ShittyKopper [they/them]

Look into opening an account on an Iceshrimp instance like https://fedia.social, or an Akkoma instance like http://pleroma.envs.net. Their APIs are an extension on top of the Mastodon APIs (and both support Markdown and should expose them to apps). Sharkey also has some Mastodon API compatibility but it’s quite broken and might require some odd workarounds to get stuff working.

That said, for rich text, parsing the HTML will be more than enough for nearly all cases.

epic megapost

(vanilla) mastodon does not have markdown, and content from other instances (marked up or not) get transmitted as HTML over the wire (and the mastodon API serves sanitized HTML to apps).

mastodon forks like glitch, and clones of the mastodon API like those on pleroma/akkoma and iceshrimp do serve the markdown source AFAIK, but unless OP’s looking to… idk, support MFM (which, on a non-web app would be difficult) I don’t really see the point in that.

mastodon doesn’t “discover” akkoma content and won’t show anything unless you’re following a user from there, which kinda sucks.

I mean – that’s how all of them work. Even Lemmy. Unless your instance administrator joins relays (which have tradeoffs between privacy / effectiveness of blocking) your instance is only ever aware of posts from followed people (and reply threads followed people are involved in)

(also MUCH lighter on server resources, compared to most other twitter-like alternatives)

Mastodon is just unusually heavy, really. Even Misskey & forks are lighter than Masto on the server side (preferring being bloated on the client instead)

Mastodon feels like a fucking funeral.

You’re clearly nowhere near the good parts, then.

In my experience, once when you find your way into the correct circles the microblog-verse makes the “shitposting” of Lemmy look like r/memes. I do agree that discoverability could be better though, it took me 4-5 months before I got the hang of it. And now I barely check Lemmy despite my Lemmy account being older than my earliest microblog account (under this name, anyway).

One important thing is that your instance matters quite a bit more than here. Starting on a large general purpose instance (especially if it’s mastodon.social) and just following Large Accounts and Nobody Else like most people recommend for some reason is just setting yourself up for disappointment. Instead, get on a smaller interest-specific instance (rule of thumb: the weirder the domain the better your experience will be!) and follow the local timeline (and on good software, the bubble/recommended timelines). And post stuff/interact with people. Don’t be that one person that does nothing but boost news bots and occasionally butt into replies of people asking rhetorical questions they already know the answer for.

(Perhaps Lemmy is better at news or whatever, I wouldn’t know as I block all news communities I can find – I just don’t see the point as all the discussion around most news ends up predictable, unproductive (not that internet communities necessarily need to be “productive”), and unnecessarily angry)

Also in a world with usable™ Misskey forks and Akkoma I think the limitations of Mastodon the software are really starting to show, and I urge anyone who’s been disappointed in Mastodon to try other microblog software. (Quotes are already a thing if you know where to look! So are emoji reactions, because people have more emotions than :star:)

the 0.19 implementation is so half-assed I genuinely think the Lemmy devs just don’t want that functionality but expected quite a lot of backlash if they outright said as much, so they decided to implement something that ticks the box in the “wanted features” list without having any effect

afaik it only blocks communities and explicitly lets users from blocked instances through

.world is unique in that because of its size it has kinda ended up being “Lemmy” to most people. I very much doubt the people posting porn on .world care about instances and federation and just treat .world as a centralized site

(talking about microblog fedi here, Lemmy/threadiverse is it’s own thing)

don’t do hashtags. hashtags (especially common ones like #memes) are overrun by repost bots and low quality garbage.

the trick is to be on a small-to-medium instance you vibe with (1k active users seems to be the sweet spot. anything larger than 2k I’d avoid. do NOT join any flagship instances like mastodon.social), follow fun people from your local timeline, and see who they boost. and follow up the boost chain until your timeline is sufficiently fun.

I wish I was in the us lol

sure let me just walk to a better country

hey wait why are there people with guns around me

it used to have it hardcoded in software but I believe they made it an instance option a bit before the reddit exodus

if you were to focus this on just Lemmy itself as opposed to the wider fedi (“Especially given that there was just an update allowing for individuals to block instances they don’t like” implies that’s the case) you already have nothing to worry about as you encountering a threads user here will be even slimmer than encountering a mastodon user.

threads is primarily targeting the microblog/personal side of fedi. the incentives and privacy expectations are quite different compared to this side of fedi

re active users: they’re a large open registration instance, they likely have a fair chunk of twitter people who joined during one of the many migrations and decided not to stick around.

so, are you paying for it?

I’m mildly worried I know (as in, am aware of their existence, thankfully not having interacted with them) who you’re talking about

well I just checked and while “sync contacts” did not turn itself on, “allow contacts to add me” did. there’s definitely something going on

They aren’t forced to do anything. Manifest v3 is just a part of the WebExtensions API (which is not a standard and is really just “whatever Chrome does except we find/replace’d the word chrome to browser”) which both Safari and Firefox chose to implement in order to make porting of Chrome extensions easier.

Before that, Firefox had a much more powerful extension system that allowed extensions quite a lot of access to browser internals, but that turned out to be a maintenance nightmare so they walled those APIs off (not a coincidence that Firefox started getting massive performance improvements after that, and extensions stopped breaking every other release) and decided to go the WebExtensions route. I have no clue what Safari was up to but I think they implemented it after.

If they don’t implement Manifest v3, extensions that want to work across multiple browsers need to support both the older Manifest v2 and the later Manifest v3, which would be a burden not many extension authors would want to bother with, which would make them just say “yeah we’re not supporting anything outside Chrome”. Firefox avoids this problem by extending the v3 API to allow for the functionality necessary for powerful ad blocking Google removed in v3 (webRequestBlocking) while also implementing the new thing (declarativeNetRequest) side by side, so extensions that want to take advantage of the powerful features on Firefox can do so, while Chrome extensions that are fine with the less powerful alternative can still be ported over relatively easily.

Firefox does have it’s fair share of extensions on top of the WebExtension API already (sidebar support for one), so adding one more isn’t too big of a deal.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

TLDR of linked gist: wayland is not X therefore it is bad. end of.

Wayland breaks Xclip: As you said it yourself, Xclip is an X11 application, so it doesn’t work on Wayland. Of course it wouldn’t work on Wayland. With Wayland, we’re trying to prevent what happened with Xorg from happening again, or am I wrong?

also, https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard. perhaps all OP (of gist) needs is a simple shim that can convert calls to xclip to wl-copy/paste? that doesn’t seem too hard to make compared to keeping X.org alive I’d say (perhaps they should try making it if it’s that much of a problem)

Wayland breaks screensavers: Yeah, that seems to be the case.

from the dev of xscreensaver at https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/wayland-and-screen-savers/ :

[…] Adding screen savers to Wayland is not simply a matter of “port the XScreenSaver daemon”, because under the Wayland model, screen blanking and locking should not be a third-party user-space app; much of the logic must be embedded into the display manager itself. This is a good thing! It is a better model than what we have under X11. […]

[…] Under X11, you run XScreenSaver, which is a user-space program that tries really hard to keep the screen locked and never crash. It is very good at this, but that it needs to try so hard in the first place is a fundamental design flaw of X11. […]

other people can comment on the parts they know about, these are two i know of off the top of my head

the rule of thumb here is that you should really just use one browser ad blocker. having multiple will conflict especially regarding anti-adblocker prevention (as uBO will try to hide itself and redirect to a “defused” version of an ad script and whatever other ad blocker you have will think that’s an ad and block it)

not entirely sure how well DNS ad blockers fit into this. there is a chance they could make your ad blocking detectable by blocking a request uBO intentionally lets through (possibly in a modified state), but as far as i’m aware there haven’t been too many issues stemming from combining DNS blockers with uBO and the likes.