When this happens, you may wish to avail yourself of some of the alternatives below.

Once you get here you're faced with trying options or even becoming disenfranchised. Switching to another browser is a prudent test, some have suggested pasting links into Incognito Mode tabs or logging out, while others have claimed that stock Brave Browser seems to humming along for them; and third party utils from among the list that follows:

Web based:

• Invidious
• Piped

Android (both are available at F-Droid):

• LibreTube
• NewPipe

Desktop:

• FreeTube ( Linux | UNIX | Windows):

Browser extension (a native, local, cross-platform solution):

• AdNauseam This last option is a simple browser extension that is apparently quite popular with folks, levying its own ethical pressure upon those who would force-feed you with data mined ad generation. The README file has some great information on the methodology incorporated.

On #Android, I haven't been presented with any of these foreboding pop ups warning me about blockers. I typically use #Brave or #Vivaldi Browser, they're stock, but I use the YouTube app more than I do any one of my browsers on my phones.

I also run the #DuckDuckGo “App Tracking Protection service”. This is NOT #FOSS, so your choices are either installing from the #Aurora or Google Playstore, yet there's no requirement to use the #DDG browser to enable this protection – it's not for your browsers though (even DDG), it is designed to work with pretty much everything on your Android EXCEPT browsers; i.e., almost all of your installed apps, seamlessly, and since most folks stream YouTube videos through the Google YouTube Android app, I surmise that it targets and obliterates ads in the app (I haven't confirmed the veracity of that, it's merely supposition, but it blocks zillions of attempts by installed apps to phone home).

I'm Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, personal observations, and concerns; other toolsets or applications that meet your needs, and why you may have chosen those particular types of tools.

I hope that helps!

I can be reached on Matrix at:

@tallship:matrix.org

via XMPP at:

tallship@jabber.org

and in the Fediverse at: @tallship@public.mitra.social

#tallship #privacy #Adblock

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Relatica is a new, refreshing, and promising cross platform #Friendica client in beta now.

#Relatica runs on #Android, #Linux, #Mac, and #Windows. It also has some welcome and ambitious goals on the roadmap:

Testers, packagers, and early adopters are wanted for the official beta program.

Relatica's developer is friendly, accessible, and responsive. The project enjoys an aggressive development cycle and has its own dedicated #Matrix support channel.

It's good to see a novel and dedicated effort to deliver a capable #desktop and mobile client that allows for #social engagement without a browser:

https://gitlab.com/mysocialportal/relatica/-/blob/main/README.md

For those here that aren't aware already, Friendica is one of the earliest and yet most modern and feature rich #Fediverse platforms, #internetworking with other protocols that enables you to do things like directly interface with #Diaspora and even the deprecated legacy silo networks too.

#Friendica has a pluggable addon system and provides direct support for multiple text formats and even direct linking of images in posts.

There's really just too much to list. If you're wanting a feature complete platform for #publishing, #microblogging, #news, #RSS, social engagement and more then Relatica is definitely worth trying out!

If you're interested in trying out Relatica's ease of use and features then you'll need to have a user account on a Friendica server.

You can self-host or get yourself a free Friendica account here:

https://Friendi.ca

I hope that helps!

I can be reached on Matrix at:

@tallship:matrix.org

via XMPP at:

tallship@jabber.org

and in the Fediverse at: @tallship@public.mitra.social

#tallship #FOSS #Relatica #ActivityPub You can haz #Cheezburgerz! 🍔

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Fresh out of the oven is #Takahē, introducing a very interesting basic functional motive for development and delivering a beautiful #UX. It also derives inspiration in the form of its #mascott from a species once thought extinct for about a century.

That is, until a single man obsessed with the saga of this large, flightness bird since his early childhood, endlessly sought out and eventually rediscovered it was actually extant 75 years ago through his tireless efforts.

In recent years, and not without some particularly problematic attempts in the management of this #endangered_species, the population of these magnificent birds has more or less stabilized at around 100 members living in the wild, thanks to the committed efforts of a government sponsored #refoliation, hatching, and rearing program; in conjunction with a comprehensive scientific tagging, tracking, and monitoring effort of those members released into the wild alongside the wild-born members of the #population.

The software project itself has struck me as rather special too, and not just for its two functionally unique characteristics amongst other #Fediverse platforms – first, and similar to name based #SSL hosting on #HTTP servers with #SNI, Takahē provides multi-domain virtual hosting capabilities to #ActivityPub – this is huge, and opens the door for for even the casusl home self-hoster to provide #turnkey #SaaS offerings to their friends and family members in the form of small and #single_user “virtual Fediverse server instances”, in consumer based home #LAN environments – let alone the potential for commercial hosting endeavors.

To my knowledge, *this is the very first time* this novel approach to Fediverse networking over ActivityPub has been broached.

https://jointakahe.org/

If you hurry, you might still be able to secure for yourself an account in their limited beta program.

Go ahead, you can do that now, I'll still be here when you get back 😎

And as if that alone were not enough to revolutionize the paradigm and dynamic of the Fediverse, Takahē also introduces multiple account (alt) identities for each user user account on the server. This can only be described as freaking groundbreaking!

A single user account for a person might be the base for say, both @userone@SLD01.TLD01 AND @userone@SLD02 .TLD02 AND @usertwo@SLD02 .TLD02 – that, at least to me, can only be described as, “The Bees Knees”.

I'm sure that many will cite, and of course it is not only possible but quite likely, that this will lower the bar for abusive actors to engage in shenanigans. However true as that may be, such potential (and existing practice) exists already within the Fediverse so the ease with which bad actors will avail themselves of such toolings only is only trivially simplified, not introduced; besides, complaining about such a thing is irrelevant – the cat is already out of the bag.

Indeed, there are already other Fediverse server platforms (such as the Hubzilla (ZOT) and Misskey families of forks and variants that already support the creation and management of multiple identities under a single account anyway – but Bringing the SNI shared hosting experience into production with a single Fediverse server instance is truly unprecedented in Fediverse space.

There's a lot more. Did I mention the beautiful, and exceedingly intuitive UI? Of course I did!

There's another corollary that I alluded to. Did you miss it? It was right there, before your eyes.

Yes, there's a metaphor, craftily scripted between the lines of everything you just read (that is, if you didn't tl;dr).

The impetus for much of #decentralization (DeSoc) and the #Genesis of the Fediverse is arguably the notion of what was indeed a #decentralized #WorldWideWeb over the fully decentralized #Internet, having falling victim to capture by special interests – the #deprecated, #proprietary, #privacydisrespecting and #legacy #monolithicsilos – owned, spawned, and managed by mega surveillance-capitalism #data_mining corporations.... IOW, the so-called, Sunnyvale Syndrome.

This effectively killed of much of the notion that there even still existed an independant, #distributednetwork of services and sites truly belonging to the #individualparticipants, i.e., average #schmoes like you and me.

For sometime now, many have even claimed and argued that the kinder, friendlier #web of days gone by, where small #communities of #people and #websites belonging to #individuals and small businesses were actually #extinct in reality – with only those well heeled analytically correct, SEO optimized, #subjugated websites and #chattel in the form of people that had sworn #fealty to their lords and masters remaining. #Apple, #Amazon, the #Google and #Faceplant having long since taken #possession of their souls and #identities.

It's dark, so incredibly dark. And you have awakened to find yourself at the bottom of a well that you apparently have fallen into. There's plenty of water, you're knee deep in it, and a voice from above booms aloud that food will be delivered so long as, “It puts the lotion on its skin!”

And in a manner of speaking, following an “Internet century” (think, 'dog years') of a #dystopian #feudal Institution where Homo sapien drones existing in #LordsandVassals lockstep, told what to think, how to believe, where to shit, and when to wake up and punch the time clock, had completely replaced the actually extinct human race... Well?...

Fast forwarding to the scene where...

Some awkward little child in a dimly candlelit bedroom, many children, truth be told, consumed with the dreams of, and empowered with an obsessive belief that, a world where real, unique and independently diverse human beings actually existed, grew up and many years later rediscovered that they really did still walk the earth.

Kinda like the true story of the Takahē. And we too, are beautiful.

I'm leaving the rest for you to discover for yourselves, and look forward to many discussions on this invigorating topic. In the meantime, you can follow:

@takahe@jointakahe.takahe.social

I can be reached on Matrix at:

@tallship:matrix.org

via XMPP at:

tallship@jabber.org

and in the Fediverse at: @tallship@public.mitra.social

I hope that helps! Enjoy!

#tallship #FOSS #virtualhosting #multipleidentity #DeSoc #SunnyvaleSyndrome #AOLEffect

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Oh my goodness!

Okay first of all, I use #Matrix and #Jabber – #XMPP w/ #OMEMO, primarily.

I typically don't even regularly give out my email address nowadays, and more and more over the past four years or so, find myself publishing a #Fediverse address for myself too as a contact point.

Most often, if you ask me for my #email address I'll give you my Matrix address.

If someone wants to email me then I figure they can get that from my #PGP fingerprint or #Keyoxide.

If they don't know what a #keyserver is or where any of them are located then I just figure they're to dumb to use email.

Yes. As a technologist, I'm at times, rather arrogant, opinionated, discriminatory, and condescending... But only sometimes. The rest of the time I'm patient, attentive, empathetic, and accommodating.

Basically, if i know you don't know shit I'm a nice guy, yet if you pretend to be an all that jazz hipster know it all, then it's quite likely you'll find that I'm pretty much a full on dikhed. Spelled just like that too.

Beginning in the later eighties I think, and then the nineties they called us #BOFH. That's an acronym for someone who might already have forgotten more than you will ever know. I knew a few old Mainframe engineers with Honeywell and IBM when I was a young programmer – those guys were Gods and could tell you how many wraps of copper to make around a toroid if you had an emergency and needed to make an in the field replacement of your memory – Gods. #SuperFreakyGeeks, having already, back then, forgotten more than you or I will ever know.

They called me #Whizkid, coz I was learning shit that they were never gonna bother with – they're gonna retire soon in Mexico with boats, babes, and beers.

But I digress. I do that.

Back to secure communications...

When it comes to Signal, I know a lot of you really like it. I have little use for it. It bleeds my DID and farms everyone's contact databases – “bing! Ex stalker bitch girlfriend just joined signal. Say hello!” What the fuck?

Well I guess she's still got me in her contacts lolz. Fuckin' bitch.

Ummm... Yeah I'll pass.

I actually only use Signal with people who already have my #DID (phone number) anyway.

Recently, a colleague flew a cray cray route to Thailand, via #LAX to #NYC, then #Qatar. Signal works on jetliner's #WiFi too, and isn't dependant on cellular services.

Good choice, but I'm still wondering why his “safety number” changed after he departed #New_York and before arriving in #Thailand – he neither reinstalled nor switched to a new device. But that's another matter.

Sounds a little cloak & dagger fishy to me.

Anyway, I hadn't actually used #Signal in a while, and left it muted for a few months.

To my surprise... #Stories! Yay! Stories!

Wait, what are Stories? You mean like #YouTube or #InstaSPAM? And I'm assuming like they have in #Whaaaasup (never used it, never will)?

Ummm... I just tucked that little nugget of, I guess, good news away, not really knowing even how to process news of the introduction of such a useless fucking feature.

Until now.

Without further adieu, I defer to @how@ps.s10y.eu , one of our more prominently distinguished members in the Fediverse community, for his novel, clever, and appropriate recommendation:

https://ps.s10y.eu/@how/109308591992363124

#tallship #FOSS #communications #privacy #shenanigans

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Moving that old white elephant in the room.

There's been a lot of talk lately, and speculation, about the #Fediverse. Yet for the most part, only with respect to a single brand of server platform.

What I find particularly odd about that, is it's a rather lackluster server platform (especially considering the hefty system requirements) with an extremely limited feature list. Mastodon servers have a hard coded default character count limit per post of only 500 characters – more than Twitter, but not often enough to get a complete thought out with a link to somewhere else, or engage in a conversational thread, and certainly nowhere near what you need to post a news article, holiday recipe, tutorial, HowTo, or movie review.

As if a paltry 500 character limit isn't bad enough for this resource hog, virtually every other Fediverse platform provides for sensible , and configurable message lengths with common defaults of 2000, 5000, or more; most support #Markdown, and other ubiquitous text formats like #LaTex or #HTML, and some even have built in #WYSIWYG editors – like #WordPress, #Hubzilla, and #Drupal, with big players like #Imgur and #Tumblr already looking forward to their official Fediverse launches soon.

When those latter two giants arrive on the scene, the world of social networking will truly be interconnected, having achieved critical mass. It will be a revolution, a juggernaut toppling the deprecated, legacy monolithic silos that have so insidiously subverted and subjugated the masses like chattel. But I digress.

Other Fediverse platforms have offered the ability for people to edit their own posts for a long time, some for years, yet mastodon enabled this capability less than a month ago. It lags behind most other Fediverse platforms in several other ways too – groups, marketplaces, federated chat, and several other often requested functions are all but ignored by that platforms' developer while other Fediverse servers enjoy active and ambitious development cycles with new feature releases.

So considering it is so lacking in basic functionality compared to the other more prominent contemporaries, I've assembled a curated list below where you can evaluate and testdrive others for yourself. I've included links to some of the most darling up and coming projects like #Foundkey and #Quanta, that scale to thousands of users, and if you truly want an even smaller, minimalist Fediverse platform I've included #MicroBlogPub too. There's a couple of web tools including databases so you can search for even more platforms, instances, and compare statistics.

Choosing from the list below, you can join existing instances, self-host your own, or even have a professional #hosting_provider do it for you – simply pick a #turnkey provider where in just a couple of clicks your new fully managed Fediverse server will be online in only a minute or two!

There are literally free and privacy respecting Fediverse platforms to replace everything from #Faceplant, #Twatter, #Reddit, #YouTube, #twitch, #InstaSPAM, #Spotify, #Quora and so very much more!

And most are so light on system resources that you can run then on an old laptop or #Raspberry_Pi in your home.

Without further adieu, here's a list of [some of] the most prominent Fediverse server platforms in operation.

https://JoinTheFedi.com

https://Soapbox.Pub

https://Btrf.ly

https://JoinPeerTube.org

https://Mitra.Social

https://Epicyon.net

https://join.misskey.page/en-US/instances

https://akkoma.dev/FoundKeyGang/FoundKey

https://Pixelfed.org

https://Friendi.ca

https://Quanta.Wiki

https://FediDB.org/software

https://WriteFreely.org

https://funkwhale.audio/en_US/apps

https://microblog.pub

https://socialhome.network

https://hubzilla.org

https://owncast.online

https://join-lemmy.org

#tallship #FOSS #Soapbox #Rebased #PeerTube #Mitra #Quanta #Pixelfed #Epicyon #Friendica #WriteFreely #Plume #FunkWhale #MicroBlogPub #Socialhome #GotoSocial #Owncast #LoTide #Lemmy #ActivityPub #Privacy #DeSoc #Federating #Decentralize

I hope that helps! Enjoy!

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Joining big #Fediverse servers does little to alleviate the #twittermigration and #twitugee problems.

Here's what does:

https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/Linboard/status/1603598950593744897

#tallship #FOSS #ActivityPub #smallweb #self_host

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