#literally one of the very few things twitter has over tumblr is the mute feature lmao

[riddlerosehearts]

i try to only block people for like actually being bigots or other really gross types of people (this second category mostly means prosh*ppers), and not just for being insufferably mean about things i like or having dumb opinions. because i make gifs and stuff on occasion and don't think people should be blocked from seeing those just because they briefly annoyed me. but my god this website makes it so hard sometimes.

[jessgartner]

Leaving Facebook Part III: Goodbye to All That

Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point. 

I'm in the final countdown to deleting Facebook, and not a moment too soon.

TL;DR:

Primary posts will be here

I'll be sending out a monthly Life Olympics newsletter

If you want email, mail, and/or newsletters, let me know where to find you

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

The Wind-Down

I've backed up my data, I've collected contact info, and I've explored a variety of new platforms with varying degrees of success.

I've reached a tentative consensus on my plan for moving forward. It's a little more complex than I would have liked, but I'm settling into some new habits and I'll continue to iterate and refine over time. Here's where I've landed:

Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about. 

Consuming

I chose: Apple News. I slept on this for a while, for reasons I can't totally remember. I revisited it and spent some time customizing it and decided it's the best newsfeed for me for now.

Pros:

Free

UX is good and it's easy to follow publications/topics

iCloud syncing across devices + desktop app is hard to beat. The next best product I looked at (Thread News) only had a mobile app, which was a dealbreaker for me.

I follow mostly mainstream-is publications and there's a full database of sources that are easy to follow.

I haven't tried News+ yet but I like the option of it - a while ago I had a similar magazine aggregator from Conde Nast that I loved and this seems similar or better.

Cons:

Initially, I didn't like the Top Stories on the home page. I don't really love the CNN/ABC/CBS-type focus on 24-hour headline news and wish this was better curated from my interests and favorite publications. I finally figured out that you can limit the Home Page to publications that you follow, but it's not an obvious setting.

I hate that share/copy link produces an apple.news url instead of the native url; this is obnoxious.

Runner Up: Thread News had a really nice Daily Digest feature that curated from your favorite publications.

I chose: Pocket for random articles that I come across on Twitter, in Slack, or recommended through text messages, I save them to Pocket to read later.

Pros:

Free (with premium paid option)

Syncs across desktop, mobile, iPad app; app UX is nicely optimized across devices

Tagging (good for saving favorites)

"Article view" that clears out web junk for a streamlined reading experience

Chrome extension for easy clipping/adding

Cons:

None yet; it's simple and works the way I want it to

Runner up: Instapaper. It has very similar functionality to Pocket, I just slightly prefer the design of Pocket. If you like a really minimalist reading experience, Instapaper is for you.

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

Creating

This one was a beast. I struggled for weeks to parse out exactly what I wanted on this front and which criteria were most important to me, because it became clear quickly that I wasn't going to get everything I wanted in one place.

I chose: Tumblr I initially wrote this off because the homepage/discovery can be nauseating without the right default settings. A tour of the mobile version convinced me to give this a second look: the mobile app is great and the posting experience is (pardon the cliche) delightful. I decided to give it a deeper dive behind the scenes and found that I was able to customize a lot of what I initially disliked. The auto formatting for photo, quote, link, and chat posts is charming and simple.

Pros:

Customizing themes is simple and there are a lot of choices.

I can use my personal domain

The posting experience is easy and relatively error-free

The tagging! I love my tags and they work so nicely. I was also able to find a theme that features tags so you will always have easy access to the latest photos of Darwin.

Great for multimedia posting

Built-in share buttons

Cons:

Not very good at importing content from other platforms; I manually recreated a few favorite posts, but otherwise pretty much had to start from scratch on content

No built-in analytics, aside from follower counts, which is not something I expect to care about or track. I set up tracking on Google Analytics, but I'll miss the built-in analytics that WordPress had. Since WP bought Tumblr, I'm hoping that they may eventually add these features to Tumblr

I just don't care about the social/discovery components here and I wish I could turn them off

Ads. I wish I could pay to make them go away.

Runner up: micro.blog For the first couple of weeks, I thought this was going to be my choice. I had a solid experience importing and archiving a lot of my content from WordPress, Instagram, and Medium. Unfortunately, once I started trying to use the platform on a daily basis, I ran into a lot of issues and challenges that gave me pause on using and recommending the platform. To be clear, a good number of these issues were either user-error or bespoke preferences due to my personal quirks on how I want to organize and share content on the Internet. Some of this is a result of it being a new-ish platform that still has some blind spots for non-developers; it's not a mainstream product yet and I'm not sure it's trying to be. Based on my personal preferences, I felt Tumblr was slightly better equipped for my use case. I'm still going to keep using micro.blog for a while in tandem with Tumblr to see if my preferences change and/or if the platform adopts some of the feedback I shared with regard to cross-posting and UX.

I chose: Drafts. One big challenge for me in this process was the desire to cross-post some content in multiple places while limiting where I post other content. I didn't want to fill my Twitter feed with cat pictures, but I wanted some little corner of the Internet for Darwin's biggest fans (my mother). Drafts is basically a universal text editor that pushes drafts of text to a variety of services, including micro.blog, Twitter, Day One, Google Drive, Evernote, WordPress, Gmail, and even text messages. It's highly configurable and I'm only just scratching the surface of its power. Creating text drafts here allows me to easily push drafts to a variety of different places with just a few keystrokes. It syncs with iCloud, has really robust tagging and filtering, and has mobile, iPad, and Mac apps. It's very cool.

He laughed literally until he choked, and I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on the back. "New faces," he said finally, "don't tell me about new faces.” 

Engagement

I chose: Twitter I've increasingly found Twitter to be a place where my friends/followers care about what I care about. The messages I care most about sharing are amplified. I can choose to unfollow, mute, or block people who are harassing or distressing me. I can follow people whose expertise I value. It can still be a cesspool at times but Twitter leadership seems to be taking steps to improve the platform - identifying misinformation, a conversation feature that limits replies, etc. For now, it stays.

Coming Soon: Substack I haven't officially started this yet, but I'm going to start a monthly newsletter that (allegedly) goes out the first Sunday of every month. I'm going to use roughly my annual Life Olympics format except there will be fun and exciting recommendations. Teaser: new Life Olympics categories will make their debut in the first installment on July 5! If you want it, make sure you give me your email address and you'll receive the first edition.

It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

All quotes by Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Many, many thanks to Jason Becker for his recommendations, patience, and tech support on this project.

[itsjesperfahey]

modern soc au

inej: 

loves to dance !!! esp ballet but she can dance to whatever tbfh, she’s that good 

likes to wear caps, esp backwards. really loves bomber jackets too. 

has a couple, small tattoos dedicated to her saints 

is that one kid who loves to do parkour (both ironically and unironically) for instance is really good at it but sometimes just yells PARKOUR and steps over a rock

usually found eating lunch with her pals on the roof of the school 

is amazing at hide and seek like holy fuck ????? hid for 2 hours once and wasn’t found, came back the next day and was like “y'all losers SUCK" 

loves to study other people’s cultures, as well as history and is great as p.e (never has gotten a bad grade in the flexibility tests) 

likes to read poem books 

has a black cat as a pet named "saint" 

pronounced meme as "mehmeh” the first time she read it 

only has snapchat and instagram. is that kid who ALWAYS posts the sunset every day, esp from weird/high places and the comments are always “HOW THE FUCK DID YOU GET UP THERE" 

cried the most during fox and the hound 

always braiding nina’s hair. Knows how to do all the super advanced onces as well

"I don’t know, CAN YOU?" 

 the best one at pushing people on the swings 

AMAZING AT JUST DANCE WITH JESPER 

"sorry I ran out of fucks to give try again later maybe?" 

gives the nicest presents. always knows what a person wants for christmas/their birthday 

the one who’s really into photography and is always taking aesthetic™ pics of Nina for her social media accounts 

Prefers tea over coffee

wylan:

bullied for not being able to read (at least up until high school), so is super shy 

loves drawing. the artistic™ one who takes anatomy to be able to draw people better 

MASTER FLUTE MUSICIAN. On the school band. Jams hard af when he plays it 

is in gem math and AP chem with kuwei. 

loves sweet. addicted to blue jolly ranchers. his tongue is always blue 

constantly pushing up his thick rimmed glasses (even if they ain’t on, which causes him to poke his eye)

looooves all the superhero shows on the CW 

V neck sweaters. always

always has his trusty satchel

only has tumblr. has like 10k followers because of his artwork. 

”‘illuminati’ ? is that a band?“ 

cat person even though he’s allergic to cat fur. absolutely adores inej’s cat. settles for owning a horned lizard named "shrek" 

secretly a huge fan of memes 

really gay for tom holland and ed sheeran (calls him "ginger Jesus”) 

gamer with jesper. they always play overwatch together, wylans better tho. a genji and Ana main 

cried the most during big hero six 

wylan, with blank eyes: “I like my coffee how I like my men” // jesper: *spits out his drink* 

matthias: 

sports fan obv. On the schools hockey team bc his fav is hockey. is extremely competitive when he plays it. Is constantly checking but never gets penalties (aka slamming the other players against the walls)

played basketball against jesper and surprisingly lost. jesper won’t let it go 

dog person. owns a pet pomsky (Pomeranian-husky) with nina who’s name is “bub" 

“long hair don’t care”draws inspiration from Harry styles 

really philosophical. takes all the philosophy/ethics classes available 

kind of sounds like Thor (thick and deep accent) 

a good™

"you’re all horrible trash”

“do we really have to be doing this now? I have to finish my homework" 

loves baking. bakes everything for the love of his life 

grey sweatshirts and adidas shoes 

wears contacts Because he hates how glasses look on him. only wears them when he’s home 

oblivious to all the women in love with him

"CAN YOU EVEN LIFT BRO? BECAUSE I SURE AS FRICK CAN” (doesn’t curse) 

real 👍🏻🤘🏻👌🏻life🤰🏻👼🏻🌱student📚✂️✏️athelete🏃🏼🥇🏆🥅🏒

has Facebook and Twitter only

cried the most during bambi and dumbo 

little spoon™ 

has a couple tattoos with very deep meanings

jesper: 

dancer with inej. dances like those ppl who look like robots ??? the ones who look like they freeze parts of their body while the others move. AMAZING at it 

loves jazz but also dubstep/edm and rap/r&b. Beyoncé is MOM/QUEEN. 

sometimes djs parties 

again, huge gamer with wylan. he’s a lucio and junkrat main for overwatch. loves like every video game ever 

loves all the marvel movies, in love with black panther (was team cap) 

dresses like a hipster but also sometimes a fuck boy (tank tops and shorts with a backwards cap style) 

favorite subject is business and debate. great negotiator 

cried the most during the lion king 

A+ cosplayer (especially his lucio cosplay) 

big supporter of human rights (LGBTA+, feminist, black lives matter, poc representation). Will LITERALLY get into fights over anyone who thinks otherwise. Fist fights, always supported by Kaz and Matthias. Got suspended for 3 days for breaking a kids nose who thought LGBTA+ people should **** ** ****) 

that one kid who has 50 fidget spinners and can do cool tricks with them. also manages to sell all of them 

skateboard pro™ 

always sends the blinking face meme, even if it’s out of context 

all the social medias. 

one tattoo only of a gun with a 'bang’ flag coming out of it 

nina: 

 PROFESSIONAL👏🏻 MAKE 👏🏻 UP 👏🏻 ARTISTS 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 HAS HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF FOLLOWERS ON HER INSTAGRAM AND THE SAME FOR HER YOUTUBE CHANNEL 

Speaking of YouTube, she always does cute videos. Baking/cooking tutorial videos featuring Matthias, 'i do my boyfriends makeup’, 'my boyfriend does my makeup’, 'my boyfriend buys my makeup’, does make up tutorials obviously, challenges with her best friend inej like the 'whisper challenge’. everyone loves her and says her and Matthias are their otp 

loves fashion design, takes that class. 

loves horror movies/creepy things but also Disney 

great at roller skating 

always wins the best dressed awards ad school 

also huge fan of ed sheeran. loves little mix more than 5h. 

cried the most during 'up' 

Can speak like 4 languages (English, french, Latin and spanish) 

loves traveling and learning about new cultures too 

dancer!inej’s biggest fan and hockey!matthias’ biggest fan 

always breaks snapchat streaks 

likes to (friendly) debate with jesper, especially over stupid things 

amazing with kids. babysits all the time. calls “bub” (the dog) her and matthias’ baby 

big spoon™ 

notes are so fucking pretty. buys the most expensive stationary and notebooks 

also huge supporter of human rights. runs the feminist club. (Jesper is the Vice President) stresses loving yourself and your body, and makes sure to design comfortable yet GORGEOUS clothes for “"plus sized people”“ 

wins 'dynamic duo’ award with inej 

always eating lollipops 

has a few very small tatos of cute things like roses and crowns. has one quote written in cursive on her rib

kaz: 

prefers black coffee as well 

loves crime shows, whether they’re real or fake. for instance loves both 'Dateline’ and 'Criminal Minds’ also loves 'House’

 favorite class is psychology, learning how a person thinks and acts and feels

has the dregs tattoo on his arm * edge lord 9000™ * such a drama queen and diva like damn 

*deep sigh* "I think I’d rather go take a nap” *gets up and leaves* 

also loves computer science. knows how to hack shit like a pro 

always rough housing with jesper. broke a table once 

does walk with a cane. likes to slap matthias’ ass with it 

“bow down you fucking peasants" 

only types in lower case with 0 emojis and no punctuation marks. CONSTANTLY leaves people on read 

only has Twitter and snapchat. His posts on snapchat never have captions, yet somehow has a 200 day streak with Jesper and a 250 day streak with inej 

loves watching horror movies with nina 

 *in a fight* "oh I’ll sHOW YOU SOME DIRTY HANDS” *swings* 

gets second place for best dressed award 

always sending memes with no context in their group chat, as well as vines 

indie and alternative rock fan 

“does it look like I care because I’m sorry if it does I didn’t mean to give you that impression" 

head over heels for inej Ghafa like wow 

likes to read a lot of mystery books and non fiction books 

cried the most during finding dory 

can solve a Rubik’s cube under a minute and won’t let you forget it 

The one asshole who picks either Kirby or metaknight in super smash brothers brawl

 hates seeing the notification bubble so he always has all chats muted and notifications turned off for apps 

kiss ass to all the teachers to get them A’s

Kuwei: 

SCIENCE NERD. ALWAYS singing the bill nye theme song. Loves ASAPScience on YouTube. Master at chemistry and biology 

"hey did u know bill nye is, like, my dad" 

nina treats him like a baby 

loves everything to do with Star Wars while wylan loves star trek more. Fighting ensues. 

has a pet Siamese cat name sparky 

Used to have a huge crush on jesper and everyone knew it except jesper. 

knows the intro to the bee movie ("according to all known laws of aviation-”)

 jesper in the group chat: “gonna go shower be right back” // kuwei: “without me ;)?” // wylan: “KUWEI SWEAR TO FUCK” // kaz: “watch your fucking language wylan" 

obsessed with Pokémon go even if it died out (chose team instinct) 

"fight me on this" 

has Twitter, snapchat and instagram 

Always drinking ginger ale 

master at bop it 

the one kid who always forgets to pay you back for stuff 

is also into the CW super hero shows, so him and wylan are constantly talking about it 

loves cartoons and anime 

speaks fluent fuckboy 

God awful at comebacks 

"let’s take a selfie guys !!!” // “kuwei no-” // *snapshot sound* 

talks !!! Like !! This !!!! for,,, some reason ???????? 

huge nerd for other things too like lord of the rings and Harry Potter and game of thrones 

cried the most during inside out

 "do you think planes are scared of heights?“ // "for fucks same kuwei it’s 4am”

[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!