| Title: How to host a local front-end for Reddit / YouTube / Twitter on
NixOS
Author: Solène
Date: 02 September 2022
Tags: nixos privacy
Description: This article explains how to use NixOS to host a local
front-end for services like YouTube, Twitter or Reddit.
# Introduction
I'm not a consumer of proprietary social networks, but sometimes I have
to access content hosted there, and in that case I prefer to use a
front-end reimplementation of the service.
These front-ends are network services that acts as a proxy to the
proprietary service, and offer a different interface (usually cleaner)
and also remove tracking / ads.
In your web browser, you can use the extension Privacy Redirect to
automatically be redirected to such front-ends. But even better, you
can host them locally instead of using public instances that may be
unresponsive, on NixOS it's super easy.
We are going to see how to deploy them on NixOS.
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# Deployment
As September 2022, libreddit, invidious and nitter have NixOS modules
to manage them.
The following pieces of code can be used in your NixOS configuration
file (/etc/nixos/configuration.nix as the default location) before
running "nixos-rebuild" to use the newer configuration.
I focus on running the services locally and not expose them on the
network, thus you will need a bit more configuration to add HTTPS and
tune the performance if you need more users.
## Libreddit
We will use the container and run it with podman, a docker alternative.
The service takes only a few megabytes to run.
The service is exposed on http://127.0.0.1:12344
```
services.libreddit = {
address = "127.0.0.1";
port = 12344;
};
```
## Invidious
This is using the NixOS module.
The service is exposed on http://127.0.0.1:12345
```nix
services.invidious = {
enable = true;
nginx.enable = false;
port = 12345;
# if you want to disable recommended videos
settings = {
default_user_preferences = {
"related_videos" = false;
};
};
};
```
## Nitter
This is using the NixOS module.
The service is exposed on http://127.0.0.1:12346
```
services.nitter = {
enable = true;
server.port = 12346;
server.address = "127.0.0.1";
};
```
# Privacy redirect
By default, the extension will pick a random public instance, you can
configure it per service to use your local instance.
# Conclusion
I very enjoy these front-ends, they draw a lot less resources when
browsing these websites. I prefer to run them locally for performance
reasons.
If you run such instances on your local computer, this doesn't help
with regard to privacy. If you care about privacy, you should use
public instances, or host your own public instances so many different
users are behind the same service and this makes profiling harder. But
if you want to host such instance, you may need to tweak the
performance, and add a reverse proxy and a valid TLS certificate. |