#and the joinmastodon account

[smitethestate]

What's it like to not be on Twitter and not have to see the literal DAILY ELON DRAMA.

[pynkbites]

Mastodon is having their very own Goncharov moment! Come, take a journey with me...

Gossip rag Mediaite recently reported on Elon Musk banning Mastodon's official Twitter account, @joinmastodon. Unfortunately, they somehow misread this as "John Mastodon" and assumed this completely fictional individual must be the founder of the decentralized Twitter alternative.

In truth, Mastodon was founded by German computer programmer Eugen Rochko... who himself was amused, if somewhat bewildered by the news.

Meanwhile, human creativity took root in this fertile new meme soil, and John Mastodon's lore began to grow...

His identity is still unstuck in place and time, but you can imagine John Mastodon as the cool anarchist techno-chad who swirlied loser nerd Elon Musk in high school. As for anything beyond that, well... you know what they say.

Nobody can be told who John Mastodon is. You have to be SHOWN.

And finally, my own small contribution to this ongoing lore-chaos:

While yet nascent, I do wonder how far Mastodon's Goncharov-alike will go...

[fancyhints]

Twitter suspends Mastodon after it tweeted about Elon’s jet I’ll miss those cute elephants. | Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge Twitter has suspended the official Twitter account of Mastodon, one of the most popular destinations for people seeking a Twitter-like alternative. If you visit @joinmastodon’s profile, you’ll see a message that the account has been suspended. We don’t know exactly why the account was banned, but it may not have been done entirely out of spite for a rival platform. Instead, it could have been because Mastodon tweeted about @ElonJet. The Mastodon suspension happened sometime on Thursday. The Wayback Machine has an archive of the active profile from 12:39PM ET, but an archive from 6:12PM ET shows the suspended page. On the archive of the active profile, there’s a tweet pointing to @ElonJet’s Mastodon account. On Wednesday, Twitter s... Continue reading… https://fancyhints.com/twitter-suspends-mastodon-after-it-tweeted-about-elons-jet-2/?utm_source=ReviveOldPost&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ReviveOldPost

[aktionfsa-blog-blog]

Geschäftsschädigende Tweets verboten

Zensur auf Twitter bringt Viele zum Wechseln

Es ist kaum vorstellbar, aber der reichste Mann der Welt hat Angst vor Mastodon bekommen. Zwar haben seit der Twitter-Übernahme Millionen von Twitter Nutzern neue Accounts bei Mastodon aufgemacht, bei der Menge der Twitter User ist das für ihn aber eigentlich kein Problem. Trotzdem versucht Elon Musk mit allen möglichen Fake News den Nutzern von Twitter Informationen über Alternativen vorzuenthalten.

So schreibt Netzpoltitik.org u.a.: ... öffentliche Links zu vielen Mastodon-Accounts führen auf eine Infoseite, dort steht: „Warnung: Dieser Link ist möglicherweise nicht sicher“. Es handele sich um „potenziellen Spam“ oder ein „Sicherheitsrisiko“. Darüber hinaus ist der offizielle Twitter-Account des Mastodon-Projektes @joinmastodon, derzeit von Twitter aus gesperrt.

Für einen Vertreter der freien Rede, als der sich Musk gern sieht, ist das ein schäbiges und für die Meinungs- und Pressefreiheit gefährliches Vorgehen. Eine Erklärung von Twitter zu den Vorgängen gab es nicht - die deutsche Pressestelle wurde offenbar im Zuge der radikalen Sparmaßnahmen dicht gemacht - vermutet Netzpolitik.org.

Im Nachhinein möchten wir noch über die Sperrung von diversen Twitter Accounts von bekannten JournalistInnen großer US Medien berichten, wie uns eine Leserin auf unseren Letzten Artikel "Neuland: Von Twitter ins Fediverse" schrieb. Die Sperre betraf u.a. Aaron Rupar, Donie O’Sullivan (CNN), Drew Harwell (Washington Post), Ryan Mac (NY Times), Matt Binder (Mashable), Tony Webster (award winning freelancer), Micah Lee (the Intercept), Keith Olbermann, Steve Herman, ...

Soll das Meinungs- und Pressefreiheit  sein oder ist es die Krönung des Absolutismus eine Alleinherrschers?

Mehr dazu bei https://netzpolitik.org/2022/twitter-exodus-links-zu-mastodon-twittern-verboten/

Kategorie[21]: Unsere Themen in der Presse Short-Link dieser Seite: a-fsa.de/d/3rq Link zu dieser Seite: https://www.aktion-freiheitstattangst.org/de/articles/8245-20221218-geschaeftsschaedigende-tweets-verboten.htm

[sareideas]

Twitter Suspends Account Encouraging Others to Join Mastodon

Twitter Suspends Account Encouraging Others to Join Mastodon

The Twitter account encouraging people to join rival social network Mastodon has been suspended, the latest in a string of accounts suspended this week. The usual feed for @JoinMastodon was replaced Thursday with a message that the account had been suspended for violating Twitter’s rules. Also on Thursday, the social network suspended several journalists — including from The New York Times, The…

[hackernewsrobot]

Elon’s Commitment to Free Speech Rapidly Replaced by His Commitment to Hypocrisy

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/15/elons-commitment-to-free-speech-rapidly-replaced-by-his-commitment-to-blatant-hypocrisy-bans-the-joinmastodon-account/ Comments

[ramtracking]

Twitter suspends Mastodon's account and bans links to Mastodon servers • TechCrunch

Twitter suspends Mastodon’s account and bans links to Mastodon servers • TechCrunch

A day immediately after Twitter crafted a new policy to explain its decision to ban an account that tracks Elon Musk’s personal jet, the fallout continues. Twitter apparently suspended its open up supply competitor Mastodon from the services on Thursday afternoon. Just prior to its suspension, Mastodon (@joinmastodon) tweeted a website link to the jet tracking account on its individual services,…

[oeffentlicheversicherung]

@𝐄𝐧𝐧𝐨 𝐋𝐞𝐧𝐳𝐞 ☑️ Du bist einer von ihnen.

♲ Enno Lenze (ennolenze@twitter.com)2022-11-04 21:30:39:

at the rate of increase, it will take just 20 years to reach twitter's user numbers ♲ @joinmastodon@twitter.com:

The number of people who switched over to #Mastodon in the last week alone has surpassed 230 thousand, along with many returning to old accounts bumping the network to over 655 thousand active users, highest it's ever been! Why? 👉 twitter.com/joinmastodon/s…

Mag sein, dass es noch 20 Jahre dauern wird. Dann soll es so sein. Es geht nicht darum Millionen in's Fediverse zu holen. Es sollten die Richtigen sein.

[comicstripoff]

Update 01/01/2020

Ditched instagram account. Might come back here. Was glad tk hear it has been bought cheap by Automattic aka Wordpress. At least some open source spirit.

Gonna have to tidy up.

Got a behance account.

#omn #openmedianetwork #joinMastodon

[underdarkgreyclouds]

Okay no that is just not the way to go. I know there's shitty servers on the Fediverse, but if you take the time to LOOK at how it WORKS it is really easy to find a place where you are safe. It's not one singular user base. Mastodon is by principle federated, meaning it's several different social media platforms cooperating! They all work on the same basic code, but each instance has the power to block specific other instances.

So please! Take your time and read about the instance you want to join. You can use joinmastodon for that. If you don't like the instance you started out on, ask around and find friends on other instances. You can always ignore the public timelines. You can forbid accounts to see certain posts. You can mute words, hash tags, everything. Heck, you can use every feature to make that your safe space. I know people who have PTSD who never felt safe until they started using Mastodon.

Please. Don't label the whole of Mastodon as unsafe and toxic and terrible when in reality I have no idea where I could be safer on the internet. Really. None.

heads up to my underage followers

don’t join mastodon. the lax nature of regulations makes it an extremely popular platform for maps and pedophiles.

[nomthecatsaid]

One of those new social networks, but actually cool

[Updated 2018-12-07]

Mastodon! It’s decentralised and has lots of queers and people are actually using it. Let me try to make a masterpost because I’m excited.

Decentralised means there’s not one site, like tumblr.com, where everyone is, but that people are on loads of different servers (”instances”, at the moment over 2000 of them) that are all running the same software and communicating with each other, so that you can have your account on any of them and interact with people who are on different ones.

What’s cool

It has content warnings (in the form of spoilers/readmores)

You can filter/mute words or phrases

It is open source and many of the people who use it actually help make it, and if you can’t do that by coding, you can still tell others about a thing that would be cool to have, and sometimes that is complicated, but sometimes it leads to really cool features

You can choose the instance you sign up on by how much you like its admin, for example… or by how good the anti harassment policy is.

Everyone uses cringy/awesome URLs. I’m literally on cybre.space and other instances that exist are catgirl.science and toot.cat and anticapitalist.party, how cool is that, finally the aesthetics to fit this cyberpunk dystopia that we live in

Posts are called toots because mastodons are like mammoths and elephants make “toot”

Most (or hopefully all) instances don’t track us and won’t sell our data and don’t display ads, like commercial social media sites do

No full text search, to prevent terfs from harassing everyone who writes about terfs, and authors from harassing everyone who criticizes their work, etc etc well you know what Tumblr and birbsite are like. (You can search for hashtags, accounts, and among toots that you have already interacted with or that are your own.)

Image descriptions!

There is a setting to autopause gifs

What’s not cool (have to be honest, no place is perfect)

The current default theme is not very accessible (low contrast, white text on dark background, not great at high zoom) – there are ways to deal with this, scroll down to “Random Stuff” for possible fixes. But still, could be better.

There are instances in the fediverse (that means: all Mastodon, and also non-Mastodon-but-using-something-similar, instances combined) that allow or even encourage their users to harass others, like on Twitter – you are dependent on your own instance admin to block those instances from connecting with yours. (You can, however, block users, and block instances from your own account, and remove whole instances from your followers.)

Sometimes, things don’t work as one would expect (but usually people are happy to help).

So, that was the honest-ish advertisement, now for resources.

General

User Guide: Explains how Mastodon works, how to use it, important terms. Pay attention to the privacy settings and to the way federation works, those might not be very intuitive. See also the FAQ

Toot How-To : Intro to Mastodon

Mastodon 101: A Queer-Friendly Social Network You’re Gonna Like a Lot on Autostraddle

Resources for Mastodon newbies (I love this one, it has a few links and some info about things that you might find weird when joining Mastodon)

Choosing an instance

So, you are considering signing up, but have no idea which instance to choose?

I’d recommend browsing through http://instances.noct.zone/ and picking whichever sounds nicest to you.

Or if you prefer a thing that recommends an instance based on your answers to a few questions: instances.social

So here are my subjective recommendations (keep in mind, I only know a small part of all the instances in existence):

monsterpit.net I only just discovered this one, but they look great

computerfairi.es is small and queer and has a lot of tech talk. It uses a theme with purple background

elekk.xyz gaming-focused & explicitly feminist

queer.party I have a side account there and it’s nice

tootplanet.space I have another side account there and it’s also great

wandering.shop I don’t know this one well, but it seems to be the good kind of geeky

weirder.earth also

mastodon.art for, well, art

sunbeam.city solarpunk

toot.cat seems super nice

Things to consider

Code of conduct and administration. You’ll want to pick an instance that aligns with your principles and the way you want to use your account, and that you trust to deal with any issues appropriately. Relevant info is on [instance url]/about/more.

Size. Instances have a local timeline, where you see the public toots of everyone on this instance. on a small instance, it can help build community. on the flagship mastodon.social, with more than 100 000 users, it is too fast to even follow.

Community. Use this tool to see the last few public toots from that instance and decide if it’s a place you’d like to be at.

Looks. Is the theme readable for you & do you like it? Unfortunately, there is no built-in way to check this yet, but screenshots are being collected here.

Basics

On Mastodon, because there are loads of different places that are connected, usernames look more like email addresses because they always include your instance as well:

One of my accounts is @maunzikation@cybre.space (but I’m mostly at @catte@situational.softi.city right now, feel free to follow me there). maunzikation alone would be confusing – in fact, I’m also @maunzikation@computerfairi.es, but these are all different accounts that have little to do with each other (except that I made them – but you can’t tell that from the name, it could be made by someone else). So if you want to mention someone who’s on a different instance, you have to include their instance for it to work. Just like you’d include “@gmail.com” or “@riseup.net” when emailing someone.

Getting involved

You have an account, you feel somewhat at home, and you want to make stuff better? Or there is some accessibility improvement that you need before you sign up?

There is the github thingie https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon

If you want to report a problem or suggest new features, what you want to do is go here specifically. There is a search bar. Use it to see if anyone has already posted about that thing. If yes, you can add your info or comments there. If not, click “New Issue” and make your own post. (If yes, but it’s been months since the last comment, maybe also open a new issue, it might not be great form, but at least people will notice.)

If you want more of an open discussion, or need help in figuring out what you want or need, post to this forum.

Or you can:

Financially support your instance’s Patreon, if it has one, or your instance admin personally.

Give feedback/money/… to any Mastodon apps you use! Most of them are also free and open source, just like Mastodon itself, and very happy about any contribution.

Keep an eye on the federated timeline and try to help people who are having problems figuring out how stuff works.

Look at #introductions and #introduction occasionally and boost some of the toots, to spread the word about newcomers that people might want to follow.

Random Stuff

Solutions to accessibility issues (also interesting if you simply don’t like the way it looks)

How to automatically post your mastodon posts on twitter with IFTTT (would also work with tumblr)

Mastodon-Twitter-Bridge: Sign in with both so your twitter followers can find you on mastodon

On the history of mastodon and some of the things that I implied with “it’s complicated” re people making the software they use

I didn’t want to post it as an actual recommendation, but there is an instance called ephemeral.glitch.social that deletes toots at some time that is determined my the moon phases, and promises to be unstable with lots of feature testing, and people there seem to be nice. Some people use it just for fun, some for self-deleting private accounts. Or you could use Forget on any instance for the latter (also works for Twitter btw).

And joinmastodon.org is like a non-instance-specific page about mastodon, not very detailed, but has a few useful links. If you want to link to Mastodon as a whole, link joinmastodon.

Apps

full list: https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using-Mastodon/Apps.md

some popular ones:

Android: Tusky, Mastalab

iOS: Amaroq, Toot!