Dominik Kozaczko @minder@qoto.org

Should I just switch all my #Python projects to #Ruff? 🤔

I gotta admit, this one stings!

I got myself Twitter Blue for $8 to see the tyre fire from the front row. Even tweeted about it. I won't be renewing but it was fun to try.

Anyway, it got me thinking: Mastodon is nice. No ads, 500 characters per message, pretty decent audience already... I could actually see myself paying $8/month for it.

SO I DID.

Is it in bad taste to talk about it? I don't know, maybe? My point really is that this platform feels more OURS so it feels right to chime in.

#mastodon #sponsorship #money

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](https://twitodon.com/) - Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon
[FediFinder](https://fedifinder.glitch.me/)- Similar to Twitodon
[Fedi Tips](https://fedi.tips/) - an informal, unofficial guide for non-technical people who want to use Mastodon and the wider Fediverse
[Fedi Directory](https://fedi.directory) - A human-curated small selection of accounts to spice up your timeline.
[Trunk](https://communitywiki.org/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](https://fediverse.info/explore/people) -growing list of people and topics can help you discover mutual interests with people around the world
**Mobile Apps:**
[Metatext for iOS ](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/metatext/id1523996615)
[Tusky for Android ](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.keylesspalace.tusky&hl=en&gl=USt)

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

@freemo @minder Ah, that makes sense. Well; I wholeheartedly agree with you. Directly blocking accounts who are harmful is not controversial. Directly blocking servers which allow harmful behavior is also understandable if done with care. But blocking servers that don't block some servers is not sustainable, breaks federation, and smells of The Minority Report.

I can't add much more as I'm not an admin and I'm a newcomer (used to be on mastodon.technology, now dead).

@ambv For starters, hashtags already act as labels. It is possible to filter out content by hashtag, so it serves your purpose well.

That said, sounds like your on the wrong side of the fediverse. You tend to have three types of servers... The extreme left, very liberal, but also very quick to block/silence over silly things like not CWing, and this is where you see the heavy pressures to CW.

Then you have the extreme right wing, they wont ban for anything and generally a lot of their users go around harassing people or at least being very confrontational and rude. They will never CW anything except maybe nudity. They are in many ways the opposite of course.

Then you have a rare few instances, like QOTO, that are very neutral... We generally like to encourage people to speak freely, even about unpopular opinions, we talk to people instaed of banning them most of the time, though we will ban if someone is a bad enough actor. We only really CW things that are not safe for work.

Long story short, CWuing everything is not really something that is the norm ont he fediverse outside of a few very restrictive communities.

But the label wouldn't hide messages by default because this makes some interactions pretty annoying. "stuff about cars"? Sounds fine, why even cw? Clickety click. "uspol". Yeah, what is it? Clickety click. "About twitter". Did it burn down yet? Clickety click...

But that's not all. If labels could be applied to posts by others POST FACTUM, this would allow the community to moderate itself even if the original author didn't think to do it.

Anyway, just thinking out loud.

3/3

The newbies are chaos incarnate. Let our feed be everything from food I ate through tips on getting a promotion to onlyfans bait. One feed, nothing is sacred.

I'm sitting here in the middle and wonder if there could be a middle way. A compromise that beats both extremes. Let people post whatever. But let them LABEL what it is. Not "warn", label. Then let my client mute messages by label. Food? Boring, never show it to me. Onlyfans? Sorry, I have this tab open all day and I work at home.

2/3

Elon is making a fool of himself, Putin’s forces are getting their asses kicked, crypto is imploding, inflation is slowing down, my brokerage account doesn’t make me cry, the BA.5 wave has broken early & the red wave never happened … let’s just take a deep breath & enjoy y’all.

Hi #Python people. Made it to FOSS Mastodon. Please connect if you like the podcast.

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