A smart redirecting gateway for various frontend services. Faster and compatible alternative to farside.
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A redirecting service for FOSS alternative frontends.
Fastside provides links that automatically redirect to working instances of privacy-oriented alternative frontends, such as Nitter, Libreddit, etc. This allows for users to have more reliable access to the available public instances for a particular service, while also helping to distribute traffic more evenly across all instances and avoid performance bottlenecks and rate-limiting.
Fastside's links work with the following structure: fastside.link/<service>/<path>
For example:
| Service | Page | Fastside Link |
| Libreddit | /r/popular | https://fastside.link/libreddit/r/popular |
| Teddit | /r/popular | https://fastside.link/teddit/r/popular |
| Invidious | /watch?v=zLGDE2j_n5c | https://fastside.link/_/invidious/watch?v=zLGDE2j_n5c |
| AnonymousOverflow | /questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags | https://fastside.link/@cached/anonymousoverflow/#questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags |
Note: This table doesn't include all available services. For a complete list of supported frontends, see: https://fastside.link/
Additionally, Fastside includes a caching feature that makes redirects faster and anonymous:
/@cached/<service>/#<path>
The app runs with an internally scheduled cron task that queries all instances for services defined in services.json every 5 minutes. For each instance, as long as the instance takes <2 seconds to respond and returns a successful response code, the instance is added to a list of available instances for that particular service. If not, it is discarded until the next update period.
Fastside's routing is minimal, similar to Farside, but includes
an additional /@cached/<service>#<path> endpoint, which utilizes browser caching to achieve instant
redirects without waiting for server responses.
Farside operates very slowly for some reason. The ping from my machine to their server in the USA is 300 ms, and a redirect request takes about 1 second to process (!). This means that processing a redirect takes 700 ms, which is incredibly long for such a simple task. On the other hand, Fastside processes requests in 200-300 ms (taking my internet into account). Additionally, the web server at fastside.link supports http3, which saves us an additional 100-150 ms.
- GeoDB integration