Tŵt Blog

February is Low Vision Awareness Month

Vision impairment, including low vision, affects hundreds of thousands of people on the Fediverse, including me. Vision impairment can make it hard to enjoy the visual media that gets posted to Mastodon and the wider Fediverse, especially if it's a screenshot of text.

Adding a simple description takes a few extra seconds, and can make everyone's experience so much more enjoyable.

We know that not all apps are helpful in showing you how to add alternative text descriptions, and we know that not all apps do a great job of showing it if it's there, but to raise awareness we are going to blur or highlight your media on Fridays in February.

Starting in November 2022 we have seen an influx of members seeking to migrate from Twitter to Tŵt Cymru. We are very happy to accomodate the move and are glad to welcome everyone, however we are now seeing a large number of accounts exhibiting various habits that are disruptive to the community. Of particular note is the unmonitored use of a Twitter crossposter, a means to automatically post Twitter content to Tŵt.

We understand many people are testing the Mastodon waters and are worried about losing their Twitter community. However, our public timelines are not intended for absentee tweeters pushing content into the public feeds that includes non-functional Twitter usernames, bot spam, and high volume retweet content that is only available on Twitter.com, a site many of our membership prefers to avoid.

Personal accounts registered on Tŵt are generally intended for engagement, not broadcast. Our members expect to be able to engage with you and your posts. If you wish to use both platforms and plan on using a bot of some kind to mirror content from Twitter, the following rules will apply beginning Monday January 16th, 2023:

Discussing politics on Mastodon is fast becoming a hot-button topic. I’ve seen a lot conversation lately about whether or not “politics'' should be behind a CW and there’s one side asking for “politics” to be CWed and another side declaring it to be the most important thing in the world and should never be CWed. (skip the intro and go straight to the play)

I do not see or hear the ninety percent of people who rarely speak up. As with all things, a small selection of voices is speaking up one way or the other (ref. the 1% rule).

We’ve worked hard on explaining the subtleties and expectations in our Community Code of Conduct, but nonetheless it’s important to note two things:

Significant changes are coming, here's a guide to some of the most meaningful

During the upgrade our look and feel will be different while we accommodate the new user interface.

• Filter posts by language: when following a multi-lingual account, you can make it so only the language you understand lands on your home feed.
• Follow hashtags: just like following a person, you can now follow a topic
• Filter individual posts: if a specific post makes it past your filters, you can filter the post by itself

(reposted from August 2018)

Tŵt is a bilingual online social content platform, very similar to Twitter in some ways, and very much not in others. You may well be thinking the same thing I heard a more than a few times during its development; “do we really need another social media platform?” and I hope you’ll read on to see if indeed there might just be a good answer to that question.

First, the similarities.

Tŵt allows anyone to create a member account and post messages up to 500 characters to the network; we call these “Tŵtiau” or “Toots”. These messages can contain #hashtags and links, as well as video and image files. Members can subscribe to other members on the network, and reply to anything in their content feed.

Familiar ground for many, but what makes Tŵt a meaningful alternative?

Technologically the differences are privacy and ownership. Unlike Twitter, Tŵt makes it simple for authors to control who can see their content, who can follow them, and they can completely remove themselves from the network at will. If desired, all content can be retrieved and even transported to a competing service providing it uses the same underlying software.

Philosophically, Tŵt is completely open source and is operated as a non-profit; no advertising, no dues, no fees of any kind. And Tŵt comes with clear guidelines about what is considered unacceptable content.

Community Requests for Account Suspensions (3 of 3)

[This document will be published in three parts, such that Part 1 can be referenced in future conversations, Part 2 deals with a very specific set of account concerns, and Part 3 addresses some long form questions posted to the moderators on Tŵt.]

Part 3 of 3 Response to community questions

Several members of toot.wales, as well as users from other Mastodon instances posed several questions and comments around our response to their concerns over one of the accounts that some people felt deserved stronger moderation than they were perceiving. These questions are preserved and answered below.