I’m thinking about joining mastodon, but I don’t know what server to go with, and the list of servers seems to have very little information about each. Right now I think I’ll open an account on mastodon.social....
I tried to find one that kind of aligned with my interest and didn’t have a crazy number of users like mastodon.social. Reading online about picking instances, the recommendation to pick a smaller instance came up numerous times.
Went with sunny.garden since it’s a creative/artsy/tech instance and it’s been great. My local feed moves at a decent pace with content I enjoy, but I could also see mostly everything else on the federated tab.
As someone who spends most of her time on Mastodon looking at pics of cool craft projects and cute otters I would have to disagree with your sweeping title! 😉
But onto the less sarcastic and more actually helpful stuff:
If you’re on a smaller instance like I am, searching by hashtag will often miss stuff especially if it’s not the sort of thing others on your instance are likely to be following. You can use tools like Fediverse Explorer to search more widely and find likeminded folks, for example here’s a search for just #gaming but you can obviously look for whatever specific tag you’re after.
It takes a bit of effort to curate your feed(s) into what you need, but it tends to get easier as you go because discovering likeminded people means you also start discovering the people they talk to, the people they boost, etc etc.
Last year on Halloween, a friend told me about this new/old social media alternative to Twitter called #Mastodon where the rules made Nazis unwelcome. I had almost 4,000 followers on Twitter and I was starting the process of publishing my debut novel, but I liked the sound of that.
Today is the one year anniversary of moving. I started with a sunny.garden account (https://sunny.garden/@ewdocparris) and moved a week later to my current instance.
There was a lot of talk on knitting Mastodon last week about how long it takes to knit a jumper. And I just happened to have this amazing green super chunky yarn lying around from a previously failed wedding project....
Thanks! The yarn is just Stylecraft Special XL, Stylecraft being one of the widely-available cheaper brands in the UK. I’m not sure how widespread it is in other countries, or where you are, but if you’re here it’s their Bottle colourway and it’s stunning.
As far as Mastodon goes. I never did Twitter either, partially like you because of the drama, partially just because I didn’t see the point and prefer longer discussions. But I’ve got two active accounts over there (this is my craft one) and honestly love both it and Lemmy very much. I tend to use Mastodon more for stream of consciousness stuff, Lemmy more for open-ended questions and discussion, and then cross-post my craft projects to both because it’s fun getting comments from both platforms in one thread and having my friends from each one interact with each other. This Lemmy post for example was actually a Mastodon toot, which is pretty neat.
Plus of course cross-posting like that gets more action for the less-busy platform, it’s weird because craft-wise knitting is waaaaay more popular on Mastodon. But cross stitch gets more interaction on Lemmy. So I just send posts to both to cover all my bases 🤷♀️
Mastodon discoverability runs on hashtags. To get an idea if there’s much action on there for your niche I would visit mastodon.social (it’s the biggest instance and therefore has most content federated) and search for likely tags, see what comes up. There’s a thriving craft community there, and also a big gamedev community, which are the focuses of my two accounts. But I have heard it’s not quite as good for certain topics, so really depends what you’re looking for.
If you do decide to give it a go, like all Fediverse things it’s picking an instance that tends to be the hard part. But unlike Lemmy you can migrate account every 30 days and all your followers come with you, so a bad choice at the start isn’t really a big deal.
Hope something in this wall of text was helpful! 😅
I have moved to a new instance, as my old one is shutting down. Big hello to those on sunny.garden. I'm sharing a photo of the crochet blanket I just finished today!
So most of its false positives are from there, so lets take a look:
https://seirdy.one/posts/2023/05/02/fediverse-blocklists/
> The pleroma.envs.net blocklist: A large list of instances that I find worth suspending. After the first couple hundred entries (imported and then reviewed), I started collecting receipts. Since early 2023, every entry has documented reasons and receipts. I share these with multiple people in a collaborative document, but I don’t share it publicly due to risk of harassment. Unlike the other two lists on this page, it wasn’t made for general use (though you’re welcome to use it as reference).
mastodon.art:
A list of blocked domains without reasons or more informations. Their blog https://dotart.blog/dotart-blog/ has a few of entries around the most controverse blocks and opinions.
toot.wales: A list of blocked domains without reasons or more informations.
rage.love: A list of blocked domains without reasons or more informations.
union.place: Their blocklist has well defined reasons but no proof.
queer.group: A list of blocked domains without reasons or more informations. Stoppend publishing their blocklist after 04-2023
indiepocalypse.social: A list of blocked domains, ~50% has reasons/categories, 50% are imported. Stopped publishing their blocklist after 11-2022.
strangeobject.space: A list of blocked domains without reasons or more informations. They actually imported their blocks one time this year.
Beside of thebadspace, another one is the oliphant blocklist or the gardenfence blocklist. Lets take a look at those one. They have a more complex system, i just take a look at their sources:
They are among the servers with the biggest blocklists ever with multiple false positives & old instances. colorid.es and tenforward.social never provided a public list at all. queer.group and indiepocalypse.social stopped sharing their list.
The only lists that actually have at least a well defined reason list is union.place and sunny.garden
In generall, many of them do have false positives, outdated informations or use blocklists themselfes.
Those blocklists are a big fucking joke!
Dont get me wrong, i dont mind if a server is overblocking everything, thats their own decision, but consolidate these lists and publishing them under the hood of a importable blocklist does harm Instances and People!
Together with not providing proofs, without publishing evidence, without sharing anything, i can safely say, fedi has a transparency issue for a time now!
Hello #fediblockmeta, many people are discussing #thebadspace#blocklist after they blocked tech.lgbt, but few people went through all 355 pages to look at it the #badspace contents. I did that and want to share my findings.
I don't want attention or followers, but I want this post shared, so I am posting from an alt.
With only two of these blocking, you already end up on Tier 3 (which is the lowest tier). Worth noting: the Mastodon.art and Artisan.chat instances share moderation resources. Blocked by one, blocked by the other, end up on Tier 3, imported by many, end up on Tier 2 and so forth.
This is how Emacs.ch, without reason, notice or any way to resolve the issue, ended up on Tier 3+2.
AFAIK thebad.space imported the full list of these blocking lists. So: listed there also.
This whole project is a farce and far from a transparent process (who decided about the "Trusted sources"?).
So are favorites not really used on #mastodon? I thought it was the equivalent of a "like" or "upvote" and would be the default interaction. But poking around I'm noticing wayyy more boosting over favoriting? Is that a thing?
@danyork
You're absolutely right, I totally forgot about that aspect of federation! Most of my #fediverse experience has been on #Lemmy and they have a similar issue with upvotes/downvotes not fully federating between instances. It makes sense that I might not see as much on my local server (under 600 users on sunny.garden but it's nice and cozy).
Hmmm 🤔 #mastodon memory leak or I just don't understand how things work. #Sidekiq seemingly can handle all the jobs quite easily, yet after a couple days of my instance running without restarting, RAM usage grows quite high, talking 80% with #elasticsearch enabled on a 16 GB machine. Is it normal? Or does that mean memory leak somewhere? Maybe I should spend a week figuring out how to run another instance and load balance, but I feel this shouldn't be necessary for a single user instance...🤷🏻♂️
@BeAware which processes are using up RAM? sunny.garden hosts 500+ users in 8GB of RAM.
There is a known leak in the sidekiq ingress queue. It usually doesn't affect instances with small user counts, but it's something to take a look at. I restart sidekiq daily in order to deal with this.
I believe ES will also attempt to use all of your RAM if you don't otherwise limit the JVM size (I have it set to 512mb)
#AltText is only for people who can't see properly, they say.
A short and concise alt-text that's reduced to what really matters within the context of a post is enough, they say.
Non-sense, I say. And so do others.
There's more than enough justification for giving full and detailed #ImageDescriptions including #transcripts of everything written in them and explanations of things which your audience may not know or understand otherwise.
A gentle reminder that this is Disability Pride Month—a perfect time to get into the habit of adding ALT text to any pictures you post. There are many sight-impaired individuals who would appreciate it, and even those with excellent vision sometimes need clarity on what is going on in a picture, or what is significant about it. ALT text is also a great opportunity to add more context, humor, or commentary.
*see addendum below
@KydiaMusic And if you're an aspiring writer, it's a great chance to work on your skills!
This also goes for screenshots of text. Screen readers see them as images, which means they can't read them. So yep, that means you've gotta type them all out. Sorry, even the long ones.
@KydiaMusic Another benefit of ALT text is that you may be waiting for a slower instance to update an older image, but the ALT-text will let you know if you really need to wait, but telling you what the image is.
@KydiaMusic I love alt-text, it's a brilliant feature. It's not only useful to people with screen readers but it's a fun place to be creative and add additional commentary about the image that otherwise wouldn't fit within your instance's character limit.
(Disclaimer: These excerpts were neither hand-typed nor copy-pasted. They were generated semi-automatically by the Share functionality that has been built into #Hubzilla since it's inception. They are guaranteed to be full, verbatim quotes.)
@hexephre I'm starting to notice that I don't see a lot of your posts on here compared to my other account, do you happen to know if that is like a setting I can change or is it just general Mastodon bugginess? x_x
@zelkova if you notice any posts in particular that aren't showing up on sunny.garden but are showing up on another instance, please let me know so I can investigate!
I'm not currently aware of any issues in this regard, but I'd want to make sure to stay on top of them if any come up.
Heads-up to chaos.social users: This week, Meta (Facebook/Instagram) are releasing their new app, Threads, which reportedly will be Fediverse-compatible.
There are a lot calls to block (or not block) them. We are both too busy this week to make a truly considered decision – sorry for that. Please give us a couple of days: We will sit down and make a call during or just after the weekend.
@ordnung
Blocking a domain as user is in fact just mute them and prevent follows from there. That means the own content is still visible to meta and could be boosted there by another instance.
Really blocking them needs the AUTHORIZED_FETCH flag to be set. https://sunny.garden/@brook/110621160641129250
@ordnung
Blocking a domain as user is in fact just mute them and prevent follows from there. That means the own content is still visible to meta and could be boosted there by another instance.
Really blocking them needs the AUTHORIZED_FETCH flag to be set. https://sunny.garden/@brook/110621160641129250
sunny.garden has limited newsie.social as it currently hosts https://newsie.social/@Newsmax a far-right american media outlet, and will consider increasing this to a suspension in the future if newsie.social demonstrates a willingness to continue platforming far-right and transphobic media, against its own stated commitment to the Mastodon Server Covenant: "Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia"
In the meantime, I would highly encourage media outlets such as @ProPublica to migrate to their own independent fediverse instances with all due haste, where they will have greater control over their presence on the fediverse, and avoid "both-sides" entanglement with other organizations which do not share their values.
[UPDATE: glad to see that newsie.social appears to have suspended the newsmax account. I still recommend media outlets to pursue their own instances if at all possible]
@Jerry I was on infosec.exchange, a lovely and very well moderated instance, but the local feed was too much for me. It felt overwhelming, so I moved to sunny.garden and it feels so cozy in here! :blobhaj_tiny_heart:
We are happy to see that many of you are exploring Lemmy after Reddit announced changes to its API policy. I maintain this project alongside @dessalines....
That is so interesting. I'm not actually on Mastadon yet (still on twitter, I know...) but I can click the fediverse icon on Lemmy on your comment and see this thread on Mastadon, it takes me to sunny.garden which I assume is your mastadon instance. This is really cool lol
What server should I join?
I’m thinking about joining mastodon, but I don’t know what server to go with, and the list of servers seems to have very little information about each. Right now I think I’ll open an account on mastodon.social....
deleted_by_author
WIP Wednesday: Super chunky is the way to go (media.mastodon.sunny.garden)
There was a lot of talk on knitting Mastodon last week about how long it takes to knit a jumper. And I just happened to have this amazing green super chunky yarn lying around from a previously failed wedding project....
Instances with 25+ members that have signed the FediPact
The list below is being updated manually, so if an instance is incorrectly listed, or its signup status has changed, please let me know....
Instances with 25+ members that have signed the FediPact (fedia.io)
fedidb.org no longer has a list of FediPact instances for some reason....
Welcome Reddit refugees!
We are happy to see that many of you are exploring Lemmy after Reddit announced changes to its API policy. I maintain this project alongside @dessalines....