Add Mastodon logo to your website as contact method!

E-Mails are getting blocked or have lack of management (some don't even check it at all !).

Add logo to menu / sidebar / floating social site list, whatever!..

If you believe in Mastodon - add it!

My Mastodon pictures and variations can be found here:
freeschool.0id.org/mastodon-pi

@freeschool@qoto.org I believe in the #Fediverse, but not #Mastodon. But Fediverse doesn't "solve" any of the problems you seem to have with #email.

@tyil
EMAIL VS MASTODON
Here are some my own personal reasons on the contrary and my consideration / awareness of email problems...

*** With Mastodon... ***
- I can actually get a response more often!... like instantly... email seems to take longer - could be a habit thing where people have to 'login' to email more whereas social is 'always on'.

- I tried emailing people and for many reasons my email falls under such sub-scenarios:

- With email people have said to me "oh I thought your name / FreeSchool must be spam so that's why I didn't click on it".

- Mastodon SHOWS the message (no choice!) in native interfaces so people have to read what I said not just look at name and judge
(although some email clients yes load too but much more unlikely to be spam in Mastodon and spam can't be automated as highly as in email)

- PLUS links and people are added in Mastodon message to what I was referring or replying to DIRECTLY / NATIVELY - like the actual POST not just a CC or plain text that could be copy and pasted from anywhere but credible Mastodon links and people attached!

- Mastodon encourages all types of people and in terms of fun, psuedo-names or aliases (it's a lot more prevalent / standard / in the philosophy)
So as has the internet always been Email just doesn't have that.

Mastodon as a social thing shows lots more real people even called 2454534 or SadCatMan or WhateverName and allows people to even ignore the name (which I think is better in general or at least not as ultimatum to if you 'sound' right by your name).

- Email lacks credibility of a profile attached - so on top of the above (ignoring Mastodon and not seeing message or not managing message) people receiving CAN actually check me as a person out (what my profile says / messages sent etc, my website, projects...)... this can be more a self-security or insecurity thing but actually more real or educational. People in email might have to say err... "Hi yeah" or "what do you want"... "oh you want conversation... that's weird by email"... people see I am human and wish little offence to others and they can see what I'm about even if it is different (can't with email it's really cold and my more likely spam)

- More interest and clicking on Mastodon seems the default (the insecurity goes away when people actually find relativity as forward-thinking humans instead of defensive "do-or-die" reply or "should I reply to this" in emails which seem totally alien and from far out... again the profile make this forward-facing more-sharing aspect or stance is better for people not self-harming themself from insecurity or paranoia...

Literally one expert (Vinay Gupta) said I was someone from his past repeatedly [good grief man] and people have mentioned girlfriend names and I'm like explaining in so many ways... repeating no I'm not and saying all this freeschool stuff and still they don't get it (yes people and everyone is stupid and don't even want audio chat on my suggestion to help situation.. but also for slowly catching little shy monkeys (to just chat) I think little things help.

So a lot can be about psychology + less colourful tech - which is +/- reasoning 100% but VERY human and because a lot about emails is VERY human I do weight more-certain or easier to see thing a lot more on Mastodon).

- People / even my admins might miss something but it helps to have the thread in 1 page (emails is sometimes not so or just a bit better in Mastodon while still being super-low in footprint as emails are)

Social side of Mastodon helps grease and involve more things and while that might not seem directly email related, for communication it's actually doing a lot of good work for us almost on it's own (the developers have done the invested work that pays us all to use it)...

***MAIN BIG REASON FOR MASTODON***
- Almost above all is that I BYPASS GOOGLE... So because everyone uses google like a " back-end " root to other services (email is the start to all subscription, passwords etc) if Mastodon people turn off email notifications (which I assume somewhat a large % do else if it would be 100's of emails) then the comms ARE ONLY USING Mastodon space NOT google)
No communications / Near-0 go to google!

NON-GOOGLE (LESS-GOOGLE)...
THAT IS SUPER.

Imagine on top people signup to Mastodon with non-gmail email - then Gmail is well and truly locked out more often and less harvesting as default! (they are now collecting LITTLE EVERYTHING and all other accounts and extension so this minimises it)

We all win if we don't give email reports or every movement email copies sent to google. 3rd party, government agents eventually...

Le$$ harvesting / tracking / web beacons in mail / no HTML loading tricking in Mastodon etc.... BIG win or MANY things I'm looking for and for the way in change from many malpractices.

- Oh finally Mastodon can do much more in terms of playing media (exchanging between people privately and native play)

- and executing less bad stuff too as default. With emails much more risky.

- and politically is aligned a bit more (email providers are political and profit orientated / do the dirty work when it comes really down to whistle-blowing on free speech or whatever).

TL; DR - Email is self-espionage :)
More people bypassing or away from that the better all our other work. Leaking it is bad work every second it's leaking / being on bad space / commercial space / attached to political company or government empire.

@freeschool@qoto.org That's one hell of a long post, and there's a lot wrong with it. I'll try to answer all the things that are worth responding to, but the post is huge and the layout is incredibly bad. Bear with me.

email seems to take longer

That is seems that way to you doesn't make it so.

oh I thought your name / FreeSchool must be spam so that's why I didn't click on it


That's going to happen with the Fediverse just as well, you don't have that yet because there's no dumb normies here... yet. If everyone was using Fedi rather than email, it would go exactly the same way.

Mastodon SHOWS the message (no choice!)

If you're talking specifically about Mastodon, this might be true, I use superiour software for my Fediverse needs. I do seem to recall you have the option to add a trigger warning to your Mastodon post, which wil
l hide the content unless the user clicks on the warning. Correct me if I'm wrong on this, though.

I find it interesting that when an email client does it, you consider it showing too much. I'm getting the impression you're just really looking to hate on email for a reason I've not yet figured out.

links and people are added in Mastodon message

You can add those fine in email, it's all about how your client renders it. While I consider it a gross misuse of email, HTML email exists and lets you do all that.

Mastodon encourages all types of people

The Fediverse as a whole could be argued to encourage all types of people, but Mastodon on its own most certainly doesn't. There's entire groups working hard to ensure dissenting voices are never getting close to
their Mastodon servers.

The only way Mastodon "encourages" more interaction is through the use of the timeline. But to me it's quite similar to being on mailing lists with people you share interests with.

Email lacks credibility of a profile attached

I can't say I agree here. If I see a mail come in from a famous name, say Richard Stallman, I will double-check the headers first, and if it's legit, I give it all the credibility it needs. It's not dissimilar fro
m how you recognize certain handles on the Fediverse.

More interest and clicking on Mastodon seems the default

There does indeed seem to be more interest in Mastodon, but I don't think that's a flaw of email itself.

People / even my admins might miss something but it helps to have the thread in 1 page

Very debatable, and I would disagree here. Especially compared to Mastodon's layout, I think mailing lists do a much better job of threading posts together to keep it more reasonable to read through.

@freeschool@qoto.org Looks like the 2nd part didn't post 😕

Very debatable, and I would disagree here. Especially compared to Mastodon's layout, I think mailing lists do a
much better job of threading posts together to keep it more reasonable to read through.

I BYPASS GOOGLE

No you don't. Mastodon is indexed by Google like most publicly accessible content on the Internet. And email does this just fine, and always has done. Interacting with people using Google services for their email is your own choice, and you could just not do it if it upsets you this much.

Even if you don't consider indexing public content as being a Google issue here, they can set up their own Fediverse services and interact just fine, exactly how they did with email.

Mastodon can do much more in terms of playing media

That's not Mastodon, that's your client, which is likely to be your webbrowser. Again, there's email clients that can do this, and it's usually very much undesired, but you can do it if you so desire.

With emails much more risky

This is just wrong. You literally just went on about how it can play much more stuff, javascript opens up a ridiculously big security hole on your machine. Plaintext email, which is the holy grail of communication, cannot do this.

email providers are political and profit orientated

Only the handful of big ones are, the vast majority is self-hosted and does not have this issue, they just want to send email. The same will happen with Mastodon the moment it becomes viable for them.

Email is self-espionage

It's not and it's honestly a ridiculous conclusion to reach.

@tyil Yeah agree with longer threads in mind. For non-archive types of info or more disposable stuff Mastodon also could be ok.

You can opt out of search engine in the Mastodon preferences. I think that solves what you say about indexing.

Javascript perhaps is iffy but I guess I have to trust on Mastodon devs and people to not exploit from this et.

I like how you write, let's chat sometime (now even?)

For email seems obvious the data is mined and sold as the big business model itself, so it is self-espionage (a way of letting people spy on you) but you said the other don't want to spy... ok so I'll take you're word for it

Self-espionage means business at data and that data business is transferred (given / sold) into politics and money and then transferred (given / sold) to governments and back around again etc!) <-- approx circle described here

Sleep for now but hope to chat later.

@freeschool@qoto.org

You can opt out of search engine in the Mastodon preferences

If you think #Google gives a single shit about your preferences, you're incredibly naive...

I have to trust on Mastodon devs

With plaintext #email, you don't have to trust anybody not to do anything shady. It literally does not support all the shady practices corporates have come to love to harm your privacy.

For email seems obvious the data is mined

With gratis email from big providers? For sure. That's why nobody should use them. But it is a pretty sane method of thinking about companies. If you're not paying them with anything, you are the product. This goes for Mastodon, email, and any other gratis service provided by a company.

I like how you write, let's chat sometime (now even?)

Thanks! I'm not too sure about real-time chats, though, but I can be found on #IRC if you really want to.

@tyil AHAAAA, so that option "Opt-out of search engine indexing" in /settings/preferences/other is only if Google respects it? (much like the "Do Not Track Me" in browsers?)

That's bad if so... could be made clearer like in browsers that it's up to Google to respect.

[Mastodon trust decreases slightly]

P.S
It would be good if you add > > or "you said: " before my parts as reading down it looks like you're saying parts you are quoting me... perhaps you do have quotes but doesn't show on some interfaces (lol work in progress but manually putting a prefix will help in other replies - it's ok for now as I remember and can see by line breaks where there seems to be incomplete formatting)

I also wasn't sure about real-time chatting but I've a bunch of friends who from time to time feel like it and we always enjoy it have our fill and then come back another time when both feel like it. Just 5 mins even - promise it's fun ping pong and we'll find whatever we want to talk about (such as this but I think you got me on a few points but don't mind ironing out anything else I don't know - obvious to me there is more than meets the eye!)

@freeschool@qoto.org

only if Google respects it?

Correct, they can still crawl unless your instance is actively blocking the crawlers. And then you have to hope you're blocking all of them properly, which can be difficult.

It would be good if you add >

I am doing that, I've attached a screenshot on how it looks for me. This is a potential downside of Fediverse, just as email, people use different clients, and thus things render differently. With email clients its usually much easier to configure it to display things in a way you like, though!

Just 5 mins even

If you have an IRC channel somewhere I can hop on and see what happens 😃

@freeschool@qoto.org I just saw it rendered on your Mastodon instance, and it does indeed look atrocious. It doesn't render the quote blocks as different text, but also chose to drop the > in front of it. It would've looked much better if Mastodon just rendered the full thing as plaintext, but instead they chose the worst possible way to go about it...

@tyil For me I realise some small things like this can exist but yeah good you point it out. For me it's more about the github-only way or just people like not as a buffer in between like @FediTips who can funnel stuff (knowledge) but it could work for bugs or things (it would also stop people complaining for years and get definitive Y/N like recently I found out Gargron@mastodon.social is totally not into full text search for profiles so at least I got my answer instead of adding hashtags to when it's already been covered (doh for me and not being on github / and not having another ways!)

@freeschool@qoto.org @FediTips@qoto.org Such small things don't happen in plaintext #email!

Not being on
#GitHub is a good thing anyway, it's a pretty badly run, proprietary platform. And #Microsoft showcased their (obvious) evil intent with the co-pilot thing, for those who were gullible enough to think they weren't evil anymore.

Git itself works very well being distributed, trying to consolidate it all on a centralized website is a very dumb thing to do and doesn't serve the wider free software community.

@tyil The same way we (me, you, other) got gmail, the same way I think we are all learning (regressing those things, seeing it being taken back from us, seeing it bought out) and that learning is naturally how it should be so it's kinda all good as long as people realise and use the better practises and do that more often (right back to the operating system or whatever root emails like not using GMail even if the other provider are nice but not 'all you can eat' such as @Tutanota).

@freeschool@qoto.org @Tutanota@mastodon.social I don't have a #Google mail account, though, I self-host my email. There are sadly very few people learning that stacking all your data at one provider doing it for "free" is a ridiculously bad idea.

@Tutanota@mastodon.social actively hurts the open email community by trying to stamp out the use of open, standardized protocols for handling email. You could check out Drew DeVault's blog post on mail service providers if you want to have some better recommendations.

Follow

@tyil
I was also interest in self-hosting for our server (for people trusted / small-usage users being safe even if not having massive storage and yes being trust-based weighting towards better computer practices as the main win because most of us are not doing anything (at all), nothing bad or anything at all more than blogging.

@freeschool@qoto.org I documented the setup of my mail server on my blog, but it is quite old, and may not be completely accurate anymore. You can read through it, but note that you likely need to adapt some stuff here and there, especially since my mail server runs #FreeBSD rather than #Linux.

One of these years I'll redo it entirely into a
#bashtard playbook.

@tyil Sounds good.
Would be also be good as 'advisor' rile for anybody that has time and for those interested right now in self-hosting, I am talking to some, so people like FeditTips (who is helpful for Mastodon) could help in the current time or whenever someone is quite serious to implement or get a run down / check on what needs doing ...and even run with it.
This also why I do audio conversation - we both are super hyped and charged when we find something and do it same day! (I'm not suggesting this is making of email for others to get away from base-evil-of-gmail but anything with affinity and being motivate we see from each other we could try as it's been practical in the past or just friendly fun / exploring.
I think on this front many might think 'I might sound like an idiot' for their thoughts but luckily I know I am already quite 'not there yet' so nothing much to lose and still I get things done for me and others when it's clearer...
so welcome on anything else to try this methodology (have fun with what interests you / talk about it) since it's a regular way for me.
Will read your blog too a bit. Anything else from me or question let me know...

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