| ▲ | rododecba 3 days ago |
| I recently launched Libre
, a small side project and social experiment. It’s not a social network, but kind of the opposite: No profiles, usernames, or followers No likes, trending topics, or algorithms No ads, no data collection Just anonymous thoughts from people around the world.
Curious to see how it evolves and what kind of conversations happen when metrics are removed. |
|
| ▲ | roscas 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| To be anonymous you cannot use gstatic.com because this way you're just telling google I was there.
Also tailwindcss and unpkg call sell data to others and there you go zero anonimous.
I'm sure you can fix this. |
| |
| ▲ | Hoodedcrow 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Thankfully, Ublock Origin in advanced mod can block those requests by default. It's just very irritating and I'd say disrespectful when you HAVE to unblock them for the site to work. | |
| ▲ | rododecba 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | i dont know any other way to show where the msg was sent if not | | |
| ▲ | dragonwriter 3 days ago | parent [-] | | "I don't know how to do this while maintaining anonymity" is not an excuse to do it in a way which does not maintain anonymity while claiming it does. |
| |
| ▲ | colesantiago 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | You might as well not use the web / internet at this point. Unless you use busybox or an esoteric OS to browse the web, almost every browser or OS (macOS, Linux, Windows) will ping to Google or some other bad spyware website. | | |
| ▲ | sebastiennight 2 days ago | parent [-] | | FYI this statement is wrong. You don't need an "esoteric OS". Just a firewall (such as Little Snitch on MacOS) and one of several browsers (such as Firefox) will enable you to browse the web without constantly calling home to Google. | | |
| ▲ | colesantiago 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Firefox is funded by Google. By using it, Google is still benefiting from it, use a different browser. Google is known for trying an assortment of IPs and DNS addresses to get around blockers such as Little Snitch on popular software. But that isn't enough to get around Google's tracking hence you would need an esoteric OS. | | |
| ▲ | sebastiennight 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > Firefox is funded by Google. By using it, Google is still benefiting from it, use a different browser. 1. You're moving the goalposts here. We were talking about avoiding tracking/pinging Google 2. Google pays Firefox to be the default search engine. If you change the search engine, how are you benefitting Google? They're paying for eyeballs that you're not providing, so you're technically making them spend money in vain. > Google is known for trying an assortment of IPs and DNS addresses to get around blockers such as Little Snitch on popular software. If we assumed that this was true, I don't see how switching out the OS makes any difference to the tactic of Google "trying an assortment of IPs and DNS addresses" from a 3rd-party website, which is where this conversation started. | | |
| ▲ | colesantiago 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > If we assumed that this was true, I don't see how switching out the OS makes any difference... Because we want absolutely zero Google tracking here and an esoteric OS has zero Google tracking. Not in source code not in network requests, zero. No amount of "Little Snitch" will help you here. | | |
| ▲ | sebastiennight 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I'm not even sure you're being serious here, but I'll assume good faith. What Google tracking is there in, for instance, vanilla MacOS? I have my traffic logs, so please let me know and I'll check it for myself. Edit: and please don't say "Safari has Google as the default engine", since we've covered that above. What else is there? | | |
| ▲ | colesantiago 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > What Google tracking is there in, for instance, vanilla MacOS? Mail > Google Internet Accounts > Google As I said: > Absolutely zero Google tracking here and an esoteric OS has zero Google tracking. Not in source code not in network requests, zero. Even with the mere integration of Google this deep into the OS is enough for those respect their privacy to not want to use MacOS. | | |
| ▲ | hackrmn a day ago | parent | next [-] | | This isn't accurate. I mean in generally you're pointing in the right direction. Your vague statements on "esoteric OS" are not helpful, and in fact I think that it is maybe _you_ who don't know your computer as well as the person you were replying to, do -- after all they bring up relevant and actual details while you point at generalities like "Mail > Google". Let me try to steer this in a constructive direction -- you're implying use of "GMail" with your "Mail > Google". That is fine -- it's certainly possible to set up a Google account with Mac OS X through the "Accounts" feature, implying SSO and/or reusable credentials API. But that does not come as default with the OS, and it requires active user participation, which makes your argument a bit of shifting the goal posts indeed -- Mac OS X does not send any data to Google by default, not out of the box. You do not need an "esoteric OS", and such an OS set up with something like described above for Mac OS X, or to demonstrate the simplicity of your argument, a Google Chrome binary blob (e.g. Ubuntu) makes the OS much less "esoteric" since it's now too a "Google vehicle". Point being that Mac OS is not a Google vehicle by default. Neither is Windows, for that matter. And this for a very simple reason -- normally both Apple and Microsoft are _competitors_ to Google, and they would very much prefer the data they would have been able to collect on the user, is sent upstream to Apple and Microsoft respectively, not to their competitor. But that is tangential, again -- the primary point is that by default Internet is not Google, not with e.g. Firefox on Windows. Let me be perfectly clear -- there's zero tracking by Google unless you use one or multiple of a) a Google provided Web browser, e.g. Chrome, and b) use Google's Web services. By using e.g. Firefox (which is indeed funded by Google) your data are _not_ sent to Google by default, and a Web extension like uMatrix also nips attempts by sites to send data to Google, in the bud. None of this is an esoteric OS. I have nothing against warning us against Google monopoly, but I find your follow-up replies to be deflections and doubling down when the person is making it perfectly clear that their network does not contain data being sent to Google (in as far as they can trust their packet logs, I would say, but if you were to contest that, you'd need to try harder indeed). | | |
| ▲ | colesantiago a day ago | parent [-] | | Unfortunately you are 100% wrong and highly naive. > But that does not come as default with the OS, and it requires active user participation, which makes your argument a bit of shifting the goal posts indeed -- Mac OS X does not send any data to Google by default, not out of the box ... There's zero tracking by Google unless you use one or multiple of a) a Google provided Web browser, e.g. Chrome, and b) use Google's Web services. I have been perfectly clear about this: > Not in source code not in network requests, zero. You do realise that gstatic.com is a web service right that can be used for tracking. The OP does not any Google requests, this includes gstatic, connectivitycheck.gstatic.com, Google owned IP addresses, DNS addresses and anything that can or could connect to or is affiliated with Google in anyway possible. This includes Google baked into the source code that nobody asked for that can connect to Google for their own purposes. You have no clue what could change in an OS update with MacOS that you didn't ask for, and now with Apple is trying to work with Google to try and bake Google Gemini into their OS to power a voice assistant, an upcoming privacy nightmare nobody asked for. (0) The fact that macOS is has Google integration baked into the OS with Mail, Calendar, Search, etc makes me not recommend it for anyone that cares about privacy. > Your vague statements on "esoteric OS" are not helpful. Here is a concrete example: You can use the base Linux kernel as an example, there are zero sources of Google in there which can be used as the basis of an "esoteric OS" so it is a good practical starting point to base a proper "ZeroGoogle" OS. Not any standard distro. I even said busybox at one point, but you chose to ignore that. Windows has its own different tracking which the OP also doesn't want so that is a complete moot point. If you are serious about privacy and don't want any Google tracking, you would use an esoteric OS. (0) https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/22/apple-is-in-talks-to-use-g... |
| |
| ▲ | sebastiennight 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well I don't know what "Internet Accounts" are, and your claim that Apple Mail uses Google tracking seems like an extraordinary claim that requires some sources (I couldn't find anything about that), so I think we should leave this conversation at that. | | |
| ▲ | colesantiago a day ago | parent [-] | | Well, maybe you don't know your computer / OS as much as you think you do. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | neilv 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > No ads, no data collection [...] Just anonymous thoughts from [...] It currently leaks cross-site user tracking information to Google (www.gstatic.com). |
|
| ▲ | 48terry 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Your site about "pure freedom of expression" and "raw thoughts" stops me from posting about buying new golf balls because of a badwords.js word filter. Why are your Terms of Service and Privacy Policy a collection of empty bullet points? |
| |
| ▲ | rkomorn 3 days ago | parent [-] | | How can you comment this without including the post content that triggered the filter? | | |
| ▲ | 48terry 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Literally just try it: "golf balls". The badwords.js isn't even particularly hidden if you check the page's source: https://libreantisocial.com/badwords.js | | |
| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | rkomorn 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'll add that, based on the other posts I saw on the site, it certainly didn't occur to me that there was any filtering in place. | | |
| ▲ | 48terry 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Well, badwords.js is client side, so if you just block it from loading you can post about balls and butts and slurs as much as you like. Absolutely incredible stuff. |
| |
| ▲ | rkomorn 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I... did not think you were being quite so literal. |
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | jibal 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No value--people want content that is focused, accurate, curated, reliable, relevant, high quality, etc. Also no freedom, with all your content restrictions. |
| |
| ▲ | atoav 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Ah the good old "freedom to" that totally forgets that freedom also should contain a "freedom of". Free like in a chaotic war zone, where you can commit any kind of horrible attrocity, but if you just want to have a nice time, that isn't an option, because everybody behaves like an idiot. No thanks. Freedom in reality isn't just a thing that you increase by reducing the rules. There comes a point where less rules result in less freedom. So it is always a balancing act between your freedom to do X and others freedom to not have to be subjected to X. Example: Giving up the freedom being able to murder random people is a little price to pay, if it means reducing the risk to be murdered yourself – especially since decent people wouldn't have the actionable urge to murder each other anyways. If you're a murderer however that may reduce your freedom in ways you dislike. But then, maybe, your freedom shouldn't matter as much. Maybe I would care more about that specific idea of active freedom if I routinely wittnessed a real repression of any idea that isn't just the mean bullshit of egocentrics who have lost all touch with humanity and just want to see the world burn. | | |
| ▲ | jibal 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I didn't say that I wanted a "freedom to" site, I'm just saying that the site is mischaracterized. | | |
| ▲ | atoav 3 days ago | parent [-] | | And I saw a ton of racist, genozidal, sexualized and otherwise unhinged content that the worst people would think call "freedom". So again, tell me what you're unfree to write there? | | |
| ▲ | jibal 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I already said. And again, I'm not seeking that sort of freedom ... the one sort of freedom the site offers is freedom from moral consequence. | | |
| ▲ | sebastiennight 2 days ago | parent [-] | | It's not, sadly, because technological choices are ethical choices. Your site uses technologies that make it trivial for large entities (like Google) to know that person X living in Atlanta just posted a certain racially-charged diatribe. This might come back to bite them in the rear-end in the future, in ways that they don't suspect today, because this data is never getting deleted and might be available to untold numbers of private and state actors in the future. |
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | mindcrime 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | people want content that is focused, accurate, curated, reliable, relevant, high quality, etc. That is trivially disproven by observing that massive numbers of people use Twitter, Facebook, etc. | | |
| ▲ | incone123 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You can follow accounts which is a form of curation. I dropped all social media except this one because it was a time-sink but I did used to find following resulted in a useful feed on Instagram. | |
| ▲ | jibal 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's a fact so it can't be disproven. Your response is a fallacy of denial of the antecedent. | | |
| ▲ | sebastiennight 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Adding "it's a fact" to claims does not make them impossible to disprove. You made a wild generalization (with the assumed meaning that ALL people want X) and the GP shared examples of people consuming "not X". You can also see, on this same thread, people explicitly building experiments of uncurated content, which means they want it so much that they are willing to spend much effort building it themselves. What would it take for you to consider that listing what you want does not necessarily imply a "fact" that all people want the same? |
|
| |
| ▲ | petralithic 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | To the first point, could there not be an algorithm that nevertheless still works without followers, likes or ads? TikTok seems kind of similar, at least when it initially started. It seems its core algorithm doesn't need likes, it can detect whether you engage with a video via other metrics like time spent watching the video. I suppose you'd want to allow people to self select based on topics, and then, well, you essentially get Reddit. | |
| ▲ | rododecba 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | i cant make a site with 100% freedom, beacuse of obvious reasons, that would be like utopic i think | | |
| ▲ | jibal 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Then don't call it that. There's nothing about your site that grants me the sort of freedoms I want, including the freedom to locate useful content. | | |
| ▲ | buynlarge 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Nah, disagree. I feel more free on this site than all the others so I back the name. | |
| ▲ | rododecba 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | i think that maybe you are looking in mi site something thats already in others | |
| ▲ | jibal 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | P.S. I'm not looking for anything in your site, I'm just saying that it's not what you're presenting it as. |
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | mattigames 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No way to filter by subjects one may be interested, no way to find likeminded individuals, no way to mute people, so yeah, not much value could be derived from it; I think that there is space for some pseudo-anonymous social network but this is not it, at least not in its current state. |
|
| ▲ | ranger_danger 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Curious to see how it evolves being a haven for sharing very illegal content is probably how it's going to evolve... unfortunately |
| |
| ▲ | PaulHoule 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Some kind of trouble one way or the other. | | |
| ▲ | gsf_emergency_2 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Strong link trouble or weak link trouble :)? In any case.. I hope TW Körner doesn't have that last footnote on the topic.. (Fwiw left/right (meta-)division seems to me to encompass all the moral taxonomies of the day, TWK just happened to settle for rich/smart vs social wrt UK) >Social Darwinism applies the Darwinian doctrine of survival of the fittest to human society. Rich social Darwinists take wealth as the best indication of fitness to survive, academic social Darwinists take intellectual achievements as the best indication and so on. They are often haunted by the fear that the unfit do not understand this and may outbreed the fit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24154247 | | |
| |
| ▲ | rododecba 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | hopefuly not, thank you | | |
| ▲ | jibal 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Why wouldn't it? How would you prevent it? You talk about evolution ... that's change over time. How it evolves is how you decide to change it. | |
| ▲ | majorchord 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | it's inevitable with any anonymous service |
|
|
|
| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [deleted] |
|
| ▲ | heavensteeth 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Did you vibe code this by any chance? It's clearly insecure. Oh, yes, you did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44656840 |
|
| ▲ | jandrese 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So you launched /b/? |
| |
| ▲ | guerrilla 3 days ago | parent [-] | | This is what I thought too. It'll go full Nazi in less than 5 hours from now. Anyone want to place bets? | | |
| ▲ | Xevion 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Haha, have you checked on it lately? You had it right on the money dude. The thing allowed HTML injection. It went from the N word and a couple emojis to downright ear-piercing multitudes of fascist /b/ propaganda over the course of an hour. | | |
|
|
|
| ▲ | listic 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There's no way of ever hearing back; being responded to, right? |
|
| ▲ | krapp 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >Curious to see how it evolves and what kind of conversations happen when metrics are removed. I've seen a ton of projects like this. It will get deluged with spam and shitposts and people will stop caring once the novelty wears off and leave once it becomes a cesspool. Probably for 4chan which at least has a culture and established userbase. And porn. |
|
| ▲ | politelemon 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The first message is from July 2022. Is it really recent? |
| |
|
| ▲ | riidom 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Could you look into your dark mode please? Thank you!:) |
| |
| ▲ | ranger_danger 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I highly suggest the Dark Reader extension. | | |
| ▲ | riidom a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I have Dark Reader. I think it wasn't working properly for me. Right now the site is 404, can't check. But I agree with other commentors, Dark Reader isn't the solution. There is not really an excuse for not doing a builtin darkmode nowadays, imo. | |
| ▲ | textadventure 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | As some who loves dark mode, I hate that extension. I get the appeal of forcing every website to be dark mode, but that ends up breaking half of them or just making them look like trash. People need to custom design their dark modes for whatever each design is. If you don't care about breaking design and stuff looking the way its supposed to, I guess the extension is fine but I rather use something like Stylus where you can use people's custom designed stylesheets for most known sites. | | |
| ▲ | ranger_danger 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I love it and I've never had a problem with it... I don't get the hate at all /shrug |
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | cxr 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| What are algorithms? |
