It seems like just yesterday, everyone was using and recommending privacy-friendly and open-source frontends to popular social media sites. Every major website had one of these: Twitter had Nitter, Reddit had Libreddit and Teddit, YouTube had Invidious and Piped, Instagram had Bibliogram and TikTok had ProxiTok. Even sites like Medium, Imgur and Quora were no exception, with open source frontends being developed for them as well. To go with all these frontends, there were various browser extensions like libredirect that would automatically redirect any social media link to its open-source frontend counterpart.
However, within the past year or so, nearly all of these frontends have been discontinued or rendered practically unusable. What happened?
The Beginnings
When the web was just starting out, most people were making websites and publishing content the good ol’ fashioned way: typing it out themselves. This is what most “web historians” refer to as “Web 1.0”, where individuals and companies ran their own websites for people to access. Soon however, technology advanced and we started getting programmatic websites that allowed people to automate the process of running them, like by using PHP scripts.
It was with the advent of more advanced websites that social media was born. Through enough web development, it was now possible to allow users to create their very own pages and content all on the same website, birthing sites like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. This is referred to as “Web 2.0” (and, for those asking, we don’t talk about Web 3.0…).
Trouble Ahead
Ever since the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, there was increased pressure on the companies running these social media websites to turn a profit. Pretty soon in the lifetime of the web, it was determined that the most effective way to monetize it was the use of advertisements. Ironically enough, despite the best efforts of advertising companies, sites like Twitch are operated at a net financial loss, and it is unknown whether YouTube actually turns a profit at all.
Pop-up ads and the like were present on the web from a somewhat early age, but things were different now. What made the modern era of ads different from the ads of yester-year was one word: data. Modern ads work through “ad networks”, such as Google’s AdSense, Facebook’s Audience Network or Amazon’s aptly-named “Ads”. These networks don’t just distribute ads to various websites; they allow for users’ personal information, often obtained simply by observing the user’s behavior, to mold their advertising preferences.
Anyone who’s ever used YouTube is familiar with this: if you start watching videos about cars, you’ll start getting ads about cars, etc…
Soon enough, pretty much every major social media site started tracking its users, down to every last click and mouse movement. This wasn’t just to recommend content, but to recommend ads, which were driving the business forward. The websites collected data on the users’ behavior and consuming habits, fed this data to an AI training algorithm, and created effective recommendation systems capable of pin-pointing any individual’s exact preferences, all within just a few clicks and minutes of use. Tracking and ads now went hand-in-hand, and not everyone was going to stand for it.
The Rise of the Ad Blockers
Let’s face it: ads are annoying. No amount of whining and whinging about “depriving companies of their due profit” is going to change that. That kind of mindset is slave to the whims of these advertising and social media companies, who, in addition to plainly annoying people, often push political agendas backed by their investors.
Luckily, people way smarter than me devised a simple solution to all this: the legendary ad-blocking extension. The most popular and effective of these is the open-source uBlock Origin, which blocks pretty much every ad on the internet. These blockers were also capable of blocking tracking on various websites, by blocking certain scripts and network calls essential to grabbing usage information and “phoning home”.
However, there was still one issue that even using an ad blocker couldn’t resolve.
Bring on the Bloat!
Despite their best efforts, these ad blockers were unable to combat another terrible trend the ever-growing social media sites were simply enamored by: the constant bloating up of their websites. It wasn’t enough to fill up a website with ads anymore: the very design of the webpage had to be littered with unnecessary additions, menus and animations that made it harder to run the site on older computers and slower internet connections.
The comparison above was made on two separate websites containing a very similar recipe for an Italian dish (my usage of this example is by no means an endorsement of the recipe…) and as you can see, the leftmost website is far smaller in size. A smaller size isn’t always the best way to determine a website’s speed and reliability, however the difference here is over 37-fold, and that’s with an ad-blocker on!
In addition to the inherent issue of website bloat, implementing an ad-blocker in the first place can be quite the ordeal. For the longest time, mobile devices have had a really rough time blocking ads, which is worrisome due to how much more invasive they can be on phones and the like.
Frontends to the Rescue
Frontends solved many of the issues people had with modern websites:
- They let users access content on major sites without subjecting them to ads and tracking
- They were purposefully designed to use simpler layouts, making them far less bloated, more compatible and faster to load on slower connections
- They were completely open-source, meaning that anyone could run their own instance and provide others with the access they needed
I distinctly recall using Invidious whenever I’d have to watch a video on YouTube for school or for fun, and it was always a far more pleasant experience than using the actual YouTube website. For the longest time, I had completely forgotten the drudgery of using modern YouTube, let alone the YouTube mobile app, which I still refuse to install.
Trouble Ahead
It really seemed that open-source frontends popped out of nowhere and took the internet by storm. Pretty soon, they were being recommended everywhere, and many popular websites even started using them as their default frontends for YouTube links. For example, if you posted a YouTube link to open-source social media such as the Fediverse, the link was often replaced with a Piped or Invidious link. It got to the point where frontends were using other frontends within themselves, creating a sort of frontend-ception. This is also around the time that redirection extensions were developed, to ensure nobody would ever have to see the official websites for YouTube, Twitch, TikTok etc… ever again.
However, all good things must come to an end. Pretty soon, major social media sites started clamping down on their APIs, the technology that allows frontends to function in the first place. Reddit first started locking their API behind a paywall in April of 2023 (though personally I did not find this as distressing as others might’ve…) Pretty soon, every other site followed suit, with Twitter making their API paid, and YouTube introducing various changes making Invidious and Piped practically unusable. But why was this being done now?
As mentioned previously, ads were present very early on in the web, however their pervasiveness and prominence only got worse over time. This culminated in the modern social media landscape, where it really feels like ads are only getting more frequent and worse in quality by the day. If you thought the days of pop-up ads were over, you were sorely mistaken! In fact, they have been replaced with their mind-numbing successors: video ads, take-up-so-much-space-that-you-can’t-read-the-actual-site-content ads, imitating-real-content-to-trick-people ads, ai-generated-YouTube-comment ads, impossible-to-delete-even-if-you-press-the-x ads, and more.
It’s gotten so bad, YouTube has considered embedding ads into the very files of their videos, similar to how television works.
As mentioned previously, it’s been practically impossible for most users to block ads on popular platforms such as TikTok or YouTube. The ads are becoming inescapable, and Google itself is pushing for changes to how extensions work through Manifest V3 to make adblocking practically impossible on new versions of Google Chrome.
As of the writing of this video, only three Invidious instances survive due to YouTube blocking any instance that makes too many requests. Many of the features that people liked from these instances, like the API access, have been disabled to save bandwidth and limit requests.
A Bittersweet Conclusion
Social media websites put few limitations for accessing their their content at first, like a drug dealer letting his clients have a taste of “the good stuff” before taking it away from them, demanding a surcharge, except in this case instead of your money, they want your data. It was from this crack in the system that open-source frontends were born, but now that social media sites are determined to shove as many ads as possible in their users’ faces, this liberal access had to be revoked. Reddit and Twitter have practically become impossible to browse without creating an account, but maybe that’s a good thing…
I don’t just say that because I dislike Reddit or Twitter in particular, (I do, but that’s besides the point…) I say this because maybe, just maybe, through their own petulance these social media giants might have killed the potential to gain a new audience. This is a net positive in my eyes; while obviously it’s not ideal that those wishing to access content on these websites have to go through obtuse, bloated webpages and convoluted account setups, (try setting up an Instagram account without getting ID verified challenge: impossible) it’s also true that this might deter people from becoming addicted to social media. After all, did you really have to watch that YouTube video, or see that Twitter post? Would your life be radically different if you had never seen it? This is the question I want more people to ask themselves when dealing with social media addiction. Life was never miserable without it, so why do we need it?
Of course, I don’t mean to degrade the unthinkable work that was put behind developing all of these frontends, but I do want to end on a high note. Similar to my feelings on the Fediverse, maybe this is a solution to a problem we should’ve never created in the first place. If all the alternative frontends were to be shut down, perhaps we should take this as a sign to simply stop relying so much on social media. It makes us slaves, in a way, and as much as we try to polish our shackles through the use of open-source frontends, at some point we do have to look outside of the window and wonder why we are bothering with all this at all.