nver used twitter before, but been wanting to try out mastodon…
any advice on which instance i should join ? also drop your handles in this thread so we can toot each ot0hr (or whatever it is u do haha)
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i’m @palomakop@autonomous.zone - helped set up that server and can get you an invite if you’d like to join, but there aren’t many people on there yet … other ones i like to hang out on include post.lurk.org and merveilles.town .
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thnx @palomakop - these look great ! maybe its a silly question, but what difference does it make which server you are on / if theres many people on there ?
but yah autonomous.zone sounds cool !
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the only difference it makes is that there will be less people on the local timeline. for example on lurk.org there’s a ton of people posting all the time so if you have an account on that instance you can kind of interact with your local community on there. i’m fine with it being a little on the quieter side, but i do follow a lot of people on other instances and my following timeline is quite lively at this point.
will send you an invite link on rocket chat dm!
edit to add: you can also browse the local timelines of other instances even if you don’t have an account on them… so yeah, doesn’t make a huge difference !
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We’re @pixelflowers@notbird.site (https://notbird.site/@pixelflowers).
We’ve been only using Mastodon for a few months now but it’s been a positive experience. We’re happy to connect there with anyone from Scanlines.
Mastodon’s features are good enough for us; it’s quite DIY and users have more control compared to commercial networks. Random interactions with strangers have been constructive and it’s been easy to find relatively interesting visual content, connect with their creators, and have them sharing their imagery with us to remix.
Like @palomakop, we’re on a very small instance but mostly follow users from other instances. We agree it doesn’t seem to make a big difference, except maybe with regard to the “quality of service”.
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I’ve only now figured out (after seeing this post) that our Peertube instance is somehow also part of the “Fediverse”.
That’s why, if you look up “cyberboy666” in the Mastodon search engine (or any other username at videos.scanlines.xyz I guess), the profile on our Peertube instances comes up:
For some reason that doesn’t happen if I search our own “Pixelflowers” username, but maybe that’s just an anti-vanity measure 
In related news, yesterday for the first time I imported to videos.scanlines.xyz some videos that I had previously uploaded to Mastodon. I did that just by pasting their URLs, no need for me to re-upload them, and it worked fine 
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@alphabetter@mastodon.social
'cause I couldn’t work out whether there was a smaller server that would suit me better. I suspect I am missing part of the experience by just going for the biggest.
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that’s right, peertube is part of the fediverse ! 
you can search this if you put in the full instance url maybe it will work: @pixelflowers@videos.scanlines.xyz
the way it’s set up is a little weird on peertube, everyone has both an account and a “channel.” try searching this one too:
@pixelflowers_channel@videos.scanlines.xyz
it seems like the “channel” accounts just boost/repost stuff from the normal accounts.
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i think the idea with channels is that a single account could have multiple channels, for different topics or what have you. but havnt looked into it.
here are a couple more scanlines users and friends who havent been mentioned here yet.
i think @andrei_jay will be joining http://autonomous.zone soon as well.
if anyone else wants to join that server, let me know – i helped @wakest spin it up and it is very open to any scanlines peoples.
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yeah i just signed up today!
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i have had the account @bobby_pharaoh@mastodon.social for 3 years but have actually never used mastodon even once i just thought i may want to save my handle there
i don’t know anything about it. or even how to use it, but i’m curious to see what is up
literally what is mastodon
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mastodon is a federated & decentralized social network. which means that instead of all servers being owned and controlled by a single company, there are lots of smaller servers that are all set up to pass data to each other. so you can “follow” and “like” people’s posts even if you aren’t on the same server.
as an illustrative example, this forum is running discourse on our own server. if discourse was federated, we’d be able to follow other servers from this one and then posts from other forums would show up in our feeds on here. it’s not the greatest example because you can’t really follow individual users, but there has been some talk of integrating discourse with the fediverse in some way.
the advantages are, instead of having to have a giant company that needs to support its server costs through advertising and data exploitation, there can be a lot of smaller low cost servers that are supported by the community, so there is no need for them to be commercialized. it also makes it much harder for the whole platform to go down because the likelihood that all of the servers will stop working at once is much lower. the current drawbacks are that it can be a little confusing to newcomers to sort out what all of this means and how to use it, but it’s getting better all the time as there are a lot of people working on the projects. so mastodon is just one of the platforms in the fediverse, peertube is another, and because they are all federated, people on mastodon can follow our peertube accounts, etc …
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things that we’ve been doing on Mastodon and results they’ve been leading to. some are very obvious but seem to be more effective compared to, say, Twitter:
- posting pics and videos of our works with #mastoart hashtag → interest / feedback from strangers who like art
- following users who post their visual creations, asking them to reuse / remix their works → positive reactions, new visual material to play with
- posting open calls to collaborations and asking this account (Mastodon•ART 🎨 Curator :masto: (@Curator@mastodon.art) - Mastodon.ART) to amplify those posts > more visibility without spamming anyone who’s not interested
- from the official guide…“post a short #introduction giving some information about yourself and what your interests are and what you’ll be talking about on Mastodon. That’s also a great hashtag to search, you’ll find lots of other people new to the network and many will care about the things you do” (we actually forgot to do this ourselves. we’ll do it soon)
- attaching many hashtags to our posts → someone will spot them and follow you
- announcing our livestreamings → we gained some audience
the technical limitations on the size of videos one can upload are a bit strict (40MB by default). maybe some instances have much looser limits but we haven’t been able to search for them on this basis. on the other hand, one can simply upload somewhere else (e.g. videos.scanlines.xyz) and then embed the video.
another criterion one may care about (or not): how welcome NSFW content is on a given instance. some ones are sex-friendly, other ones are not as they prioritize a safe experience for everybody. most of them ask their users to properly mark sensitive content (which includes non-sexual topics that can affect other people). this seems to reflect the Mastodon decentralized attitude that goes together with having many different communities of like-minded people with their own rules.
some tools/pages that allegedly help you choose your native instance. some of them are out of date, some are up to date but didn’t help us that much…
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Hey,
we’re on Mastodon, too. If anyone wants to connect: @hintt@sonomu.club
This is pretty interesting, but I have not yet found where and how to do this. Could you point me in the right direction?
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it hasn’t been effectively implemented in the web version yet, the closest thing is going to (instance.url)/public
however on some of the mobile apps you are able to “add” servers without actually logging in. i know this is possible on “toot!”, maybe @wakest can confirm any others.
i find i’ve been using this less as i’ve been following more people on different servers, the “federated” timeline on my home instance pretty much gets everything.
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Thanks a lot! I was looking around on the github and found many requests for this feature but nothing about if some1 was actually working on it.
But using XYZ/public will give you the federated timeline of that instance, right? I guess there’s no way to have a look at the local timeline, is there? I mean it kinda makes sense
the public timeline is configurable. for example post.lurk.org has theirs set to the local timeline - but i think it’s set to federated by default.