A couple of days ago, the Brave browser stopped loading lobste.rs, just showing an error page. Now, I get a bare block of text:
Blocking a cryptocurrency scam where the Brave browser pretended to be fundraising on behalf of a site without that site’s knowledge or consent, then lied about funds being held in escrow and kept them for itself. See https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters-ansible/issues/45 and https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/761 for details.
There’s some commentary on the “What are you doing this week?” thread 1, but none of it seems authoritative, and (as some comment) all the cited behavior is old. There’s also a new comment by @pushcx on the first link in the above blurb 2, but all the comment’s links to bad behavior by Brave are old, except for Brave replacing ads, and I didn’t even know Lobste.rs had ads. (I remember seeing a comment that the change was actually Brave no longer spoofing its user-agent for Lobste.rs, but I can’t find it now.)
Is there a way that Brave causing harm to the Lobste.rs site? Or is this a philosophical issue: anyone who uses a deceitful browser like Brave shouldn’t be allowed to visit Lobste.rs? Should I resign myself to using Firefox whenever I want to check out Lobste.rs? (Sorry if this sounds snippy or sarcastic, but it all seems strange to me.)
You linked the subthread but missed the earlier github issue where I answered the same questions from the same user.
The blank screen was a bug that I fixed today (thank to @hoistbypetard and a random guest on IRC). I don’t know if Brave stopped spoofing its user agent and the old block kicked in or if the new approach started working. I don’t expect any of it to be especially reliable and I’ve written it in favor of missed detection rather than risk blocking other browsers.
The “bad behavior” you dismiss is a years-long pattern of repeated bad actions followed by dismissive statements with no countervailing behaviors. I don’t care what browser you use or if you figure out how to spoof the block. I care that Lobsters isn’t part of their next scam and have taken basic, reasonable steps to prevent it while accepting that I can’t afford an arms race with Brave, who are well-funded and have already specifically targeted the site. I’m already very unhappy about how much time and energy they waste. Lobsters has one fewer bug fix or small feature this week because of Brave.
Those details are interesting and make sense to me, but anyway I support you having almost any policy because you put so much work into making this site exist.
Thanks, but I don’t think the time I’ve put into it should be a blanket exemption from criticism of my mistakes. I still make ’em. Ideally fewer and smaller, but still worth correcting.
That’s why I said “almost” :-)
Thank you for the detailed answer, and the Github issue you linked does have more info. And thanks for the time/money you’ve put into Lobste.rs; it’s a great resource and a wonderful community.
But I still don’t understand: how is Brave harming you and/or the site? Is it wasting your server bandwidth? Is it harming your reputation? Does it cause Brave users to believe your site hosts ads when it doesn’t? Or that they’re donating to Lobste.rs when the money actually goes to Brave Software?
And, if some of this used to be true, but no longer is, is it maybe time to let it go?
(Personally, I don’t use Brave’s cryptocurrency feature; I switched from Chrome because Brave still supports uBlock Origin, is very compatible with all the Google services I have to use for work, and is privacy-focused. I like what I’ve seen at Lobste.rs, and would like to continue using it, but firing up a separate browser just to view the site isn’t going to happen very often, if at all.)
I can’t speak for @pushcx directly, but to me the core issue of Brave is that it is a cryptocurrency scam that harms its users and site operators:
The content you see on a site may not be the content being sent - they’re deliberately replacing content being sent by the site to content that they profit from
They then claimed that they were doing this to “help” the site operators and were holding the earnings in escrow, but were not
There’s a consistent level of malicious and dishonest behavior, and given that allowing Brave posts is not significantly different from allowing posts from any other scam ware company.
I like reading theads where people are huge nerdy fans of something I know very little about, where they can learn enormous amounts from details that fly right by me. I get a kick out of fan communities.
So a few minutes ago I was reading a ridiculous bit of nerdery and I saw a comment with a vague claim that Brave sells user data. I googled ‘brave sells data’ and landed on a different claim that Brave scrapes the web to sell as AI training data without respect to robots.txt. Brave initially claims it “respects robots.txt” but later their Chief of Search admits the crawler doesn’t provide a user-agent (familiar!) because they don’t want people to be able to block them without blocking Google. This isn’t even the claim I was trying to look up. This is another example of bad behavior followed by misleading statements.
Brave’s current documentation says they still don’t honor robots.txt. To preemptively rebut more earnest questions: Yes, I am familiar with RFC 2119. Reread the first sentence of 2.2.1. Brave’s own documentation says they use the product token “googlebot” to decide whether to scrape and sell a site and that this “respects robots.txt”.
I should note that I haven’t tried to create a comprehensive list of controversial stuff that Brave has gotten up to. The events I described on GitHub are only some of what happened to come up in #lobsters when people discussed Brave not working. And now something I learned while reading about backpacks.
There’s a specific thing that has been done many many times by many different people and entities, and it goes something like this:
X, where sometimesXis an open-source project, sometimes it’s a website, sometimes it’s a person who has a popular video channel or whatever.Xshows up and jumps through hoops, they might release some portion of the pool of money to that someone.Xnor an authorized agent ever shows up or jumps through all the hoops, though, all bets are off; from what I’ve seen these schemes often don’t refund the money collected on behalf ofXif it “expires” or is unclaimed, and often hand-wave about how it will be paid out to other beneficiaries or used to support the system as a whole or whatever.I don’t know about Brave’s version specifically, because I’ve never used or even downloaded it (I very conspicuously want to avoid ever doing anything that might accidentally bind me to their terms of service), but I have encountered other iterations/versions of this which claimed to be fundraising on behalf of me, and was not pleased by it. There are many reasons why someone might be displeased, but here are a few:
Xalready has their own fundraising channel, then the “we’re fundraising on their behalf!” stuff, if successful in attracting attention, actually reduces the amount of funds being sent toXby forcing another middleman into the process (and possibly by never releasing funds toXat all).X, they may well attribute tax liabilities toXfor funds thatXnever received and may not even be able to access.etc., etc.
While I do not know the specifics of Brave’s implementation, I know it caused a lot of anger when initially rolled out; I recall, for example, some YouTube personalities did videos explaining that they were not affiliated with Brave and were not happy to have Brave using their names and content to solicit funds from viewers. And in general, for the reasons given above, my personal opinion is that no scheme of this type can be ethical. My personal preference would be for one of these schemes to finally anger someone with deep enough pockets to use the legal system to make a thorough example of them, but sadly that has not happened, and every few years someone once again has the “brilliant” idea for this amazing new “community” “fundraising” and “support” scheme.
This is something akin to defamation. Brave is using Lobsters’ name and reputation without permission. The user thinks that these words are coming from Lobsters, harming Lobsters’ image.
specifically, it’s fraud by passing off
@pushcx is there anything specific that Brave-the-company or a Brave browser user can do or say moving forward to change this lobste.rs policy?
(Context: I prefer to use Brave on Android as it makes the web much more usable for me. I did read this thread and the linked threads. I hope this question comes off as being asked in good faith. I’m happy to write a good faith request to people working at Brave to make reasonable changes, as they’ve been fairly willing to make them in the past.)
I’ve been thinking on this one over the weekend. My initial concern six years ago was that the site would have to sink a bunch of time into dealing with users being scammed on its behalf. Even not being the direct victim would have created a ton of work communicating what happened and figuring out if there was any way to help users seek justice, and there was the likely timesink of getting dragged into litigation against Brave. The decision has been and must be what’s actually a danger to the site rather than some kind of paternalistic judgment that a browser is bad for its users. So while the list of things they’ve gotten up to helps inform their character and how to read their justifications, only the “fundraising” and scraping matter to Lobsters itself.
I followed news of the fundraising scam for a while waiting to see if there was any kind of postmortem, but I didn’t one. If anyone has seen one, please do share a link, but I doubt one is forthcoming given the potential for civil and criminal liabilities. Even beyond the lack of consent from site authors and confiscation, depending on whether regulators judge the particular cryptocurrency used to be an equity (a question that has only gotten more complicated in the years since the events), Brave may have acted as an unlicensed money transmitter or securities broker. I can’t imagine any competent product counsel would permit the company to publish a narrative about it, even just to list the number or names of people’s likenesses Brave used. It was caught pretty quickly so it’s unlikely the dollar amounts involved are high enough that there anyone will bring suit, and I don’t think any person or law enforcement agency has in the last six years. Realistically, there will never be any public closure on the event.
The scraping and selling I accidentally ran into is an ongoing concern. Lobsters blocks scraping to train AI, which I did based on what implied consent seems unambiguous and feedback from the chat room/email, which has run unanimously against allowing it.
I started my other big comment explaining some of what would be persuasive and how I was really off-put by the statement from their Chief of Search, which I read as consistent in tone with Brave’s messages six years ago. I believe the way they claim their crawler “respects robots.txt” is weaselly way of saying something that sounds like they follow the spec while their documentation unambiguously admits they don’t. While I’m sympathetic to how the landscape for crawlers reinforces Google’s dominance, Brave chose to ignore the spec in a self-serving way rather than try to improve the situation. They enlist browser users as mules for their crawler, so blocking the browser is the only way available to opt Lobsters out of the scraping.
If their policy of having their bot not identify itself and not follow the robots.txt exclusion standard were reversed, I’d lift the ban. To be clear: not if they made some individual exception for Lobsters, if they fixed their practices. With the lack of closure on the fundraising I simply wouldn’t trust a private promise. And then I’ll hope like hell for the future they don’t come up with “misunderstood” ideas that enrich themselves at the cost of sites and communities, because I’d love to return to the last several years of not thinking about them.
I appreciate you taking some time to think about it and break down your feelings!
Above all, I want to validate your experiences over the past 6+ years: you are valid to feel what you’re feeling about the company or people who worked there. I also hold grudges about several companies from a fairly narrow set of actions they did over the years despite the rest (even with substantial cost, I stopped using all Apple devices). I relate.
As a fellow lobster, I appreciate you trying to separate the grudge from what you feel is most constructive for the Lobsters community.
First I want to rephrase and acknowledge the main concerns/blockers for the Lobsters community regarding Brave’s search crawler behaviour, as described here: https://search.brave.com/help/brave-search-crawler
Specifically,
The call to action here is for Brave to abandon their attempt at being able to compete with Google’s crawler? (Given their claim that we’re in a world where googlebot is exclusively allowlisted by a large subset of the web.)
The call to action here is to support robots.txt instead of forcing websites to add a
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">tag? Is the underlying motive here that the Brave crawler can be better singled out and blocked specifically?I noticed lobsters already has a
<meta name="robots" content="noai, noimageai">tag. I assume that a global robots noindex that Brave respects is not desirable for Lobsters?Also to clarify, banning Lobsters from using Brave user agents does not resolve or impact either of those issues directly, correct? The intent is to be a kind of sanction on users that will create political pressure for the company to make the changes above?
One thing I’ve been going back and forth while ruminating on this is whether to push back on anything.
If you’d rather just stick to the core constraints above, feel free to ignore the rest of this comment. I feel like I put in a fair amount of effort reading everything and compiling requested materials so I’ll leave it in, just in case that’s something you’re in the mood for.
Preamble: I don’t think I have any pronounced allegiance to Brave. I’m open to switching to a better browser that fits my needs, but I like Brave browser because:
I’m 100% certain which fundraising scam you’re referring to, as it seems everything is referred to as a scam these days so it’s hard to distinguish. 🫠 (A lot of people just call any ICO token a scam to begin with.)
I did read the links of grievances in this comment and the one below, too: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters-ansible/issues/45#issuecomment-531630295
Am I correct in assuming you’re referring to this part?
I didn’t find a dedicated postmortem but I did find a bunch of discussion around how it happened and the intention:
In the thread you linked,
brandnewlowon the “business team” from Brave responded to a bunch of comments:brandnewlowin https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 – I totally get it that it’s easy to not find those responses convincing or sufficiently remorseful. I personally find them reasonable, but I understand that I’m coming from a different perspective.I found a couple other threads of Brave employees trying to address/debunk various criticisms that include the one above (note: I don’t have any expectation that these people are particularly trustworthy but it’s a nice collection of grievances with some useful links):
I did find something resembling a post-mortem regarding the Binance affiliate code address bar override debacle: https://brave.com/blog/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/
I was also curious if there were any civil lawsuits against Brave, but have not been able to find any.
Brave got you twice with their misleading description of their crawler. First, that
noindextag would block all crawlers, same as how they only obey robots.txt if a site blocks all crawlers. Second, they pitch their crawler as fighting the big guy on the block, but their crawler ingests for the very different business of selling scraped sites to AI trainers. Their rhetoric handwaves at big problems and convenient scapegoats, but their supposed solutions benefit themselves at the expense of others rather than improve the web generally.Thank you for the great roundup of links to their reactions to these various events. Maybe it’s worth calling out that I participated in that first HN thread on the fundraising scam and got a response from brandnewlow. Their comments on that thread strongly informed my opinion of Brave.
I’m not trying to create pressure on Brave, no. I’m trying to protect the site from them. I do not expect any action I take will ever change them. Also I should’ve noted in my previous comment that I’m not solely committed to them following the robots.txt standard; I’m sure they could take actions I can’t predict that would flip my opinion. Hope springs eternal, I guess.
I don’t think they mislead me at all? I think I acknowledged all that?
I acknowledge that with:
You said “that noindex tag would block all crawlers”, as I said “is the underlying motive here that the Brave crawler can be better singled out and blocked specifically”.
I had a section about the AI stuff specifically, but I removed it because I thought it was obvious that the real googlebot and all the other fake googlebots and every other crawler is also using their crawlers to gather data to train AI from too.
I see where you’re coming from. I think part of the difference in this perspective is that I don’t view intellectual property as a virtuous invention in our society (I feel it is a vehicle of value that is exclusively captured by publishers and the “capital” side of industries, not by individual creators – all of my work and code is permissively licensed to this effect). But I do have other friends who value intellectual property very highly, so I can at least understand the controversy around AI training from copyrighted materials.
I genuinely appreciate you engaging on this. Thank you.
I think your clarifications made me feel somewhat less upset about this conflict that I feel in the crossfire of. This was a good opportunity for both of us to clarify our own perspectives and positions.
I was hoping to find something reasonable that I could credibly ask Brave (either through backchannel of friends-of-friends, or publicly on their issue tracker, or on social media), but my takeaway is that the only thing for them to do here is:
In either case, I’m going to end my side of this thread here. I welcome you to add any final words in reply or just leave it as is. Thanks for all of your effort and time you put into this community, I hope I can continue to participate in some forms.
I have read some of the discussions here. You ask pushcx to respect the decisions made by the Brave owners, don’t you respect the decisions made by this site owner? He can block whatever he wants, it’s his site in the end, and he has given enough explanation on the why. You are under no obligation to participate, are you paying for the service somehow or feel entitled to a certain SLA? It could be as well a discussion about off-topic blocks, and end up in the same.
I respect this but I would have preferred to know upfront and have time to find alternatives or mitigation rather than being forced all a sudden to change my tools and habits to please site-owner mood. I’m yet to find other popular websites or privacy/freedom-defenders that block brave. I would not pay for lobste.rs indeed anymore because they prefer to make their content not accessible for everyone. at least there are 32bit.cafe, HN, reddit, etc. I can survive without a lobste.rs and will likely close my profile soon like many users.
whaaaat? Where do you pay for lobste.rs, I’d like to do the same! :)
I have to say on the whole I am not a fan of blocking browsers. As much as possible I agree that users should have the choice to make their own mistakes.
However I agree with pushcx that Brave really crossed the line when they tried to trick the user into thinking that a donation message was coming from Lobsters and Brave together when really Lobsters knew nothing about it and wasn’t going to benefit at all. This is abusing Lobsters’ reputation, is harmful to Lobsters and is probably a real crime.
I also think the reluctance to revert the ban after a weak apology while maintaining a pattern of similar behaviour (even if not directly harmful to Lobsters) is reasonable. The admins don’t want to need to rush to action when the next truly harmful change is made. And to be honest it is probably good to show that a half-hearted “I’m sorry” isn’t enough when you still show constant bad behaviour. Actions speak louder than words.
I would prefer you showed a web-page describing why the site is blocked. I thought the site was broken until I visited on a different browser, was confusing.
Brave seems to have cached the “blank” page (content type was a default
application/octet-stream), if you try a new profile or clear your cache you should see it.I get the warning on some pages not on others (lobste.rs/top) for now. Is it also related to caching? Is it possible to point brave users maybe to this thread or some place to gain more info or some alternative browser that are accepted while being ethical?
Same here. I thought the site was down and I was waiting quietly for people to fix it. I just discovered the Brave thing yesterday. I still assumed it was just a glitch and not done on purpose. Oh, well…
Here’s my attempt to summarize a complex discussion:
It also sounds like this is a charged subject, with historical bad blood.
So… why block Brave users from browsing Lobste.rs?
Only that last point is current and has anything to do with the browser, and blocking Brave in case its users are being misled seems a bit paternalistic. You may think I shouldn’t be using Brave, but it’s the best browser for my needs, and I’m causing no harm to anyone by using it, nor am I supporting a (purportedly) unethical company.
The current behavior seems to have appeared when code blocking Brave, implemented years (?) ago but not working, suddenly started working because of something Brave changed (perhaps in 1.73.91, released Nov 20, 2024). So this seems to have been a historical decision; perhaps it could be changed?
Let me say again: Lobste.rs is a great community service, run without any cost to their users, either explicit (fees) or hidden (ads). I have no basis to complain if Lobste.rs decides it doesn’t want to serve this Brave-using contributor (with a big 170 reputation points to date). But it’s kind of sad that, unless this changes, I (and probably dozens of others) will no longer be enjoying your thoughtful discussions. I guess it’s the Orange Site for me.
It surprises me that your reaction to this is “well, guess I’m done reading lobste.rs”, rather than “whoa, Brave is not the browser/organization I thought it was, maybe I should re-evaluate the browser landscape”. It sounds to me like Brave’s behavior doesn’t bother you, and so you don’t understand why a site administrator would put a soft-block of it in place. Does it not concern you that the browser you are using is making/has made the kind of poor choices it has?
Personally, my own efforts to get away from Chrome ended by switching to Orion shortly after its public release, while I have Vivaldi installed for if I specifically need something Chrome-based, e.g. for development (though I haven’t been doing frontend work for a number of years now). Part of the reason I switched to Orion is that it had a clear, sustainable source of funding (people paying for the browser, which I do, as well as indirectly via things like Kagi Search, but the browser is free to use), and it supports Firefox/Chrome extensions, so I lose nothing functionality-wise (and in fact, gain some things IMO), while meaningfully putting my money where my mouth is in terms of supporting alternative browser development. It’s macOS-only, so if you are predominately using Windows/Linux, then I don’t have any personal recommendations myself, but I know I’d be looking for something other than Brave.
If you think using Brave is more important/valuable than what you get out of lobste.rs, and changing the user agent string for the site isn’t enough of a workaround for you, then your options seem pretty clear. I’m not sure why you would put your trust in an organization that has exhibited such bad-faith behavior though, the people that made those choices aren’t going to suddenly stop making similar ones.
It’s the OP again. The discussion seems to be getting more and more polarized, with the light/heat ratio going down. It may be time to lock it (if that’s something that happens on Lobste.rs).
Thinking to make the choice easier, I actually started work on a PR to remove the block. But there’s tens of thousands of lines of code, and searching for that block message turned up nothing, so clearly the relevant code has been obfuscated.
@pushcx knows how their users feel and will make their decision as they think appropriate, and that’s fine by me. I’ll put Lobste.rs on my “check once in a while” list of sites, and if Brave starts being able to access it again I’ll be back.
Thanks for the (mostly) calm discussion.
Not a Brave user, but breaking the web because you don’t like the browser the user has picked, seems the wrong approach and very similar to past decisions people criticized (
best viewed with IE,only works on Chrome, etc.).Imagine if everybody started doing that, what a mess it wouldn’t be.
One site blocking one specific user agent is “breaking the web” now?! Let’s tone down the hyperbole a bit.
It is a pattern, a behavior, a way of thinking. If everybody did the same, trying to enforce their preferences on others, it would affect the web as a whole, yes. As it already did in the past.
What has changed? Many websites are atrocious to use from mobile browsers. And that includes big ones like X, facebook, AWS console. I just need to wait until I can use a desktop browser sometimes. They don’t care, and that’s a preference that breaks my internet experience. Recently there was an article about someone IP blocking certain RSS reader users, since the software was not playing nice with server requests, did it cause this uproar?
Google decided to break an entire class of plugins because they didn’t like them, what did you tell them?
What uproar? A civil discussion with 40 comments is an uproar?
Just stating that it seems the wrong approach, if we criticized it in the past we shouldn’t do the same.
The situation in the past was very different. IE wasn’t available on all platforms. A Chromium browser is. Lobste.rs is perfectly usable in read-only mode in links or w3m. There are plenty of ways of accessing this website if you’re not ideologically or financially incentivized to only use one specific browser.
There is a bit of a difference between blocking one browser, and blocking all browsers but one.
Yes it is: Don’t use a shit product made by shit people.
Most of the time you won’t notice the consequences of such a decision, but sometimes you will.
what browser do you use? if it’s mozilla or chromium based you are also using products made by shit people? If you visit internet or use product that are hosted on microsoft/aws/google infra you are also helping shit people making a shitty world. I hope you drink your own philosophy. I guess I’ll too avoid lobste.rs in the future, I prefer to visit communities that defend freedom in a right way. Here lobste.rs acts as toxic as the tool they attack.
That’s absurd. Consequences to bad behaviour are bad behaviour themselves?
Safari. It’s pretty decent as far as browsers go.
But this is strong “Yet you participate in society. I am very smart.” vibes.
If we consider Brave unethical I wonder what to think of other browsers that support unethical companies like Google, Mozilla and Microsoft to name a few. For now I use DuckDuckGo on mobile just for lobste.rs while using Brave on desktop but sending a different user-agent for visiting lobste.rs.
Browsers from Google, Mozilla and Microsoft has never directly attacked lobste.rs by e.g tricking users into thinking they can donate to lobste.rs through the browser UI.
It was not lobste.rs specific it was a general strategy mistake they have admit and fixed. Also nobody forced users to make donations to lobste.rs through Brave.
In the meantime other companies like ones mentioned make money from training AI on free lobste.rs data without giving back to the users or lobste.rs. this is also sort of unethical. The companies behind the browsers allowed by lobste.rs spy on the users visiting lobste.rs and sell this data. Lobste.rs also allows browsers from companies that support anti democratic nations. Lobste.rs also gives more visibility to unethical products and companies. So it’s not more ethical and in fact it’s even saying lobste.rs is not open to all. Lobste.rs targets in the end innocent users who have likely no better or more secure alternative browser. Should I install spywares such as chrome, firefox or Edge and support totalitarian regimes? Should i support companies with a shitty culture so I can be considered an ethical user for lobste.rs? Shouldn’t lobste.rs favor privacy friendly browsers rather than monopolies trying to survive in a world dominated by the GAFAM?
Lobste.rs punishes brave users and thus discriminates who can debate and it harms access to internet for those users. But blaming brave for making money while also allowing Google/Microsoft to reinforce their monopolies and their control of freedom seems really too much for me. I respect brave have made mistakes. But Google and Microsoft are eating everything and make money from worse sources, sacrificing freedom of speech, privacy, environment and health, and burning the planet through crypto and AI too. But one can decide to ignore all this and just attack brave. It just helps the contenders.
Those companies seem to respect robots.txt which tells them not to do that on lobste.rs. Brave also trains AI on free lobste.rs data and specifically says that they do not respect robots.txt..
No one is being targeted. If you’ve decided that you like Brave’s bad behavior and want to use it, you can easily use it to visit lobste.rs. The block is absolutely trivial to avoid.
You also have several options for better/more secure alternative browsers if you want. Here are a few:
If you want to use a chromium based browser like Brave but want to avoid Google and Microsoft, Vivaldi is a good option. It has several interesting privacy features, including an ad blocker built-in. And Vivaldi doesn’t do the shady things Brave does.
If you want to be in the Firefox ecosystem but avoid Mozilla, Librewolf is an independent fork focused on privacy, security and openness. It works very well on all the platforms Firefox does.
If you want to stretch even farther than either of those toward privacy/security/etc., Tor Browser is excellent. It’s even more locked down than librewolf and routes all of its traffic through the Tor network.
If you want an alternative engine, GNOME Web uses the WebKit engine from Safari.
I would argue that all of those options are better and/or more secure in many measures than Brave.
Google still scans lobste.rs so really it scrapes enough. I could find all my discussions on lobste.rs using google.
And the alternative browsers mentioned are not either as performant, private or portable (desktop and mobile) as Brave. Just checking https://privacytests.org/ Tor is slow and can’t download big files. Librewolf has no Android version. Vivaldi leaks a lot more than Brave. So really brave is the only usable option ticking most criteria.
On brave desktop I had to install an extension so decrease privacy in order to spoof user-agent… on mobile there is no option to install extension for brave so I have to install a crap like DDG that leaks everything to Microsoft in order to reach lobste.rs.
Until I can avoid those options I feel forced to unsafe options due to lobste.rs waiting to block some user-agent for achieving nothing.
All of the criteria on there are developed by a Brave employee. Of course Brave ticks the most boxes; the boxes were modeled on what Brave does.
Now I’m 1000% certain you’re just trolling. I tested it myself, and circumventing the block took me less than 30 seconds, no extension involved whatsoever. I don’t even use Brave normally; I installed it on a machine I’m about to re-image, so I could look at Brave’s behavior for testing purposes.
A basic understanding of HTTP request headers and a trip to Chromium’s developer tools, which are accessible via hamburger menu -> More Tools -> Developer Tools in Brave Desktop just like they are in every other chromium browser was all it took.
I would argue that if you don’t know enough about HTTP request headers to do that, you don’t know enough to interpret the chart on privacytests.org in a meaningful way.
You should, of course, use whatever you like best. But I think you probably need to deepen your understanding of how it works, from the sound of it.
Also:
lobste.rs specifically allows google’s search bot to scan it. It’s the AI bot that’s disallowed by robots.txt. You can read more about robots.txt and google’s relationship to it here:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots/intro
and here:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots/create-robots-txt
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Fraudulently inducing “donations” to brave by using sites names (including lobste.rs) is about as close to force as you can get on the internet.
It’s a crappy behavior but I’ve read dozen times they make it clearer and fixed it. Anyway they did crap and I only defend the fact I want a free access to websites without being discriminated for using a browser I find not satisfying alternative to based on the behaviors I can’t influence. For what is worth yes those debates convinced me brave did crap but I’m really disagreeing that lobste.rs is blocking me for using brave without warning/notice/alternative. I thought lobste.rs wanted to be better than other communities that ban/block ppl. Now I’m so disappointed for first time in years to find yet another community I have to leave because one man view can’t be changed.
I don’t know if you’re willing to accept or absorb advice right now, but I’m going to give it a try: It might be best to take a nice long walk in the autumn chill, spend at least 24 hours away from this thread, and re-center. You didn’t know Brave was a scam. It’s not your fault. You also don’t owe any allegiance to it, and you don’t have to defend it. It doesn’t have to be part of your identity. It was just software. Who cares?
Everyone here has been burned by something similar. We’re not better than you, we just have more scars. I think after some time has passed, defending this piece of software won’t seem so important anymore. None of us is happy with the current state of the internet, but we can choose to dig trenches, or to build better things. Let those scammers rot in the past, take the lesson learned, and move on. It’s worth it.
I agree with your reasoning, but I just panic upfront with all the changes I have to make in my tooling, all the research I have to make for finding a better alternative, all the work I have to make for porting extensions, profiles, history, all the reconfigurations of extensions I have to make, all the work I’ll need to sync browser across android/mac/pc, all the re-learning I’ll need for the alternative ways to achieve what I was doing thanks to brave. Being forced all a sudden to such change is not nice. I would have preferred to know long time ago that Brave would be blocked and have more time to think about finding alternatives. here the change is just forced.
I don’t have fewer scars than most here. not more maybe, I just criticize the fact a browser is blocked while other scams are allowed, maybe those scams do not target lobste.rs specifically because they target everyone at the same time. So yes I decided to use brave. I also decided to use gmail but it’s hard to leave. I decide to use android but alternatives are not so easy / stable to move to. I decide to work for money because I have not much choices with my current power and mental load. so yes I have dreams about finding perfect tools everywhere in a perfect world, but it’s not realistic, that’s why I use android, sometimes google too, that’s also why I use sometimes paypal, sometimes I buy plastic toys or smartphones despite they do not meet my ideal goals. Is that a reason to be banned/blocked? I’m not sure that’s how we make progress.
maybe I’ll just take a long walk indeed and decide to stop investing time in lobste.rs, if all of a sudden we can be blocked depending what tool he likes or not. but I can’t change from brave to something else all a sudden, even after a long walk. I don’t even have time for long walk. I’m living in a place I want to escape but it costs money, I’m alone bringing money at home, I take care of several adhd people which consume my mental load and energy. I’m putting all energy solving problems other people can’t find the time to. I’ve no family (parents etc) to rely on, so no break/day off for me. I only have seldom browsing time I was using this time for browsing lobste.rs and rss feeds and now it’s just harder and I know, because I’m suffering from adhd/autism and perfectionism, that if I look for alternative to brave it will take me days and then migrating will take me weeks. In the meantime I’ll just find everything harder. It’s not something I can fix at will. But unblocking brave is easy and would save me from all this struggle and unnecessary tension.
What unimaginable toil this must be! I switched browsers five times just last week (because besides Safari as my main I use a bunch of neo-browsers as well and that is a lively space at the moment).
You keep asking all these distracting questions but you haven’t yet once made an affirmative defense of Brave’s actions or given a reason to expect different behavior in the future, even when you’ve agreed with the description of the consistent pattern of behavior stretching back for years. If possible, those approaches would be a lot more persuasive.
I’d still like to answer your question about the slippery slope of other browser manufacturers’ practices. I have been making websites for 29 years, starting back when sites were often adorned with “Best Viewed In” buttons that were often enforced by user agent. I have used every major version of every browser that has reached 1% market share in the US and then some, often working around bugs and limitations. There are currently four major browsers in the west: Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox. I have reported bugs in all of them, I have serious criticisms of business decisions made by all of the companies behind them, and executives at all of them have promoted political causes I find abhorrent. I have had the technical capability and organizational authority to block browsers for dozens of sites I have worked on, including this one. This block of Brave is the only time in 29 years of making sites that I have blocked a browser.
Last night I happened to learn of another bit of bad behavior from Brave, where they’ve once again taken an action to enrich themselves by violating social norms and justified it with condescending and misleading statements. Their current documentation admits that they evade IP bans by enlisting the browser users you characterize as innocent victims to act as mules whose personal browsing is scraped into their crawler to sell. I’d like you to prove me wrong on anything instead of asking morally-loaded questions about different issues. Their Chief of Search says “The reason we do not expose a crawler user-agent is practical: we do not have the resources to contact all domain-owners, who rightfully or not, discriminate against anyone but Google.” That’s not my reason for wanting to block their crawler and they claim to respect the standard for opting out of crawling. Here’s our robots.txt and nginx config. Write a working pull request to opt us out.
With all the love and respect, I think you are doing yourself a disservice.
I get it, you don’t like Brave. Fine. Just ignore it instead of ruining the site for everyone. People won’t start hating Brave all of a sudden, but they will hate you.
Can’t please everyone. Some people actively approve of blocking Brave browser.
What does “actively approve” even mean?
Do you, yes, you personally, actively approve of people like me not using this or that browser? Why?
And since we’re all pulling the boomer card in this thread, I remember when IE people did that to Firefox users.
Spend literally one minute reading the thread, the linked threads, find information for yourself instead of expecting to be spoon-fed.
Oh, I read them. I was trying to figure out if there is a way back to fixing the site or the bridges have been burned. 😁
Seeing it done raises my opinion of the person doing it.
Oderint dum metuant.
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Why did you write three paragraphs without responding to this very direct request? It seems weird that you love the work @pushcx has done, but refuse to respond to such a simple, direct request.
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LibreWolf supports Firefox Sync (optionally self-hosting the server, just like Firefox).
Your profile says “I hate […] products focused on profit rather than solving problems” yet it seems you’re willing to spend a lot of energy defending Brave here when, IMO, it obviously fits that description.
LibreWolf is not working on Android so what’s the point of a sync? I’m defending my right to access websites not brave behavior. but you are right about the fact brave had a shitty way to look for profits especially in the past. I just don’t find the alternatives better. Also lot of sites don’t so well on Firefox based browsers.
Edit: I note also that until reading all the recent threads I wasn’t suspecting brave to still be guilty of the problems they are blamed for. I thought it was just concerning for brave users that opt in for crypto/ads etc while I use brave with all such features disabled.
On Android you use Mull instead of LibreWolf.
The closest thing on Android to LibreWolf would probably be IceRaven.
Whataboutism does not absolve Brave of responsibility.
But why punish the users for Brave choices? How will it help debates and resolve the issues. Blocking seems for me too simplistic solution to something worth fixing or mitigating but just banning users and closing all discussion is not more ethical and not less responsible. It’s a free nonsense attack too, comparable to how brave is “attacking” lobste.rs.
I’m struggling with your repeated use of the term “punish.” You freely choose your browser and you know that lobste,rs takes some measures to block your favorite one, so you can choose to either use a different browser for lobste.rs specifically, or tweak a setting to be able to read it. You have a list of other alternate browsers above that capture many of the good aspects of Brave, without bringing in the bad. You also, clearly, have already bypassed the block trivially as any other user could choose to do. None of this seems like a punishment except in the most extreme first-world context imaginable.
@pushcx has very eloquently described this site as his “backyard cookout” and I loved that image. As someone who has experienced his hospitality in person on more than one occasion, I can easily picture the scene he describes and he tolerates a pretty diverse group of virtual friends all having a good time. However, he clearly also has drawn the line in some places, for example nazis get kicked out of the backyard. To keep the analogy going, a cartel (Brave) is using innocent mules to take things they shouldn’t (scraping websites, among other things). @pushcx is simply saying he’s keeping the gate shut if he sees a mule so that no one else has to worry about the issues that will bring. If the mule decides to take a shower before showing up, awesome, they’re more than welcome.
This seems fair and I don’t understand the level of pushback or questioning for what is, effectively, a very simple policy: don’t support the cartel.
(Note: I’ve had family members taken in by the cryptoscam and I whole-heatedly support more people being made aware of Brave’s behavior that might not have before they clicked on this site).
I’ve been using brave for years without knowing its story with lobste.rs and without opting for any of the crypto crap in brave. I was focused on using brave for its superior privacy features not for making money through BAT or whatever. For same reasons I never invest in Microsoft and never hesitate to explain every recruiter how crappy this company is. I’m tech savvy so I found a way to access lobste.rs through Brave after trying first to find other options or discuss this but my attempts to debate were just ignored (no answer to private messages and no way to edit or reply to the 2-3 GitHub issues about it).
Someone not tech savvy will just be blocked from accessing any link to lobste.rs when using user-agent blacklisted by lobste.rs but is it the open web we want? Or are we in fact then building walls and paving the way to filter each other? With enough data you can find reasons to block every user and tool. That’s also how we cultivate silos and differences. I’m for diversity. If brave is a scam and homophobic then please also block every crypto user and ask for losbte.rs users political views so you will find lot of users that support unethical behaviors. But having a brave user agent has nothing to do with supporting a crappy man in its castle. Not more than using JS /Mozilla makes you support the same homophobic man that founded brave. I use WhatsApp because everyone is on it but it does not mean I like how Meta spies and influence the political views of the “free” world despite they do. So I’m not Brave tool. Will you tomorrow block Chrome and Mozilla and Edge because they do something unethical every minute or is it ok when it’s not brave?
As noted in the comment you replied to, this isn’t debate, it is Whataboutism.
@pushcx laid out extensive reasons for why he dislikes what Brave is doing, including steps Brave took explicitly against Lobste.rs. You keep bringing up other browsers like Chrome, Mozilla, and Edge, but none of them made it personal and came into the backyard party starting trouble. I hope that analogy helps you understand why Brave’s behavior would get it treated differently than the others.
Thank you for cooling it down and yes it makes sense and then maybe that should be the main problem to communicate when accessing lobste.rs from brave not pointing to issues solved years ago. I would also recommend mentioning then to brave users some workarounds for accessing lobste.rs with or without not just make it appear there is no solution. Also what is possible or done to mitigate this with brave community? Was the point even escalated with them? Brave users on lobste.rs are just forced to leave either without anyone asking their view.