmy of). This would also prevent the issue of sending URLs that are not internet-wide (eg.: are on a localnet resolver, or an intranet).

As well as the abiity with an option send the request through a relay or proxy, to remove IP origin information that can be used to build the profile.

Newlines and paragraph breaks have my ENTIRE support!

The Lemmy extension allows you to see and link directly to lemmy discussions on whatever instance you like (multiple even) if you’re on a site/news article/blog post/whatever. If the extension sees that this has been posted on Lemmy, it will provide you with a direct link to whatever discussions it finds based on the current URL you’re on.

So wait, it reports all browsing activity you do to third parties to search for matching Lemmy posts?

Bad, bad, system.

You’ve completely lost the point of why we’re here in Lemmy in the first place. Restrain or remove this feature ASAP.

But that would imply that Python is faster than the one in this comic!

I mean I could, but I ran out of tapes to keep recording stuff in.

This can’t be C++. Not enough stacks of unneeded template names, and the function names are not mangled beyond recognition.

I am amazed at how helpless some people…

It’s what TikTok did to a generation. It’s incredible.

Back in my day, I could even program the time on the VCR!

A new user will know because they sign in and they get access to more features of the instance, such as ability to follow, star, block, etc.

A mere visitor, can simply be pointed to the /all button. It just does not need to be the default.

Porn like stuff

Which one, exactly? A woman showing a nipple? Artistic renditions of men in classic statues? A furry? A LGBTQ person existing?

That’s how it begins. We’ve already seen how it ends.

There is a fair point to make that it’s instances that should default to /local instead of /all - at least for uncredentialed guests. Since if you want to see more, you can just get to the next instance, and the next, and the next…, and that way we avoid reloading basically the same content and stuff on every instance you visit.

And it helps instances better moderate how they present themselves to potential sign-ups.

Nobody is advocating for a ban, nor can or will this be used as a first step towards one.

History has proven you wrong since as early as the Dark Ages and as recently as two weeks ago in the UK.

[…] and I don’t want it in /all.

Skill issue. That’s literally what /all is for.

Block what you don’t want, or set your starting page to subscribed and curate from there. That’s half the point of this entire place.

The other half you already did the work: notified the comms they have to set to NFW, etc.

My usual concern with force redirecting people to “where the stuff is popular” is that it promotes centralization, which is the literal opposite of why we’re here. Besides, as I’ve commented some other times, the feasibility of user participation is not transitive across instances. !soccer@sports.xyz might have a completely different rules, mood or culture than !soccer@euro.pe , or the redirect might lead to !soccer@ya.ml which is blocked in my country or otherwise made unavailable. (I am using examples here ofc but I guess this could very well hit people in and around feddit.uk, for one).

There is literally no punishment for keeping a community open so it can sometime either grow organically or die organically. Locking them however, fully prevents either option.

…It’s literally a public communication network? The point is that what you post is seen.

If you want private there’s Signal, Jabber, etc. Wholly different purposes.

If they are locked, the people who come here and see them locked will go elsewhere instead of contributing, because they literally can’t.

Some people came here to creat communities (eg.: in the wake of Reddit stuff) with the hope that it would catch on. But we can’t expect them to do all the work.

Requires Github (/Microsoft). Not good.

mAkE FaMiLY nUcLeaR aGaIN

Just tell them the truth.

Children, I voted for your mother to be treated as a subhuman and we all got what I voted for. Don’t you dare throw me into an asylum!