Adam @adam@librem.one

You don't need to use link shorteners on Mastodon!

All links on Mastodon count as 23 characters towards your post limit, no matter how long the links actually are.

Link shortener services like bit.ly, t.co etc track users who click on their links, so Mastodon removed any practical need to use them. If you still use link shorteners on Mastodon, it will be obvious to everyone that you are just doing it for tracking purposes.

More info at https://fedi.tips/you-dont-need-link-shorteners-on-mastodon

Hey #fediverse Hive Mind: ❓

If you had to recommend a set of #hashtags to follow for brand new users, not knowing their particular issue set they cared about, what general, noise-free, but active hashtags would you suggest? Here is a thread of mine, please add in comments:

(HT top @feditips for some of these)

🧵 1 of X

#Introduction & #Introductions - New people on here, say hello

#Befound - lists of other lists of Fedi users

Dolly 2.0 is a really big deal: https://www.databricks.com/blog/2023/04/12/dolly-first-open-commercially-viable-instruction-tuned-llm

"The first open source, instruction-following LLM, fine-tuned on a human-generated instruction dataset licensed for research and commercial use"

My notes so far on trying to run it: https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/dolly-2

That "take me down to the Parallax City where the far moves slow and the near moves quickly" tweet by an unknown author should be in a museum.

All software eventually becomes open source. If it doesn't, it either fades into obscurity or an open-source lookalike replaces it. Take web browsers, for example. Google develops Chromium (which also powers Brave, Opera, and now even Microsoft Edge) because they realize that this gives them influence over their competition. Because they understand that everything eventually becomes open source.

If a piece of software is a good enough idea, someone will eventually, in their spare time, create an open source version of it. It could be simply out of interest, to learn, or because they want to gain influence. Take Mastodon vs Twitter for example. Mastodon was created by a young man in his free time, and it's now in the ring with a $42bn company. It was able to do this specifically because it's open source, which stoked the enthusiasm of other technologists who self-hosted and made it happen. You will see how "Post News" and "Tribel" or whatever, have quickly burned up in the sun in the aftermath of Elon Musk's yesterday drama.

Everything eventually becomes open source because it can be. The reason people climb mountains is because they can. If you want to play the short game in an already flooded market, you are free to take your chances and build a secret project in a secret lair that nobody will ever find out about. Or you can start playing the long game from the very start and just build it open source. It would be a missed opportunity not to.

Here's some more great stats about the Fediverse:

1. Half Year Average Users (HYAU) just reached an all time high of 4,786,827

2. Active servers might soon hit 25,000

3. Misskey is the fastest growing part of the Fediverse, and in just one month doubled in size from 100,690 accounts to 226,480

Things are really taking off!

Last night, the website of Reykjavík #Hackerspace, Hakkavélin, got flagged by Google's "Safe Browsing" as "deceptive:
https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/110166076666804008

Thanks to fedi friends reporting this block as incorrect, the site is unblocked. 🎉

But our #Yunohost login page is still blocked:
https://bob.hakkavelin.is/yunohost/sso/ 🤦‍♀️

We would really appreciate help with reporting this also as incorrect. You can do this here, and it takes less than a minute:
https://safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/report_error/?tpl=mozilla&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbob.hakkavelin.is%2Fyunohost%2Fsso%2F

Thank you! <3

#FuckGoogle #Hackers #InfoSec

If you're scared by the change that AI brings, and you want to feel the safety of consistency again, just read the WebAIM 1 Million report. The fact that we keep repeating the same accessibility errors every year will give you a warm and comforting feeling.

https://webaim.org/projects/million/

TURN ANY PUBLIC PLEROMA INSTANCE INTO A TALK RADIO STATION IN YOUR BROWSER NOW!!! PLEROMA SPEAKS - WE LISTEN

https://getgle.org/pleromaspeaks

🧵 [10 / 10]

Let's face it, the most likely explanation for these shenanigans is that the bird is done for. Elon knows that he can't save it and will have to file for bankruptcy unless he intents to burn his remaining fortune on it. So he's having fun now before pulling the plug.

Meet the crew of #Artemis II, NASA's first trip back to the moon.

The first woman, the first person of color and the first Canadian are among the humans headed there next year

https://theconversation.com/meet-the-next-four-people-headed-to-the-moon-how-the-diverse-crew-of-artemis-ii-shows-nasas-plan-for-the-future-of-space-exploration-203214