July 6, 2023

Direct download link for Instagram's new 'Threads' Android app

Meta’s new microblogging app “Threads” (aka “Barcelona”) is not available on Google Play in Europe, due to the GDPR . This is actually a good thing, but also prevents research.

For those europeans, who have a research interest, here’s the direct download link for the APK on the Playstore, using the curl command (you can also copy the url directly into the addressbar of your browser, but the filename will be garbled in this case). The URL will expire in two days:

curl -o com.instagram.barcelona-489720145.apk -L "https://play.googleapis.com/download/by-token/download?token=AOTCm0T7ISAb-0YfGnOGkIediA_Qs1cjMAvZ-vQuLrB3ULumddqB3T376pnSU8uxZItCPs7JtSNNKX_4FZZS-8f609W9Rc0FdREg5kD3ALVY1UIIzu5tvz6ypmFrV6WZ62ptSgK6-Yp6Fo0SRDx0QaVnoGUtCsVahcQlo_WXrDWcflHFYdo8trp35_CHIeAlRVbEzH_bLvtsvivoItMDKFG0PxJsrpIUkrTyMwdDA6c80ixwkZo8wx1KBXTrq_YQOuypE6moeovREBVn9Svop1shvFJMKXQIGUyFSaB21wjdOghxvJ2DavIbVwXWLm-6tLKLAXVSjodmKHB7G9JOssNOcFJZmNlmCpddzQAL_ANAtOvTvvkq56aQL9xAPtoItZArtdkWh3GbnfEnwEt_4LCp_xSr6RGW2iAq&cpn=PmyVGwNoZKoc3WI7"

Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement of the app.

July 5, 2023

Who is Bluesky PBLLC anyway?

If someone would like to know everything about you, wouldn't you, at least, want to know who he is? Turns out that for a social media company, Bluesky is pretty defensive of its own privacy.
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July 5, 2023

The Bluesky Federation Paradigm

Taking a dive into Bluesky's recently published concept for ATP based federation and how/why it fails to work on purpose.
Full article »

July 5, 2023

Bluesky - AT Protocol vs. ActivityPub

A quick comparison between Bluesky's AT Protocol and Mastodon's ActivityPub
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July 5, 2023

Bluesky - Security made by Javascript Jokeys

A server backend written in Javascript? What could possibly go wrong?
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June 2, 2023

How to write a shell script for boosting Mastodon post from the commandline

When talking to a broad, english speaking audience on Mastodon, then that audience is clustered around three major timezones with 9 hours in between them. There's no single time during the day at which publishing a new post will reach everyone. That's where boosting comes in.
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May 31, 2023

What happens, when you have to move your Mastodon account to another instance?

They say, it doesn't matter which Mastodon instance you sign up with. You can still communicate with the entire Fediverse and when push comes to shove, you can also always move. Well, push came to shove for me and I had to move. So let's talk about the giant asterisk that belongs after both of those claims.
Full article »

April 26, 2023

What Journalists get wrong about Twitter an Mastodon

It's a bit like watching someone repeatedly getting conned into playing a shell game. But hey, what can you do, right?
Full article »

April 20, 2023

Fedimeister v1.2

Bugfixes:

  • Treat the apostrophe as letter like instead of punctation, so it doesn’t interfere with spellchecking.
  • Strip whitespaces from addresses copy&pasted into the signup field.

Changes:

  • Make highlighted text in rendered quotes look less like hyperlinks.
  • Reduce visual lag when pasting large texts into the composer.

April 11, 2023

Fedimeister v1.1

New Features:

  • Show the time of publication in a nicely formated tooltip when hovering over the text field in the composer.
  • Added ☰ Edit > Force thread creation to create threads with short posts.
  • Added ☰ Edit > Place Cursor to position the cursor at the start of a selected preview block.
  • When making a post, set it automatically as the one, that is being replied to.

Bugfixes:

  • Select the best matching dictionary for spellchecking, when replying to someone (Mastodon only hints the language, not the language variant).
  • Spellchecker should no longer randomly crash the application on Linux.
  • Quote Tweeting: text highlights were one character off to the right.
  • Quote Tweeting: fixed formatting of the alt text.