Satsuma @Satsuma@cat.family

Blorbo.social is now open for applications yaaaay!!

If you apply to join, please tell us a little bit about your own blorbos.

Alternatively, you can join immediately with an invite from any current member.

Keeping Mastodon non-toxic & benevolent requires total community buy-in when it comes to moderation.

Yes, we have mods + admins. But we must also habitually practice individual moderation using the robust safety tools at our disposal.

This means blocking clear-cut trashbags AND reporting them to admins

This means also reporting trashbags to the trashbag's own home instance admins.

It means calling out bad actors early and often & sharing information via #FediBlocks & boosts.

So many people are having a bad first experience with Mastodon because they're using the official app which is lacking features, doesn't allow image uploads randomly, has random slowness, and doesn't give you easy access to the two most active feeds where you can find people (Local and Federated).

Please switch to Metatext, Tusky, or Tooot for a better mobile experience (or even use a browser).

Out of the >15k users that joined this week, over 11k are on the official apps.

fediverse admins disgruntled with mastodon 4.0, please send me your critiques

archiving is complex, but it should always be opt-in. needs from the medium like representing longform content should be taken care of by modifying the medium so, again, people can opt-in (and opt-out if they aren't interested in longform content). I say this as someone invested in scraping as a practice (ethically, against corporations who conceal information in bulk, not aggregating personal information or using it contrary to people's wishes)

I'm helping people join Mastodon & the Fediverse this Saturday 1pm EST at @iffybooks, both in-person and virtually: https://iffybooks.net/event/mastodon-onboarding/

To help me teach newbies the basics, could you please share with me any questions you have, no matter how "stupid" the question may seem to you? Or, send me tips that helped you get your bearings in this new virtual neighborhood.

I've been on Mastodon since 2018 so I'm sure I'm forgetting some roadblocks, and some things have changed for onboarding people.

picking a mastodon server to join is easy -- just think of it like you're allying with one of many families in a war-torn medieval land, each with their own histories, feuds, laws, blood rituals

blorbo.social wants to be a welcoming place for marginalised people, including #BIPOC fans.

We know many areas of fandom have not been welcoming. We want to build a community where racists aren't welcome, and there's zero tolerance for microaggressions.

If you're interested in joining our moderation team, please contact me. We especially want to invite fans who are black, indigenous, or people of color.

(Boosts appreciated)

if you want to see your oldest posts, just add ?min_id=0 to the URL of your public profile :)

Another tip: Did you know you can turn off boosts (retweets)? If you get tired of only seeing shared content, and nothing original from your friends, you can turn off boosts for a while.

Check the menu at the top of your timeline.

The other day I was talking with some friends about the “old days” before Mastodon supported CWs, and how we used to EBG13 nyy bs bhe cbfgf because, guess what, if Mastodon didn’t have CWs we still wouldn’t throw nyy guvf fuvg out in the open. I realized that I actually kind of liked ROT13 better than the current system, because you could only ROT13 ⁜cneg⁜ bs n cbfg and the remainder would give the reader context as to how the problematic bit was being used.

Then I realized that our old ROT13 system was an effective plaintext fallback for pbagrzcbenel Qvfpbeq-fglyr fcbvyre gntf and that I could just implement that in Mastodon, so I did.

GlitchCat users! You can now create inline spoilers in your posts by using a <spoiler-text> HTML tag in either the Markdown or HTML content modes. Spoilers ⁜can⁜ include emoji but ⁜cannot⁜ include other markup like links, mentions, or hashtags.

Spoilers federate as ROT13 with special properties so that other servers can recognize them. If you are on another Mastodon instance which supports Markdown and HTML content modes, let me know and I can get you a patch!

RIGHTS TO VOTE FOR THE RIGHT TO VOTE GOD

We need another sex positive, sex worker instance on the fedi.

We don't have enough smut. Smut levels are far too low.

Really enjoyed this piece: "Why Do Archivists Get Rid Of Things (And Enjoy It)?"

https://contingentmagazine.org/2022/11/11/why-do-archivists-get-rid-of-things-and-enjoy-it/

One of my jobs is helping folks work with our catalog's data and it's been very meaningful to help the archivists identify things to weed and open dozens of feet of shelf space. This piece explains some of the reasons why it's necessary (and can feel good).

#StarWars peeps, come and look at this amazing fanvid by ExtraPenguin: https://archiveofourown.org/works/42901995/chapters/107782347

"Start A War", about Palpatine and all the wars he's started. A perfect song+theme choice, and a really well-made vid as well. (Disclaimer that it's done by a fandom friend, but it really IS that good.)