(Guide/Review) Teddit: browse Reddit in a privacy preserving way

[Karlston]

Teddit: browse Reddit in a privacy preserving way

 

Reddit has become a central discussion hub in the past couple of years.  The site has received a number of financing rounds in the past decade, the last in February 2019 when it received $300 million based on a €3 billion valuation.

 

Reddit has intensified advertising and tracking in recent time; some options can be turned off in the Reddit settings, others are based on scripts running on the site. While it is possible to use content blockers to prevent many of these from being effective or loaded at all, some have started to use third-party Reddit clients instead that promise better privacy.

 

One of the latest ones is Teddit. Teddit is a web frontend, unlike many others that are available only on mobile devices. You can load the site using any web browser to access Reddit's content.

 

The core difference between Teddit and Reddit is that the former does not track users and that it has no advertising. In fact, you can load Teddit with JavaScript disabled and it will work just as fine.

 

 

Teddit loads much faster; you download about 270 Kilobytes to your system to display the site's homepage whereas you will often download more than 20 Megabytes to display Reddit's homepage. The number of requests that Teddit makes to display the site is 30 while Reddit makes about 190 requests.

 

According to the developer, all requests go through the backend so that clients connected to Teddit never communicate with Reddit directly. Users interested in the code can check it out on Codeberg.

 

You may access text and media content on Teddit including user comments. A search is provided to find threads or subreddits of interest, and you can check out the posts of individual users.

 

All account related activity is not available on Teddit. You cannot sign-in to your account, and that means that you won't get a feed of all subscribed subreddit groups or the ability to leave comments, reply to them, or start threads on the site.

Bookmarks are your friend if you need to access certain groups regularly on the site

Closing Words

Teddit is ideal for accessing information on Reddit. Since it is limited to read activity, it is great for accessing Reddit content without being tracked by the site.  You can easily replace the URL of any Reddit page by replacing the "r" in Reddit with the "t" in teddit, and the "com" with "net" to load the content on Teddit.

 

The Reddit URL https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/ becomes https://www.teddit.net/r/firefox on Teddit.

 

Teddit is not for you if you want to interact with other users on Reddit, but if you require only read access, it may be ideal.

 

Tip: the option to combine multiple subreddits in the URL to display these all at once is available on Teddit. Check out the guide for details.

 

There is the danger that the project will go away at one point. If it becomes too popular, it could be shut down because of increasing costs to run it.

 

For now, it offers an excellent option to access Reddit content in a privacy preserving way. It is also excellent for users who live in countries that have blocked Reddit.

 

 

Teddit: browse Reddit in a privacy preserving way