#I used to be admin of Mastodon.ART

[rheallsim]

Honestly, the Fediverse feels, to me, like the perfect place for the Sims Community to go to.

Mastodon is well developed and there are tons of fun servers to sign up for. It provides a Twitter-like experience for those who like the whole micro-blogging thing. 500 characters per toot! Four pictures! Polls! Content Warnings/Read More links! Chronological timelines! NO ADS or data scraping! :O

Maybe someday folks will make a bunch of Sims-focused servers for people to be on? I'd sign up for one! (I'm aware there used to be a Mastodon instance called Simstodon, but it collapsed years ago due to a tidal wave of sims pornography and I think some in-fighting, so maybe we could do better a second time around? Multiple small communities > than one large one, anyway!)

Pixelfed is perfect for simmers who like Instagram-style picture-focused posting and image galleries.

Peertube is great for simtubers, and OwnCast for folks who stream.

Want to do something larger-scale? There's Friendica, Hubzilla, or Calckey. There's Lemmy and Kbin for those who like Reddit-style apps. There are also ActivityPub plugins for WordPress, so you can send your WordPress posts automatically to your Fediverse followers! And at least with Mastodon, every account defaults with built-in RSS feeds, so you can follow folks that way if you prefer, too!

And the awesome thing about the Fediverse is no matter where you land, whether it's a Mastodon instance, or an Akkoma instance, or a Friendica account, or even a Bookwyrm (Goodreads) account, etc. etc., you can still follow anyone on any other app. Is there a simstuber you want to follow, but you're on Mastodon and they're on Peertube? No problem, you can follow each other! You like Pixelfed better than Akkoma? Folks can still follow you there, and you can follow them!

No more closed gardens, no more having to smush yourself into boxes to try and fit into a social media that demands your money, data, content, and mental health.

Anyway… I'll stop ranting. But maybe I'll start posting more Sims stuff on Fedi. I'll use the hashtag "#SimmerFed" if I do, hopefully more people will join me!

I'm here if you want to follow me, btw: https://comicscamp.club/@Rheall/

[chaoscontrolled123]

im not goin back thru 20000+ posts to look for any flags so

mastodon: @ameliadrawsthings@mastodon.art (i mostly post here now, feel free to email the instance admin for an invite, follow from another instance, or just bookmark!)

twitter: @ameliadraws123 (idk if i’ll start using it again but just in case)

bonus twitter for my fic: @DreadnoughtFic (this one i am gonna use the same way i’m using the fic tumblr from now on)

pillowfort: ameliadrawsthings (nothing on it yet)

i aint deleting this blog or anything but i am prolly gonna let my queue run out and see what the situation is from there

[smellslikebot]

i recently remembered i made a mastodon.art account 5 years ago and never used it, so i logged back in to see what's up. and there's currently beef between the mastodon.art leadership and the creator of mastodon/admin of the two largest instances (who is apparently the Sole Moderator of both of them, which have 250k+ members combined) which has culminated in mastodon.art silencing those instances on their end. Very "community pizza fire gif" experience

[nomthecatsaid]

One of those new social networks, but actually cool

[Updated 2018-12-07]

Mastodon! It’s decentralised and has lots of queers and people are actually using it. Let me try to make a masterpost because I’m excited.

Decentralised means there’s not one site, like tumblr.com, where everyone is, but that people are on loads of different servers (”instances”, at the moment over 2000 of them) that are all running the same software and communicating with each other, so that you can have your account on any of them and interact with people who are on different ones.

What’s cool

It has content warnings (in the form of spoilers/readmores)

You can filter/mute words or phrases

It is open source and many of the people who use it actually help make it, and if you can’t do that by coding, you can still tell others about a thing that would be cool to have, and sometimes that is complicated, but sometimes it leads to really cool features

You can choose the instance you sign up on by how much you like its admin, for example… or by how good the anti harassment policy is.

Everyone uses cringy/awesome URLs. I’m literally on cybre.space and other instances that exist are catgirl.science and toot.cat and anticapitalist.party, how cool is that, finally the aesthetics to fit this cyberpunk dystopia that we live in

Posts are called toots because mastodons are like mammoths and elephants make “toot”

Most (or hopefully all) instances don’t track us and won’t sell our data and don’t display ads, like commercial social media sites do

No full text search, to prevent terfs from harassing everyone who writes about terfs, and authors from harassing everyone who criticizes their work, etc etc well you know what Tumblr and birbsite are like. (You can search for hashtags, accounts, and among toots that you have already interacted with or that are your own.)

Image descriptions!

There is a setting to autopause gifs

What’s not cool (have to be honest, no place is perfect)

The current default theme is not very accessible (low contrast, white text on dark background, not great at high zoom) – there are ways to deal with this, scroll down to “Random Stuff” for possible fixes. But still, could be better.

There are instances in the fediverse (that means: all Mastodon, and also non-Mastodon-but-using-something-similar, instances combined) that allow or even encourage their users to harass others, like on Twitter – you are dependent on your own instance admin to block those instances from connecting with yours. (You can, however, block users, and block instances from your own account, and remove whole instances from your followers.)

Sometimes, things don’t work as one would expect (but usually people are happy to help).

So, that was the honest-ish advertisement, now for resources.

General

User Guide: Explains how Mastodon works, how to use it, important terms. Pay attention to the privacy settings and to the way federation works, those might not be very intuitive. See also the FAQ

Toot How-To : Intro to Mastodon

Mastodon 101: A Queer-Friendly Social Network You’re Gonna Like a Lot on Autostraddle

Resources for Mastodon newbies (I love this one, it has a few links and some info about things that you might find weird when joining Mastodon)

Choosing an instance

So, you are considering signing up, but have no idea which instance to choose?

I’d recommend browsing through http://instances.noct.zone/ and picking whichever sounds nicest to you.

Or if you prefer a thing that recommends an instance based on your answers to a few questions: instances.social

So here are my subjective recommendations (keep in mind, I only know a small part of all the instances in existence):

monsterpit.net I only just discovered this one, but they look great

computerfairi.es is small and queer and has a lot of tech talk. It uses a theme with purple background

elekk.xyz gaming-focused & explicitly feminist

queer.party I have a side account there and it’s nice

tootplanet.space I have another side account there and it’s also great

wandering.shop I don’t know this one well, but it seems to be the good kind of geeky

weirder.earth also

mastodon.art for, well, art

sunbeam.city solarpunk

toot.cat seems super nice

Things to consider

Code of conduct and administration. You’ll want to pick an instance that aligns with your principles and the way you want to use your account, and that you trust to deal with any issues appropriately. Relevant info is on [instance url]/about/more.

Size. Instances have a local timeline, where you see the public toots of everyone on this instance. on a small instance, it can help build community. on the flagship mastodon.social, with more than 100 000 users, it is too fast to even follow.

Community. Use this tool to see the last few public toots from that instance and decide if it’s a place you’d like to be at.

Looks. Is the theme readable for you & do you like it? Unfortunately, there is no built-in way to check this yet, but screenshots are being collected here.

Basics

On Mastodon, because there are loads of different places that are connected, usernames look more like email addresses because they always include your instance as well:

One of my accounts is @maunzikation@cybre.space (but I’m mostly at @catte@situational.softi.city right now, feel free to follow me there). maunzikation alone would be confusing – in fact, I’m also @maunzikation@computerfairi.es, but these are all different accounts that have little to do with each other (except that I made them – but you can’t tell that from the name, it could be made by someone else). So if you want to mention someone who’s on a different instance, you have to include their instance for it to work. Just like you’d include “@gmail.com” or “@riseup.net” when emailing someone.

Getting involved

You have an account, you feel somewhat at home, and you want to make stuff better? Or there is some accessibility improvement that you need before you sign up?

There is the github thingie https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon

If you want to report a problem or suggest new features, what you want to do is go here specifically. There is a search bar. Use it to see if anyone has already posted about that thing. If yes, you can add your info or comments there. If not, click “New Issue” and make your own post. (If yes, but it’s been months since the last comment, maybe also open a new issue, it might not be great form, but at least people will notice.)

If you want more of an open discussion, or need help in figuring out what you want or need, post to this forum.

Or you can:

Financially support your instance’s Patreon, if it has one, or your instance admin personally.

Give feedback/money/… to any Mastodon apps you use! Most of them are also free and open source, just like Mastodon itself, and very happy about any contribution.

Keep an eye on the federated timeline and try to help people who are having problems figuring out how stuff works.

Look at #introductions and #introduction occasionally and boost some of the toots, to spread the word about newcomers that people might want to follow.

Random Stuff

Solutions to accessibility issues (also interesting if you simply don’t like the way it looks)

How to automatically post your mastodon posts on twitter with IFTTT (would also work with tumblr)

Mastodon-Twitter-Bridge: Sign in with both so your twitter followers can find you on mastodon

On the history of mastodon and some of the things that I implied with “it’s complicated” re people making the software they use

I didn’t want to post it as an actual recommendation, but there is an instance called ephemeral.glitch.social that deletes toots at some time that is determined my the moon phases, and promises to be unstable with lots of feature testing, and people there seem to be nice. Some people use it just for fun, some for self-deleting private accounts. Or you could use Forget on any instance for the latter (also works for Twitter btw).

And joinmastodon.org is like a non-instance-specific page about mastodon, not very detailed, but has a few useful links. If you want to link to Mastodon as a whole, link joinmastodon.

Apps

full list: https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using-Mastodon/Apps.md

some popular ones:

Android: Tusky, Mastalab

iOS: Amaroq, Toot!

[reinderdijkhuis]

Master list of places where I post stuff

I’m still not sure if there is anything to this ‘Tumblr purge’ other than sheer incompetence on the part of some admins, but it won’t hurt to create and post a master list of my social media accounts for people to follow in case one of them goes down. Unfortunately there’s a bit of a problem here: my main art account is on DeviantArt, which has been going through the exact same thing right now, and I’m keeping Facebook/Instagram and Twitter at arm’s length because of their promotion of the far right, surveillance capitalism and complicity in getting the Tangerine Tantrum elected. So I will recommend following me on one or more of the federated social media sites I use as a first resort:

Mastodon: https://mastodon.art/@reinderdijkhuis https://mastodon.social/@Reinderdijkhuis

Pixelfed: https://pixelfed.social/reinderd

Other social media DeviantArt: https://www.deviantart.com/reinder Tumblr: https://reinderdijkhuis.tumblr.com/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Reinder (currently infrequently updated but new SFW content goes up as free updates) Furaffinity: http://www.furaffinity.net/user/rocrspecies/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/RoguesClwydRhan (Currently inactive but will reactivate if needed) Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reinderdijkhuis/ Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/reinder.dijkhuis (personal) https://www.facebook.com/RoguesofClwydRhan/ (webcomic page) https://www.facebook.com/Chroniclesofthewitchqueen/ (webcomic page)

On all of these, including the federated ones that I trust more than the corporate ones, users are at the whim of admin who may or may not be honest and competent, and of policies that may change with no notice. So everybody, self-host if you can, as much as possible. I have the following websites: Main webcomic site (Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan):  http://rocr.net/  - this site is self-hosted but dormant as the CMS has been broken for over two years. It will get revamped eventually, and until it is, the content isn't going anywhere. Comicfury alias for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan: http://rocr.thecomicseries.com Spun Off: http://spunoff.thecomicseries.com Abúi's Travels: http://abuistravels.thecomicseries.com Chronicles of the Witch Queen: http://cotwq.thecomicseries.com The Lives of X!Gloop: http://xgloop.thecomicseries.com

[rheallsim]

Social Media Rambling

I don't use any of the big social medias anymore; I used to be an avid Twitter/Facebook user, but I had to quit them a few years ago for mental health reasons in addition to a sense of moral obligation. They were so horrid for my self-esteem, and I was constantly stressed out by them; and I couldn't ignore how shittily they were being run, either.

I used to be a big Tumblr user, too, back in the day, for my art. I stopped posting regularly about four years ago. It also wasn't great for my mental health at the time, but I met some wonderful people here. ^^

I only returned to Tumblr last year for Sims reasons, and I'm glad I did; this community is so chill and sweet, and I'm having so much fun sharing my game and CC with you all. You're all the best. <3

Where I spend the vast majority of my time, though, is Mastodon. I joined it in 2017 looking for a Twitter alternative, and I fell in love. (It improves on so many of the areas where Twitter fails! It gives you descriptive content warnings, per-post privacy features, algorithms don't exist to mess up your chronological timelines or track you, and the decentralized system of instances means you can very effectively moderate your own distinct communities, and block other instances who don't; we were even able to discourage and drive out a huge group of alt-right and transphobic assholes who tried to make their home there through the collective action and hard work of instance admins. ^^ It's not perfect, but it's a million times better than Twitter for even those small reasons! There are many others besides.)

I was the admin of Mastodon.ART for a while, the largest primarily English-speaking art-focused Mastodon instance. The community there is awesome. :D Now I have my own small instance, ComicsCamp.Club, where I hang out with a lovely group of people. It's a cozy, quiet spot on the web, and just how I like my social media to be. ^^

There used to be a Sims-focused Mastodon instance called @simstodon, but it's been gone for a while now (I think it got overrun by NSFW/Pornographic Sims players, and the community kind of tanked from there :\). It just makes me think how nice it might be to get a community of sims folks on Mastodon again. I don't have the time or energy to admin yet another instance, but I wish someone else would! It would be a lot of fun to share my Sims stuff with a larger community of like-minded folks on Mastodon. :D

Anyway, if you're also a Mastodonian and want to follow my very quiet ramblings about my garden or its visiting birds, you're welcome to! I'm located @Rheall@ComicsCamp.Club. I might occasionally post the odd art or two, also, if the mood strikes. <3

Also, if anyone has any questions about Mastodon and how it works or what it's like, don't hesitate to get in touch! I'd be happy to ramble anyone's ear off about it, but I'll try to be helpful too. 😅