one of those "make money online"/"internet marketing" type people just wanting to get the affiliate commissions from a pay-per-install network of the PUP bundler type.
Tor isn't such a great solution here, because too many sites discriminate against Tor users, in one way or another. Some impose horrible CAPTCHAs. Or block access entirely. Some allow access, and even logins, but don't allow account creation. And maintaining usable Google or Facebook login accounts via Tor is virtually impossible.
Using VPN services would be far more practical. Although some sites do discriminate against VPN users, it's much less common than for Tor users. The EU could of course block access to VPN servers, just as China has done. But some VPN services use obfsproxy, and so can piggyback on obfuscation efforts by the Tor Project.
No, having functional Google and Facebook accounts that they can use to anonymously mess with people.
Basically, you need clean IPs and mobile accounts. Tor and VPN exits don't work so well. Creating your own VPN in a VPS sometimes works. But I gather that the pros use botnet slaves with genuine residential IPs.
Good point. I bet, though, that creating an account there triggers heavy-duty authentication.
And that reminds me. I recently tried to create a ProtonMail account via Tor. But they wouldn't activate it without mobile and credit/debit card numbers. Ironic, no? And yes, I do get that many jerks have misused ProtonMail accounts.
Edit: I take that back about Facebook. Via the onion, it just wanted an email address to authenticate. I'm impressed.
It’s worth mentioning that this discrimination is sadly necessary. Tor amounts to a massive open proxy, and just about any service that requires accounts (and many that don’t, like IRC or image boards) looks down on open proxies as primary abuse sources.
As someone who has run both an image board and a decent IRC server in the past, it’s a choice between heavily scrutinizing tor connections or banning them outright.
I am impressed. HN does allow throwaway accounts, when necessary to post anonymously. And making that possible via Tor is admirable. There's certainly potential for abuse. I see occasional spam, and angry insults, but nowhere near as much as one might expect. Which suggests either that shadowbanning works well enough, or efficient moderation.
I downloaded all the floppy images from this archive, and found some interesting (from a historical perspective) documents on some of them.
Lists of computing equipment owned by the BBC in 1987, letters responding to what appears to be viewers who wrote in with questions, that sort of thing.
there are a few alternate web user interfaces that work with the Mastodon client API (which Pleroma also implements); halcyon and pinafore being two of them. To be more specific, Halcyon's UI is Twitter-clone.
Brutaldon is even more pared down skin (and offers an even more Web 1.0 brutalism beyond that): https://brutaldon.online/
Most of the skins redirect to mastodon.social on the Create Account link because they don't host the accounts themselves, they just offer views for whatever account(s) you do have.
Sorry, but that is not brutalism. That is just a badly designed page. Small grey font is pretty much the opposite of brutalism. So are small pastel colored buttons with rounded corners.
It looks like a bootstrap theme but with all spacings done wrong.
Brutalism is in the eye of the beholder, of course, and any talk of Brutalism on the web is an exercise in analogy given that the core mantra of architectural Brutalism was to stay "true to the materials" and for pixels it's hard to be "false" with them.
The variation of the theme that just uses HTML2/3-esque TABLEs and table borders is definitely more directly evocative of that spirit, stripping away CSS for just the brutal truth of classic HTML design. I tried to find a direct link to that version of Brutaldon's theme, but am not sure where to find one, and searching one's Mastodon feeds from weeks seems to be tougher than I expected.
Halcyon and Pinafore are both just front-ends for existing mastodon accounts (like brutaldon).
Pleroma is a different technology, but federates the same. As is Misskey; depending on what you're looking for in features either of those might do it more for you (or the glitchsoc fork of mastodon). (and theming is a thing, of course, regardless)
It's been posted here before, but http://fediverse.party/ is a nice little overview of the federated social web (over ActivityPub, I believe); https://the-federation.info/ is broader. Both have some small issues but are nice starting places.
My exact reaction. I have tried using Mastodon, but that thing is designed by engineers with no common design sense. Just sticking to browser defaults would be a huge improvement. It looks like something I should use to impress 15 year olds with.
i'm sure that if installcore supported linux, then the linux binaries would also be bundlers.