Lately I am having a hard time getting any of the 3rd party front ends for social medias to work properly. Is it just me?

The site doesnt load, it can't find the media, etc. Sometimes I can get one item to load but then can t get another on same instance.

Twitter, reddit, YouTube mainly but sometimes I want to see something on tiktok or Instagram.

I use libredirect/Firefox on desktop and as a last resort on mobile. I regularly re-ping the instances list although it doesnt seem to reflect which ones actually work. On mobile I prefer newpipe or another app if available.

Not sure if VPN is getting in the way, or adblocking on mobile etc. Sometimes turning it off helps but other times it does not.

  • FumpyAer [any, comrade/them]
    ·
    2 days ago

    Social Media sites have made a concerted effort to make it harder or impossible to do so. So unless it's actively developed by creative people with time on their hands, it's gonna have lots of downtime.

  • plinky [he/him]
    ·
    2 days ago

    i think reddit ones still work semi-reliably, twitter only works on xcancel, youtube only on nadeko and only sometimes and yewtube very rarely deeper-sadness

  • Justice@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    2 days ago

    (Not a direct answer) On mobile, both iOS and android, modified versions of the first party app work. I know that wasn't the question, though.

    • on Android revanced has both root and non-root versions of the app on GitHub. You can also modify your own clean apk yourself if you wanted.
    • On iOS you can sideload (look it up. Too much to write here). There are a few currently working options like YTliteplus based on uYou/uYouPlus... too many forks to list really. You can find the .ipa in repositories or build them yourself on GitHub after obtaining a clean YT .ipa. YTliteplus provides instructions for people who need

    I haven't messed around too much with third party frontends besides YouTube and Twitter.

    YouTube I could absolutely not get either of the big two working (I forget their project names). I had some luck using hosted frontends, but as far as selfhosted, I had no luck. I have to imagine the few people maintaining the hosted ones have tweaked things and have an actual team monitoring stuff.

    From my understanding, YouTube is highly aggressive issuing (false, imo, but good luck...) DMCA takedowns against people who have modified apps hosted.

    Apparently they just ban people for "API abuse" if you're running your own frontend. There's ways around it as always, using ipv6 and essentially constantly making the hardware address different to get new ipv6 addresses, or something along those lines, was one way.

    I also tried getting various twitter frontends to work solely because I didn't want to sign in. However, I have since stopped using Twitter altogether once I noticed it was just a sea of Nazis and Elon just bans... everyone to the left of Hitler but with total randomness so you never know what to expect. I couldn't get the frontend to work though. I know xcancel usually works when people post the links. But it doesn't matter that much to anymore.

    Android has solutions for Twitter available to root users. Not sure about non-root. Not sure about iOS anymore. Although this is also not the question. But a different work around.