Jules @afewbugs@librem.one

If your morning isn't going the way you were hoping, take a moment and enjoy this photos of sleeping #squirrels. I promise it will help.

I see a lot of people emphasizing to new users that "mastodon is not twitter", in a way that I suspect alienates those users while also being misleading.

Mastodon and mastodon-like fediverse nodes (ex., pleroma, gnu social, etc) look and act almost exactly like twitter, very intentionally.

To the degree there are technical differences, they are largely either scale-related (the fediverse was federated since long before mastodon was a twinkle in gargron's eye, because centralized social media is only possible with stupid amounts of no-strings-attached VC money) or downstream from culture.

Almost every technical decision that differs from twitter here is downstream from culture, and almost every technical decision that isn't different from twitter is the result of the culture not yet having enough discourse to change it.

What is the culture?

The culture on the fediverse is formed from ex twitter users -- people who left twitter in various waves at various stages. These waves are mostly people who felt like they didn't fit in (or who felt actually unsafe) on twitter.

The first wave predates mastodon by years, and was open-source / free-software / security / privacy / civil liberties people. Basically, the kind of guy who tries to get everybody he knows to use tor & kali linux. These folks felt like the proprietary nature of centralized social media software was an ethical problem, and that the centralization & ad-based monetization was a security risk.

Later waves include: furries, LGBTQ people, and non-white people, all of whom faced systematic harassment on twitter; anarchists and communists, who don't like the profit motive in general and were happy to move as soon as they were aware that something else was available; retrocomputing / slow-computing people, who felt that centralized social media produced an unhealthy and environmentally unsound relationship between people in social media; sociology-of-UX & software-utopianism people, who felt that centralized & profit-driven social media produced unhealthy relationships between the people it mediates.

These categories overlap, and the more of these categories you fall into, the more likely you've actually been on the fediverse for a while. (For instance, I'm an anarchistic free-software guy with sympathies for slow-computing & software-utopianism, so all of the concerns other than systematic harassment have affected me personally, & I've got a lot of friends who have gotten systematic harassment too, so I've been on the fediverse for a good half-decade.)

Anyway, despite the fact that the fediverse is populated mostly by people with strongly-felt objections to the way things work on twitter, these cultural concerns actually only rarely result in visible technical changes -- and even then, they tend to be subtle. Emphasizing the technical differences is probably not helpful for onboarding new users, because new users are unlikely to encounter them on their own for weeks or months! To a new user, mastodon looks like twitter with a different color scheme.

It is more useful, in my opinion, to emphasize to new users that the fediverse, in general, cares about the users that twitter was happy to subject to harassment & other forms of violation long before a Musk regime was on the radar. Then, when a user encounters a technical difference, they are primed to understand it as downstream from culture: they know that it's somebody's attempt to fix a social problem that was rampant on twitter, and every former twitter user is aware of the kinds of social problems that were rampant there.

It's great to see so many familiar faces on here, hopefully Mastodon works for soil biodiversity SciComm now that Twitter has sadly razed itself to the ground. Here, start off your Sunday morning with a photo of a blue oat mite showing off its unique dorsal anus... you're welcome!

#SoilBiodiversity #SciComm #TwitterExodus #Mite #SoilFauna #Macrophotography #Mesofauna #Soil

once you have defeated gender you may wear its strictures as you please, not as trappings but as trophies

Eggs of blue Morpho butterflies, Belize.

#entomology #insects #lepidoptera

First things first, mastodons were a giant animal related to present-day elephants and woolly mammoths. The name literally translates as "breast tooth" because anatomist Georges Cuvier thought its molars looked like they had nipples.
Image credit: Mary Gagnon

To inaugurate our brand new Mastodon account, we're gonna tell you everything we know (and don't know) about MASTODON VAGINAS. As in the extinct animal, obvs.

#TwitterMigration

If you're a cyclist based in the UK, I'm *slowly* creating route guides for traffic-free cycle routes.
You can see all the routes I've done so far neatly displayed on an interactive map.
If there's a route not shown, please tell me, using the comments form on the site?
https://www.willcycle.com/traffic-free-cycling-routes-in-the-uk/
Finally, liking this post is appreciated, but if you want to share it with others, you'll need to boost it.

In important climate change related news:
There are more fossil #fuel lobbyists at the #COP27 event than delegates from the ten countries most impacted by #climate change, including Pakistan, Bangladesh and Mozambique. Campaigners say they want industry representatives to be banned from all future climate summits.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-63571610

Wee reminder for new Mastodon users: stick your #Wordle results behind a Content Warning, not because it's scary or triggering, but because if someone is using a screen reader, they can hear and decide "oh a wordle result, I won't expand that".

Have you heard what a Wordle result sounds like to a screen reader? https://slate.com/culture/2022/02/wordle-word-game-results-accessibility-twitter.html #accessibility

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.

I'm working on creating route guides for all traffic-free cycling routes in the UK & your help would be much appreciated.
Please look at the map and let me know what routes are still needed?
Please use the reply form on the page to tell me, as keeping track of suggestions on here will be hard.
#UKCyclingTweeps
https://www.willcycle.com/2022/11/02/traffic-free-cycling-routes-uk/

I must say, that even in the last few days since I joined Mastodon I’ve seen a culture shift - more #politics, more ‘hot takes’, less discussion, fewer #CWs, less #AltText. I hope it’s a blip and urge newbies like me not to unwittingly play out the #coloniser #stereotypes and ride roughshod over the existing culture. It’s a lovely, gentle, curious #community here, would be awful to ruin it because we’re conditioned to something worse.

A billionaire emits a million times more greenhouse gases than the average person, according to Oxfam.

We know which ones we need to hold accountable for the climate crisis.

https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/carbon-billionaires-the-investment-emissions-of-the-worlds-richest-people-621446/

There will never be a bell loud enough, a helmet strong enough or clothing bright enough to make up for poor infrastructure.

Mastodon: What you need to know for your security and privacy

If you’re leaving Twitter for Mastodon, here are some things you should know.

https://grahamcluley.com/mastodon-what-you-need-to-know-for-your-security-and-privacy/

Please reblog/boost if you think this would help folks you know who are new to Mastodon. (Likes are appreciated, but won't help spread the advice)