One thing I really love about seedy anime websites and YouTube mp3 converters is like. They actually do what they say they’re doing. But they WILL try to trick you into downloading a virus. Like it’s almost just a greeting at this point. I try to extract a song from a YouTube video and it says free VPN installer tonight perhaps? Free VPN installer tonight queen? And I say YouTube-mp3 converter you sly dog, you know what I’m here for. Show me the goods. And YouTube-mp3 converter says ahhh you got me, no getting one over on you. Thought it was worth a try tho. Here you go king x

Guys, it's time to drop Google.

Google isn't the only search engine in the whole internet, there are others! And we need to diversify our search engine usage or we're gonna end up where we were a decade and change ago with the Internet Explorer issue. We can't let a single brand monopolize everything! This is why Google Search can afford to suck so hard: because people use it regardless! And there are alternatives.

A little bit about search engines, there are 3 types: crawlers, which work by scraping the web and developing their own indexes; metas, which get their results from the crawler-type search engines and therefore depend entirely upon them; and mixed, those which have their own (small) index but also pull results from the crawlers.

Right now, there are a couple of independant crawlers apart from Google, Bing (from Mycrosoft) and Yandex (the Russian one): this are Mojeek and Wiby.

Supporting independant crawlers is the easiest way to fight the shittyfication of the internet.

Mojeek.com is an independant british search engine with its own growing index commited to fighting internet censorship. It's small, and therefore it's usability isn't as good as that of the Big Three, but it doesn't censor, it's fairly respectful of people's privacy, and it doesn't drown you in adds. For those old enough to remember, it's a lot like early 2000s Google: you can find what you need, but if you write "dig shelter" instead of "dog shelter", that's what it's gonna search for. That said, please try to use it and support it as much as you can before we end up entirely dependant on Google, Bing and big corps adds. [click here to go to Mojeek]

Wiby.me is a new indie project that is literally dedicated to bringing back the old-school web. It's goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. So, for those of you who can't find any answers to technical questions beyond highschool level because Google buries them under a gazillion commercial sites and other meaningless shit, keep an eye on this project! It has a lot of potential. And, if you know of any personal websites that have great stuff but have been murdered by Google, you can go over to Wiby and submit it to their index. [click here to go to Wiby]

Aside from those, there are also meta search engines you can use to ween yourself off Google and search for random, day to day stuff.

Qwant.com is my go-to here—it has its own index and pulls from Bing, has relatively little censorship, and is fairly private. This is the one I use on my phone for everyday stuff. [click here to go to Qwant].

Historically, DuckDuckGo has always been a go-to for those who want a search engine that respects your privacy and doesn't censor. Personally, I've never been a fan, and there have been a LOT of scandals in recent years. It supposedly has its own index and pulls from Bing, much like Qwant, but I don't know. I just don't like it. Still, I've added it here for completeness' sake.

If you have Firefox Mobile browser, you can set any of these search engines as your default search engine and you can also add the others as secondary search engines and switch quicky from the navigation bar. If you don't have firefox mobile though, what are you doing with your life??? Go get it!! It is So. Much. Better. You can have add blockers and watch YouTube add free, for free! You can have reader mode and dark mode add-ons! You can have the world oh my goshhhh, drop Chrome!!

4get.ca is my last recommendation: it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn't have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it's the best for reaserch, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can. It's also very privacy conscious, so that's an other plus, and it has that late 90s / early 2000s vibe that I totally dig. [click here to go to 4get]

If you wanna learn more about the topic, you can over to the Search Engine Map [click here] which shows you a bunch of Search Engines and how they relate to each other. Or you can also go over to this one dude's personal website whose done A Lot of reaserch into the topic (way more than me) and seems to be pretty legit, if a little extra. [click here to go to digdeeper.neocities.org] Hope this infodump is useful to someone =D

PS: here's to hoping all the links work!

EDIT: eliminated the "read more". Figured there are enough mega long posts in tumblr, one more won't make no difference lol (tho the version w the read more has been reblogged already, in case you'd rather)

Here's uBlock Origin's official guide to bypassing youtube's anti-adblock popups, updated weekly. Please share widely. Don't reward google for their predatory anti-consumer bullshit

To summarize: 1. Get uBlock Origin and make sure it's updated to the latest version. 2. Click on the gear icon to get to the dashboard, go to "Filter lists", and make sure that "uBlock filters - Quick fixes" is up to date

Repeat those steps any time you get another popup (google and uBlock are having an arms race right now so it might stop working at any moment), and if you have any more problems, read the reddit thread for troubleshooting advice

Reblogging again. Firefox is an excellent, safe and fast browser and everyone should consider using it.

Don’t just consider it. If you have the ability to switch to Firefox, this is your official notice to do it.

Stop everything you’re doing and go download and install Firefox.

If you’re saying, “well, I need Chrome because I need such-and-such extension for my job”, the computer will not explode if you install another browser. Use Chrome ONLY for work tasks and use Firefox for everything else. If you’re concerned about losing your bookmarks, Firefox can import your Chrome bookmarks.

[ID: Firefox Library window. The “Import and Backup” panel is expanded, displaying the option, “Import Data from Another Browser”, which is also circled with a red MS Paint ellipse. ID end.]

And, don’t forget to install uBlock Origin while you’re at it.

Forgot a thing. Subscribe to Mozilla VPN for bonus points. It’s basically the only truly secure VPN service in the world right now.

For $5 a month, you can completely conceal your online activities from your ISP in a manner that isn’t just immediately monetised or turned over to the cops. No, it’s not free, it does cost money, but the money doesn’t go to line a billionaire’s pockets.

I wonder how much of this is because of work/school from home forcing people to use Chrome so all their stupid monitoring softwares and platforms can work.

This is also your reminder that you don't have to use just one browser. You can use chrome for all the monitoring bullshit your office wants you to run and use firefox for everything else.

Be sure to add the multi account containers extension to your firefox, which allows you to be logged in to multiple accounts on the same website at the same time in the same window but in different tabs.

look on my five open tumblr accounts (not sideblogs, accounts!) ye mighty and despair.

Firefox is super good, folks. It's good in a general "google shouldn't own everything in the entire fucking world" sense AND in a "this is an actual good product that does lots of cool shit" sense.

ALSO make sure to add the Ublock origin extension on Firefox - I haven't seen a youtube ad in five years and you don't have to either.

While you're at it, why not add the Wayback Machine extension so that if you go looking for a page that has been taken down the wayback machine will automatically offer you an archived version instead; also handy for documenting people's shitty takes and winning arguments after they delete the original post!

Worried that Firefox is going to slow down your computer? In benchmarks, modern versions of chrome and firefox are pretty much the same speed but you can still install the auto tab discard extension ANYWAY so that it will snooze unused tabs in order to keep your computer running faster. Set it to sleep, discard, close, and store tags at your discretion!

And while you're at it: install Firefox as your mobile browser for android and add those extensions to your mobile browser! Mobile adblock is here, baybee, save your data and enjoy a better mobile experience! And install it on iOS! iOS can't add extensions, but at least it's better than safari, and if you want a somewhat more private iOS browsing experience try firefox focus for iOS (which is also available on android but you can accomplish the same thing with extensions).

Anyway, firefox is good.

The Pillowfort.io Kickstarter is now live!!

Pillowfort.io is a new blogging platform that aims to improve the current state of social media by providing better privacy and communication tools. We wanted to make a user-friendly space on the web for creativity, communication and content-sharing. Pillowfort aims to be a hybrid of Tumblr, Twitter, and LiveJournal– keeping the strengths of these sites while giving you more control over how your content is seen an shared, as well as providing better communication tools. Everyone who contributes $5 or more will get a registration key to create an account on the site once the Kickstarter completes, and we also offer a bunch of cool physical rewards pictured above, so click through to the Kickstarter for information about the site, our business plan, and more!

We only wanted to know what job Jon Arbuckle was supposed to have when we found the word “ba-limp” in his wiki page. Googling this took us down the mesmerizing rabbit hole of Wikipedia’s abusive editor list.

This is like some SCP shit

I’ve been thinking a lot about how old I am in technology years lately so here’s a bit of reminiscing for you kids in the form of stuff you’ll thankfully never know the pain of

this is really long already so I’ll stop here but long story short it was a dark time and you all should grab every technological advancement you can with both hands and never let them go. for the sake of my childhood self, nose-to-screen with a GameBoy. do not let them go.

Hello everyone, now seems like a good time to finally tell you all about Pillowfort.io, a blogging platform that I (juliabaritz) and vaguestblogging have been working on for a while. Basically, we wanted to start a new blogging platform that takes our favorite features from sites we’ve used like Tumblr and LiveJournal, and create the best kind of blogging platform we could think of. Our goals for Pillowfort are to create a place where fans and creators alike can share their work, create a community of their own, and do so in a positive and safe environment.

On Pillowfort you’ll be able to run a personal blog similar to how Tumblr blogs operate, but also create communities similar to the ones that LiveJournal features, so that you can easily share content with people who share your tastes and interests. We’re also working on privacy features like blocking users, the ability to make posts rebloggable or un-rebloggable, and creating privacy lists so that your posts will only be visible to certain users. In the next few weeks, we’ll have more detailed posts about what Pillowfort is going to look like and what features we’ll be including, but above are a couple screenshots from the current state of the site so you can see what we’re going for.

We want to get the word out, so share this post if you would be interested in using a site like this so we can get an idea of how many people are interested! This site would also be a very large undertaking for us to attempt to finish ourselves, so we would love for people who would be interested in helping us with the programming to contact us and let us know that you’re interested. The app is built on Rails and currently deployed on Heroku (using Postgres for the database), so a familiarity with Rails and PSQL is greatly preferred.

Interesting.

So basically, what Dreamwidth is to LJ, you’re hoping Pillowfort will be to Tumblr?

SIGN ME THE FUCK UP.

please let this pan out

torrencethehalfwit:

ofyourlife:

Oh, great! I've only seen it in Russian. 8D

It may have been even funnier. But then, Russian Internet is a funny place. If you look from the outside.