Ancient mastodon pictures discovered in the Amazon rainforest!

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine-chapel-of-the-ancients-rock-art-discovered-in-remote-amazon-forest

"Their date is based partly on their depictions of now-extinct ice age animals, such as the mastodon, a prehistoric relative of the elephant that hasn’t roamed South America for at least 12,000 years. There are also images of the palaeolama, an extinct camelid, as well as giant sloths and ice age horses."

Amazing!

This makes me think of one of my favourite book series, Earth's Children by Jean M. Auel :)

@QOTO

After discussing with the QOTO moderators we would like to nominate @khird as a new moderator.

It isn't official yet though, we want to give all of our users a chance to consider our nomination and vote either for or against. Also users are welcome and encouraged to nominate their own suggestions as well.

After about a week if no objections are raised and the support is positive with no opposing nominations to consider we will make the nomination real.

Lets hear from you!

#QOTO #Mastoadmin

@cy

There is so much to unload in that statement.

For starters lets be clear I do recognize and agree that there are plenty of examples of governments where the laws are designed in such a way that is unfair for those in poverty and makes it harder to get out of poverty than I’d like.

With that said, I certainly wouldnt adopt the idea from this statement you made:

Yes, almost everyone has some influence over their financial situation, and that influence is tiny, doesn’t matter.

As someone who grew up in absolute poverty, on welfare, had to grow up in a home with 4 generations under the same small roof and never even had a room of my own until much later in life, someone who later made my own success and am now financially successful, I can say first hand, at least in the USA, that nothing can be farther from the truth.

My success didnt come at the whim of some rich person, no one gave me a chance, I worked my ass off in near-starving conditions to get there on my own. I spent my free time at the library, I studied at a very young age, and by the time I was 15 years old I figured out how to make 6 figures from a house hold that otherwise could barely feed me.

I’ve been through the process, I’ve seen it first hand, and I can say without a doubt int he USA we have a great deal of power to define our own financial freedom. While that doesnt mean the system is fair, and it doesnt mean you have the same advantage as someone born rich, it is clear the notion of ones control over their own financial health as being insignificant is simply not the reality.

I should also point out I spend a good deal of my free time tutoring young adults in subjects that they cant afford to go to college to learn, in the hopes they can use that knowledge to get out of poverty on their own. I never give these people dumps of money or give them favors to start them out in life, the only thing I do is spend a year or more helping them study and learn marketable skills. Virtually everyone I ever taught who lasted a year without quiting went on to make very good money and be successful despite having a start in life of poverty…

So I also know im not the exception, I’ve seen dozens of people go from rags to riches due to their own hard work and study and little more. So even if we agree that the cards may be stacked against them it is also clear that most people have a great deal of influence on their financial standing, the system may not be fair, but you do have a lot of the power to change your situation despite this.

@arteteco

Managed Groups Feature

YAY! I finally got the email confirmations working on the group server. that is the last of the bugs/features, it is now ready for opening to the public. Later today anyone interested in registering for a managed group can do so.

Only thing i have to do now is fill in the policies and about page, fix the headers on the load balancer to pass in the ip address and it will go live.

Stay tuned the server should be open for registration in about an hour. Hello managed groups fediverse!

#mastoadmin #fediverse #mastodon

@QOTO

I go into a little detail about how the new managed groups at qoto ( https://groups.qoto.org ) works. Might be worth a look for anyone interested.

#fediverse #mastoadmin #mastodon
QT: https://qoto.org/@freemo/105118351270711468

QOTO New Features Guide

Since we have so many new significant features deployed as of last night I wanted to take a minute and give a brief explanation of the features and how to use them, as well as how we expect them to evolve over the next few weeks as I continue to work on them.

The following is a brief summary of most of the new features added:

• Groups Rendering - Accounts which represent groups (such as those from Guppe) are now tagged with a group badge and are specially rendered so the messages relayed by a group appear to be originating from the user.

• Group Directory - Groups are federated in the group directory which, like the federated timeline, will list all groups followed by anyone on our server.

• Markdown Posts - You now have the option to select markdown formatting when posting.

• Circles - You can now create circles with followers in it. When you make a post you can select one or more circles to privately post to and only users of those circles can see your post.

• Colored follow button - The follow button seen in the feed and in profiles (the one that can be optionally turned off in settings) will now be colored to indicate follower status. Gray if not followed, yellow if followed, blue if following, green if mutual follow

• Read/unread notifications - Unread notifications now have a subtle blue indicator. There is also a “mark all as red” button added.

• User Post Notification - Users now have a bell next to their name where the follow button is. This will send you a notification every time they makes a new post.

• Rich-text rendering - We now render rich-text from other servers, so servers which post in a formatting that includes things like bolding, quotes, headers, italics, underlines, etc, will render in the statuses.

• Rich-text Stripping - The user option to partially or fully turn off the rendering of rich-text.

• Registration Captcha - A captcha is now required to signup for a new account, reducing spam.

• Local-only toot default - You can now optionally set all toots to be local-only and prevent all your posts from federating outside of the local server. Without this setting you can still select local-only on a per-toot basis.

• Quote feature turn-off - As introduced earlier you can quote a toot rather than just reboost it. This is an additional button on every toot. This can now be turned off in your settings and removes the button.

• Bookmark feature turn-off - As with the quote feature we could previously bookmark posts. You can now turn off the bookmark button.

• Follow button turn-off - As mentioned earlier our added feature allowing you to add a follow button, optionally colored, into the feed can now be turned off.

• Subscribe button turn-off - As before the subscribe feature that lets you watch a users public toots without following them can now be optionally turned off.

• Favorite Domains - Our last release allowed us to add remote timeline as a feature where you could pull up the local timeline of a remote instance as its own column. Now you can also add domains to a favorite domain list which makes it easier to access and bring up the timelines by listing them directly in the navigation panel.

• Favorite Tags - Similar to favorite domains this allows you to create a list of your favorite tags and have them easily accessible in the navigation panel.

Notes

Markdown

The engine used to render the markdown is called Kramdown. It supports standard markdown, of course, but it also supports some special formatting. You can view some of its formatting rules here: https://kramdown.gettalong.org/syntax.html

Keep in mind that while many other fediverse serves will view the rich text not all servers can or will and the formatting will be converted into html in a best-effort to remain compatible. For examples vanilla Mastodon instances reject all special formatting, but links from markdown should still be correctly rendered, but bold and other formatting will be filtered out on Mastodon. Pleorma and other software which allows rich-text should properly render the markdown.

Groups

Right now all of the support on QOTO around groups is centered around the group directories and rendering groups. You can not create a group on the QOTO server itself, but you can follow and share to groups and have a better experience. As it stands right now groups on the diverse are unmoderated and open. Anyone can join a group and participate, gup.pe which are open groups. The directory basically lists any groups known to the QOTO server, so if anyone follows a group on the server that group will show in the group directory.

With that said we will be releasing shortly a specially coded QOTO group server. It will behave similar to the way Gup.pe behaves in the sense that group is still an account that relays posts to that group by mentioning the group account. However it will allow for managed groups where the group is owned by an individual and thus a person can block people from the group. That should be up very shortly so keep an eye out for that announcement. It should allow QOTO to participate in moderated groups as is.

#QOTO #Fediverse #Mastodon #Mastoadmin

Here is an excellent explanation of QOTO's remote local timeline feature.
QT: https://qoto.org/@freemo/105107254312720634