Is there a server that doesn't require allowing javascript of a million other servers?

Submitted ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨awbvious@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

So, I am one of those old school types who mains with Firefox and Noscript. And also a filthy casual that just goes on lemmy.world. But half the images are broken because I’m expected to allow scripts on like 30+ sites to see most of the posts. I’m literally expected to all /all/ the scripts from a domain just so I can see a dang picture behind the thumbnail. That’s the entirety of the scripting needed. That seems ridiculous. Is there, I don’t know, a server/way that makes it so I don’t have to blanket allow all these scripts? To put it in meme form (not sure I’m doing it right, never seen the show): “It’s an image of a banana Michael, what should it take, one Raspberry Pi running Docker?”

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rimu@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Yes.

PieFed uses very minimal javascript (it 95% works with JS entirely disabled) and you can access all the same communities and posts.

Try it at https://piefed.social or any of these other instances - https://join.piefed.social/try

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- trinsec@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Just curious, what's the 5% that doesn't work with JS disabled?
  
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  - rimu@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Voting, lol. Kinda important.
    
    Dropdown menus. They're not really needed but life sucks without them.
    
    Can't manually switch between dark and light mode (only automatically based on browser settings).
    
    There's probably more but I haven't seriously tried to use PieFed for long without JS. Fundamentally it's built HTML and CSS first, with sprinkles of JS added on for funsies rather than the modern way of being all about JS.
    
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- awbvious@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Looks nice is my immediate impression (looking at it with all javascript off, including ). Still would like thumbnails that are the entire image just much smaller, maybe via CSS. The cropping is very misleading on a lot of images. Perhaps one could use css-toggle-switch–not going to try to solution it, and I know last time I checked css wasn’t great for it. But the results are notably different from lemmy.world for Active or Top past 12 hours. Not necessarily /bad/, particularly for top posts as they at least have a bit of engagement. But it seems like part of the solution is just don’t incorporate results from servers that require javascript. Is it possible (ethical even) to incorporate them, but be a middle-man that saves the user from their javascript?
  
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  - rimu@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    In https://piefed.social/user/settings there are two different compact modes to choose from, which shrink the images to varying degrees.
    
    I don't know of any way to determine how JS-heavy a link is.
    
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- mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Piefed i kinda awesome. Switched earlier in the year :)
  
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Nothing4You@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

doesn’t require allowing javascript of a million other servers?

half the images are broken because I’m expected to allow scripts on like 30+ sites to see most of the posts

software like noscript is not exactly beginner friendly. you’re expected to understand the impact of your blocking and what you are blocking. the only domain you need to allow JS from on lemmy.world is lemmy.world. standard lemmy-ui does not load any js or css from third party sources, only the domain where lemmy-ui is served. your noscript configuration is blocking the actual images, not javascript that would be required to load images.

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- awbvious@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  That looks cherry picked or very lucky. Can you show me a screenshot of Firefox with NoScript and allowing only lemmy.world and ANY other image from the first five results of the home page? My result? “The American Dream” discuss.online - BROKEN “We are way overdue for an open source 2d printer” sub.wetshaving.social - BROKEN “We never stood a chance.” ani.social - BROKEN “literally useless” lemmy.blahaj.zone - BROKEN “Anime Recommendations” lemmy.dbzer0.com - Works (the one you show)
  
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  - Nothing4You@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Image
    
    nothing about this is cherry-picking. it’s simply how lemmy works. there are no remote js sources. lemmy-ui even sets security headers that prevent loading js from third party domains.
    
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asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I think the old Lemmy alternative frontend supports no JS. But I’m not sure whether the dev is still actively maintaining it: github.com/rystaf/mlmym

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- gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  This is available as old.lemmy.world
  
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  - Blaze@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    https://old.lemmy.zip/
    
    https://oldsh.itjust.works/
    
    https://old.lemmy.ca/
    
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  - awbvious@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Which is basically the same as old.reddit.com . Which is great as far as functionality. Squint and you can imagine it would be perfect. Zoom in and it’s decent, except the thumbnails now are even more clearly 4-pixel potatoes. Okay, so where’s my FOSS firefox extension that works like RES (Reddit Enhancement Suite)? Or, I actually don’t need that, just a FOSS firefox extension that takes any old.lemmy and makes the layout look like the new layout, with toggles to turn off anything in the new layout you don’t want (e.g. right side bar)? Or, maybe some custom javascript I can save in greasemonkey to make everything zoom 150% and replaces thumbnails with better compressed versions of their expanded versions (make my own thumbnails)?
    
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solrize@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’m on lemmy.ml, it uses JS but it doesn’t appear to load any from other domains. It serves images through a local proxy.

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lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
This tbh.

I don’t understand why is this not he standard for Lemmy and the Fediverse. We got here, among other things, to get away from the kind of crap enabled by JS-first web.

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Sintra@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Unfortunately no. Lemmy is a web application. JavaScript is the only thing giving interactivity. Without it we’d load a whole new html page each time. Try middle clicking on image links to view them, should open a new tab. “It works on my machine” of course, but good luck though.

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Shimitar@downonthestreet.eu ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I respect your choices, but I am afraid modern web is mostly JavaScript. Can you actually browse anything with noscript today?

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- Ashtear@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Absolutely. The vast majority of my sites do just fine when whitelisting only the primary domain. I consider it an essential add-on myself.
  
  Lemmy is one of the few that needs a little babysitting, and it’s only for the purpose OP stated.
  
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  - Shimitar@downonthestreet.eu ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Good to know… Is it a pleasant experience?
    
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- naught101@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Yes, you can.
  
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  - Shimitar@downonthestreet.eu ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Yes, I did
    
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- awbvious@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  So, I agree with everything the other responders are saying. Whitelist the primary domain (and maybe a cdn domain that is hopefully nicely labeled) and a decent site should play decently. But it is also that I (generally) know when to pick my battles–or I at least keep my pointless battles to a small scope and fairly sporatic.
  
  I’m asking for a solution to this from the lemmy community, not reddit or a big corposite. They would want a single domain or a few domains for opposite reasons than making the user happy: they would want to control the user experience and enshtify via dark patterns. I do not think we should need to blanket allow scripts from dozens of sites just to see images, that’s the scope of this mini-battle I do not plan to fight beyond this post. I mention enshtification because I just happened to see this thetyee.ca/…/Internet-Sucks-Cory-Doctorow/ on this old.lemmy.world/?sort=Hot&listingType=All&page=3 (thanks, above suggester for reminding me of old.lemmy).
  
  So open technology like the web is replete with disenshi**ifying add-ons. Ad blockers are running in more than half of all web browsers in the world. It’s the most successful consumer boycott in human history, but there are zero ad blockers running in apps, because you have to reverse engineer the app first, and that’s illegal under use of Bill C-11 and under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and Article 6, the copyright directive.
  
  [Note, I censored those letters. I’ve been told you can swear on the internet, though.] One of my “old man yells at cloud” moments of late is when I have to deal with a very small company forcing an app down my throat when a website will do and the using of that company/service (and thus app) is being forced upon me by outside forces. If it’s a small enough company, I will go through too many emails back and forth with their “CTO” telling them why it’s a problem and why they should just have an app (a site that, yes, almost certainly would need javascript). Because that’s the small act of protest some of us should be doing in my mind. That way the next time someone thinks, hmm, we could just do an app and only offer it, they’ll then think, naw, there’s going to be that one annoying customer, not worth it. Same with this issue, for me at least. I don’t see why we /have/ to run javascript on secondary sites just to have a thumbnail and a resulting image. And I’m posing this, again, on lemmy not reddit. So, consider this my allowing myself a brief moment to yell at a cloud.
  
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flamingos@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
What do you mean load JS from 30 sites to see images? Lemmy-ui seems to only request JS from the instance you’re on:

Screenshot of Firefox network tab showing three network requests for JS from feddit.uk

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dragnucs@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Look for a desktop app.

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- OmegaLemmy@discuss.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I don’t think any exist
  
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  - QuazarOmega@lemy.lol ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    There is Interstellar!
    
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  - nokturne213@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Blorp has a desktop app.
    
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mnmalst@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I use the vger.app on mobile AND desktop and as far as I can tell it tunnels the images through their servers, so this is as minimal as you can get in regards to extra requests.

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- bdonvr@thelemmy.club ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Some instances host this themselves too.
  
  app.thelemmy.club
  
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ademir@lemmy.eco.br ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
old.lemmy.world

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- awbvious@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Mentioned elsewhere, and a decent workaround. Doesn’t do well with thumbnails, unfortunately.
  
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