K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

@peterdrake apparently this is by design - there is a school of thought within Mastodon that someone shouldn't know that he's blocked, because it's desirable for him to spend his time fruitlessly trying to fix what appears to be a network problem, as a sort of tar-pit approach to wasting bad actors' resources. A more transparent behaviour was [implemented](https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/10420), but rolled back after objections. I suppose we could implement such a notification on QOTO's local fork, as long as we stay responsible about getting rid of people who engage in block circumvention.

@freemo @trinsec

@markmccaughrean Check out QOTO too - we have a STEM focus and are always happy to welcome new users!

@CanXClV Mastodon is a microblogging platform, and large videos aren't really in its scope. But QOTO also has a Peertube instance at video.qoto.org which is designed around handling this type of content. The best part is that it's on the Fediverse too, so you can follow your Peertube account from your Mastodon one and boost your videos to your followers here, and they can reply just like a normal Mastodon post.

@aut Follows are part of ActivityPub. The other party gets a notification, depending on their settings he may have to approve your request, and if he blocks you it will remove you as a follower. If you follow someone, you get to see all his posts at the "follower only" privacy setting, and he may reciprocate by following you back.

Subscribes are essentially a way of scraping the other party's public feed. Neither he nor anyone else gets any notification, and the only way it is stopped is if we get blocked at the instance level. It tends to be more robust, because as long as the other instance allows QOTO to fetch its RSS feeds, it will work even if authentication or something breaks. But the tradeoff is you don't get to see "follower only" posts and he won't know to reciprocate.

Generally, if following isn't working at the technical level, it's worth trying a subscription. It's also a useful technique if you think following that person might expose you to harassment, because each person's follower lists are public. So if you think there might be a cyberbullying campaign targeting followers of a controversial account, it's safer to subscribe than to follow.

@worldsendless it's more like custom privacy settings. You set up a circle that includes certain people and then select it from the privacy dropdown. It behaves as if you'd selected followers-only and, for that post, they were your only followers.

@freemo no objection whatsoever, the extra help would be very welcome these days!

@freemo

> Clearly the result of the Musk takeover.

Well, partly. It's also partly due to the first half of the week being Divali, and a lot of the Indian spammers who make fake accounts for SEO purposes were on holiday. So when they came back at the end of the week, the rate of new account creation picked back up.

@punkymcmunky Welcome back to QOTO!

@STORM

It would be hard to implement in a way that works across the Fediverse. You can change your display name easily, but your handle is part of the unique identifier for your account and posts, so changing it would break things on remote instances that use the old handle to locate resources.

However, you can do an account migration - essentially, you make a new account and turn your old one into a static redirect. It's a bit cumbersome, but it does the job, and it's less painful if you're still relatively new and have less investment in the old account. There's a writeup [here](https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#migration) which you can follow if you want to start this process.

@freemo

With today's developments at Twitter, we have some new faces at QOTO. If you are one of them, welcome! Please take a minute to familiarise yourself with the [rules](https://qoto.org/about/more#rules).

I'm a fluid dynamicist and a volunteer moderator here. Mostly this just means I spend some time deleting spammers, but I also deal with reports of rules violations. If you're considering reporting another user, please read [this post](https://qoto.org/@khird/108194488065404744) for a description of how users from different instances are subject to different rules.

If you have questions, ask away! We have a genuinely helpful community here and it's likely someone will be able to point you in the right direction.

@derickflorian Hello and welcome!

@worldsendless your best bet is probably to disassemble it, slip some heat shrink tubing on it, reassemble it, and hit it with a hair dryer. Won't come off, doesn't have seams to betray the repair, pretty abrasion resistant.

If you must have tape, a black cloth hockey tape is probably the sweet spot between inconspicuous and durable? Just make sure you press the edges down well all along the length of the tape, or the adhesive might grab a chunk of hair when you go to remove the headphones.

@RL_Dane one thing I'd really love to see is a libpurple plugin to access SMS alongside my other flavours of chat. Just seems unnecessary to have a whole 'nother program when Pidgin is right there with IRC, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc. already running.

@deadtom @joel