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.

The only part that is wrong TMK is the “indivisible” one; and perhaps the last item because I recall that PulseAudio and Wayland were pushed this way worse than systemd was.

Because it was not always the case that sysvinit was supported - things were sorta “accidentally hazy” for a while. There was a time (I think during Debian 9 and 10) that systemd not only was the default, but was also enforcedly linked against a large part of the stack (you couldn’t have a desktop environment, PulseAudio or NetworkManager without systemd, for example).

This led to the rise of projects like Devuan, that provide a working system that installs without systemd by default; Antix’s nosystemd repo, which allows to install components of the Debian stack without the enforced systemd dependency; and later libam-elogind-compat which aided shimming some of systemd’s requirements under elogind.

Nowadays at least, the only hard part of not using systemd in Debian is 1.- switching (from or to) seems to require rescue mode and 2.- you lose some of the container management goodies (for eg.: Podman services).

None. On Alpine you can only use OpenRC and on Debian you can only use systemd. Most distros don’t let you change out the init system. If you want systemdless Debian look into Devuan.

Fake news. On Debian you can use both sysvinit and openrc (I have six servers on sysvinit, tho I do actually intend to shift them to systemd later mostly because of the container management goodies).

Judging from this post, I would say you should not be looking to change out your init system

Mostly agreeing here. For selfhosting the init system matters barely any, since past the default distro setup one would be doing most of everything with Docker, Podman, etc. At that point, none of the usual Linux religious wars matter much (you can perfectl edit a compose file with nano).

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!

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

I’m done with Google! Watch me rant on Google’s Youtube! Earns me money!

So… yeah.

Why are we giving neonazis attention, again?

Oh, do cry me a river while you’re at it. Pretty much every community everywhere has a general or memes room, those are for the meme gifs (or wait, these are webp these days…).

If I’m talking with people about the topical thing which is why I joined a room in the first place, the last thing I want is a looping autoloops fruityloops annoyance. Plus, not autoplaying and autolooping them saves battery.