While https://joinmastodon.org might look good at the first view,it unfortunately has hidden Google shit which isn’t required.
If you hit the “How it works” button,you get to see a Youtube video which could also be loaded from https://peertube.social/videos/watch/7a087e5f-68e0-4359-8035-bfd9752e9b2e or at least using Invidious.
It’s even worse than it looks first because it’s not loaded using a more or less safe sandbox using a Iframe but instead a Youtube Javascript is loaded directly into Mastodons page.
Now have a look at https://docs.joinmastodon.org - Another Youtube video (or maybe the same,this shit gets blocked here so I don’t know),this time even without needing to click a button.
Additionally is tries to load a Google font.
Again that gets blocked here because I don’t want to see any Google shit on the internet but the page looks good anyway.
This could be removed without any replacement and likely nobody would even notice.
Alternatively,it could be embedded in a privacy-friendly way from Mastodons own server.
So let’s have a look at other projects…
https://gup.pe may be useful but it’s an epic fail when it comes to privacy :loudly crying face:
Every page tries to load Google fonts.
And I’m talking about the actual project,not only a documentation page.
With Google fonts blocked,the page looks good,so just why?!?!
Having a look at Fediverse infrastructure providers,it doesn’t get better.
The biggest managed Mastodon hoster https://masto.host is also trying to load Google fonts for no reason :face with rolling eyes:
At least they’re not using ReCaptcha for the sign up what,in fact,was what I expected when I opened the sign up page for checking it.
In my opinion it’s very important that we keep the Fediverse safe from the bad players which have already turned a large part of the internet into their corporate network.
We should try to reach out to the responsible people,no matter if it’s a open source project like Guppe or a infrastructure provider like Masto.host.
Another important point is to make Fediverse software protect its users by rewriting links to evil third-party services to better ones.
We should support issues like this: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/12145
Also we shouldn’t tolerate instances hosted on Google Cloud.
I’m really sad when I see that even people in the Mastodon community who I thought they’d care about Mastodon think that it’s okay to use Googles malicious network to host their servers.
Instances like that must be isolated,for example by using these firewall rules: https://paste.bka.li/view/8308edd5