Hey, how’s it going? Are you still working on it?

Sorry for this huge delay, sometimes RL takes over… I don’t know how relevant it still is. I’ll try anyway.

but if there is some way for people, posts, communities, servers, to opt out then ok.

I think this could pose an issue. Many people in the Fediverse are very sensitive about informed consent — which cannot be satisfied by any opt-out mechanism. This is an issue for every bridge/search service, because with opt-in you will have way less users. I strongly recommend to go for opt-in however, you will be starkly criticized otherwise.

I’m wanting to do this open source, which means anybody can take it, remove the check and scan everything. What are your thoughts about that?

Yes, anybody could do that, or build something from scratch, but will meet strong opposition in the Fediserve, as we’ve seen more than once.

If you know how to query servers, communities, posts or comments on that topic I’m all ears, I’m only doing 50% of that today BTW.

Can’t help here, sorry.

On a side note, where is your 0xCAFE come from? Is it like the stack overflow/ memory error checks like 0xDEAD(or 0xDEADBEEF) and so?

Nope, just a nerd who likes computery stuff like hex numbers and, obviously, coffee. No technical magic number I know of (maybe there still is…?).

Maybe you want to try the Tree Style Tabs or Sideberry extension.

oh that’s really cool!

Suuuuper late answer, sorry. It is working perfectly for me (FF 122), I’m using Firefox exclusivery. It can be slow sometimes though and take several (tens of) seconds for the web application to load.

My recommendation? No. Don’t.

I’m an ex Windows user, current Linux and Mac user. Keyboard shortcuts on Linux are much closer to Windows conventions compared to macOS. I wouldn’t recommend using a Mac keyboard with Linux. I’d only recommend it if you want to use both Linux and macOS with the same keyboard (you will be happier in this case, because using macOS with a Windows keyboard sucks, vice versa).

If you don’t like the Windows key design, get a keyboard with a custom one.

For browsing on the desktop, I strongly recommend https://phtn.app!

I don’t know if it does everything you need, but pinning a tab prevents it from unloading AFAIK.

• Firefox (often preinstalled)
• Thunderbird
• Code
• FreeTube & Stremio
• Apostrophe
• KeePass
• Nextcloud
• Syncthing
• yt-dlp

The search is abmyssal in my opinion. I can’t reliably paste links I’ve found elsewhere — always have to manually change it to match the expected community syntax. I only every use it if I have to, and then I resort to search for the community of interest, and use the community view to find a post I’m looking for. Not suited for discovery in my experience.

It may have improved lately though, I wouldn’t know since I’m not using it much.

That’s a long list of changes, wow.

Personally, I’m not considering Vanilla OS just yet. It does too many things in a custom way. I am however keeping an eye on the project, since they have interesting ideas and they’re making progress in the area of immutable distributions (which will be the future I figure).

I second the recommendation to use NTFS. I don’t have the same use cases as OP, but in my experience it works really well. Back in the days when I was using Windows, I had a system and a data partition (i.e. personal files, pictures, videos… you get it). When I switched to Linux, I kept my data partition and just mounted it on my Linux system. I started with dual boot and didn’t have any issues. No need to manually install a NTFS driver these days.

That’s a couple of years ago and my secondary SSD’s still that same old NTFS partition. Thought about moving to a Linux native filesystem, since I don’t use Windows anymore, but never had an actual reason to do it.

oh, Good luck with that. Make sure however to respect the users privacy and indexing preferences. People in the Fediverse are very privacy consious and not everyone likes their post scraped and indexed.

I’d start with the Mastodon docs, it’s a solid resource to get started.

While this chart certainly shows how dominant mastodon.social in the Fediverse is, I like this chart. It also shows how diverse the Fediverse is. For any other social network this graph would be a simple circle. For the Fediverse it shows 38 different servers, and apart from mastodon.social, the distribution seems quite fair.

Very good!

Biggest follower count.

I think drive-by (leaning towards off-topic) comments can and should be moderated by the community mods.

It’s not in the linked article, but it was part of it in the beta release notes. Now it’s on the dedicated Android release notes page (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/android/122.0/releasenotes/):

• Firefox for Android can now be set as the default PDF reader.
• Firefox for Android now supports enabling Global Privacy Control. With this feature, Firefox informs websites that the user doesn’t want their data to be shared or sold. This feature is enabled by default in private browsing mode and can be enabled in normal browsing in Settings → Enhanced Tracking Protection -> Tell websites not to share & sell data toggle.
• To reduce user fingerprinting information and the risk of some website compatibility issues, the OS version is now always reported as “Android 10” in Firefox for Android’s User-Agent string.

Side note: in recent versions of Firefox you can use right click → Copy Link Without Site Tracking to get a clean version of the link without any tracking paramters.

I second the recommendation for Tree Style Tabs, however Sideberry did work better for me (don’t recall why, sorry).

One downside is that they don’t hide the horizontal tab bar on the top. AFAIK you can manually hide it by editing the userstyle css file.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/

Personally, I’m not interested in the type of posts you mention. However, I don’t mind it. In general I think it’s great to tell the world if you ditch Windows for Linux, because it shows other (Windows) users that they can do it, too.

Though I have to agree that for a dedicated Linux community, it doesn’t add too much value. If I think a post is a bad fit for the community, I vote it down.

Thanks for not only posting your issue, but also updating with newly discovered information. I wasn’t aware that uBlock can prevent caching.