Why does Kutt use so many google services?

[yusf]

@girish said in Why does Kutt use so many google services?:

usage of google fonts and things like that

On that topic it would be really cool to have a feature in Cloudron similar to what LocalCDN does in the user's browser, blocking or limiting tracking and data harvesting exposure to FAANG and others.

[marcusquinn]

@yusf Interesting idea! Maybe worth just suggesting it to the author that there would be interest in a server-side version: https://codeberg.org/nobody/LocalCDN/issues

Maybe @Lonk with his OpenVPN project would have ideas on this too?

[Lonkle]

@marcusquinn said in Why does Kutt use so many google services?:

@yusf Interesting idea! Maybe worth just suggesting it to the author that there would be interest in a server-side version: https://codeberg.org/nobody/LocalCDN/issues

Maybe @Lonk with his OpenVPN project would have ideas on this too?

I couldn't think of any more features to add aside from new protocols, but this would increase speed (especially important over VPN), and reduce tracking. I'd have to find a way to intercept and deliver "local" VPN Client packages / fonts / etc. I'll have to research how LocalCDN does it. I'm also going to start using LocalCDN, it's brilliant.

How do you find all of these amazing products?

[yusf]

I didn’t mean for it to be another Cloudron app. Instead I meant implementing it as a service layer directly in Cloudron.

[marcusquinn]

@lonk been online as long as the internet And, recently very much woke to the privacy issues when these behemoths behave like drunks in a brewery for their data-mining through so many browser trojans by proxy.

[andreasdueren]

@girish Would it be possible to just omit the relevant parts and serve the google font locally before building for cloudron?

[JOduMonT]

@andreasdueren said in Why does Kutt use so many google services?:

@girish Would it be possible to just omit the relevant parts and serve the google font locally before building for cloudron?

If I understood well, the goal of Cloudron is to make easy life SysAdmin job via Docker by adding a thin layer; not to fork the project.

More in a laughing voice, I would say like they often say in the Open-Source Community; use your rights; fork it and code it as you want. While this is beautiful to say and to have the possibility to do; not everybody has the time and knowledge to rebuild apps and to maintain it and, for me; this is where Open Source Movement lack; they lack power of federation and inclusion; most of them will end by saying fork it; go away with my code and leave me alone than trying to work together.

[JOduMonT]

@robi said in Why does Kutt use so many google services?:

spying services

do you also consider the JS trap ?

[robi]

@JOduMonT for what reason?

[JOduMonT]

@robi said in Why does Kutt use so many google services?:

@JOduMonT for what reason?

JS ping home such as API

[robi]

@JOduMonT Define home for a self-hosted system serving up the JS. Also, which API, self-hosted or otherwise?

[girish]

@andreasdueren I think maintaining upstream patches is out of scope for us (unless it's some serious temporary bug). Are you able to report this upstream? For example, https://github.com/thedevs-network/kutt/commit/4e672a8b51e741f0f276fab999d622dc5337ca88 removed GA, so maybe they are open to this.

[andreasdueren]

@girish Understandable. Unfortunately it looks like the maintainers don't seem to be very interested in removing GA seeing these issues being open for a while now. Maybe I have to go back to yourls

[timconsidine]

@andreasdueren I missed the original post, but shall now look to move away from Kutt. Shame because it looks nice and works well, but I can't tolerate anything built around Google services.

Yourls works but is just ugly and dated (IMHO).

Looking at alternatives :

• https://github.com/shlinkio/shlink (Dockerfile √)
  (wishlist https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/2325/shlink-modern-url-shortener?lang=en-GB)
• https://github.com/muety/anchr (Dockerfile √)
• https://github.com/ldidry/lstu (Dockerfile √)
• https://github.com/urlhum/urlhum (Dockerfile √)
• https://github.com/steven-tey/dub (no Dockerfile)
  (wishlist https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/7719/dub-an-open-source-bit-ly-alternative-for-url-redirection?lang=en-GB)
• https://github.com/cmpct-io (no Dockerfile )
• https://github.com/origranot/reduced.to (no Dockerfile)
• https://github.com/webfuelcode/link2u (script)

[robi]

I've generally solved that problem by using the LocalCDN browser extension which blocks such requests from any sites.

[jdaviescoates]

@andreasdueren said in Why does Kutt use so many google services?:

yourls

I prefer that anyway because you can customise the homepage of the domain

Kutt has a nicer UI, but I don't see the need for a nice UI for such a simple tool. I just need to be able to create shortlink and track how many clicks they get and YOURLS does that perfectly fine imho.

[andreasdueren]

@timconsidine I'm currently looking more into shlink which ticks a lot of boxes. It looks like this could potentially run in a lamp stack if no one ports it for cloudron it seems

---

Edit: Seems to run well in a lamp stack. Now my only Problem is that there is no public facing UI and user accounts

[JOduMonT]

@robi said in Why does Kutt use so many google services?:

@JOduMonT Define home for a self-hosted system serving up the JS. Also, which API, self-hosted or otherwise?

we might be lost in the translation/transmission
when I said ping home; I meant phone home to make a connection so if you don't localize your JS, the provider notice you (ping)

otherwise it was just to raise awareness on JS such as Stallman did years ago and now https://openjsf.org do.

[poeti8]

Hello everyone,
I'm the creator of Kutt and I just somehow stumbled across this forum post.
I wanted to let you know that everything related to Google was removed in the version 3 of the app, which was released a few days ago.
I also wanted to say that I'm happy to see you took interest in Kutt. I hope you like the new version too.

[humptydumpty]

@poeti8 I switched to Yourls because of the Google references and the higher resource requirement to run Kutt. I know the idle usage is probably the same, but any reason why the recommended RAM is 1GB vs 256 MB for Yourls?