Wendy W @WendyW@qoto.org

Never forget that when Seoul, Korea removed the #Cheonggyecheon expressway in 2003, and replaced it with a restored stream and 1000 acre park in the city’s centre, not only did it transform the city’s public life and economic success, but the vehicle traffic got better.

The traffic got BETTER.

#cars #cities #urbanism #Seoul #traffic #car

I mean come on…. #Dog #Dogs #DogsOfMastodon #DogsOfFediverse

I was quietly minding my own business taking photos of Bullfinches (small/far away) in a tree when this Robin came and perched right in front of my camera and demanded to have his picture taken. How could I refuse?

#AngryBirds 🤣

#Birds #BirdWatching #Twitching #Nature #BirdsOfMastodon #Bird #Photo #Photography #Robin

This is important — A global study reveals that Dutch residents are the most physically active on earth, getting 12.8 hours of exercise each week. The key—designing activity into daily life. The average #Dutch person cycles about 1,098 kilometers per year.

https://www.ipsos.com/en/global-views-to-sports-2021

#Dutch #Netherlands #Holland #cities #cars #HealthyCities #exercise #cityplanning #bikes

Friday night, lights on.

If you like these drop me a #follow and please #boost

#London #Photography #streetPhotography #SE1 #ElephantAndCastle #Creator #DailyShots #DailyPhotos #NeilEvansRocks #FollowFriday #FridayPhotos

Best Venn diagram ever

This government appears to be heading towards a U.K. Universal Basic Income through sheer incompetence.

@freemo thanks again for providing this server for me to lurk from. You and the other admins have been doing a good job for my experience on the Fediversr

Twitter's down.

And here we all are .

Looking sheepish and thinking up excuses as to why we've not been here for ages.

LOVE YOU ALL!

That feeling when you put your best smile on for a photo and still come away looking like an idiot.
#DogsOfMastodon

I’ve just started reading “The Brompton - Engineering for Change” (https://www.brompton.com/shop/bike-accessories/the-brompton-engineering-for-change ) which is a history of the company rather than the bikes (although they obviously feature quite heavily!) and hopefully will contain some good business insights.

I’d had it on my Kindle’s to-buy list for a little while but came across a YouTube video this evening which prompted me to finally buy it: https://youtu.be/MBXYZ7vHmXw

#business #brompton #RaspberryPi #books

This was some total kickass experience #OurBike #BikeTooter #UKCyclingTweeps #Richmond #EastSheen

i love #bikenyc's diversity & unicycle culture.

https://reddit.com/r/NYCbike/comments/k4kocu/i_didnt_know_they_made_modern_unicycles_with/

@brklynsurfer every good yacht needs a tender. when I need to haul a big load, I bring it out. Otherwise the annual maintenance cost of that thing in the winter is not cheap. I'd rather have a little bike that I can wash in my tub and that can fairy me back-and-forth to my yacht.

Also, who doesn't want a brompton? #BikeTooter

Dr. Mae Jemison, MD, the first black woman in space and first actual astronaut to appear on a Star Trek show, one of the very few people on this planet of whom two pictures can be posted depicting them doing their job on a spaceship with entirely different contexts.
#StarTrek #BlackHistoryMonth

Another rainy day in #pdx - perfect nappin’ weather. #DogsofMastodon #dogs #dogstodon

At least I have this guy to be cute and fluffy. #dog #DogsOfMastodon

A fancy sweater is helpful against the cold. #dog #DogsOfMastodon

New Folks: if you expect this place to work like Twitter you'll get frustrated because the mechanics at #Mastodon are rather different.

Here's seven bits of advice to help you settle in:

1) Go up to the search bar in the top left and search for some #hashtags relevant to your personal interests. Cooking, cybersecurity, hiking, pets, the war in Ukraine, World Cup soccer, whatever. When you get hits, click the little follow icon. Choose some hashtags and follow them in this fashion. This will start getting interesting content into your feed.

2) While you're at the search bar, search for a few people you may know from other examples of social media -- whether it's friends or acquaintances or journalists or influencers or what. If you find them, follow them too. It's less important for your choices here to be perfect and more important for you to start getting some feedstock into your feed.

3) This is where it starts to get fun: you've made a web, now start crawling it. View what comes into your feed and start selecting additional people and topics you like to follow, based on their posts or replies or whatever. If something disappoints, unfollow it. Easy peasy. Feed your home timeline like this until it's got enough content in it to infotain you as you browse it.

4) You now have four basic varieties of browsing timeline instead of one. Your home timeline, which you are curating around your personal interests. Your local timeline, which is a precis of the other posts being made by the other people who have made their Mastodon home in the same instance as you. Your Federated timeline, which is as close as you're gonna get to the old Twitter firehose as it will draw content from across every different Mastodon instance that your own instance has elected to federate with (i.e. share its content). And your Explore timeline, which is as close as Mastodon gets to a curated exploration mode of the more interesting bits that are in the Federated firehose.

5) (This might actually be your number one!) Notice the conspicuous lack of trolls! That's also by design in the federated model. Trolls have to pick an instance just like anyone else and the way federated instances share information makes it a lot harder for trolls to get the massive exposure they want. And the federated model makes it a lot easier for people to find a place that will moderate trolls and stalkers if they place a high value on doing so. All that means that Mastodon is just less rewarding for the typical troll. Which is good for you!

6) While you're waiting for your timelines to 'mature' a bit, realize that some of that initial silence you're encountering is rooted in three things - one, a lack of drive by noise from uninvolved and uninvested people; two, much like in a neighborhood bar, people are likely to listen a bit and wait and see what you're like before they decide to chat with you, no matter how snappy your patter; and three, the larger part of Mastodon is still itself learning the ropes and finding its place. It's a lot like junior high when you interpreted silence as disinterest or contempt when in reality everyone was in the same insecure boat as you.

7) Just hang in for a while, don't try too hard, reply to stuff you like or are amused by or that you find interesting, and let everything marinate for a bit while your brain starts to go 'oh, I get it, it really IS different here' instead of clenching up going 'No one's talking to me, wtf'. It'll go at a slower course, largely because you aren't being supercollided with each other by the Twitter algorithms, but by basic conversational interest.

Aaaaanad voila! Suddenly you have an improvement over Twitter.