Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Hello new friends making introductions!! Happy to see you!!

Please remember if you can, to utilize both content warnings and image captions when possible!

It helps people with screen readers to more comfortably navigate the site and enjoy + engage with what you post, and in the case you post something others might find alarming (bugs, excessive blood, etc) they can choose to engage with that post or not :]

#feditips is also a good tag to peruse if you're new and figuring things out :D

It's Friday and version 1.2 of "The many branches of the Fediverse" is published. Thanks everyone for your interest and engagement.

There is a changelog at the bottom of the post with more info, and you are welcome to download hi-res PNG and PDF versions of the diagram.

Do feel free to use this visual in any way you like, in your presentations, publish in your own spaces, etceteras. I'm just glad if you find it useful.

https://axbom.com/fediverse/

#FediTips

#FediTips unlike Twitter, Mastodon has "private" posts that are followers-only, so letting someone follow you means you trust them to see all your private posts. for a lot of us, that's gonna be a "nope" by default.

for the love of god, interact before following. at least put some effort into your bio. post some stuff. have a history. if you don't post primarily in the language of the user you're trying to follow, maybe send them a note in a language they do use, so they can make some sense of you.

and don't be a dick when they say no anyway. do not send another follow request. do not expect explanations.

personally, i've defederated entire instances because there were too many fossbro reply guys there. don't need someone to explain Linux to me, thanks. if i wanted that shit, i'd still be on Twitter.

Welcome to the Fediverse. It's nice here!

Remember to report horrible things, your admins and mods can and will deal with it.

Don't try to "grow your brand" here, the Fedi doesn't really work like that. Virality doesn't really happen. It's nice!

Connect with people. Make new friendships. Just be, in a place that respects you as a human.

#FediTips

#feditips
#twittermigration

there is no algorithm.

yeah you heard that right. no ads and no algorithm.

while it sounds cool, it also means your posts' coverage is not going to be amplified by bots or sorting algorithms. no clout seeking or trend hijacking or some kinda other shit.

you need to talk to people and socialize to be seen. follow people, talk with them, find someone who is interested in what you do and go from there.

wish yall luck.

On Mastodon the so called "Direct messages" are *actually* messages where the privacy setting is "visable for mentioned users only", i.e. users you "@"'

Now let's follow that to it's logical conclusion shall we… what if you want to talk to someone in private about a third person?

Do NOT "@" the person you want to talk about or guess what… you are talking to them as well!!! 😱

💡 If you write out their username without the first @, e.g "ruari@velocipederider.com" that OK.

#FediTips

It's important to note that since we only federate with a hand-picked list of instances (which is available on our about page), we get less traffic than the average instance with our user numbers. Also we might have a lot of registered accounts but only around 100 are active regularly.

It comes down to

~6€ a month for the server (a ssdnodes KVM (4 vCPUs, 16GB RAM, 320GB disk [way too much]), they basically always have a sale going on if you're willing to pay for three years in advance, the usually throw in free daily backups), we did a big upgrade during the last big influx because the old one wasn't enough
5$ a month for around 500 GB S3-compatible media storage on Wasabi (they've been unstable in the past but it's been years since we've had issues)
<20$ a year for the domain name

The Fediverse is NOT a Twitter replacement. We who built and helped build this place with our sweat and tears don't want Twitter culture on here. The Fedi has its own culture, as you will realise soon enough. There will be no "back to business as usual". #feditips

reasons mastodon's "viral dampening effect" is a good thing:

👉🏻 no "main character of the day"
👉🏻 no free text searching for people to get angry at (and harrass)
👉🏻 doomscrolling is *actually bad for you* and not a thing we should be trying to replicate
👉🏻 birdsite's virality is heavily driven by actual paid advertising and bots. You think that "Explore" tab gets its content organically? really? That's not making connections between people, it's about driving sales.

Mastodon is not, and should not be, a 1:1 replacement for Twitter. But it *can* be a new place for you to make valuable connections with other human beings. #twitter #twittermigration

I may have gotten carried away with my #domotica obsession, I'm running out of IP addresses on my /24 lan

hsnl.social staat sinds vandaag open voor iedereen van Nederlandse hackerspaces en is al gegroeid van 8 naar 28 users :)

One somewhat encouraging observation for folks with a genuine sense of community on Twitter: pretty much all the Freenode communities survived. A little bit was lost, and there was a big transition cost, but mostly the communities found new homes and continued.

When Andrew Lee bought (kinda?) Freenode and blew it up last year, I was surprised by how quickly one rich dude could tank a long-standing social network with an established community, and baffled why someone would spend so much money just to burn something down.

That was cute.

if you've ever written a sentence that's just "imagine using XYZ" and¹ XYZ is some linux distribution or whatever. have you actually imagined using it? nobody creates out of pure folly; so this thing must at least serve a niche. what type of person gets value from the thing you are deriding? who are they & what do they want? what is it like to be them?

explore the lives of your fellows and then delete ur post bestie

¹ i wrote this post about software but extrapolate elsewheres if you'd like

I wonder how many people are still using Google Chrome because they haven't tried Firefox at all in the last decade.

If you've tried Firefox years ago but found it didn't suit your needs, and are currently using Google Chrome or one of its many clones, I'd highly recommend revisiting Firefox. It really has come a long way over the years and you may be surprised by what you see.

🦇

With the way things are going, I expect this is an especially good time to throw some money in your fediverse server admin’s tip jar, given the influx of new people.

I sincerely hope that the Twitter takeover by Elon Musk and the subsequent massive user migration to alternative media such as Mastodon will initiate the downfall of tech giants having way too much influence in the public debate.

@thufie yep, you can connect to any other masto user in less than 6 polycule steps