QOTO Announcements & Polls @QOTO@qoto.org

In case you didnt know, #QOTO is a non-profit organization. Not only that no one who works for #QOTO is paid, not even the founder.

Despite that we have a very generous donation fund. We can currently afford to host all QOTO services, give each user a TB quota, run on production level load balanced redundant server architecture, and still have enough in our donation fund to operate for at least a decade.

This is all due to the hard work of our volunteers and the generous nature of our donators. We do this with a pledge to no advertising and never selling your data..

So don't feel guilty, claim your free accounts and enjoy. We love to see how the members of our community enrich us all. It is why the volunteers like myself and the whole team do this!

WOW according to our new user bot #QOTO has 34 new users this week and its barely half way through Monday. So exciting, we cant wait to get to know the new additions to our family!

#introductions #fediverse

Just a reminder that we offer the following free services to all of our users with up to 1 TB quota for free.

Also we never advertise or collect any of your data!

NextCloud - https://cloud.qoto.org

GitLab - https://git.qoto.org

GitLab pages (including user hosted pages) - https://*.qoto.io

FunkWhale - https://audio.qoto.org

PeerTube - https://video.qoto.org

Discourse - https://discourse.qoto.org

#fediverse #mastodon #gitlab #git #STEM #Science #Software #programming #CS #nextcloud #funkwhale #peertube #discourse

Just a reminder. All of #QOTO's free services including NextCloud, FunkWhale, PeerTube, and Gitlab have some quota restrictions to new users.

Any user with a QOTO account or who is active and established on another one of our servers, may request a quota upgrade for free. In most cases we can provide each user with a TB of space or more.

Thanks to our very generous donations we are currently funded to keep the lights on for many years into the future. So just ask for your free quota upgrade and we can usually take care of it for you.

Currently the #QOTO User Count Bot displays a single graph twice a day that represents all server stats for the last two years. Would it be useful to configure it to also post stats for other time periods as well, like the last week? That means it will post a bit more often as well.

#QOTO Mastodon hint:

Don't like to see toots in languages you don't understand?

Just Go into your Settings -> Preferences -> Other then select whichever languages you know under "Filter Languages".

#Hints

I'd like to hear any feedback about the #QOTO bots now that we reactivated them. Please leave comments below to tell us if you like them or not, or how you'd like us to handle bots. There is also a poll for all you introverts.

#QOTO notice: Sorry one of our bots, hackernews, was far more verbose than we realized. It has now been set to unlisted so as to minimize noise on the federated and local timelines.

Just a little note about #QOTO bots.

We just revived our old bots over at QOTO. You can find a list of the bots at the end of this post

One note: The arXiv bots are very noisy. As such we set them up to only go off once a day, in the middle of the night when the server usage is minimal. This should reduce any spam and not bury the posts of other users in the timeline.

@time - Toots the time every 15 minutes, unlisted so wont show int he home timeline unless you follow it.

@HN - Posts hacker news every 3 hours except when the server isn't active.

@arxiv_stats - Posts new arXiv papers on Statistics

@arxiv_bio - Posts new arXiv papers on Quantitative Biology

@arxiv_math - Posts new arXiv papers on Mathematics

@arxiv_eess - Posts new arXiv papers on Electrical Engineering & Systems Science

@arxiv_physics - Posts new arXiv papers on Physics

@arxiv_stats - Posts new arXiv papers on Statistics.

@starfleet - an auto-follow bot that follows people from around the fediverse in order to increase QOTO's federation.

Did you know #QOTO provides free personalized mailing lists to all its users through our #Discourse server?

Each category on our discourse server is bound to an incoming email address like lists+qoto@qoto.org . Anyone who sends an e-mail to one of these addresses will automatically have the content of that email posted as a new topic in that category. Similarly people can reply to the emails as well. You can even configure your account so you never need to login to discourse at all and just use it like a traditional mailing list.

We provide a special category on our server called "projects". Anyone on our server can request a category as their own personal project space. Aside from being able to control the content within your own project space you also get your own customized e-mail address to act as a mailing list. This is useful for open-source project managers who want a way to provide technical support via email, but it can be used on non-technical projects as well.

If your interested just post a request in the projects category on our Discourse server found here: https://discourse.qoto.org/c/PROJ

#discourse #opensource #oss #floss #programming #science #Software

A reminder to all #QOTO users that by default you will **not** show up in the user directory. If you want to increase your exposure and follower count you may want to consider having your account listed in the user directory.

Also if your listing yourself in our user directory be sure to add any Hash tag's to your profile that describe your interests. This should help people follow you.

To be listed int he user directory simply go to settings -> profile and make sure you check the box labeled "List this account on the directory" then save your changes.

For all those who feel this would be a bad idea; it would be really helpful if you spoke up and expressed why you feel it might be a bad idea. The reasons it might be a good idea are obvious but the reasons it might be a bad idea are less obvious. As such it would be really helpful for moving the conversation forward.

Would you like to see ArXiv and other non-commercial STEM-specific bots brought back online here at #QOTO.

It has been offline for some time but I still have the scripts to bring it online. You can see an example of the type of content it used to post here:

https://qoto.org/web/accounts/8917

I had an idea I wanted to run by the #QOTO community. Not sure if I love it or hate it personally so could really use some feedback.

We have several services here that can be very expensive in terms of storage costs, things like NextCloud, FunkWhale, PeerTube, are quickly getting to the terrabyte range.

Right now we give a small but generous quota for free on all our servers. Usually enough to play with, 1 - 10 gigs as a starting point. We have more than enough funding for many years into the future to be able to give several people much higher quotas, even a terrabyte a person would be doable if it werent too many users.

Problem is if we just open it up to the public and give everyone a high quota it wouldn't take long before the costs would be overwhelming. Especially considering that many of those users wont be contributing to the QOTO community and may just use the space for personal storage only. Thats fine, but we need a better way to figure out who to give a higher quota, some way to earn it.

Obviously QOTO is a non-profit so charging users is out of the question. So we need a better way. I had an idea to make it reward based.

Basically QOTO reward people if they have been on the server and active for a certain amount of time. Create "tiers" based on how long an account was registered and how many posts they have made as qualifications for each tier.

Also no need for it to be limited to qoto mastodon either. We can actually use the the user trust-levels on discourse (which are calculated automatically based on post history) as another measure. Each Discourse trust level gets you a new tier of quota allowances.

This should reward QOTO engagers and content creators to create meaningful content and give us a way to ration out our server resources.

The #QOTO #Discourse server now has full support for **both** MathJax based rendering for Latex formatted Math equations and Latex formatted Pseudocode. In fact you can even render math latex inside your pseudocode!

Check out the following post to see an example along with some quick instructions on how to use the new functionality.

https://discourse.qoto.org/t/rendering-pseudocode/45

#Programming #Algorithms #discourse #science #ComputerEngineering #CS #ComputerScience

We just fixed Latex Math based rendering on the #QOTO discourse server ( https://discourse.qoto.org )

You can now insert Latex based math into your posts on Discourse in the same way you can on the QOTO mastodon server!

This is the last major bug we have observed across all the new QOTO services we brought up this month. We will keep an eye on things but everything appears fully functional now!

What other services would you like to see hosted free on #QOTO?

The #QOTO source code link in the footer did not update in our last code update as expected. The issue has since been fixed in the source code and will be applied in the next version bump.

In the meantime if anyone wants access to the QOTO's variant of the mastodon source code it can be found here:

https://git.qoto.org/qoto/qoto