Toka @Toka@wonkodon.com

all I can think of when I see that mugshot everywhere is...

@TappinLisa @Toka @RMKH @LandShark @Picka @AlpacaSuitcase @admin @milburn @SisterArtemis
so:
"The rules:

1. No slurs against children or physically or intellectually disabled people
2. No wishing or ideating physical threats to people (not even "with votes")
3. Try not to be totally libelous
4. No talk about skullfucking your enemies, or any clever equivalents
5. No mysogyny. No racism. No Nazis. No demeaning of women, no incest jokes, no rape jokes.

It may feel a little less URGENT!! and COMPELLING!! here than on a commercial site, and maybe it will be a little less STRESSFUL!! and UPSETTING!! as a result. Somehow I doubt that we’ll be any less well informed.

/fin

No algorithm populating your timeline(s). Some are bemoaning this. However, since the home and federated feeds build out according to your follows, you are effectively building your own algorithm, based on who you follow. Commercial algorithms show you stuff that promises to delight or concern you and makes you want to click, whereas here, once your follows mature, you should see stuff you want to read/feel you probably should read/ be aware of.

Filtering stuff: you can screen out stuff. Use ‘whole word’. Interpretation is necessarily strict, so to get rid of cat pics you’d need to filter ‘cat’ and ‘cats’. ‘cat’ without whole word checked is either going to screen out everything beginning with ‘cat’ or else everything with the string ‘cat’ in it. I didn’t figure out which but either way, it’s a bit like going out to the chicken coop to get dinner armed with a machine gun.

Finding people: I didn’t have much luck with partial names, but if you can copy and paste in their exact address, it comes right up and you can do a follow. Walter Schaub has compiled (is curating maybe? he says hopefully...) a useful list of people on his site (it’s a Google Docs spreadsheet).

What you see:
home: posts by whoever you follow, local: people posting on the Wonkette server, federated: whatever people you follow are looking at, wherever hosted.

Finding stuff: search using #hashtags, eg #Ukraine #war or #Arizona. You get a list of user names (if any) and hashtags (if any) matching your search string. You don’t get a list of posts. Plain text searches don’t seem to work, use the #.

So long as this server remains populated principally by Wonkette readers, ‘Local’ should remain a relatively calm and rational place to begin your day.

Being on a server run by people you can trust is important, so be glad you’re here and that wonkodon.com exists. (Thank you Uncle Milburn for setting up - and administering!!! - this and Rebecca for saying yes.) Also, when the inevitable Day of Legal Bullshit arrives, your @editrix is friends with some Very Good Lawyers (Hi Liz! Hi Jamie!) who will will strike down with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy this server.

The people who run the server you’re on CAN see your e-mail address and everything you do. If the operator is an individual, they’re not subject to the same legislative and regulatory controls that a corporation would be. (For those of you thinking ‘What #*$& corporate controls?’, let that sink in a minute.) Your DMs are not encrypted.

The Android ones each seem to display the same stuff in slightly different formats and they have slightly different UI features, but they all appear (at least superficially) to have the same functionality. Until the inevitable ones with the secretly creepy features are outed, I would suggest just sticking with the one put out by Mastodon itself. On a computer, the web browser experience (at least in Firefox) is fine (yes, light mode Rebecca!).

Mastodon is like e-mail, it doesn’t matter what server you’re on, you can send to/receive from any other server (unless your server admin has blocked it, or they’ve blocked yours – just like a spam e-mail server, too many jerks posting from a server may get it blocked by others). Like e-mail, there’s a variety of Mastodon client apps.

OK, I’ve been messing around with Mastodon for the last two days, my forefinger hurts, my eyes are fed up, I’ve read the same stuff too many times and I’m done for a bit.

FWIW, here’s what I’ve learned:

for those landing here wondering what exactly 'here' is, a bit of background:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/leaving-twitters-walled-garden

how it's going:
https://twitterisgoinggreat.com/