Joshua Casey 😷 @JoshuaACasey@social.cleverlibre.org

Consistently impressed by design decisions by Mastodon devs. Sure, there’s some usability rough edges compared to the bird site. But on balance the reasons for the general vibe here are clearly intentional decisions, not an accident. 🙏🏻

Encryption rules. 💪

Check out Tutanota: tutanota.com/big-tech-alternative?t-src=m

@lavenderlens

Agreed. The back story is long and crazy. But in short the LGBTQ and others in the community at the time were being mass banned simply for following bad actors, even when they didnt boost, promote, or in any way show sympathetic leaning towards those bad actors.

The reason they were following them was to watch their account for violent threats and then disseminate that throughout their community for safety. But many instance admins didnt care and blocked/banned anyway.

As a result the LGBTQ community in masse migrated here for their safety.

We added a feature for them called subscribe. It lets you follow a person without them knowing you are following them. BUT it only lets you access the posts that person gives you permission to view (basically public posts, you cant see follower-only posts on a subscription). We did this so members of our community could follow these bad actors without alerting them and putting themselves at risk of violence or retaliation.

People again twisted this feature into being privacy violating despite the fact that it honors the privacy rules set by the poster.

Needless to say a lot of people were very mad that their blocking and banning abuses were coming back to bite them in the ass and ultimately distorted and lied the truth about QOTO and our feature to try to make it sound like something evil when it wasnt... those lies persist to this day.

@trinsec @War_Kittens

I gotta admit, this one stings!

Privacy is not a privilege.

That sense of exhilaration when you see a Twitter friend join Mastodon and you're like HI OMG, MAYBE IT'S HAPPENING

So Elon Musk’s birdsite officially has the most restrictive speech policies that the bird site has ever had in its entire history https://www.mediaite.com/tech/twitter-blocks-mediaite-post-critical-of-elon-musk/

Some things I learned about #accessibility and Mastodon this week.

• Lower case hashtags like #this are fine when the hashtag is one word.

• Mastodon encourages use of the superbly named #CamelCase for hashtags of two words or more. Named because of its capital letter humps! 🐫

• This helps screen readers announce the words correctly. Screen readers are used by blind and visually impaired people, and those who find it easier having information read out.

• Remember alt text for images too!

If you're looking for an awesome alternative for #Instagram be sure to checkout #Pixelfed!

This is like Mastodon, also self-hosted and does 'federate' with the #Fediverse.

You can join our on https://pixey.org or https://catgram.co

and follow from Mastodon on @stux@pixey.org and @George & @Washy

If you want to setup your own checkout https://pixelfed.org

I was hoping to release the new https://pixelfed.org a few days ago

The problem was the new server directory, it's really complex!

I wanted to make this super simple for server admins to submit & update their listings which meant I had to build a submission queue that is integrated into the Pixelfed admin dashboard and also caches (avatar, header, post) images on S3 on our side.

Anyways, it's almost ready and I can't wait 😁