You probably should not use link shorteners, here's why:
- All links on Mastodon count as 23 characters no matter how long they really are. There is no need to shorten links on Mastodon, it won't save you any space.
- Link shorteners endanger privacy by allowing click tracking, and by hiding what is actually being clicked.
- Shortener providers will shut down, breaking all their links. e.g. Google's shortened links will all show 404 errors from September: https://chaos.social/@root42/114929876895398208
There is a counter-campaign to call the payment processors and demand they reverse the censorship, see here for who to call and write https://bsky.app/profile/meltingcomet.com/post/3luqlzgxkz222
A lot of these payment processors are headquartered in California. If you're a vendor that's been discriminated against (for example, if you're an LGBTQ artist whose content has been censored) you can file a civil rights complaint at https://calcivilrights.ca.gov/complaintprocess/
New California state law may also be needed to require large payment processors to accept payments for any legal business, similar to how a utility or railroad have to serve everyone. Talk to your state legislators. 4/
HTML day, Ottawa edition 🍁
August 2, 2025
12pm-5pm
Brown's Inlet Park
Come hang out and write some HTML!!!
More info ➡️ https://html-day-ottawa.vercel.app/
Not in Ottawa? Other locations + online event here: https://html.energy/html-day/2025/index.html
If people want to do something about the itch.io thing, a number of us engineers, artists, and community members are gathering together to plan for and build a real alternative that's genuinely resistant to this kind of censorship in a way centralized platforms with singular payment processor relationships simply can't be
Join us! We need all the help we can get.
Every little website is being pushed onto Facebook thanks to the computer illiterate duckheads in UK Parliament. We'll played MPs, people are much more vulnerable on Facebook you cuckwombles 🤬
open up any program
immediately have to go through a needlessly complicated series of steps to try and disable all of the bullshit
As a Meta employee, I can honestly tell you what we know, and I do not know how we obtain all of it.
* Your full name
* Your full home address
* Your phone number
* Your e-mail
* Your government ID
* Your consumer report history
* The name of every family member
* The name of every friend
* The name of their family / friends
* Your marital status
* If you are faithful to your partner
* Your work history (all of it)
* Your education history (all of it)
* Your travel history (going back years)
* Your birth gender
* Your gender ID
* Your sexuality
* Your sexual preferences
* How often you're having sex
* Your partner's details (all the above)
* Your political ideology
* Your involvement with any group
* If you protest, we know
* If you're unhappy, we know
The amount of information we collect on you is insane. And we do it all for supposedly marketing and yes, we help the government since they have access to all this too.
So when someone says they want to avoid META or GOOGLE - respect.
Explicit guidance from my boss that even though persons A and B are best and fastest at doing the task, we're going to use persons A and C and deliver it slower.
This is so that C learns and takes some of the pressure off A and B for later. Person D is queued up to for this later in the year.
We are choosing to deliver software more slowly so we can spread the knowledge out and not burn out two very good engineers. I never thought I'd work in a company like this.
We're experimenting with federated geosocial features in Bonfire, free from surveillance capitalism.
Check into your local community garden. Add location to mutual aid requests. Find tools nearby.
Imagine your local fablab or community center sharing check-ins, calendars, events, opening hours - all federated. A living hub for what's happening there.
🔧 https://github.com/bonfire-networks/bonfire-app/issues/1444
This unlocks new possibilities for local organizing, let's explore together 🔥
Still get nightmares about the effort I had to put into doing multicast UDP over Android wifi hotspots.
Per WaPo: U.S. state and federal government agencies have already been breached by the SharePoint zero-day bug. Commercial sector also affected. Tens of thousands of SharePoint self-hosted servers around the world at risk.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/20/microsoft-sharepoint-hack/
Occult Enby that's making local-first software with peer to peer protocols, mesh networks, and the web.
Yap with me and send me cool links relating to my interests. 👍