@theextremerockers Can you please open a issue on our Github tracker with some details (what you are trying to do, the accounts involved…) so we can see what is wrong?
In the last few weeks, I have been trying to organise the #Mastodon development work, so our (very small!) resources are used efficiently. This led us to a tentative roadmap for Mastodon 4.3, with a (very optimistic) release date before Christmas.
Notify users when relationships (follows, followers) are severed, due to a server block, display the list of impacted relationships, and have a button to restore them if the remote server is unblocked
Improve account recommendations, to help users find relevant accounts to follow
Redesign all e-mails, add a few onboarding e-mails to help getting on board with Mastodon, and send an (optional) weekly digest e-mail
If you want to help and are a developer (Ruby and/or Javascript), you can head to our Github repository and have a look at some issues, or can ping me if you want guidance on what is available to contributors.
And if you are not a developer, you can donate to the project (https://joinmastodon.org/sponsors), so we can hire more people to work on Mastodon full-time and be implement new features faster!
Mastodon instances admins are going through a very challenging time right now.
They have difficult, often heartbreaking, decisions to make 💔
They have a lot of changes to managed :blob_dizzy_face:
They have large influx in traffic to deal with :blobastonished:
And they have to deal with all of our comments and strong opinions about this :oh_no:
Be Kind with instance administrators and moderation teams. Even when you do not agree with their choices. You can state your opinion, but always remain polite and empathetic.
This is volunteer work!
They all deserve our kindness 💚
@Em0nM4stodon and the beauty of Mastodon/fediverse is that if you don’t like your admin’s decision, you can migrate to a different instance that aligns with your opinions.
"We, the undersigned... call upon the Government of Canada to enact policy and dedicate budgetary resources to enable the Parliament of Canada to provide an open, trusted, federated, social media presence for use by all members, senators, officers and other employees of Parliament as appropriate for communication to all Canadians.”
This petition is a joint effort by Canadian Mastodonians and Fediverse Citizens all across the country! @chad@Dunstable@bougiewonderland@LALegault@mike@dragons@stephanie@bluefacedbeast and @danamcfarland all contributed in creating and getting the petition off the ground. It also took some educating of my own MP. It's an exciting day. I believe we can get the minimum 500 signatures easily over the next 90 days and hopefully many more! If you're Canadian, please sign!
I am going to add Canadian Mastodon political and media influencers to this post/thread in an effort to raise awareness. You can see the list below. If you know of a Canadian political or news person that should be on this list, please reply.
Dear, Canada Media/Political Voices: Petition #e4769 is to have Parliament create an independent social media service for all Parliamentarians to use. And Yes! Hopefully instead of relying on Facebook and Twitter and whatever corporate social media there might be on any given day... Parliamentarians should have a trusted place to create their communication for Canadians and there should be no other place as reputable and trusted as a source of information by Canadians as parl.gc.ca.
When I started on Mastodon, people would advise me to “only Boost posts.” Since there’s no algorithm that places a value on Favorites, “only Boosts have value.”
I disagree completely.
When people Favorite my posts, they unwittingly introduce themselves to me. I have discovered some very interesting people that I may not have if they didn’t Favorite my posts.
@gadgetboy I have a couple friends on my local instance where we just all favorite each other’s posts all the time and it is lovely. Favorites are little tiny notes saying “I see you and it makes me happy”
Direct messages (DMs) on #Mastodon / #ActivityPub / the #fediverse are not end-to-end encrypted (#e2ee) and you should never include sensitive/private information in them.
Until they are e2ee, this is all we should be telling people. Anything else is irresponsible and could cause vulnerable people harm.
Specifically, it doesn’t matter:
if your instance admin is ethical or not
whether Elon Musk can read DMs easier on Twitter
etc.
It’s not end-to-end encrypted. It’s not private. End of.
@aral Certainly journalists should never use DMs on Mastodon or Twitter to communicate with sources. I was disturbed to learn how many journalists use DMs heavily on Twitter.
Post Canada's #OnlineNewsAct and Meta's ban on Canadian news content, sharing journalism on social media has been tough to say the least.
And yet The Tyee has seen much growth here on #Mastodon.
We want to see how far we can go. If you enjoy coming across Tyee stories on your Mastodon feeds, share our profile with your friends, or repost this toot, to help us get to 6,000 followers. 🐘🌟🗞
Yeah, that's to do with another issue, the boost-grouping system allows duplicate boosts after you have seen 40 other posts in your timeline. This was hardcoded a long time ago when this place had far fewer people on it, and the number is way too low for current timelines.
The first beta of #Mastodon 4.2.0 is now available for testing! There are too many improvements to count. See the extensive changelog and upgrade instructions here:
Well the devs aren't known for pausing anything to deal with objections or concerns ... so, screw the privacy rights violations for users and legal problems for admins!
After 8 months working on Mastodon, in particular on infrastructure for mastodon.social and mastodon.online, I have been able to articulate my vision for the future of Trust & Safery for Mastodon : https://renchap.com/blog/post/evolving_mastodon_trust_and_safety/
We need better tools to go along the growth of the Fediverse, and they need to enable multiple instances to work together on those topics and keep our loved network safe for everyone!
@renchap Thanks for the writeup, and it's great to hear that Mastodon gGmbH has heard that the community is asking for more effort in this area.
As things move forward, it's critical to get the input of people communities who are targeted by hate speech and most at risk from harassment -- including women, BIPOC, trans and non-binary people, Muslims, Dalits, disabled people, and especially people at the intersections. They're the experts, but their input is often ignored -- Twitter for example repeatedly rolled out moderation solutions they thought would help but had obvious holes, and Bluesky's making the same mistake. So this is a chance for the fediverse to do better -- while also making progress on some of its equity issues.
@housepanther@renchap One of the top perks of separating the moderation tools out from Mastodon itself would be that other fediverse software could use those same tools.
One of those immediate lessons from the Lemmy/Kbin spike was that fediverse moderation tools are very, very unequally available to different platforms.
Been trying this out secretly for the past few weeks — a "catch-up" timeline page. Did whole bunch of iterations, where I myself is the guinea pig, but this time reaching a point where I just got to share it out in the public.
NOT final design, still very experimental, only on my local machine
Instead of algo timeline, this is focused on data-grid-like UI for configuring exactly what I want to see.
This honestly could be another full-fledged app/client by itself 🫠
Okay, here we go! Giving social media another try with #Mastodon since I started to miss the academic community that social media used to provide for me.
I'm Nele, a #linguistics postdoc at the University of Oslo, working on the language of fake news in English. I'm also affiliated with Lund University through my work on the London–Lund Corpus 2 and spoken language.
That's (mainly) what I'll be posting about. Here we go again!
It looks at the people you follow and the people they follow and ranks them by the number of follows from your followed. Hopefully you will find some people who were on here all along but who you hadn't found yet - I did.
As for the issue with Followgraph, this is rather something that I might look into when I find myself with time. If it's only about authentication, not an issue to be implemented. The issue is rather how to run it locally at the user's computer, so that the privacy requirement keeps being satisfied.
@Sheril not having as many celebrities, influencers, and "mastodoners" (in the same way as youtubers, tiktokers, etc.) is an argument for the fediverse imo. I much prefer genuine human interaction over marketing disguised as interaction.
All media and news outlets that are unsure if it's worth setting up a #Mastodon account because they won't get enough followers: Take a look at Ars Technica (@arstechnica).
Ars established their account fairly recently (Apr 25, 2023) and have quickly gained a large following -- 118K followers!
They actively post
Their account is verified
Their homepage has a link to their Mastodon account
@InfraredEyes@frozencanuck Yeah I never found Twitter good for following news direct from the source, because those tweets don’t get engagement and thus don’t get boosted by the algorithm. So yeah, news sites should get better reach here with the people who follow them (and with those peoples’ followers).
@frozencanuck@arstechnica
I mean. Ars also "just happens" to be really good. I would invite all news outlets to be more like Ars, though I don't know enough about news to know exactly what that means.
New #Mastodon merch just dropped! Responsibly sourced cotton t-shirts, enamel pins, mugs, and vinyl stickers with cute, exclusive designs! Get them while they're hot and support the development of Mastodon!
@Mastodon Any chance for a EU based merchant? Using a merchant on a tiny island that chose to globally isolate itself and no having to charge everyone insane delivery fees and import taxes isnt great :(
Since there's apparently something like 300,000 more users on here, here's some articles I've written about getting started with #Mastodon and the #fediverse.
Deliberately friend-sized and friend-shaped, with a soft surface material and soft, squishy stuffing, you will soon be able to have a #Mastodon in your home:
@pieselpriemel@dansup Nope, I only looked at 4.3.0-alpha.1-glitch. Presumably, anything 4.2.5 should be fine, that’s the release made specifically for this fix.
University College London shoutout! UCL is unwilling to set up a Mastodon account now, but they say that if there's lots of UCL presence here already it will nudge them in this direction. If you're at UCL or know someone who is, and you're on here, please reply to this to let us know! Current chief plotters: @sellathechemist , me and maybe more)
@sellathechemist THANK YOU to everyone who has replied so far. This is all really helpful (and hopefully you're finding each other through the replies too). I'm not sure what the ethics are of posting full list of all the handles I collected, but if people think that's a good idea maybe I can do that. But the good thing is that there are LOADS of us here! #UCL
