Marc Madness @marcmadness@librem.one

I don’t remember where I first found this, but here’s how the #mastadon feeds work 💙

There is a statue of St. Ignatius of Loyola (The founder of the Society of Jesus) outside of the Borgia chapel in the Jesuit Curia.

One of his mottos was "Ita Inflammate Omnia", which translates into "Set the world on fire!"

It's a beautiful statue that we see every time we leave the chapel.

...

Of course, once a year, when we need to inspect and recertify all of our fire extinguishers... we can't help ourselves! 😇

Today is #TransDayofRemembrance when we honor and remember trans lives taken by violence. How horrifying that a deadly attack upon the LGBTQ+ community in Colorado Springs should occur right before this solemn day.
Hate isn’t born in us. It is taught. It must end.
This starts with our political leaders, who must cease their cynical attacks against our community before another attack occurs.
Call out the hate. Remind them of its consequences. Hold them to account.

Hello to all our new members!

Before your first toot, and definitely before you start tooting questions about how to use this site, please read this:

https://mastodon.help/

TIA! And welcome!!

I’m nearing 80K fans already here. I’m feeling the love, and not regretting spending some of my time here. Folks seem very nice, very supportive.

I wonder if I can hit 100K by my third day here. That would be something. Follow along to be part of this new adventure!

Dear Space Karen,
No thanks.

Now that we're learning this lesson that centralized silos are brittle and operate in the interest of the owners not the users...

...please note the move toward centralizing podcasts into apps from Amazon/Audible, Spotify, iHeart, YouTube, TikTok etc.

If you like podcasts, use an RSS-based podcast player. Support the open ecosystem. We can only survive if you clearly see the threat and act supportively.

Friday Evening Incident Response Advice from GovCERT.ch

“The critical vulnerability called #ProxyNotShell is being actively exploited and abused by cybercriminals. We are aware of 2,800 exposed Microsoft Exchange servers in CH🇨🇭Businesses and administrations are being urged to install security patches 🚨

👉 https://www.ncsc.admin.ch/proxynotshell-en

#infosec

18 November 1913 | A Czech Jew, Walter Pollak, was born in Prague.

He was deported to #Auschwitz from #Theresienstadt ghetto on 18 December 1943. He did not survive.

#history #Holocaust

The #fediverse is a fleet of interconnected ships, many of which were built by the #mastodon shipworks and in the past two weeks the fleet has doubled in size while going warpspeed.

The interstellar wind is shaking the whole place up tonight. Hold on. Hold fast. We're gonna get through this.

Tip your server admins, and be kind to newcomers.

Thanks! (boosts ok, paying it forward preferred)

“I alone can fix it” didn’t work in the White House, and it didn’t work at #Twitter.

Which browser do you use?
Thanks for any boosts! I wanna know!

I will give big points to the first news organization, big or small, that:
* Sets up an instance for its newsroom,
* Sets up an instance for the community it serves,
* Enables rel=me for staff,
* Creates a boost-on-Mastodon sharing function,
* Enhances that function so headlines/images (with alt-text) appear in the toot,
* Covers the Fediverse as more than a geeky curiosity or alt-Twitter,
* Listens to and joins in the conversation here.

This holiday season Twitter fires 4K workers, Amazon fires 10K workers, & Facebook fires 11K workers—all while US Billionaire pandemic wealth increased an absurd $1.7T.😳

A reminder that billionaires don’t create jobs—they exploit workers. Tax billionaires. Unionize workers.

If the UI in your Tesla feels a little sluggish, don't worry, we're just balancing @twitter server load through our vehicles' computers since Elon shut half the servers off

Haha ex-Twitter employees have created their own Mastodon instance 😅

"This server is intended for current and previous twitter employees and their friends/family. We filter signups to try keep the server focused for community reasons." - https://macaw.social/about/more

Welcome to the Fediverse! :)

#Mastodon

I THINK SOMEBODY JUST FEDERATED MY TOOT

Now the way the Internet Archive is doing mastodon is how more organisations and celebs should be joining the fediverse!

They have a dedicated in house instance, which lets you identify official staff, and gives them control and security over their content, whilst also allowing people and instances to opt in or out of interacting with them

Kudos for doing it right @internetarchive!

Your instance can defederate from any instance for any reason. It's one of the built-in tools and it exists for a reason.

You can do the same! Click the 3 dots under a toot to block the user, report the user, or even block their whole instance!

Reporting and posting to the fediblock hashtag is strongly suggested if the reason is more severe than "I just don't like this person," but not liking someone is /still/ a good enough reason to block them.

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.