honest question because personally I’m not seeing it or maybe I’m just blinded to it but how is it worse? From what I’ve seen the moderation hasn’t been anywhere near as heavy handed as on Reddit with the exception of nuking bots. Maybe because I’m just blocking certain instances that I’m not seeing it.

Thanks, when I have the time I’ll look into implementing this.

No automatic browsing activity reporting - The extension only searches for Lemmy discussions when:

1. A page finishes loading (background.js:119-128)
2. URL changes are detected (content.js:37-54)

What data is sent:

• Only the current page URL and its variations (content.js:73-80)
• URL variations include cleaned URLs (no tracking params), with/without www, http/https variants (content.js:109-168)

Where data is sent:

• Only to Lemmy instances you’ve configured (background.js:149-152)
• No third-party analytics or tracking services
• All requests go directly to Lemmy APIs for post searches

Privacy protections:

• Results are cached locally for 30 minutes (background.js:141-143)
• No persistent logging of browsing history
• You can disable the notification indicator (content.js:172-184)
• Only sends URL when you actually visit a page, not preemptively

User control:

• You choose which Lemmy instances to search
• You can remove instances at any time
• The extension only activates on http/https URLs

Answer: No - The extension does not report all browsing activity to third parties. It only queries your configured Lemmy instances with the current page URL to find relevant discussions, and only when you actually visit a page.

Regardless after some discussion last night I’ve added a consent notification when the extension is installed, it can now also be enabled/disabled via the sidebar so now people know exactly how the extension is being used: https://codeberg.org/rozodru/LemmyBridge/commit/2e735b56f273d44bae9df638b01985519debcfd1

…it doesn’t view the browser history at all.?

Fair enough. also to your earlier point it’s only 1 request per instance. the reason you might be seeing 5 is because 5 instances are the default.

Worst-Case Scenario (10 Heavy Users)

• 10 users × 60 page visits/hour = 600 searches/hour
• With 30-minute caching, actual API calls = ~300/hour
• Distributed across 5 default instances = 60 requests/hour per instance
• That’s 1 request per minute per instance

Lemmy Server Context:

• Normal web traffic: Thousands of requests per hour
• Single user browsing: 10-50 requests/hour easily
• RSS bot: Often 100+ requests/hour
• This extension: 1 request/minute = trivial load

A single person browsing Lemmy normally generates more API traffic than 10 extension users combined. The /api/v3/search endpoint is also one of the lightest operations, it doesn’t involve complex database queries like fetching full comment threads.

Totally understandable. I added in some rate limits, search result caching, timeout handling and error handling (to prevent retry storms), there’s also a max result limit per instance. If this WERE to take off with like 1000+ users I’d have to adjust it further. But right now as it stands the impact should be negligible.

It was easy to pull out of the browser as a standalone because really that’s all it was, just an extension that was baked into the browser. and since a lot of people requested it I just decided to do it.

the extension: https://codeberg.org/rozodru/LemmyBridge

done: https://codeberg.org/rozodru/LemmyBridge

https://codeberg.org/rozodru/LemmyBridge

Eventually yes, I will be turning it into a standalone extension.

The only time you might have issues with Ubuntu is when it comes time to update/upgrade it. I’ve seen people on Mastodon, every time an update rolls out, say that its broken something. But I think those cases are few and far between.

Mint is a good choice to get your feet wet. Install it with KDE Plasma so it will at least feel familiar to you. Cinnamon is fine but I always found it a little bit wonky. When I first started on linux I got kinda carried away with customizing Cinnamon and it totally just wrecked my install.

There’s a lot of documentation and support for Mint/Ubuntu so you can pick up stuff pretty quickly. Once you get comfy with it you can always switch your distro to something else. But yeah there’s nothing wrong with starting on Mint to get a feel for it.

Yes there are things like hunting which you could. not. do. with poor vision

Matt Murdock took that personally.

wouldn’t be much stress really.

I’m currently building something with fediverse integration so this is a great idea and something i’ll look into. Basically you would be logged into an instance (lemmy.world) and if you’re navigating a to a site or even an RSS feed you could see if there’s any relevant links to said article/story/whatever back to lemmy.

right now I have a feed built that allows you to log into all your instances (mastodon, lemmy, peertube, etc) and displays all the content you’re subscribed to in a single feed. So adding in what you’ve suggested would be a great feature.

I mean really just spruce up one unit, charge for tours, charge for applications, why even bother renting?

I mean places already charge just to submit an app.

showing my age but when I was a kid during the summer or on weekends I’d be out of the house all day and just where ever in my town. My parents didn’t care as long as I was either home for dinner or by the time the street lights came on. and if I wasn’t home for dinner I had to find a phone and call not because my parents would be worried but so they either wouldn’t have to cook as much or set out a plate for me.

ah yes the old “hide your weed in the back of your PS2/under your Gamecube” method.

I mean here in Canada why would I go to a bar and spend like $12 on a single pint of beer when I can go to the store and pay the same amount and get like 6 pints?

Back in my 20’s when I could go to the bar and pay $1.50 for a pint of PBR, sure it made sense. it was cheaper and i was with friends. I could get drunk on the cheap and have a good time.

now? there’s no point. Cheap Dive bars (the ones I used to frequent) are going the way of the buffalo and in my city there’s literally like only one left out of the dozens I used to go to all the time. I’m not paying over $10 for a single beer. Plus the patrons that still do go to bars are crap. they all would rather be on their phones then have a conversation at the bar.

so to sum up A. it’s more expensive and B. younger generations killed the vibe.

it’s already happening. A lot of places are now realizing that advocating “vibe coding” and what have you is generating a lot of broken shit and tech debt. I’m a front end/back end dev consultant. been doing it for a couple decades now. and lately most of my contacts have been for fixing or refactoring or straight up rebuilding stuff built by a vibe coder.

Nothing produced by AI scales. None of it is encrypted, everything is exploitable, and eventually it all breaks. Example call I got last week: a startup had decided to set up their own mastodon instance for marketing reasons or whatever. they left the setup and configuration of it to their vibe coder who essentially had Claude Code set it up for them. basically build it out locally then throw it in some dockers for the server. real backwards ass way to do it. The problem is on weekly basis it was completely maxing out the storage on the server, thus it would crash and also crash whatever other instances for whatever they had on their (namely their own Gitea instance). Ends up the vibe coder in charge of setting this thing up either used Claude Code (doubtful) or straight up when to Claude.ai to walk them through the setup process. What was happening was all the images, videos, cached stuff was going into some extra .config dir and that’s it. wasn’t getting cleaned out, just all being thrown into some random directory and sitting there gradually growing. The fix was painfully easy just clean it out and make sure the cached stuff goes into the proper dirs and as a safety just run a cron job like once a week to clean it.

Digging around same company pretty much set up all their instances for various things the same way. a couple of their apps had major security holes cause AI really doesn’t care or know what to do with that stuff. It was a mess.

And it’s not just that company. like I said most of my calls now for work are just being a sort of digital janitor for AI and Vibe Coders. And I’ve dropped these companies some hints saying “look, hiring this dude who touts being a vibe coder is going to cost you way more money and tech debt in the long run then saving a few bucks right now. get rid of them and hire devs that actually know what they’re doing.” But most of these CEO’s and CTO’s only think in the short term. A year from now they’ll all be collectively fucked. Expect a LOT more stories like the recent Tea App to come out. Everyone’s data is at risk currently. I wouldn’t sign up for shit using my ID or anything right now.

oh OH I’ve seen this episode before!