Notices by Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe), page 2

Topics I'd love to see at a fediverse conference:

- "Building a community on the fediverse"
- "Privacy and security for non-geeks"
- "The art of Mastodon bots"
- "Let's start an instance!"
- ...something else?

USER AGENT: Hey website, please don't track me

WEBSITE: Aha, you are one of the 0.5% of users who request not to be tracked. This is an excellent way to track you

WebKit release notes for Safari Technology Preview 75: https://webkit.org/blog/8594/release-notes-for-safari-technology-preview-75/

"Removed support for the expired Do Not Track standard to prevent potential use as a fingerprinting variable." Endlessly ironic that the thing that was supposed to prevent tracking has become just another vector for tracking 🤦♂️

Still, I think Mastodon has done more to make decentralized tech accessible than anything else I've seen. There are non-techies on the fediverse! There are people here who don't know what SSH is! That's a miracle.

I hope we continue doing this kind of good work and bringing more people into the humane, privacy-respecting, own-your-own-data world. It would be a shame if we succeeded on the technical front but failed on the human front, and people turned around and went back to the silos.

I can see why normal people just throw their hands up in the air about data privacy. I've put so much effort into this stuff, but instead of feeling like a super-cool guy in a spy movie, I feel more like a guy with a half-working phone and no decent emoji input

"Big Tech's problem is Big, not Tech" by Cory Doctorow (video) https://archive.org/details/decentralizedwebsummitmedia-2018-courtyard-2?start=509

I missed this when it came out a few months ago, but this is a great talk. I'm becoming more and more convinced that the problems of technology centralization can't be solved without antitrust. Tim Wu's recent book "The Curse of Bigness" also comes to mind here.

This is one of the reasons I'm still bullish on the web: at least with a website, you can install an ad blocker or a tracker blocker. With apps, though, it's kind of a black box.

It's also one of the reasons I'm glad I set up a Raspberry Pi with Pi-Hole (https://pi-hole.net/) this weekend. Amazingly it says it's blocked 9.2% of requests so far, which is impressive given that both my wife and I use adblockers on our web browsers. But of course phones and apps are another story.

OTOH Facebook deciding they're going to draw up a constitution for a governing body to decide what 2 billion people are allowed to say is definitely some dystopian shit. Like, don't you have to read Hobbes and Rousseau to figure out how to do that kind of thing

The question is whether Europe's quest for "digital sovereignty" will ever reach consumers, or if it'll just be something government employees have to put up with. Consumers just want something that works, and it's hard for European companies to compete with American companies that have all the data, mindshare, and resources.

I refuse to call gen-Z "iGen," because they're not an Apple product. Also naming a generation after a corporation reminds me too much of the "Pepsi Generation" campaign

To be fair, the *real* reason "turn it off and turn it back on again" works is more interesting than that. It's because systems are complex, and the more changes you make to a system, the less likely it is that the programmer foresaw the exact set of changes that led to whatever configuration it's in at the moment.

Programmers are pretty good at testing state 0 though (i.e. when you turned it on). So returning to that known state usually makes everything better.

Firefox Focus is migrating from the built-in Android WebView to GeckoView. Very cool! https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/09/focus-with-geckoview/

thank you Duck Duck Go

The other interesting thing about Brutaldon is that it doesn't seem to store any user data in the local SQLite database. I'm poking around in there and only finding the access token and session tokens.

So it seems to act as a simple proxy – fetches your data from the Mastodon API, then immediately forgets it. Good from a privacy POV!

Brutaldon is an alternative Mastodon web client by @gcupc that works without JS and is usable in the Lynx browser: https://github.com/jfmcbrayer/brutaldon

This looks really neat. I love the idea of multiple Mastodon web clients, each tailored to a different niche. Keep 'em coming!

#Pinafore v0.2.0 is out!

- new "Sorcery" theme by @mlcdf
- block/unblock accounts
- mute/unmute accounts
- CSP for better security
- fix emojos in CWs
- perf and UI fixes

Release notes: https://github.com/nolanlawson/pinafore/releases/tag/v0.2.0 https://toot.cafe/media/HoUCsRuVey9LKqTe-HY

F-Droid joins Twitter: 9 retweets https://twitter.com/fdroidorg/status/984786845530763266
F-Droid joins Mastodon: 217 boosts https://mastodon.technology/@fdroidorg/99852640003305252

Awww yeah 😎

To upgrade Pinafore:

1. Go to the app store
2. Accept 200 permissions
3. Download a 30MB binary

Just kidding! Refresh your browser until https://pinafore.social/settings/about says you're on version 0.1.2. #ItsJustAWebsite 😉

New blog post: "Introducing Pinafore for Mastodon" https://nolanlawson.com/2018/04/09/introducing-pinafore-for-mastodon/

It's been one year since I set up toot.cafe. Happy birthday, 🎺.☕️! https://toot.cafe/@nolan/1