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Adnan boosted
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Zev Eisenberg

Huge if true

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Adnan boosted
Christopher

Real long aggregation of Mastodon etiquette for birdsite expats 

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.

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Adnan boosted
Wefail

If you've noticed your Home timeline here is pretty quiet it's because at the other place you were constantly hit with 'here's a tweet someone you follow has Liked', or 'here's another from someone you don't follow but someone you follow follows them!', or just general spam. So your timeline was constantly full of things you really didn't want to see and hardly any content you actually cared about.

In this place you only see posts from those you follow, so remember to boost the good stuff!

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Adnan boosted
internetarchive

New post from @brewsterkahle: We have added a Mastodon Server blog.archive.org/2022/11/13/we

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Adnan

A sincere question about content warnings, or really trigger warnings. 

This post is a contradiction in search of guidance.

For a bit of background on myself, I'm a war refugee who escaped a genocide with his family in early childhood. As I've become more grey hair prone, I've helped my parents and myself get therapy and work through decades of anxiety processing disorders, and I'm always actively looking to tune how I can approach and see the world.

One of the things I do to learn about myself and to establish healthy boundaries is I try to get an understanding from people who are far more educated than I am in the neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatric field.

A tool that I've found immensely helpful has been the podcast 'Hidden Brain', which brings on people from these fields to discuss their research and things they've derived from it.

One of the recent episodes (hiddenbrain.org/podcast/a-bett) had discussed how anxiety can be a force for good, and that the inability to cope with your anxiety is what should be addressed.

A specific topic in the podcast was related to trigger warnings and how the research found that there is "substantial evidence that trigger warnings' previously nonsignificant main effect of increasing anxiety responses to distressing content was genuine, albeit small."

As I'm building a new client for Mastodon consumption, I can't help but feel like the content warning field when used for a trigger warning alert _can_ be contradictory in its goals since the linked research shows that people could experience _more_ anxiety when they're forewarned about a topic that they can see as potentially harmful.

To me that makes me want to minimize, in terms of UX, posts that have content warnings as much as possible. Is that a regressive solutions?

I do understand this is one researcher with a couple of cited papers and that is not the end all be all of the problem space, but as someone hoping to build an inclusive and accessible client for users, I want to make sure I don't make any missteps and perpetuate the harm social medial tools can bring to people who struggle with anxiety disorders.


Tagging as I'm hoping for some feedback.

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Adnan

Need to take someone to get groomed today.

I'm still laughing at the prom style photos they sent her home with last time.

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Adnan boosted
Daniel Andrlik

Twitter news 

Looks like twitter did another round of terminations. ~4000 contractors were just terminated with no notice to either them or their managers. Including people working on misinformation and child safety.

twitter.com/caseynewton/status

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Adnan

I avoid cryptocurrency stuff, but this is too crazy. 

The owner of a popular exchange had a separate entity called that partakes in cryptocurrency speculation.

Allegedly, in attempt to either cover debt or to highly leverage their positions in , the owner of moved _client funds_ from the exchange to the speculative entity without client consent. Worse yet, he likely used a freshly minted currency from itself as collateral for the transaction.

amp.theguardian.com/technology

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Adnan boosted
Sarah T. Roberts

Musk’s Saturday Night Massacre 

Around 3,000+ contractor employees of Twitter were canned last night (totally normal thing to do, btw). How does Twitter have so many contractors? This is where the CONTENT MODERATOR numbers are hidden. From an ex-colleague I’ll not name: “of the 3,000+ contractors let go last night, I believe that it included a SIGNIFICANT portion of the content moderation workforce.”

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Adnan

I know doing an exercise like this can be dysregulating, and it used to be for me as well; but I've realized that being honest with myself regarding how long some aspects might take allows me to set healthy boundaries in regards to other aspects of my life.

If I know something takes intense research, I can do that asynchronously to active in-front-of-the-IDE, development.

I don't like to touch code unless I'm very comfortable with what I'm looking to implement.

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Adnan

Taking a pass on scoping out the rest of the work required before I'm comfortable making this client public.

I dislike T shirt sizing since that process doesn't give enough insight into what is contributing to estimates, so I'm trialing out a new process for myself.

Glossary:
Trivial - I know how to do this, it's easy to knock out in hours w/ limited research.
Involved - I need to research some aspects, might be a week or two.
Significantly Complex - Need a ton of research, tough to estimate.

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Adnan boosted
Rachel Widome

Here’s the good news: I think we have at least 6 months before your boss finds this place.

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Adnan boosted
Mark Riedl

Oh boy…

Buy access to a model that will make a professional image for your LinkedIn profile

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Adnan

While dogfooding my little prototype here, I think I'm realizing that the 'Public/Federated' feed is a bit useless (at least for me). I'm going to make custom feed tabs a priority.

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Adnan boosted
Noah Shachtman

Went on the birdsite for a sec and found the new owner lying his ass off.

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Adnan

Enjoying the sunsets here in the .

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Adnan boosted
a fae, a demi-female fae

Doing some retro computing and it’s wild that software back then didn’t have half the features we expect today, for example Lotus 1-2-3 doesn’t have a “stories” feature for sharing videos

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Adnan

@Decad3nce Just realized the text colors need fixing on the light mode 😂

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Adnan

Implemented notifications (not push yet) and dark mode toggle. I will say material 3 is awesome when it leverages colors from the underlying Android phone, though it still looks pretty good on iOS.

Probably the last things I'll do today as I'm taking a break to drink some beer 🍻.

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Adnan boosted
🦥 Mx.Grey ☭ :verified_gay:

mastodon vs twitter (updated)

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