Had read about them recently when looking up about bookmarklets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Userscript

Which userscript manager do you use? What are your opinions/advice on security of using them?

Also, are there other similar things like bookmarklets and userscripts that regular people can start off fast?

Are there any lemmy communities or resouces(wikis, forums, youtube channels etc) that are on the topic of simple/beginner-friendly automation and customisation?

Thanks in advance

  • Daemon Silverstein@calckey.world
    1·
    2 days ago

    @[email protected] Yes, and in a fairly heavy manner. Currently, I have four personal user-scripts configured for Tampermonkey, as well as a few custom filters configured for uBlock Origin.

    In Tampermonkey:
    - Matching Lemmy (a specific instance): if the current location address is the main feed (which is often the “Local” feed sorted by “Active”), automatically redirect to “All” feed sorted by “New comments” (as I currently have no Lemmy account, I browse it as a guest, so Lemmy doesn’t memorize what my preferences are)
    - Matching Pixelfed (a specific instance): automatically fetch and reveal hidden media marked as sensitive (the original Web interface for Pixelfed doesn’t allow for automatically expanding/revealing media marked as sensitive). It uses localStorage for storing already fetched media URLs (so I don’t need to consume the ActivityPub API every time).
    - Matching a specific image hosting platform: sets the image wrapper’s background to white.
    - Matching a specific PeerTube instance: automatically reveals media marked as sensitive (differently from Pixelfed, it just uses CSS to blur the thumbnail, so it’s just a matter of unblurring it).

    As for uBlock Origin, there are many filters intended to hide advertisement and other banners, but there are also a few filters unrelated to ads, filters meant to be functional:
    - Matching Lemmy: hide specific communities I’m not interested in, using a rule ##.post-listing:has(.community-link:has-text("/^name_of_community/").
    - Also matching Lemmy: hide the wrapper for composing comments, because I don’t have a Lemmy account so Lemmy platforms will display a warning box “You’re not logged in”.

    Sometimes I also tinker with DevTools for specific purposes, such as transforming text, copying text, classifying text, or just randomly experimenting with JS snippets.