Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

New action figure dropped.

I've had lots of thoughts lately about bounded versus unbounded systems.

A book is bounded; the global library system is unbounded. A CD is bounded; Spotify is unbounded. The world is effectively unbounded, and networked computer systems tend to be unbounded too.

Many things are bigger than a human can experience, or changing faster than a human can keep up with. Many curious explorers and tinkerers are drawn to these unbounded things because they are vast, unknowable, and therefore exciting.

But what finite, bounded things are worth exploring and tinkering with?

About the only tip I have for people landing here post-birdsite is the habit of defensively misspelling/obfuscating terms is not just unnecessary here but harmful.

Search is harder to do due to the federated nature, being a search-botting reply-guy is harder to do. However a lot of people can and do mute hot-button words for their own health.

If you think you need to obfuscate to prevent discovery there's probably a better privacy tool to deploy.

Assorted recs for new accounts:
@plants — plants from the gardens of various fedifriends! (and other topics: https://a.gup.pe/ )

@glitchbot — a bot that glitches photos you give it

The hashtags #cats and #florespondence
@quasihaiku and @poem_exe — haiku bots (quasi avoids latin’s fifth glyph)

@alt_text — reminds you if you’ve forgotten to describe your images

Accounts by topic from the trunk: https://communitywiki.org/trunk

by way of #introduction hi i'm andie sophia. i'm news editor at the reykjavík grapevine. i'm a nonbinary trans woman, a communist, and i will never not favorite pics of possums, cats or ravens. my presence here will be a mix of trans stuff, politics, and humor. happy to follow back likeminded folks. hope the days are kind to you all!

#introduction for those who don’t know me: i’m a cool as hell dutch gay nerd who loves programming (NEVER finishing anything i start on ever), typography and mario kart

#FediTip if you get a link to a post or profile and want to interact with it, put it in your search box.

Twitter has algorithms to get you engaged. Mastodon does not. So in order to enjoy Mastodon you have to take some time to reach out and find content and follow folks that you enjoy. Don't expect Mastodon to send you random popular posts to keep you engaged, you have to curate your own feed. But this is good! It gives you control.

#NewHere

like, a lot of twitter takes about mastodon read very much like people who have only ever traveled by car complaining about the existence of any other infrastructure

anything that doesn't exactly replicate the convenience of the car must be shunned

A few years ago I made this flow chart of which Mastodon posts end up in which timelines!

So, you can see how each instance will have a different local timeline, and even a slightly different federated timeline - and you can see why the federated timeline moves so much faster than the local one, too.

This is why it's important to boost good posts and use hashtags - the fediverse is fragmented and harder to search by nature.

[ #mastodon #meta #tootorial #howto #mastopedia #mastotip ]

alright which one of you people did this. LOL

me, logging on today, reading the struggles of other instance admins like

@rigatonimonster it's this famous study where they said to a kid, "you can have one marshmallow now, or two marshmallows later," and the kids who took the two marshmallows had higher SAT scores and better life outcomes. This is supposed to prove that being able to delay gratification is good, rather than proving that people whose life experience has given them reason to trust authority and go along to get along have an easier time succeeding

having to go to the datacenter for maintenence always sounds cool to me. My "going to the datacenter" is just walking downstairs to the utility closet and giving my laptop-server a boop

like it could just be you put one in your profile name like

🔵 / ✅ doin good ayyyyyy

⚫ /⚪ hanging in there but maybe say a nice thing if you have the energy

⛔ /🚫 /🔴 doin real bad please be nice and give me space if i ask

⚠️ / 🆘 having a crash please be nice and/or assist if you're up for it

like that way all the triggering detail stuff is still under an mh(-) CW but also you can still safely share your status and know what's up with friends