蘭鳩 @Ranbato@fedibird.com

Well, I’m slowly getting a little more confident and paddling out deeper into the Mastosphere. Trousers now rolled up to the knees and the water not feeling as cold…

Didn't the fact that Republicans manufactured the expectation of a "red wave", and got the press to go along, actually motivate panicked Democrats to show up and vote? Strikes me as a bad strategic move, presumably from self-delusion.

Check out Fedi.Directory -- it's a list of "interesting accounts to follow on Mastodon and the Fediverse"

Hand-curated, just like Yahoo in the 90s!

I love it

https://fedi.directory

Absolute hats-off to the fediverse believers to have got this to where it is.

In my opinion, criticisms of mastodon being unusable by the general public are over blown.

Is "Republicans believe their own bad polls" the new "Putin believes his own propaganda about Ukraine"?

I'm gonna keep posting this until one of you fucking boosts it

This is why everyone can't look away from American democracy even though we want to:

For all it's advantages and faults, #Mastodon was not built to be a *new* Twitter. It was built to be *not* Twitter.

That distinction is important.

@alanb Seeing a small wave of people on the other side of the nerdosphere from me join _some_ Mastdon server and tentatively start posting and interacting makes me believe it's slightly more likely to take off than I would have believed 2 weeks ago.

TIP OF THE DAY

If your instance server is having a hard time right now, don't freak out.

You do not need to change servers. Mastodon is getting a huge influx of new users and they are all working tirelessly to add capacity. If you are otherwise happy with your instance, trust that they will get things working smoothly. Give them some time to sort things out.

We're all in this together. It's our social network. Be patient. What we are building is amazing.

#mastodonmigration #twittermigration

Some Mastodon thoughts, for bird-site expats (which include myself). I'm aggregating these from posts I've boosted before, so little of this is my own brain.

- There's no algorithm here. That means favoriting/liking doesn't do anything except communicate approval to the OP and others (which is still nice!).

- No algorithm means boosting ("retweeting") is the true method to increase a post's visibility. Do that more than you did on birdsite.

- There's no post-quoting here, and that's by design. Look at quote-tweets on the birdsite; it's a feature primarily used for toxicity.

- There's no direct word-search here either; that means you want to use hashtags to make posts more searchable. This is also intended, since word-searching posts was often used to harass/stalk on the birdsite and elsewhere, so that was left by the wayside here. This also means hashtags are much more a thing here than any of the algorithm-powered sites.

- It's encouraged to put in text descriptions when you post images; a lot of Mastodon users use screen-readers due to various disabilities, and getting an image description read out loud helps them immensely.

- Speaking of screen-readers: using capitalization in your hashtags allows the screen-readers to read them more easily, especially if you're smashing multiple words together. #rockmusic = unreadable. #RockMusic = readable.

- The best way to make threads is to make set your first post as public, but "unlist" all of your replies. This prevents your whole thread from clogging up feeds.

- Content Warnings should be used more liberally here. If you haven't gotten the impression yet, much of Mastodon was built and populated by marginalized groups who were harassed/bullied off of other platforms. This is the culture they built, to respect each other's mental health. It's not a rule, but it's well-appreciated.

- Consider chipping a few bucks towards whomever runs the server you're on; the strain is real, and most server admins were likely paying out of pocket before so don't have an existing donation base. The growth here has been extremely fast, and that means money's needed.

- DMs are just posts with privacy settings. So if you @ someone in a DM, you pull them into the thread. That could be embarrassing.

- Also, no, DMs aren't end-to-end encrypted, but they aren't on Twitter either. Don't use either if you want true privacy.

- Including your Mastodon handle in your birdsite profile will help people find you here; there's a tool (pruvisto.org/debirdify/ is one of them that's used) people can use to pull Mastodon handles from Twitter profile.

- Use the blocking and reporting features liberally, if needed. This should go without saying, but they work, and work well!

- If there's an entire Mastodon server you don't want to hear from, you can block the whole thing too.

- Preferences -> Appearance -> "Slow Mode": this can make larger "Local" feeds and any "Federated" feed much more readable.

I'll reply with some more as I see them, or reply here too. I've only been here 4 days but I'm loving it so far.