605 private links
Trying to apply the idea of POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) to my own posting. Here I'll summarise my results.
Automatically tweet public links I add to Shaarli (this would be a very convenient solution). But did not work because Twitter now requires you to jump through hoops to get access to the Twitter API from within your own Twitter account! Most egregiously, there is no way to complete their application procedure without handing over and verifying your phone number. Not doing that, Twitter can forget about it.
I still liked the idea of using Shaarli as my canonical source, so to speak, so let's look into Shaarli -> Mastodon instead. Alright, that's awesome and works great (well, unfortunately my Mastodon instance does not render Markdown, but that's not shaarli2mastodon's fault - I'll just have to avoid using Markdown in Shaarli notes posted to Mastodon).
With Shaarli -> Mastodon working, let's explore whether Lond's Mastodon <-> Twitter cross-poster can tweet our toots.
And yes, indeed, that worked right away. All I had to do was authorize the app on both my Mastodon and Twitter accounts. It needs lot of permissions, but hey, at least its source code is public, and it's even possible to self-host it.
That's positively awesome! I can now select to post any Shaarli note to Mastodon, and doing so will automatically
cross-post the same to Twitter too. Well done, POSSE!
- micro.blog is perhaps a nice alternative to self-hosting, and allows cross-posting to Twitter, Mastodon, et al.
- github.com/AmauryCarrade/MastodonToTwitter is another software project, but may be broken (last commit over a year ago, with an open issue that looks worrying)
- https://github.com/renatolond/mastodon-twitter-poster
- https://github.com/bitkeks/mastodon-to-twitter
- https://github.com/yogthos/mastodon-bot
- https://p.xuv.be/how-to-transition-from-twitter-to-mastodon
- https://tantek.com/2023/296/t1/posse-syndicate-link-reply
- https://tantek.com/2024/173/t1/years-posse-microformats-adoption
Seems there is a new kid on the block: moa.
Fraidycat is a desktop app or browser extension for Firefox or Chrome. You can use it to follow people (hundreds) on whatever platform they choose - Twitter, a blog, YouTube, Instagram or even on a public TiddlyWiki.
So it's like a feed reader, and if you use your browser sync functionality, it will sync between your devices. Really worth trying out this concept, especially if you don't want to setup your own web-based feed reader. The built-in (and increasing) support for many non-RSS sources is also nice.
- No ads
- No need to create a Google account
- Tools for managing subscriptions
- Adds ability to listen only to audio
- No need for YouTube app in order to listen to videos on mobile (or use Newpipe on Android)
- No need to "ding" bell, just being subscribed is enough to receive all notifications
- No age-gate
- Dark mode (although YouTube has this now too)
- Free software (AGPL v3 license)
A good Firefox add-on is Privacy Redirect. Apart from handling Youtube can also redirect other services, and it also automatically rotates each redirect from a list of Invidious instances so as to avoid overloading any single one.
See Invidious Instances for a list of publicly available instances.
- "Small acts of resistance are all we need. Together, we make change", Yarmo Mackenbach
- https://reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/8wvazc/invidous_alternative_frontend_to_youtube/
- https://github.com/omarroth/invidious
Other Youtube front-end alternatives
- yt-dlp
- NewPipe (Android)
- PipePipe (Android), includes SponsorBlock
- yt-local , via reddit thread
Replacing Youtube altogether
Another approach is to replace Youtube with an open-source, federated video host service.
That would be PeerTube (see this blog post by LazyBear).
- https://fedi.video - a good place to get started with PeerTube, by FediThing
No coding knowledge required, very portable with Markdown text, and supports custom domains
Via Waxy.org
Images
- Creative Commons search engine that indexes over 300M CC-licensed images.
- Flickr Commons. An attempt to catalog the world's public photo archives.
- https://public.work - search engine of public domain images, via kottke.org and @holly_cummins@hachyderm.io.
- Openverse - search engine for openly licensed images, audio and more
- Unsplash. Fair warning, has started watermarking some photos.
- Pexels. Free-to-use (without attribution) stock photos, images and videos.
- Lexica - Stable Diffusion search engine. Search for images generated by the Stable Diffusion AI text-to-image model.
In related news
- https://www.flickr.org
- https://pechaflickr.net
- Google broke its image search. And hey CogDog, thanks for posting!
- https://cogdogblog.com/2022/12/flickr-fdn-thanks/
Text
- https://crowdview.ai - search engine that exclusively searches discussion forums
Scientific
- https://www.scienceopen.com/search (blog post)
- https://search.crossref.org
- https://scholia.toolforge.org (very cool - relies on WikiData, hosted on WikiMedia Toolforge)