@ColinTheMathmo@ChuckMcManis
That jibes with my observations here on mathstodon.xyz. For specificity, here's a post today by a user who set their native language to Deutsche, which causes a "Translate" button to appear in my client:
The translations are done by DeepL and are usually good quality.
Some users never set their language, and when someone pops up with e.g. 100% of all posts in Chinese characters, I get fatigued and often block them. I've studied Han characters a little, but only a tiny bit.
(Fortunately that has only happened a few times in the streams I observe. Most mastodon posters post at least sometimes in English.)
So it would be improved by a language detection heuristic -- but at some runtime cost.
Another major benefit to this client is support for LaTeX.
Friendly reminder, #Mastodon instances are run by volunteers shelling out their own money for hosting. While it's free for us to use, it's not free for them to run.
I have rclone trauma.😂 A decade ago, I misconfigured rclone doing a backup of my personal computer and lost everything in both directions. Luckily, I caught it early.
For my personal files, I have backups of my backups, so it was an easy fix. I've been afraid of rclone since.🤭
I've been reading the rclone guides over the past week but decided, $5.00 to transfer my instance with Flexify was worth it. I still have a credit from the first transfer.
The three things that have helped me find a safe, happy social home on a larger instance are carefully curating who I follow, the hashtags I follow and keyword muting. This is my own self generated algorithm.
Still getting my bearings about how to make a smaller instance just as vibrant. Relays? Being more lax about who I follow? Maybe some of the newer fedi platforms like @newsmast and @Flipboard can help. I know @mammoth has hand curated topic feeds as well.
@box464
> Still getting my bearings about how to make a smaller instance just as vibrant. Relays? Being more lax about who I follow?
One thing I would definitely do if I started my own instance is to have 2 accounts on it.
With one I'd curate selectively, as you've been doing. With the other, I'd follow as widely as possible, while still filtering out noise. The first account is where you live. The second populates your federated timeline, hashtag searches etc.
#TIL: Do not use your root domain name to test federated software, once you federate your domain is registered across multiple instances and relays, there is no way to rollback, you can't reuse that same domain with a different implemention, and even reinstalling the same service might break if you change the keys.
Also: Mastodon has a self-destruct command, if you ever decide to move away from mastodon for your instance, instead of just shutting down, run the self-destruct from tootctl.
This command will send a message to all federated servers to cleanup their caches and references.
If you want to search for posts you’ve made previously, the criteria “from:me” can be used.
E.g. If you wanted to search for all your posts related to the influential Belgian musical artist Technotronic, you would search “from:me technotronic”.
Wow #mastodon !
Silk browser in Amazon tablet:
Just for fun I tested Mastodon on Silk browser and boy was I impressed. #fediverse #mastotips #feditips
Customize the feed using the "unpin" arrows ?This feature is brilliant!
Now I can view TWO FEEDS LIVE.
The #Explore -> People list on my current #Mastodon instance has recommended the same accounts for the past 1.5 years without rotation even when they've stopped posting on the account.
If I haven't followed them by now, and they don't post...why does this list exist?
Finding new accounts with hashtags is very easy and rewarding, but the admin account discovery tools built into the servers are stagnant.
If you're posting a video clip or an audio clip attached to a post, remember to include a text description which describes the sound. This is important so that the video or audio is accessible to deaf people.
Also, if it's a video, it's important to describe both the sound and the visuals so that it's accessible to everyone.
Text descriptions for audio and video are added just like text descriptions for images (exact steps vary depending on which app you use).
Of course, if I were to describe a video, I'd have to go as much into details. However, there'd be a whole lot more to describe.
The video would constantly change. It would show much much more than a still image. There'd be audio that'd require detailed description instead of just name-dropping. All of it. Yes, including panning position. Movements of my avatar would have to be described. Movements of the camera around my avatar as well as independently from my avatar would have to be described. All movements would of course require distances, angles, speeds and changes of speed
The description would require a time code: Everything that happens would have to be mentioned including when exactly it happens, and since things might happen quickly or in quick succession, I'm talking about at least tenths of seconds.
Ten minutes of in-world video would take me weeks to describe, and the description would be the length of a novel and take a whole day to read.
Mastodon users would never see the post with the video because, as far as I know, Mastodon automatically rejects all external posts that exceed 100,000 characters, and I'm talking about millions of characters here. I don't even know if Hubzilla would let me post that much, and Hubzilla doesn't have any character limits except for what the Web server can handle.
Nobody would ever read this, so the whole effort would be in vain. But anything less than this would be critically lacking.
If you're posting a video clip or an audio clip attached to a post, remember to include a text description which describes the sound. This is important so that the video or audio is accessible to deaf people.
Also, if it's a video, it's important to describe both the sound and the visuals so that it's accessible to everyone.
Text descriptions for audio and video are added just like text descriptions for images (exact steps vary depending on which app you use).
In case you don't know what this is: It's a quote-post of another Mastodon post. There's a link to the original and a link to @Fedi.Tips who posted it. Check both out.
If you're just joining fediverse welcome to Mastodon. Cat is not happy about all this work even on caturday. Why?
I had to mute over 200 posts in the last 30 minutes or so. Cleaning up the feeds so you can get to a few good posts will take lots of effort because there's no algorithm
You'll notice many posts come from sources like dlvr ... review them and use filter/block
I just in the past few minutes stumbled upon https://fediwall.social , a configurable social media wall that lets you configure and display selected public content in a rotating panel based on server, accounts, or hashtags.
You can do this on the fly, or customize and save a link, or install and run your own, by the look of it.
#feditips if you want to delete media without search.
Tap media tab on your profile.
Scroll through media thumbnails and click image.
At bottom of displayed image find and tap an icon that looks like an expand button. In the tangerine skin, it looks like a box with an arrow to the upper right.
Edit the post with the media, then delete it or whatev. OR...
If media isn't shown, it may be further down in an associated thread. Scroll until you find it.
Happy time deleting images and video that prevent you from downloading an ActivityPub archive. Beats using has:media search term!