Adam @adam@librem.one

get yourself a girl who deletes tracking parameters from URLs she shares you

TIL how to disable CSS on firefox:

press alt
choose view
page style > no style

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.

I'm getting pretty confident telling people if none of the following #VPNs are well ranked on a ‘review’ site - drop the site ❌

- @mullvadnet
- @ivpn
- @protonvpn
- Windscribe

Sites with the best #privacy & #security reputation consistently have these as their top winners, and for good reason - they’re pushing the envelope on keeping you safe, without insane sponsor/affiliate deals to buy out websites.

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.