Mastodawn

Thom Slattery

@thom@indieweb.social

105 Followers

170 Following

1,093 Posts

Working with big tech professionally, but interested in small tech personally.

My Own Private Instance	https://tragically.social/@thomnottom
Personal Blog	https://thomnottom.com/social/

Thom Slattery Jan 20

David - Forking Mad Jan 20

Myself and my good friend @bumble (who runs a variety of server types on the fediverse), are joining forces to offer #hosting for #GoToSocial servers.

It's early days but we'd be keen to hear from anyone who wants to try running their own GoToSocial but doesn't have the skill, want, or equipment to run their own server.

The aim is to simply charge for running costs for the server. We will not take any costs from this (unless we end up with hundreds of them!). We anticipate a basic instance for one user (or a small handful) will be 5 euros per month and the charge is month to month. You pay each month in advance, and can cancel any time.

All you need is a domain name (or a sub-domain of your existing domain). We can help with this, or help you buy one for a few dollars/euros. We will handle all admin of the server.

Initially we are only looking for a few people to participate. If you are interested send me a direct message.

Thom Slattery Jan 19

Christine Lemmer-Webber Jan 19

We're coming to the point where decentralized social media contains the only structures we're going to have left that aren't completely controlled by hard-right interests

The one centralized holdout is Bluesky, which means either that's going to need to be decentralized, or it's going to be the next right-wing target over this year probably

Thom Slattery Jan 9

The Public Domain Review Jan 8

🥁 Announcing the Public Domain Image Archive! 🥁

We are very excited to share our new sister-project, the Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA), a curated collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright historical images, all free to explore and reuse.

Our aim is to offer a platform that will serve both as a practical resource and a place to simply wander — an ever-growing portal to discover more than 2000 years of visual culture.

Start exploring here: https://pdimagearchive.org/ @pdimagearchive

Public Domain Image Archive

Explore our hand-picked collection of out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse. This is a living database with new images added every week.

Public Domain Image Archive

Thom Slattery Jan 8

@tchambers Understood, that's just not good enough for me. You obviously have different factors to consider running a large instance.

Personally I'm pretty jaded with the tech community as a whole. It's probably best that I just avoid it completely.

Thom Slattery Jan 8

With the latest turn of events over at threads, it looks like I should probably move on from this server to be safe. I've been meaning to spend more time nurturing my own Mastodon instance, so I may just switch to a single account presence. The future of this account is currently up in the air.

Thom Slattery Jan 8

Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦Jan 7

Mark Zuckerberg, Recipient of World's First Rat Penis Transplant, Announces Meta Will Stop Fact Checking
https://thehardtimes.net/culture/mark-zuckerberg-recipient-of-worlds-first-rat-penis-transplant-announces-meta-will-stop-fact-checking/

#Meta #MarkZuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg, Recipient of World's First Rat Penis Transplant, Announces Meta Will Stop Fact Checking

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, medical pioneer who received the world's first experimental rat penis transplant, announced today that the social media juggernaut would stop fact checking.

The Hard Times

Thom Slattery Jan 8

@tchambers That is your decision to make, but I'm not interested in waiting it out. Their intentions have been made clear, so I will most likely either move this account or simply delete it.

Thom Slattery Jan 8

Martin Ralya Jan 7

The best time to abandon anything Meta touches was years ago. The second best time is today.

Thom Slattery Jan 8

Stop calling lies misinformation or disinformation. Just call them lies.

Thom Slattery Jan 3

GlastonBeny Jan 3

From Reddit

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@TheBreadmonkey meanwhile, over on #duckduckgo

@econads @TheBreadmonkey
Gad srsly what is Google doing?
They must think nobody actually needs real search anymore.
I've been training myself to add "-ai" to searches but maybe it's just time to make duckduck the default.

@grechaw @econads @TheBreadmonkey you can filter out the ai-crap from google by https://udm14.com/ but that doesn't hinder anyone to generate a fake trailer or, scourge of the earth, an article that uses all the right keywords but has no information at all (every time I look up if a second movie/season of something is comming)

&udm=14 | the disenshittification Konami code

A quick way to get an AI-free search without any extra work.

@jollysea @grechaw @TheBreadmonkey I tend to use Wikipedia for that

@TheBreadmonkey yeah, that's my first try, too. But sometimes the information just isn't there or it's unsure if it's up to date

@grechaw @TheBreadmonkey
I've not googled anything for years, dunno what all the fuss is about ;-) not that #duckduckgo is perfect, but it's certainly useable. I have turned off the AI summaries, but that's a 1 off cookie, not something I need to do every time.

@econads @grechaw @TheBreadmonkey DDG relies on Bing results, when Bing API was recently down, DDG also didn't work, whereas Brave Search is truly independent.

@niutech @grechaw @TheBreadmonkey
Not all:
"To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing."

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/

But I'm not trying to police anyone

Where do DuckDuckGo search results come from?

DuckDuckGo is an independent internet privacy company that offers a private alternative to Google search & Chrome in one free app.

DuckDuckGo Help Pages

Sir Osis of Liver 🇨🇦 🇲🇽Jan 3

@econads @TheBreadmonkey

I've been using the DDG browser and search for a few years. Generally happy with it.

Our work laptops updated to Win11, Edge, CoPilot and Google search set as defaults. It's just an awful experience.

Fortunately, it's not locked down so much that I couldn't swap to DDG.

@Sir_Osis_of_Liver @TheBreadmonkey do companies get paid by MS to do that? What's the motivation?

Sir Osis of Liver 🇨🇦 🇲🇽Jan 3

@econads @TheBreadmonkey

I'm not sure.

We've got about 30k desktop/laptop Windows installs. If there was a financial benefit, I'm sure they'd go for it.

@econads @Sir_Osis_of_Liver @TheBreadmonkey It could be good deals at scale for MS licenses, and/or that IT departments select the easiest/most commonly used programs/OSes as the standard because having to troubleshoot every possibility with people who would say the browser they’re using is a “Mac” can get pretty tedious.

@WhiteCatTamer @econads @Sir_Osis_of_Liver @TheBreadmonkey it's the latter. MS doesn't give you anything for setting those defaults.

@econads @TheBreadmonkey

Meanwhile, over on #kagi

@Atemu @TheBreadmonkey
That's interesting, compared to the other kagi screenshot, it doesn't actually give you info about 5. I guess there's some personalisation behind the scenes? I know you can configure some things.

@econads @TheBreadmonkey

Yup that's it. Wikipedia is boosted for me because it's a useful factual source in most cases.

If I was into movies, I'd also likely have blocked many rumor mill shites entirely, so they wouldn't turn up at all.
You can see two sites are blocked already but I don't know or care which.

What also makes these results more bearable is that listicles ("Top 10 leaks about John Wick 5" or whatever) are filtered out entirely without needing to block the sites manually.

@Atemu @TheBreadmonkey
I looked at using kagi and while I had my 100 free searches I was using it as a backup if I couldn't find what I wanted on DDG, but I wasn't using it often enough to justify paying the monthly fee.