YSK because webpages are increasingly bloated from excessive trackers, popups, sidebars, and more. This diminishes the experience of reading, eats up your precious internet data, and threatens your privacy.
Newswaffle is a public service created by Acidus that intelligently strips webpages of their cruft and leaves only the valuable text content. Its based in gemtext and was originally intended to be accessed using the gemini protocol, however it can very easily be reformated to HTML and proxied through HTTP for normal web browser usage. The proxy I am using is SmolNet Portal by Mozz.
If you have a kobo e-ink ereader or similar device with extremely simple web browser its invaluable for getting a modern webpage to render correctly.
Source Code
YSK because the people who made these tools and host them on their own time and dime, may not be around forever. Only a few other people on this planet know these tools exist or actively use them. There are only one public instance of these services running thanks to the makers themselves. Ideally we need some self hosters to deploy and fork these tools to ensure they exist in the future. That can’t happen if nobody knows about them.
(How) is this different from Reader mode in Firefox?
They are similar and use some of the same underlying technology powered by the readability library, but newswaffle gives more options on how to render the article (article mode, link mode, raw mode), it isolates images and gives them their own external url link you can click on, it tells you exactly how much cruft it saved from original webpage (something about seeing 99.x% lighter makes my brain tingle good chemicals). It works well with article indexes. You can bookmark a newswaffle page to get reader view by default instead of clicking a button in firefox toolbar. Hope these examples help.
That’s really good, but it suffers from having a “good enough” competitor built in. You’re already using an ad block that prevents loading ads, trackers and other nasties. Then you click Reader mode to get to a result that works well enough most of the time. A lot more convenient than handling finding a website to paste a link into, let alone self hosting a tool.
What this project needs is a browser extension to make it more convenient.