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submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by rozodru@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

Not sure if this the appropriate place for it but the FOSS communities seemed dead.

This is Bridge - a privacy focused, Firefox AI disabled, Fediverse integrated browser. It has vim navigation via Tridactyl, Bitwarden integration, as well as Ublock integration.

It has an old Firefox RSS feature where you can scan a site for RSS feeds and it will add them to the RSS feed reader.

But the highlight of this is the Mastodon and Lemmy integration. you can have your Mastodon feed displayed in the sidebar on the browser which will give you access to your home, local, and fediverse feeds. you can post, reply, boost, and favourite posts.

The Lemmy extension allows you to see and link directly to lemmy discussions on whatever instance you like (multiple even) if you're on a site/news article/blog post/whatever. If the extension sees that this has been posted on Lemmy, it will provide you with a direct link to whatever discussions it finds based on the current URL you're on.

This has been a hobby project of mine for a bit now, It's very slow development as I have a job and can't dedicate all the time in the world to this. I wanted to originally build a browser from scratch but realized that would probably take me years so I settled with a fork of firefox.

Currently I believe it only works on Linux and is in a very early alpha. It hasn't crashed on me yet but visually is a bit rough around the edges.

I just wanted to share this little hobby project I've been working on. Thanks!

https://codeberg.org/rozodru/Bridge

UPDATE Since I already got a lot of feedback and more people than anything else wanted the Lemmy Extension as a stand alone extension...I delivered.

You were all correct, the Lemmy Add-on is a bigger deal than the browser. Again this was just a hobby project of mine as I've never played around with firefox forks before or extensions/addons for that matter so this is my first time.

Regardless, here it is: https://codeberg.org/rozodru/LemmyBridge

NOTE: I have submitted it to Mozilla so it is NOT VERIFIED as of right now, if you want to use it, use it at your own discretion. If it breaks something in whatever fork of firefox you're using then I take no responsibility.

Again thanks for all the support, appreciate it.

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[-] rozodru@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[-] rimu@piefed.social 12 points 1 day ago

I guess if the logic for finding the posts was done on the server then you would only need one API call - the extension would just send through whatever url it had. That would be more efficient.

If this gets popular I'd be open to adding a dedicated API endpoint for this to PieFed.

Kind of a privacy nightmare though, aye. Sending your whole browser history to a third party... But that's a whole different issue.

[-] rozodru@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

...it doesn't view the browser history at all.?

[-] rimu@piefed.social 18 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It doesn't access old browser history but from the moment it is installed onwards it sends every url you visit to 7 instances, to do a search. Any one of those instances could save those urls and over time build up a profile on someone.

[-] thenexusofprivacy 3 points 1 day ago

Yeah. Interesting to think if there are ways to get around that problem. Still, very interesting work @rozodru@lemmy.world, and great idea splitting it out into an extension!

[-] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 20 hours ago

Yeah. Interesting to think if there are ways to get around that problem.

At a first flance, perhaps a uBlockOrigin-style control pane with per-domain toggle, so that for example you can send the info only when browsing a specific domain (let's say, a news site; that'd be interesting to find discussion in Lemmy of). This would also prevent the issue of sending URLs that are not internet-wide (eg.: are on a localnet resolver, or an intranet).

As well as the abiity with an option send the request through a relay or proxy, to remove IP origin information that can be used to build the profile.

this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
377 points (100.0% liked)

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