Frequently asked questions¶

This is not really an FAQ, because nobody asked these questions yet, but I feel like some of them might interest people.

Why does BrutaLinks looks so basic?¶

There are a couple of reasons.

• I wanted the site to be as minimalist as possible, sometimes known as the “brutalist” style, and at the same time keep its roots in the old Reddit layout.

• I want BrutaLinks to be as compatible as possible with modal browsers like Qutebrowser and TUI browsers like lynx. This means that all links have to be accessible by hinting and filtering them by names or alt properties.

• You might just be using an older browser. Even though the layout of the site looks simple, it’s using some HTML features that might not be present in all browsers.

Why was BrutaLinks created?¶

The short explanation is that I dislike reddit as a whole, but remember fondly the “good old days” of its beginings. A longer explanation can be found here.

But still, why was BrutaLinks created, when there are already federated alternatives around?¶

Even though at the time of this writing the project is not fully functional as a fully federated service, its inception started a long time ago, predating a lot of the current federated link aggregators. The fact that we had to build a lot of underlying functionality from the ground up proved to be quite an intensive labor that spanned the course of several years.

Why doesn’t BrutaLinks have federation yet?¶

Federation between BrutaLinks instances is not difficult to achieve at this point, most of the pieces are already in place. However I feel like it requires having good, or at least better, moderation tools for both the users and the instance’s moderators in order to deal with the inevital spam that being publicly reachable will bring.