Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Het is de sfeer, niet de bubbel

COLUMN Floor Rusman

"Ik heb ze niet allemaal gesproken, maar ik vermoed dat de nieuwe Mastodon-leden niet op de vlucht zijn voor andersdenkenden, maar voor een omgeving die een oprechte discussie steeds minder goed mogelijk maakt. Met hun vertrek willen ze niet polariseren, maar juist staken tegen het grote polarisatiespel. Als Musk echt in de beschaving geïnteresseerd was, zou hij dat begrijpen."
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/11/04/het-is-de-sfeer-niet-de-bubbel-a4147353

Just resist the urge. Because you're not going to think to check for robots.txt, but you ought to, that's how we communicate we don't want to be involved. You're probably not going to bother to read the various terms of service for the instances you touch, many of which explicitly ask you not to do any scraping or automated activity beyond normal use of the service. You're not going to know to respect people using the NoBot hashtag that was meant to prevent automated follows. You're certainly not going to parse user profiles and pinned posts to learn how people like to be approached, what will get you blocked, or even think to heavily throttle your activity because instances are falling over in response to load.

Whatever your thing is, make it 100% opt-in. Make it appropriate for a significantly more at-risk user than you are. Make sure it forgets things, purges info about servers it can't contact, can't operate in any sort of logged-in mode where consent is an issue.

We will straight up help advertise your cool thing if it respects users properly and takes the time to consider the safety and preferences of every person involved. There are a lot of fun, thoughtfully-designed toys! And there are a lot of people really tired of having to come and tell you off when you wanted to help, honestly. Help yourself and ask around before you flip on your cool new thing, let folks point out what you're missing.

There is no single site or app that is "Mastodon." This isn't like Twitter, or Facebook.

Mastodon.social isn't "Mastodon" anymore than Gmail is "email." Gmail is one very popular email server, Mastodon.social is one very popular #Mastodon server.

Same goes for mastodon.online, mstdn.social, mas.to, etc.

This seems to be tripping up a lot of new people during the #twittermigration to the #fediverse

#FediTips

Make the net weird again. Hand write sites like it’s the 90s. Pick interesting domain names and make fan sites or random knowledge known to everyone. Don’t monetize anything. Spearhead new protocols like Gemini. Make mods for games on your site. Make FAQs for obscure games no one knows about. Make public software services available to anyone. Make a news site about a really random subject. Create music in all kinds of different formats. Most of all, do it because you want to!

So, let's do an #introduction too! I'm Sebastian, at the time of writing 40 yo living in The Hague (Netherlands) with my cat Gadget.

During the workweek i'm a teacher at a Montessori primary (elementary) school here in the Netherlands.

Outside of work i'm part of the hackerspace Revspace where i hang out a few times every week for gezelligheid and making stuff. Currently looking into vacu-forming and woodworking, but normally i mess with electronics and soldering.

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.