@acjay@qoto.orrg has moved @acjay@qoto.org

Imagine you're a visually impaired Mastodon user and your screen reader encounters a post that says something like "A stunning view I saw this morning" or "This is hilarious." But the image is the equivalent of what you see below: a blank. Wouldn't it be frustrating to encounter post after post like that?

Describe images. It's an act of love. Describe them as you would to a dear friend you were talking to on the phone.

🚨 Heroku free tier warning 🚨

Heroku will start deleting apps on their old free tier on November 28th 2022 - that's Monday coming up

If you have old projects that you need to archive this weekend is the time to be doing it

(Not a great time to find out that the accounts you created to help out various non-profits a few years ago can't be signed into anymore due to changes to the Heroku/Salesforce login flow...)

It's perfectly reasonable and possible for *both* of these statements to be true:

* it is better here than on Twitter
* this better *isn't good enough*

Federation and decentralization *as currently and inconsistently and idiosyncratically practiced* while better, are not good enough.

Digging in and saying that decentralization and federation *is* good enough is really, really unhelpful.

Also, the potential for better does not mean the practical experience is better.

There's a parasite that makes wolves 46 times more likely to lead a pack. It's tied to risky behavior generally. In humans, toxoplasma gondii is associated with less conscientiousness and generosity. In women, it's tied to increased tribalism and less cultural liberalism. Oh, and it's also been linked to greater attractiveness.

https://www.iflscience.com/a-strange-parasite-massively-improves-a-wolf-s-chances-of-leading-the-pack-66368
https://www.iflscience.com/your-political-views-could-be-the-result-of-a-parasitic-infection-65636
https://www.iflscience.com/people-infected-by-brainaltering-cat-parasite-are-more-attractive-finds-study-63735

Check out how land is used in the United States. Cows take up the most space!
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/ @sociology

Disturbed by reports of Black Mastodon users—Black women in particular—having negative experiences on this app, including being randomly banned for discussions of racism. Some of these users will not come back. All will share their experiences. The answer is not to condescendingly lecture them on “how the fediverse works,” as if their experiences are inevitable, nor to swear to do better next time. (There may not be one.) It’s to do better now lest the reputation of this app be cemented.

There were two notable moderation incidents on mastodon.social and mastodon.online in the past 24 hours that I would like to address. In the first, a post was wrongfully removed due to a report claiming it contained a dogwhistle, and in the second, a person was wrongfully suspended due to a report claiming it's an impersonator. Both were undone and apologies issued.

Veteran stopped Club Q shooter. Per NYT
It was Mr. Fierro’s first time at a drag show, and he was digging it. He had spent 15 years in the Army, and now relished his role as a civilian and a father, watching one of his daughter’s old high-school friends perform.
“These kids want to live that way, want to have a good time, have at it,” he said as he described the night. “I’m happy about it because that is what I fought for, so they can do whatever they hell they want.”

https://baratun.de/3i3h89V

😩 My follow up blog post about Solo hosting will not be ready until tomorrow.
However, as a consolation prize here is a partial list of 18 companies (hosting in 45 countries) that have the tech skills to host your Federated Instance upon your own domain:
https://darnell.day/stress-free-managed-hosting-options-fediverse
Note: Some companies are already full & no longer accept new clients. I will also update this list to include more companies in the future.
#Feditips cc: @feditips

@acjay you mean to spin up your own instance... check out masto.host