Ethan Black @golemwire@librem.one

One thing that was super common on Mastodon / Fediverse prior to this mass migration was adding image descriptions to help be accessible to our many blind and partially sighted users here. Many people won't boost posts without them.
Please consider adding alt text to your images when you can.

Some advise for new peeps on Mastodon:

The people you're following would generally *love* to follow you back IF you:
* Post an #Introduction toot and pin it
* Fill out your profile's bio
* Put in a profile picture

Whenever I get a follow request and there's no profile pic, no bio, no intro, and no toots posted yet in general, I don't follow back, because I don't know anything about that person. It's like being introduced to a person wearing a bag over their head. ;)

#Boost please :D

I haven’t seen so many people so excited about a social network since the early days of Twitter.

As more people join the #Fediverse, some instances will likely need to pause new registrations while they allow their existing community to absorb new members. This is a *good* thing and no different from towns limiting new housing developments based on what town infrastructure can handle. The town/city governance metaphor applies pretty well to the Fediverse in my opinion.

I don't think Mastodon or the fediverse has ever received this much attention before. It's a great opportunity for people to finally see that social media can be done differently, that it can be a protocol not under control of any single company.

Okay, apologies for the many unanswered questions that are slipping past, am trying to answer as many as possible.

My timeline has just frozen completely.

Please check sites like https://fedi.tips and https://github.com/joyeusenoelle/GuideToMastodon/, they will answer lots and lots of common questions about Mastodon and the Fediverse!

If you are a techy person who wants to see technical details, you can find the official Mastodon documentation at https://docs.joinmastodon.org

I've made a deliberate choice against a quoting feature because it inevitably adds toxicity to people's behaviours. You are tempted to quote when you should be replying, and so you speak at your audience instead of with the person you are talking to. It becomes performative. Even when doing it for "good" like ridiculing awful comments, you are giving awful comments more eyeballs that way. No quote toots. Thank's