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@inherentlee i wouldn¦t use box drawing characters for this; css is already very good at drawing boxes

in this case you need to draw two boxes, one shaped like an L which is half the height of a line, and one shaped like an I which extends for the entire list item (unless it is the last list item)

so

li{ Position: Relative; Padding-Inline-Start: 1EM }
li::before,li::after{ Display: Block; Box-Sizing: Border-Box; Inset-Block: 0 Auto; Inset-Inline: 0 Auto; Inline-Size: .75EM /* or whatever */; Border-Inline-Start: 1PX Solid }
li::before{ Block-Size: .5LH; Border-Block-End: 1PX Solid; Content: "" }
li:Not(:Last-Child)::after{ Block-Size: 100%; Content: "" }

[note: above code is untested, i just threw it together to demonstrate the idea, it may not entirely work]

@OctaviaConAmore early mastodon had that (not particularly organized, but people who would watch the local timeline and greet new people). following the introductions hashtag is not necessarily the best approach because new users do not know that they should post in the introductions hashtag

an example script might be something like:

---

Hey! Welcome to Mastodon! I hope you enjoy your time here! If you want to meet new people, we recommend making a public post in the hashtag so that people can find your profile and learn what you are about.

You may want to take some time to review the post visibility settings—many people have a better time when they set their default visibility to “Unlisted” or “Followers Only” (fewer reply guys). This is only a default, and you can always make an individual post have a higher or lower visibility if you want!

You can find other people on this server by checking out the “Local Timeline” [instructions on how to access it]. This is a great place to hang out! There is also a “Federated Timeline” which includes posts from other servers. [if the server supports local-only posting:] If you are making a public post but you don’t want your post to appear on the Federated Timeline, set the “Local-only” toggle and you will only be chatting with the people here.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

---

however i think there is a lot more to it than just making an initial welcome post. especially since most people on fedi have been here for a while. it is ensuring that people are on the right server, making sure they can find people with similar interests, responding with help and advice when they run into problems, facilitating community events…

@OctaviaConAmore welcoming people, making them feel welcome, ensuring their time in this space is a pleasant one, answering questions, pro·actively offering support, generally doing the social work that makes a stranger feel like they belong in a place which is not their home

the biggest lesson personally for me has been that the people who pour the most energy into hospitality are usually abusers. hospitality is a great way to build followings and social capital. and when i think of the people who had the biggest impact on early mastodon, many of them did eventually end up hurting a lot of people and crashing out and splitting on the platform. for you know, diagnosed personality disorder reasons. the ones that didn¦t, who were stable and goodhearted, were usually the targets. so you know. gotta figure out how to fix that

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i think the most annoying piece of cognitive dissonance with the fediverse today is that there is no reason why it couldn¦t be good. when mastodon first launched it was an oasis in a sea of techbros and edgelords and outright nazis and there was one timeline and none of the good and useful features you take for granted today. but people still built a strong and resilient community, because they wanted to

you could do that now. you could make a server and be welcoming and hospitable and build a strong and resilient community, and be an oasis in a sea of techbros and edgelords and outright nazis, and if like five servers did that you would have roughly the same constellation that was the fediverse in its heyday that everyone misses. but nobody wants to, because it isn¦t new and interesting anymore. it is just work. the end

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the fediverse sucks because all the hospitality workers burned out and never sought replacements, or were evil people to begin with, or stopped caring once all their friends were on the platform

@coriander you have to understand that 85% of the comics in the newspaper annoy quite frequently so any that don¦t become cherished friends

@coriander i regret to say i have come around on The Family Circus

@coriander Crabgrass can be pretty good once you get into it

if you ever wonder why millennials are all like this the answer is because we all read Frindle

@gaditb but, importantly, you can be a hypertext document connected to other hypertext documents with·out following standards, and that is probably still participating in the big web even if it is standing apart from the little one

@gaditb well, i think there are two competing definitions here

there is a big “web”, which is anything which is arguably hypertext and which participates in the hypertext universe of the Internet

but there is also a smaller “web”, which is a set of social norms and conventions (including file formats and standards) for those hypertext documents

i don¦t buy the argument that the web should not have standards, but then the question remains as to what the scope of those standards should be? (which presumably is also the scope of web browsers)

@gaditb as an example question that is hard to resolve given the history of the web and browsers: are R·S·S feeds part of the web?

@gaditb the problem is that our conceptualization of “the web” has largely been created and directed by web browser manufacturers, who have had bad ideas about it

i used to think web browsers were cool and now i hate them. whose fault is this? everybodys

any time a european tries to have an opinion on anything i feel like you must remind them that they chopped down all of their trees

there are so many discourses which only really exist in academia and which consequently use big academic words. and you can¦t summarize them in lay terms because there aren¦t lay words to express them. it is a kind of knowledge security. the computer cannot make sense of you because you exceed the ontology of the user. the people who would not read your blogpost because it engages with difficult concepts still will not read your blogpost, just differently

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i am so excited for somebody to try to get a·i to summarize my work and a·i to fail because it doesn¦t know the word “epistemology”

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📟🐱 GlitchCat

A small, community‐oriented Mastodon‐compatible Fediverse (GlitchSoc) instance managed as a joint venture between the cat and KIBI families.