Steve Hammett @bitflips@qoto.org

This great article in #Tribune pulls no punches about the utterly shambolic management of Birkbeck.

The staff cuts are totally shocking and must be resisted as hard as possible, lest every uni thinks they can get away with it... #UCUrising

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2022/11/birkbeck-university-of-london-140-job-cuts-university-managament

A few years ago I made this flow chart of which Mastodon posts end up in which timelines!

So, you can see how each instance will have a different local timeline, and even a slightly different federated timeline - and you can see why the federated timeline moves so much faster than the local one, too.

This is why it's important to boost good posts and use hashtags - the fediverse is fragmented and harder to search by nature.

[ #mastodon #meta #tootorial #howto #mastopedia #mastotip ]

Did you know?

Bumblebees used to be called Humblebees?

Back in Darwin's day and up to the early 20th century, they were mostly referred to as Humblebees due to the fact that they hummed while flying! But the lesser used named of Bumblebee existed on the fringes.

At some point between the two World Wars, there was a shift and Bumblebee became more popular and Humblebee was consigned to history.

This entry by A.W. Stelfox in the Irish Naturalist' Journal in 1921 still used the old name.

Not a bad view for morning run

Salut salut 👋
je débarque du discord recherche & cie, je découvre mastodon par la même occasion!

Dans la vie je suis post-doc en maths appli au Québec, je travaille sur l'estimation d'erreur pour les méthodes éléments finis avec un petit faible pour le domaine relativement émergent des EDP fractionnaires.

Sinon à part ça je suis fan de jds, je fais de l'escalade, j'aime la rando et je suis papa de 3 poilus (deux lapins et un chat)!

PS. merci à @celliern pour l'instance 👍

I will miss the #borscht that our guests from #Ukraine️ made us. Very happy that they are quickly settling into their new home though #HomesForUkraine 🇺🇦

Hello there smiley mitochondrion! #CellBiology #ElectronMicroscopy

The Fediverse has its own video platform called @peertube.

You can follow PeerTube accounts from Mastodon, for example try following craftykat@diode.zone

You can watch and interact with the videos entirely within Mastodon, or on PeerTube itself.

Here's an example of a PeerTube server:

➡️ https://fedi.video

If you see an account you like, you can copy and paste its account address into Mastodon to follow it there. When new videos are published, they will appear in your Mastodon timeline.

#introduction I’m a Royal Society research fellow at UCL where my lab uses computational biology to study how mutations cause disease, with a special interest in #aging and #cancer!

Our research covers multiple scales- how mutations change proteins to trigger disease, how genes coordinate to control cell behaviour, and how cells compete and interact in the tissue to cause disease! Check out my lab website for more info https://www.hall-lab.com/ #sciencemastodon

Royal Holloway Students' Union has launched a Preferendum to determine their stance on the current UCU industrial action. RH staff - please share!
RH students - please vote!
https://www.su.rhul.ac.uk/ucudispute/preferendum/

In my opinion, criticisms of mastodon being unusable by the general public are over blown.

A reminder for anyone new to mastodon who might not be happy with some of the racist and bad actors out there on other servers... Just import the fediblock list to your personal blocks and you will be safe from the vast majority of bad actors.
QT: https://qoto.org/@STORM/109260056830000449

Hello #ScienceMastodon ! I just made the Twitodon transition so a bit of #introduction: I'm a PhD Student interested in #DevelopmentalBiology, #Embryology and sometimes #StemCells and #Transcription. Looking forward to less promoted posts and more #AcademicToots.

Beautiful blog post reviewing the cognitive capacity of multiple animal species. Their work focuses on #animalwelfare and #cognition. #cognitivescience #behavior #physiology
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tnSg6o7crcHFLc395/the-welfare-range-table

#introduction I'm a behavioral #neuroscientist working in #marketresearch. I use a combination of psychological, neuroscientific, and traditional market #research tools to better understand #consumer behavior. Board member for #actiondesignnetwork and #SSP (#societyforsensoryprofessionals), I'm busy trying to make sure the science is right in industry research.

Okay this might be a long post

One thing that I realised is making #twittermigration harder for people to switch is because the whole concept can feel daunting & overwhelming for non-tech savvy people.

With Twitter to them it was straight forward and easy to find topics they enjoy but with mastodon its a bit different.
So if you’re new to mastodon or you want to introduce someone to mastodon here are some tips, useful sites & tools:

Tips:

• Choosing a home instance isn’t as importance as it seems, don’t overthink it. Yes moderation rules & policies may differ but they all have one thing in common: Be a decent human. You always have the option to migrate your account to a new instance.
• Toots (or posts if you think toots are cringe ) are what we call micro-blogging instead of tweets
• You’re supposed to “boost” AKA “reblog” toots that you like.Since Mastodon does not have an algorithm that surfaces toots that have been liked a lot, boosting is the best way to help spread stuff that you like, and to show appreciation. (credit to @orsvarn for this comment)
• Another way to fill your timeline with content you enjoy is to: Find other people with similar interests, follow them, favourite their posts, boost their posts, use hashtags. rinse, repeat. (credit to @garry)
• If you ever feel yourself getting sucked into arguments on the #Fediverse, you might want to take advantage of the instance mute/block feature!
  Instances tend to foster a culture, so if you find people from a specific site tend to be bothering you, muting/blocking that instance will keep other members of that community from bothering you as well.
• Finally do not share private/sensitive information via DMs on Mastodon. Direct Messages are not E2E. Keep it in mind

Useful tools & resources:

Twitodon - Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon
FediFinder- Similar to Twitodon
Fedi Tips - an informal, unofficial guide for non-technical people who want to use Mastodon and the wider Fediverse
Fedi Directory - A human-curated small selection of accounts to spice up your timeline.
Trunk -Trunk allows you to mass-follow a bunch of people in order to get started with Mastodon or any other platform on the Fediverse
Fediverse.info -growing list of people and topics can help you discover mutual interests with people around the world
Mobile Apps:
Metatext for iOS
Tusky for Android

Lastly if you are interested in setting up your own instance you can learn via https://learnfoss.org/ its completely free and its made by the wonderful @stux

I apologize for the long post lol, just hope this helps anyones transition over

Who’d have guessed Elon Musk would pay $44 billion to promote Mastodon.