Frequently Asked Questions

Suggest a Frontend

Requirements

1. Open Source
2. Enhances Privacy over main site
3. Can be self-hosted. So, It's Decentralized

Good Examples

• Nitter
• Invidious
• Libreddit
• SimplyTranslate

Bad Examples

• PixivMoe - Wasn't meant to be an alternative private frontend in the first place
• Imginn - Wasn't meant to be an alternative private frontend in the first place.
• Startpage - There's already an extension for it.
• Old Reddit - There's already an extension for it.
• Pinafore - A full featured web app for Mastodon, not a frontend
• Soju - A website that gives you samples of Spotify songs, not a frontend. If you want to use it, just visit their website and paste the spotify link you want to get a sample song of.
• PornInvidious: See Discussion

Why forking Privacy Redirect?

Privacy Redirect hasn't been maintained since 6/12/2021. Many instances are hard coded. Some should be removed as they became offline and many others should be added. Many Pull Requests were left pending and waiting. So we stepped in. Later, we started improving it further by adding new features and frontends.

Disclaimer: Even though we forked from Privacy Redirect, LibRedirect is ahead of the main project with several improvements and new features. LibRedirect is independent now.

Why all those permissions?

Let's examine them one by one:

• webRequest, webRequestBlocking: To block http requests or redirect them. For example, to redirect to Invidious before it can reach YouTube's servers.
• storage: To save LibRedirect's settings permanently.
• Clipboard.writeText: To write the original link to the clipboard while using Copy Raw. This permission is used to only write data. LibRedirect does NOT read the data in your clipboard.
• menus: To add LibRedirect buttons to the Context Menus:
  
  
  
• bookmarks (optional): To add the same Context Menus to Bookmarks too.
• all_urls: The targets e.g youtube.com, twitter.com can be static, but the Switch Instance and Copy Raw buttons require access to the instances' urls which are custom to each user, and by so can't be static.

Where the hell are those instances coming from ?

Almost every frontend project has a list of public instances. Examples: Invidious' official instances list, Nitter's official instances list. We fetch those lists using an automated python script. This script gets triggered every single day. We don't intercept nor modify the lists outside of removing urls that are not valid (the structure is not that of a url). They are not our responsibility, they are the projects maintainers'.

Chrome Web Store ?

We can't publish it to the Chrome Web Store as it requires Manifest v3 which removed essential features LibRedirect needs. You can still install it manually though.
We are planning to adopt Manifest v3 in Firefox though as they will support the features LibRedirect needs. If other browsers adopt Mozilla's Manifest, then you might see LibRedirect in the Chrome Web Store.

Mobile Support ?

See this: Mobile