Eubie Drew (QOTO 🦣) @EubieDrew@social.cleverlibre.org

Friends, I've finally figured out how the CW thing works & now I feel like a total idiot. To save you my embarrassment: click the CW in the text box as you compose & it opens up a headline text box & when your post comes out that's what folks see & they can click through for more.

Thank you!
We use: drosophila.social

Building an aggregator for #ScienceMastodon. Let's you view multiple servers at once. Creating a list of all the science servers I know of. Please let me know of any others!

genomic.social
ecoevo.social
mstdn.science
fediscience.org
scicomm.xyz
scholar.social?

Any others?

It’s also easy to account spoof: I’m @PeteStrzok, but that doesn’t prevent someone from creating (on existing or new severs they make) @petestrzok@mastadan.social, @petestrzok@mstdn.social, etc.

Make sure you verify the account you’re following is in fact the person you think it is. An old article (would welcome an updated version):
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2017/04/mastodon-risks/amp

None of this is meant to disparage Mastodon - just noting things to keep in mind.

I keep seeing people say Mastodon is nothing like Twitter. And they’re right.

Mastodon is an echo of the old internet, it’s decentralised, chaotic. What you get depends on your sysadmin. You can’t search, everything has to be shared to you by a human. Networks split apart and rejoin. What you see is your unique connection to it.

Is this good? Maybe. But for me that’s the internet I grew up with. No algorithms, no targeted adverts, just human interaction, and it was glorious.

After 70 years of relative stability, democracy is weakening all around the world. Strongmen and dictators are ascendant, and legislatures are weakening.

The real problem is we are in a global information war. It goes on every minute of every day.

And we are LOSING THAT WAR.

Mastodon will update to 4.0 soon! Here are the most exciting new features (in addition to fixes & changes):

- ability to follow hashtags
- ability to filter by language
- ability to translate posts
- ability to post HEIC files (i.e. your iPhone’s native photo format)
- define user roles (big deal for admins)
- define sign-up process on your Instance (admins again)

See all changes here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.0.0rc1

Thanks, @Gargron and @Mastodon Team. #Mastodon4

I’m quite impressed by (a) how helpful existing users of Mastodon have been for all of us noobs trying to learn a new system, and (b) by the deep and widely-held sense of a Fediverse culture (the fact that there’s a “we” that uses content warnings more liberally, alt text more frequently, etc) - it’s complete with a sense of place, ethics, identity. It’s fascinating, and makes me glad to have had the good fortune to stumble into it.

“I want news organizations to not only set up their own servers but also to start adding share-on-Mastodon buttons to story pages. That will send a message to Elon et al, endorsing an alternative.” — @jeffjarvis https://buzzmachine.com/2022/11/05/hope-for-a-post-musk-net/

A+ idea—how hard can it be? Hire reporters, writers, editors, & fact-checkers. Don't forget to factcheck & proofread everything, incl. photo captions & cartoons. It's "Book of Revelation" not "Revelations"; women's shirts button on the left; no "the reason is because," etc. etc.

Features I’d love to see on Mastodon (imo!)
✨ Link previews (pull headline & image from the story)
✨ Quote tweet type functions (totally disagree this encourages harassment! It’s a way to add to other’s ideas, like a reblog on Tumblr)
✨ Better search functionality and discovery to find all the great people and content buried on here
✨Direct messaging to continue certain convos in private and build deeper connections
#technology #tech #twitterrefugee #twitter #twittermi #media #news #journalism