~mayhair's blog

It's a blog, I guess.

Cool people

October 19, 2019 — ~mayhair

Cool people and organisations in no particular order.

Framasoft - services respecting your freedom
GNU - GNU operating system
Free Software Foundation - free as in freedom
Richard Stallman - father of Free Software
Mastodon - free software social network
Pleroma - similar to Mastodon, and it can communicate with it. Also free!
tilde.team - they host this website for me - for free! :D
Peertube - Upload videos freely
Cock.li - Free e-mail, as in freedom AND beer. WARNING: Contains some vulgar humour and offensive domains (fortunately with some innocent ones like airmail.cc).
Frama.link - Framasoft's link shortener
Gitea - self-hosted Git. Like GitHub but free
Notabug - Free Git!

Goodness me, how many times did I say the word 'free'?

tags: fediverse, free software, software, tech, freedom, free, libre

Fediverse instances to stay away from.

September 29, 2019 — ~mayhair

The fediverse is a great place to socialise. You can meet people of many different races and cultures and their opinions. You can express your own, and have civilised discussions and arguments about your own opinions. The fediverse is divided into many instances, or web servers to communicate with each other. To those familiar to centralised services such as Twitter, choosing an instance can be hard. Fortunately, I have made a list of instances you shouldn't consider when first signing up. Of course, this is my own opinion. If you don't like it, feel free to not follow it.

gab.com: It advertises itself as a place of free speech, with little to no moderation. This can sound good at first, until you realise that it can attract delusional members of the alt-right. And it certainly does. Due to their outrageous opinions which no sane person would want to hear, most instances have barred Gab users from interracting with them.
gab.ai: It's just an alternative domain for Gab.
banana.dog: From what I've read, it's a funny joke instance in which you post memes to get into the top. Not for serious socialising, though.
octodon.social: The owner has a wrong idea about Richard Stallman's opinions about Epstein. I was in favour of him, and she said something in the words of: 'alright fuck it you have 24 hours to get out of my instance' I have matured and changed my opinion on this. I see where these opinions come from, and I respect them.
awoo.space: It whitelists the instances which it federates with. It's a cool experiment, but in my opinion, it just limits potential for communication.
pawoo.net: Runs on an outdated version of Mastodon.
botsin.space: This instance isn't for humans; it is an instance solely for bots to live in!
newsbots.eu: Same as botsin.space.
kiwifarms.cc: Movitated by the same pressures as Gab, and therefore has a similar community.
Any GNU Social instance (e.g. gnusocial.no): GNU social has not been updated in a long time; therefore, expect some important features (like ActivityPub!) to not be implemented.

This list will be updated in the future.

tags: mastodon, stay, away, alt-right, toxic, fediverse, federation, social, network