I'm very wary of installing more extensions since I heard how many lucrative requests extension devs get from third parties for allowing them to enshittify their software.

[–] danielf@aussie.zone 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's FOSS. You can verify that the code doesn't make any malicious requests. The only requests it should make are to GitHub/Codeberg to update the list of instances.

[–] __matthew__@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, but that doesn't prevent the author from selling their extension to an untrusted buyer like in the case of Nano Adblocker.

[–] danielf@aussie.zone 1 points 11 months ago

Wow, didn't think something like that had happened. That is a valid concern. However, it could be mitigated by disabling auto update and subscribing to the GitHub releases via RSS. Then you can either manually check for malicious commits, or if the extension is more popular, wait a bit for any bad news to come out about the update. Obviously, this isn't possible for everyone and every extension, so I can understand why people would be cautious of more extensions, but I think Libredirect is a big enough extension that you would hear about it, like the case with Nano Adblocker.

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 3 points 11 months ago

I've just blocked YT in my browser, and use https://freetubeapp.io/ instead. It's a desktop app, so I don't have to deal with cookies and storage being deleted after every session, just as i can do subscriptions to channels without requiring an account.

So far, it has been an amazing experience, I totally recommend it. And I second the point about Nano AdBlcoker, since I've also been one of the victims, since at the time Nano Defender was one of the alternatives pretty well recommended on Reddit, that was better at avoiding anti-adblock scripts. Plus, any extension you have only makes you easier to fingerprint, thus defeating the point of VPN or privacy focused browser. Especially with Mullvad browser + VPN, which is especially build on the idea of sharing the exact same fingerprint with every other Mullvad VPN user.