Vincent Cloutier

Open source developer

Admin of bird.makeup and r.town

Github: https://github.com/cloutier

Public Key

npub1t9z7cu36dakk7g557a2c7dxmcce7zsrww5lz5t9vwqzxjz0g92nsg5q39v

NIP-05 Address

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs9j30vwgax7mt0y220w4v0xnduvvlpgph820329jk8qprfp85z4fcpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dscs7y9q

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1t9z7cu36dakk7g557a2c7dxmcce7zsrww5lz5t9vwqzxjz0g92nsg5q39v

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Last Notes

2026-04-06 21:03:00 UTC

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I was looking a bit at the downstream camera commits, and I was wondering why weren't the 4 lanes used from the get-go? Are there only 2 lanes connected on a librem5?

2026-04-02 01:44:07 UTC

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thanks for the pointers! I’ll review that thoroughly
What are the best thing that you think I should look at?

2026-04-02 00:21:35 UTC

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I'm probably going to send my fuel-gauge patches next and I'd like to send some of yours alongside it. A few that would be nice in the serie are missing a sign-off (a3aaadbc308d - a4d886fbfdd9 - 2df12cac0f86). Are you okay to send those? I don't mind adding the sign-off on your behalf if you confirm it's okay 😁

2026-04-02 00:16:27 UTC

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That was exactly the one lol. Very good first patch!
I ended finding something else debugging charging with a battery pack: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-usb/[email protected]/T/#u

2026-03-31 00:58:15 UTC

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do you mean the community/librem-5 channel? If so I’m in there already, just not active
I’ve done some more work: I’ve now rabased all the way to 6.19!
I have some interesting patches only in my tree about battery improvements and a trivial one about a null pointer in the USB-subsystem that caused an oops during shutdown that is still a problem upstream. Those are my best candidates and they don’t seem to be related to work you are doing.
https://rtownfiles.s3.bhs.io.cloud.ovh.net/media_attachments/files/116/321/071/266/592/390/original/dee965c9c511c29a.jpeg

2026-03-27 01:07:01 UTC

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ah nice! Still great learnings for me.
Looks like you have it pretty well handled. Is there some parts that would be worth it for me to look at and contribute, or would it be better that I look at other phones/other parts of the stack?

2026-03-27 00:49:37 UTC

I’ve finally gotten into something I wanted to try for a while, kernel development!
On my #librem5, I’ve managed to rebase the downstream kernel changes in 6.12 into the 6.15 branch. I plan to continue until I get it fully working, then I’ll rebase again to latest, then I’ll try to send patches to mainline it
https://rtownfiles.s3.bhs.io.cloud.ovh.net/media_attachments/files/116/298/388/184/164/908/original/c891322b98e1a0d7.jpeg

2026-03-18 22:47:32 UTC

Mastodon will now fetch replies from hacker.makeup! Coming soon on bird too 👀

2026-03-15 15:56:11 UTC

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Beautiful! That is exactly the pointers that I needed 🙏

2026-03-15 15:30:57 UTC

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Fascinating! That is correct. I guess I should change that. Do you know if many other implementation outside the threadiverse support that form too?

2026-03-15 00:18:38 UTC

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Still no luck with mbin and Lemmy, does anyone have any pointers for me?

2026-03-14 15:25:31 UTC

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Fixed! https://git.sr.ht/~cloutier/dotmakeup/commit/a7329a749569ce1339a66d834fb5283b9b5e3a2b

2026-03-14 00:50:41 UTC

Seems like @npub1ytn…7xlk is finally federating with Mastodon correctly! 😁

2026-03-07 19:46:01 UTC

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I just shipped some improvements. Let me know if you find other bugs!

2026-03-07 17:17:19 UTC

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Weird! My test request works... if you tell me enough to reproduce I will fix it

2026-03-07 16:48:17 UTC

Thinking of spinning up a Loops server. Should I?

2026-03-07 14:26:48 UTC

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if you want to try it out already 👀 https://hacker.makeup/

2026-02-24 02:53:04 UTC

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should the Linux kernel itself be included? https://lwn.net/Articles/1026558/

2025-12-16 04:38:53 UTC

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no, why?

2025-11-08 20:25:49 UTC

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Indeed!
Unfortunatelly I wasn't able to debug from that, I replied with the results if someone knows more https://todo.sr.ht/~cloutier/bird.makeup/39#event-434910
😔

2025-11-07 03:33:09 UTC

Seems Twitter has put cloudflare up… looking into it

2025-09-13 16:40:00 UTC

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if it’s implemented in a privacy respecting way, I would consider making the dotmakeup bridges contribute data to improve activityrank’s recommendations

2025-09-10 15:53:28 UTC

Pretty sure that is just a warmup before doing a folding phone, otherwise it would be a bit pointless https://kilogram.makeup/users/verge/statuses/DOZFhyckS4k

2025-08-25 22:07:25 UTC

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if you are on Linux you can disable that https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Discord?useskinversion=1#Discord_asks_for_an_update_not_yet_available_in_the_repository

2025-08-06 18:10:45 UTC

Looks like Instagram is getting reposts 👀 https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/324277/instagram-adds-reposts-friends-tab-in-reels-and-new-map-feature?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

2025-08-05 15:58:06 UTC

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I've made some tweaks if people want to try again!

2025-08-04 19:28:54 UTC

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Here is a failing Accept: https://paste.sr.ht/~cloutier/c4a1ef7aba10ba8198cfbde354d2d00d1aeaff6a
My current theory is that I'm dropping the "to" property from the original activity and Lemmy doesn't like that
Lemmy also seems to be the only implemention that cares about "to" in this context

2025-08-04 18:34:56 UTC

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I'm actually willing to expose this data if any implementation could render this in a useful way, not just mastodon!
And I don't think FIRES is quite what I'm looking for, as community notes are applied to posts, and not accounts

2025-08-04 18:25:35 UTC

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Thanks to everyone who tried! Seems lemmy is returning an error 400 when I send the AcceptFollow

2025-08-04 17:12:44 UTC

Lemmy users! Could you test if you are able to join @npub1ytn…7xlk ?
I have made some changes to be more compatible with Lemmy (in theory)

2025-08-04 15:03:49 UTC

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I'm starting to think that might be the only way... I was hoping there would be an implementation out there with something like a "moderation notice" or "admin note" directly on the Note object

2025-08-03 17:34:36 UTC

Is there a way to represent community notes that would feel native to the fediverse?

2025-07-21 15:35:20 UTC

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it was mostly to debug parsing of quotes on mastodon, but the problem I had was on QuoteAutorisation that I've since fixed
I removed quoteUri and _misskey_quote, but added back a tweaked FEP-e232 representation. I want it to work on the mobile clients I use, so I might tweak it again soon

2025-07-17 14:55:30 UTC

I've made a huge number of optimisations to kilogram.makeup over the last week, if you had problems following the accounts you wanted, now is a good time to try again!

2025-07-11 02:57:24 UTC

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a bit outside what you are asking, but a good validator!

2025-07-10 17:59:03 UTC

In today's episode of "Why did they think putting an ai assistant here was a good idea?", I present you Docker Desktop's new chat
https://rtownfiles.s3.bhs.io.cloud.ovh.net/media_attachments/files/114/830/226/490/269/626/original/fcacf1c720ac3650.png

2025-07-09 19:31:14 UTC

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oh nice!

2025-07-09 13:58:37 UTC

When are we going to get support for native quotes in @npub1lyn…ve6v ? 👀

2025-07-08 16:59:48 UTC

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Here is a few: https://r.town/@vincent/114778914267614858 (those might be cached on your instance with a previous version that didn't fully work with mastodon yet though)
also: https://bird.makeup/users/jani__gee/statuses/1941923902911099311
https://bird.makeup/users/adamscochran/statuses/1942314079479030032
Tell me if you need more!

2025-07-08 16:40:35 UTC

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I’ve implemented them on bird.makeup if that helps!

2025-07-07 14:14:17 UTC

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I'm getting errors on stamp validation in Mastodon, and I'm starting to think that might be the root cause, so I will make the switch anyway.
Also do you know if I will lose compatibility with some implementations if I remove the tag relation and keep quote, quoteUri quoteUrl and _misskey_quote?

2025-07-04 00:01:26 UTC

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I have confirmations of it working on Mitra and Pleroma, but not on Mastodon 4.4, does anyone have any pointers? #fedidev
https://browser.pub/https://bird.makeup/users/davidfowl/statuses/1939555328343085175

2025-07-02 14:52:06 UTC

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Thanks for the review!
I have made the changes you suggested, could you do another round of test?

2025-07-01 16:28:41 UTC

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cc @npub19yg…wysk I would like your input for mitra 😀

2025-07-01 16:27:21 UTC

I've just deployed the first set of changes to have proper activitypub quotes on bird.makeup, those exemples should (in theory) work on Mastodon 4.4 and others implementations that support those:
https://bird.makeup/users/davidfowl/statuses/1939555328343085175
https://bird.makeup/users/bigtechalert/statuses/1937857604488970603
https://bird.makeup/users/nntaleb/statuses/1937556442103288296
Can you all test and report back? I will fix any incompatibilty with any implementation #fedidev

2025-06-30 18:31:43 UTC

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Oh nice! I will be there!

2025-06-29 15:41:14 UTC

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It is very clear in the monitoring at the very least 👀
https://rtownfiles.s3.bhs.io.cloud.ovh.net/media_attachments/files/114/767/402/832/316/879/original/554558d7f693b00c.png

2025-06-29 15:38:25 UTC

I've introduced a little change today on kilogram.makeup! Just like bird, there is now a special day of the week where accounts not covered by the r.town boost or the Wikipedia boost are crawled.
For kilo, it's every Sunday, so you should see a lot of new posts today!

2025-06-20 17:04:47 UTC

I have made a change on how load is displayed on dotmakeup. It used to be how long it took to cycles through all accounts, but that started to make less sense since I started crawling some accounts more frequently than others.
Now it displays how fast the system is currently crawling (as of this post: 1092 accounts per hour for bird, 17 for kilogram and 4 for hacker). What do you all think?

2025-06-20 14:40:24 UTC

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I will also be upgrading to 4.4 as soon as the release candidate drop, and I will be able to start the native quotes on bird.makeup 👀

2025-06-20 14:38:24 UTC

r.town has been updated from mastodon 4.2 to 4.3! Everything looks good on my end, but let me know if something is weird for you

2025-06-03 15:42:12 UTC

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Curious why being KVM based is of value to you? I've never noticed really the hypervisor in all my career so far

2025-06-03 15:40:27 UTC

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It's because your server (mastodon.social) blocks bird.makeup.
It works on r.town and others
https://rtownfiles.s3.bhs.io.cloud.ovh.net/media_attachments/files/114/620/176/361/977/091/original/2f69476d94c50297.png

2025-05-29 20:32:38 UTC

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It's a bit hard with 160k followed accounts to know if everything everywhere is going all right, but everything on my dashboard look normal, and from my own usage too
https://rtownfiles.s3.bhs.io.cloud.ovh.net/media_attachments/files/114/593/019/585/863/558/original/55f1f60d6c26746d.png

2025-05-29 20:28:40 UTC

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There are stages of how fancy the crawl is, there should be frequent posts at 5 followers, and posts and replies at 12 followers. All account below that get the basic crawl of their most popular tweets. There is also a special crawl on mondays for accounts that haven't posted in a while.
If you have an account that should be crawled but isn't, I'd be happy to look into it

2025-04-27 22:37:44 UTC

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There is a death row you can visit too there!
It’s very spooky, but it’s also great historical preservation. I do recommend a stay there (if you are not sleeping alone)

2025-04-18 19:44:01 UTC

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Completely open to it, but there is no support in dotmakeup for following accounts on the fediverse, so it would be a lot of work to add that.
I would hope bridgy fed make an exception for us and optin all the domains of dotmakeup manually
Also outboxes are empty in dotmakeup, not sure if it would cause compatibility problems but it might

2025-04-17 15:02:53 UTC

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I’m hosting this instance with OVH (a French corporation), with their Canadian data centre in Quebec. It’s powered by 100% renewable energy, and they contribute a lot to open source.
I’m using their managed Postgres, blob storage and kubernetes and I’m quite happy so far

2025-04-17 00:29:53 UTC

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pretty sure at least 99% of all energy consumed is from PyTorch

2025-04-12 21:14:20 UTC

I have a little integration idea I want to do with https://fed.brid.gy/ , but does anyone know if there is a way to get all profiles that have opted-in?
I could alternatively use webfinger to test the thousands of profiles that interests me, but that feel very inefficient ...

2025-03-11 16:33:23 UTC

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Looks like they patched something!
In the past, whenever they came back from an outage, there was always something new that stayed broken, let's see what we find this time 👀
https://rtownfiles.s3.bhs.io.cloud.ovh.net/media_attachments/files/114/144/743/329/757/961/original/a642a2558e778437.png

2025-03-11 13:35:42 UTC

I'm still having a massive amount of errors following the twitter outage yesterday on bird. They might have changed something and I need to adapt, I'll look into it
https://rtownfiles.s3.bhs.io.cloud.ovh.net/media_attachments/files/114/144/050/611/490/532/original/9547bf010ba10a80.png

2025-03-04 22:49:16 UTC

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how long is it to rebase when a new version of Godot comes out?

2025-03-01 17:14:54 UTC

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That was effective! No rate limit error on search today so far

2025-02-28 22:20:41 UTC

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I almost forgot, there is also wikidata! Very useful to link accounts between all the networks (including the fediverse) and is also a good signal that the account is important.
Everyone can contribute upstream there, and it's useful for all sort of apps, including wikipedia itself
I wrote a bit already about that: https://git.sr.ht/~cloutier/bird.makeup/tree/master/item/src/BirdsiteLive.Wikidata/README.md

2025-02-28 22:09:29 UTC

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I have hope some activitypub implementations will use IPFS natively in the future, and then we would get this feature "for free"

2025-02-28 22:07:58 UTC

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If you are willing to contribute there, everything is ready on the bird side to make use of this!
There is one live instance doing this already, so it covers a very small proportion of bird's requests

2025-02-28 22:04:24 UTC

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Nitter is really hard, like professional sysadmin/cloud engineer kind of hard
IPFS would be this easy yes. I would have to add a few features to coordinate this though

2025-02-28 21:59:57 UTC

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It's possible! I have to worry about this kind of attack though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

2025-02-28 21:58:02 UTC

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There are 2 ways though that people can trustlessly contribute right now though:
- For bird: setting up a nitter instance and allowing me to crawl. Long story short, I can validate everything from the tweet ID, but I have to disable boosts for those accounts
- For kilogram: replicating posts via IPFS. This would allow me to prune my main ipfs server, but allow old posts to still resolve

2025-02-28 21:51:36 UTC

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The problem is trust. If I can't validate that posts are genuine, people are going to abuse it in all sort of ways.
I had this exact problem once with bird, where 5% of what I crawled was blindly trusted, and it was used to promote hate speech

2025-02-28 19:27:17 UTC

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I disabled mentions on kilogram for now, as they were using up all the profile lookup quota I have, leaving search always down. I will make it smarter and reactivate them only for accounts that are already cached.

2025-02-28 19:25:38 UTC

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And we are caught up with the backlog!
https://rtownfiles.s3.bhs.io.cloud.ovh.net/media_attachments/files/114/083/147/120/861/581/original/ee95b968051b56ac.png

2025-02-27 15:27:47 UTC

For those curious about the infrastructure we need to deal with the insane amount of snow that we get where I live https://kilogram.makeup/users/val_plante/statuses/DGaqonXKVmr

2025-02-24 23:58:03 UTC

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I figured a work around! IG crawling is working again 😁

2025-02-20 22:26:27 UTC

Uh, just noticed that lemmy and mbin's top level entry in a magazine are not "Notes", but "Pages". Comments are "Notes" like mastodon.
That might complicate the implementation of hacker.makeup a bit ...

2025-02-18 19:06:10 UTC

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I put forth a challenge!
https://github.com/azac/cobol-on-wheelchair

2025-02-16 18:06:17 UTC

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I have written a FAQ about most of those points: https://git.sr.ht/~cloutier/bird.makeup/tree/master/item/faq-opt-out.md
I can add to it if you have more questions

2025-02-16 17:55:55 UTC

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Thank you!
It's mostly reverse engineering work, looking at what their web interface or mobile apps do, then replicating that in my software. There is also figuring out how many requests they would let me do before rate limiting me. They often change things, and then I have to redo things again!
But especially for bird, I have amassed many alternative ways of doing that over time just in case.

2025-02-16 17:52:05 UTC

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Do you know with which platforms compatibility would be improved with just this change?

2025-02-16 17:44:18 UTC

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Do you think it would be useful if I added the "https://misskey-hub.net/ns#_misskey_quote" rel attribute to bird.makeup in QT right away?

2025-02-14 18:29:23 UTC

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they haven’t changed the name in French/canada:
https://rtownfiles.s3.bhs.io.cloud.ovh.net/media_attachments/files/114/003/657/230/786/524/original/f30048276faed5f4.jpeg

2025-02-14 15:39:38 UTC

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The most interesting addition is a special account @npub1ytn…7xlk . Unlike all accounts so far in dotmakeup that are "services" and show up as bot/user accounts in fediverse software, this is a "group". This means that fediverse links aggregator will show it as a community

2025-02-14 15:37:54 UTC

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You can follow any Hacker News user, such as redis creator @npub12er…g9yd or mastodon creator @npub1sq4…nnlm . Their posts and comments will show up just like for bird.makeup.

2025-02-14 15:36:35 UTC

The expension continues! After Twitter and Instagram, the next network supported by dotmakeup is the famous orange site, HackerNews.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/122137774

2025-02-14 15:19:06 UTC

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i have a aging kobo that I’m quite happy with, but I’m considering getting myself a PineNote too: https://pine64.org/devices/pinenote/

2025-02-11 15:39:51 UTC

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bird will federate alt-text if there are any, is there something that could be improved in this area?

2025-02-06 18:29:28 UTC

Looks like instagram broke something... There won't be any new posts from kilogram until the underlying lib finds a workaround: https://github.com/instaloader/instaloader/issues/2501
sorry about that

2025-02-03 18:40:52 UTC

I do believe Elon-only tariffs (Tesla and Starlink) would be quite effective in negociation with minimal side effects, especially if Europe does it too
https://mastodon.social/@verge/113941099411726677

2025-02-01 03:03:19 UTC

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you care way too much about those internet points

2025-01-25 20:07:50 UTC

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tldr: yes, only bigger account. Criteria for what is a big account will go down over time

2025-01-23 15:47:17 UTC

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When that IQ comes up, I like to refer to this @npub1tqh…72zz piece that hits hard: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39

2025-01-18 17:29:12 UTC

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Oui, mais vos follow aide beaucoup à construire le graphe pour que le crawling puisse être élargie à eux!

2025-01-18 17:24:15 UTC

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I would love for someone to build this!
You can use an AP viewer like https://browser.pub/ too with dotmakeup.
Having an auto-redirect like that to use AP software as a private frontend would be great

2025-01-18 17:18:54 UTC

New patreon update is out! https://www.patreon.com/posts/happy-2025-119419815

2025-01-10 15:35:59 UTC

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I can clearly see this trend from my bridge bird.makeup in the last week. There is a bit less than 50% less tweets posted on the accounts the fediverse is interested in. German (and Dutch) are a quite large fraction of the userbase
https://rtownfiles.s3.bhs.io.cloud.ovh.net/media_attachments/files/113/804/773/866/018/666/original/9df67b951c902406.png

2025-01-09 21:08:49 UTC

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I can either make the criterias more strict for an account to be crawled/updated so that the number of accounts is less, or I can put more ressources into the system (more servers, crawling accounts, etc)

2025-01-08 15:19:08 UTC

I guess I started working on kilogram at just the right time https://kilogram.makeup/users/zuck/statuses/DEhf2uTJUs0

2025-01-02 21:58:28 UTC

Optimal crawling time achieved
https://rtownfiles.s3.bhs.io.cloud.ovh.net/media_attachments/files/113/760/997/678/108/498/original/5f6b52fb21ec5742.png

2024-12-15 05:46:12 UTC

Look, a Twitter poll federating properly in the wild 👀
https://bird.makeup/users/timbeiko/statuses/1868081903074783678