æʃliŋ, purrepurrocessor @aescling@cat.family

The GlitchCat #SundayPost offers news and updates from our corner of the fediverse to yours.

§ Instance News :—

• In light of the recent flood of new users from Twitter, concerns about the moderation capacity of some larger servers, and increased concern on my part regarding the potential for boosts of posts from our server to reach instances which do not share our values, I am currenty planning to upgrade silences on several large instances to suspends. These blocks will be open to revision, but only if the servers in question can demonstrate they have their moderation act together. Expect them to be carried out imminently.

People on other servers: This is a good time to remind that moderation on GlitchCat isn’t about what content ⁜we⁜ can see, but who can see ⁜us⁜. We trust in our users. My hope is for people here to feel comfortable posting on the public timeline without fear of it getting boosted into the wrong hands. Preventing federation with large, poorly‐moderated instances is essential to cultivating this environment, as those instances form the hubs through which others might encounter our posts.

We will continue to federate with large instances which ⁜do⁜ appear welmoderated, like mastodon.art and scholar.social, and look forward to working alongside their moderation teams to resolve any issues we might have.

• We have modified our robots.txt such that even the root page of glitch.cat.family will not be indexed by search engines. This website is now entirely part of the “deep web” 🌊😱.

• We have added a new feature to Kibicat Mastodon—the fork of GlitchSoc that we run—vayvar fcbvyref! This feature is only available in the H·T·M·L and Markdown content modes: Wrap text in a <spoiler-text> element to make it require a clickthrough, like on Discord. This feature ⁜does⁜ federate, but considering no other instance has implemented it (yet), everybody else on the fediverse will see Rot·13, which is the fallback.

• We’ve optimized the settings for GlitchCat to make it run smoother. We weren’t experiencing any problems before, but now we’re extra not‐experiencing‐any‐problems.

We also recently upgraded the amount of RAM this server uses, so now is a good time to mention that you can support this instance financially if you have the means.

§ From Our Users :—

• @Lady and @aescling: See above. We’ve been hard at work improving this instance!

• @noracodes: Recently @noracodes did some great work helping our friends at weirder.earth to scale their instance in the face of the current migration of users from Twitter. She also wrote about it!

§ Holidays and Observances :—

• 🟠 19 November–25 November is Orange Week, a week of mourning and activism focusing on genderbased violence and its impact around the world. The colour orange is used to symbolize the spectrum of antiviolence work, from 🟥 emergency response to 🟨 education & advocacy, and is the official colour for the United Nations UNiTE campaign to end violence against women.

• 🤍 19 November is White Ribbon Day, a day for recognizing the cost of genderbased violence in terms of human lives. The White Ribbon Campaign was formed by a group of profeminist men in London, Ontario in response to the École Polytechnique massacre on 06 December 1989. This is recognized at various dates depending on location, but we do 19 November because it is six days before Cathemas.

It so happens that 19 November is celebrated in some locations as International Men’s Day. It also so happens that men are disproportionately the instigators of genderbased violence, so this observance could be seen as a counter·observance of sorts.

• ⚧️ 20 November is Transmas, a·k·a the Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day of remembrance for trans people dead or debilitated due to genderbased violence. Transgender Day of Remembrance was begun in 1999 to memorialize Rita Hester, a transgender woman, who was murdered on 28 November the previous year in Allston, Massachusetts. Although the original organizers solely emphasized remembering those trans people lost to murder, we also recognize those dead or debilitated from other violences, such as systemic violence and suicide, on this day.

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!

(specifically the confirmation popup is broken; sorry local users we’ll fix that lmao)

(for clarity: GlitchSoc is already a queer trans fork; i mean a slightly harder queer trans fork which is friends with GlitchSoc and Hometown but isn’t as concerned with upstream compatibility)

@maloki led that charge and you can see her recent posts for more on how it went; i won’t try to summarize it here

HOWEVER in the time since then, we have also had new projects spring up in the form of GlitchSoc and Hometown; please please support these as they are the future of Mastodon development

also, if you want to get to work on a queer trans fork, @ me