Neurofrontiers @neurofrontiers@qoto.org

I've seen a lot of people saying that liking posts here is pointless, but I absolutely love the way it works - it feels like what this sort of feature is actually supposed to do.

If I put a star on a toot, I'm not trying to blast it to the universe, I just want to quietly inform the poster that I liked or appreciated what they shared. Not everything needs a comment and I don't always have the mental energy to make one, but I still want someone to know that I valued their thought.

Just learned that favourites ⭐️ don't help popular posts get views. They just tell author you liked their post.

If you want others to see the content, be sure to boost it (re-Toot)! 🔁

I see people here worrying about what happens if their instance gets shut down.

You can easily export all your data from Mastodon! Just go to /settings/export

You can download your data as a CSV - or a full #ActivityPub JSON archive.

Now you have a backup of all your posts, media, accounts you follow, etc.

It's really quite exciting starting up on Mastodon.
Rather like opening a door in a wall and suddenly finding you are in a party with some old friends and lots of new interesting people.
As one who was an early adopter of Twitter, it also is very reminiscent of the old days when I first realised how useful social media could be for meeting new people and learning new stuff.

another gentle call in esp to my academic friends:

plz refrain from making grand proclamations of what would fix fedi, esp until you have taken the time to be humble and learn :)

other parts of the fedi I've seen are nervous about Academics Being Academics coming in with resources thinking they know what's best.

Lots of very smart people have been here for awhile! we should learn from, and later contribute to this place, not colonize it ❤️

Why is Mastodon, a free platform run by volunteers that I didn't even know existed last week and has experienced explosive growth in a few days, slow?

Please recognize this site (ok, federated collection of servers) as unique & with it's own structure and flavor. I'd rather not replicate the warts of Twitter here, and am a bit surprised by all the posts trying to figure out how to do just that.

My #introduction is overdue. I’m a professor at Penn who studies memory using systems and computational approaches. I’m also writing a book: When it comes to understanding the brain, what are we trying to achieve? What’s our plan to get there? What challenges do we face? #neuroscience #author

Writing has deepened my appreciation for community-based progress. I’m excited to be on this inclusive platform where we can leverage collective intelligence, and work through conceptual blocks together.

Our instance, drosophila.social, has been reported as malicious to google. As far as I know, the same thing happened to other instances, hosted on other servers (e.g. xtaldave.net)
When this happened I was running everything on containers, based on v3.5.3. All the content served (JS, CSS) was genuine and unaltered.
I have now upgraded to v4.0.0rc2 and asked google to remove us from the blacklist.

I suspect a boycott attempt against Mastodon. Anyone having the same issue?

#deceptive #blacklist

So here's what I've learned.
Mastodon isn't Twitter.
And that's by design.
You've grown used to things designed to give you that anger rush.
Mastodon is very deliberately built to avoid that.
The temptation is to replicate your Twitter experience.
Picking arguments, amplifying trolls.
Please don't.
This isn't your house, people here put time into building it.
Content warnings, ALT tags.
Don't turn it into a replica of the mess you just left.
If you miss the fights, the birdsite is still there.

imo if you wanna stop being addicted to twitter or whatever you just need to care less about knowing what all the other people in the world are doing and thinking all the time. cultivate a rich inner world. bake a book. read a bread. touch moss. eat mud. chase a large grazing beast with your claws and fangs. healthy things like that

It is great to see the growth of (academic) Mastodon. Not just for us, to have more people to talk to and smaller niche topics to geek out about.

But also because Twitter, Facebook and colleagues do enormous damage to society. And should go down. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/10/four-revelations-from-the-facebook-papers/

They give us a wrong view of what humans are.

'Twitter: “Why are people so horrible to each other?”

Mastodon: “Wow! There are so many interesting people in the world! I want to know more of them.”'
https://mastodon.social/@Sheril/109293820013855962

imagine deciding which engineers to keep around based on lines of code and choosing to keep the ones who wrote the MOST

I recently had a fascinating conversation with a group of bright PhD students who were net enthusiastic about social media but felt great about watching & learning but fearful of chiming in. If that describes you, what holds you back from posting? And as we move to this new platform, is there anything that we can do to facilitate your participation?

The types of issues that the students brought up included things like fear that their posts might be wrong or misinterpreted.

#neuroscience

Academics in psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, etc.: I've created a repository for our accounts to help people find and bulk-follow each other on mastodon:
https://kaitclark.github.io/mastodon-psychology/

Please let me know if you want to be added!

(based on the repository by https://social.tchncs.de/@perspektivbrocken in Sociology)

#feditip: add .rss to the end of most pages you see on a Mastodon server to get an RSS feed for your RSS reader.

Level 2: go about your day without internet, then in the evening settle down at your Computer Desk with a nice cup of tea to RSS-digest the day's shitposts.

Level 3: Aggregates your RSS feeds into epub format. Load the output onto your 2000's e-ink e-reader via USB cable. Sit in an overstuffed armchair with a nearby lamp, say aloud "Ah, yes, today's internet" and sip your port.