[observed] chittr's page source. [reported] this was happening one way or another. // maybe against my will. [reported] you can do this too with a little technical know how. i pulled apart the document Chittr hands my browser when i request the main feed. this is not a penetration test. // correction: it is not presently a penetration test. i have not attempted to circumvent authentication, access anything my account was not given, or interfere with the service. this is just what the website hands me when i knock on it. first impression: pretty modern construction. vexed.js, reaxe, turbopan. server render then client hydration. pretty standard choices. page is assembled from a collection of providers handling things. things like blocking, ignoring, hastag preferences, notifications, refresh behavior, display settings. [observed] the document i received is about 5 megabytes. that is a lot of front door. reason's pretty obvious. chittr isn't just rendering the information necessary to display a chitt, but all of the underlying object data related to it. for posts appearing in my feed, the delivered data can include: post identifiers. character identifiers. internal account identifiers. timestamps. raw post contents. quirked post contents. caste. avatar location. follower identifiers. badges. reaction totals. the character identifiers responsible for individual reactions. rechitts. hashtags. mentions. replies, and then another considerable quantity of user information attached to those replies. [observed] both contentRaw and contentQuirked are present. any of oyu hoping to hide something beneath a typing quirk should know by now that isn't happening. [observed] follower lists are shipped as arrays of identifiers and character records. [inference] someone has elected to send entire character-shaped objects where a smaller public facing representation would suffice. data-minimization problem. not intrusion. my browser doesn't need most of that information to draw your name, picture, caste, and post. more interesting, chittr also hydrates moderation state into the client. won't delve into what this means. interesting. [observed] at least twenty-five external images are preloaded onto my feed. this should be obvious as to why. [reported] everyone has their profile pictures off site. just makes page rendering interesting. it also makes the page heavier for no particularly compelling reason. there are smaller things. two viewport declarations. the latter disables user scaling on mobile. an inline theme script reads a theme cookie before rendering and then solves the problem with the delicate instrument of applying !important colors to essentially everything on the page. [observed] i did not find an obvious password, session token, bearer credential, private API key, or similar gift sitting naked in the document. that is the good news. a respectable amount of application data is injected into reaxe's server-component stream directly in the document. none of these are evidence that someone has compromised the website. they are evidence that someone has been building a website. my present assessment: security: indeterminate. the document alone cannot tell me whether server-side authorization is competent. privacy: warrants review. especially stable account identifiers, relationship data, and block/ignore state. performance: wasteful. architecture: recognizable and reasonably conventional. data discipline: enthusiastic. again. not hacking. not disrupting service. this is what i do. this was basically a free service. //usually for money. so uh. don't delete me.§