The only one I know about is tosback, but that seems to be a bit stale:

https://tosback.org/

“But where will my car live?”

It’s a case of Gell-Mann Amnesia.

Waiting on the platform for a morning train that was nowhere to be seen, he asked Meta’s WhatsApp AI assistant for a contact number for TransPennine Express. The chatbot confidently sent him a mobile phone number for customer services, but it turned out to be the private number of a completely unconnected WhatsApp user 170 miles away in Oxfordshire.

Ah yes, what else to expect from »the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use«.

Wallabag user here for 7 years or so, previous Pocket user, instapaper user before that. Wallabag is good. Not perfect but good. I’m a happy paying subscriber.

It has some challenges with some articles and content here and there, but overall it’s a good alternative. I think my last yearly subscription was €12, so also very affordable. It has a handy export function for individual items, and you can share individual articles publicly. Has an auto tagging functionality which is flexible and very useful.

The annotation feature is not great though, so if that’s important to you, then it might not be your jam.

I legitimately believe that if ActivityPub services had gained traction before the dotcom bubble, they would be the default today, and twitter/bsky/reddit etc would have to go above and beyond to convince people to used their siloed platforms.

Strong agree. Email is prolific because it is the proto social network infrastructure, and it has interoperability at its core. You have someones email, you can write them. Theoretically it doesn’t matter what email you send it from, you can send an email to any address in the world. There are limits to this these days, because of things like DMARC, DKIM, and SPF, which have been introduced because of shortcomings in the open protocols, but in its purest form, there are no barriers.

If ActivityPub had been around at the same time as email, it would be considered infrastructure the same way email is today. The online world would look different, but don’t neglect that industries are still finding ways to make money from email. There might not have been platforms like the social media silos we have today, but there might be an industry trying to milk ActivityPub for money.

I’m hoping this is the phenomenon that is the best chance for the fediverse’s future, because every time one of the platforms dies off some small percentage of the userbase switches to a fediverse alternative. And a protocol won’t fail like a private service will. So over time, the more often private services fail, the more users find the fediverse, the larger it gets, and the more people notice that it’s the most dependable way to go. It might take 100 years for a critical mass of people to figure it out, but I think in the long term, the fediverse will eventually be seen as “old reliable”.

I too subscribe to this hope. I always end up writing emails to people I haven’t been in touch with for a long time, and aren’t sure about which phone number, social network, or physial address they are currently reachable on. Which reminded me of this post:

https://my-notes.dragas.net/2023/09/25/25-years-later/

Email just (still) works. Can’t ask for more than that.

Ah yes, to prove they drive traffic to places, they funnel all outgoing links through themselves for tracking.

It’s great that Bluesky is gaining traction, but how sure are we that it won’t turn to shit before other relays come online and make it actually decentralised?

"Access Denied

Our apologies, the content you requested cannot be accessed."

Samesies. KeePass works great for me as well, storing it on a server so it’s accessible for both phones (using KeePassXC), and desktop using the web app for keeweb.info (app.keeweb.info).

I tried to like Magic Earth, but I haven’t gotten used to it yet.

Organic Maps is great. Although addresses can sometimes be a bit iffy to search for, unless you type them exactly as they are written. Probably also depends on where in the world you are searching.

Yes, thank you for adding that aspect. In general it behaves fantastically, but if a site misbehaves, you can disable it for specific sites by clicking the extension when on the page, and unticking the only box there.

I use Consent-O-Matic to automatically select “Reject all”. It’s an extension for both Firefox and Chrome, and I highly recommend it.

https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic

“I haven’t listened to this album, but I don’t like the instrumentation on song #3, and the way they play the drums.”

Install the Duck Duck Go browser, and sign up for the “App Tracking Protection” beta in the settings. Once you are enabled for the beta. Enable it in the settings. It acts like a VPN on your device.