thefranke / tzeentch

A load-balancing redirector for privacy-oriented alternative frontends

Tzeentch

A load-balancing redirector for privacy-oriented alternative frontends. Inspired and partially rewritten from Farside.link.

Demo instance at https://alternator.hstn.me.

About

Tzeentch maintains a list of links to privacy-oriented alternative frontends, which scrape popular but horribly written websites and present them in a much cleaner, ad- and tracking-free way.

Alternative frontends can easily get rate-limited or banned if there is an unusual amount of traffic coming from them because too many users are on a single instance. In order to help distribute users more effectively, Tzeentch will randomly select an instance and forward the original request to it.

To use it, you will need to set up a redirector add-on for your browser such as Redirector or Redirect Web for Safari.

As an example, instead of redirecting reddit.com to a libreddit instance, you instead redirect it to https://tzeentch-instance/?libreddit/r/subreddit.

Difference to LibRedirect

LibRedirect is a browser add-on that already does most of the work here without the need for another redirector add-on and a webservice like this. However, it does not work on mobile devices (there is a hack for Android, but none for iOS) and it has a fixed scope of redirects. In contrast, with Tzeentch you can create your own list of frontends and their respective list of instances as soon as you discover them, and simply add them directly to your favorite redirector add-on.

Difference to Farside.link

Farside.link was the inspiration to create Tzeentch. The reason for this clone (instead of contributing to Farside) is twofold:

1. I do not know any Erlang/Elexir, the language Farside is written in.
2. I cannot install the dependencies of Farside on my VPS.

Tzeentch is written in PHP, which is universally available, and even free hosts with PHP support exist, making it much easier to deploy. You will only need to upload a single file index.php to run Tzeentch on a VPS, and an additional data.json if you want to maintain a local configuration for your own frontends and their instances.

Configuration

Every alternative frontend and its instances are stored in a JSON configuration which Tzeentch refers to. The configuration is compatible with that of LibRedirect.

Tzeentch will search for configurations in this order:

1. A local JSON file called data.json
2. The latest commited configuration in the Tzeentch repository
3. The latest commited configuration of LibRedirect
4. The latest commited configuration of Farside

If you want to add a new or custom frontend, fetch a copy of data.json from this repository and simply add the frontend in question as follows:

"alternative-frontend-name": {
    "clearnet": [
      "url1",
      "url2"
    ],
    "tor": [ ... ],
    "i2p": [ ... ],
    "loki": [ ... ]
  }

tzeentch's Issues

Check for instance health

Check for instance health in regular intervals and dismiss dead instances from a list for a certain period before re-checking.

Cache configuration

If there is no local data.json, download the next best configuration off of Github and store it locally. Automatically update local file after a certain time period.

Button to create Redirector rules for Tzeentch instance

Add a button to the interface to automatically create a Redirector configuration for the current Tzeentch instance.

Autodetect frontend from full URL

Special parameter to simply forward entire URL and automatically forward it to respective frontends if it matches any supported list.

Allow multi-frontend redirection

Allow for instance LibReddit and Teddit instances to be combined, e.g. tzeentch-instance?libreddit+teddit/r/programming

Merge configuration mode

Allow merging local configuration with existing libdirect configuration.

This mode is helpful if one wants to only add a new frontend list and maintain it.

Select URL categories via parameter

Add a parameter to select URLs for frontends:

• Clearnet
• Clearnet without Cloudflare
• Onion protocol
• I2P
• Loki
• ...