Tŵt staff routinely boost toots to help your content gain visibility using boosts, featuring your content on #DyddDilyn or #MidweekMindful, and approving your content for the Explore pages and the Trending list.
Please note, to be included your content must meet our Code of Conduct and follow our guidelines:
– no swears without a CW
– media files must have alternative text descriptions
– no links to Twitter or Meta-owned properties
If you'd like to nominate someone for Dydd Dilyn/Follow Friday please DM @teamtoot
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:
We operate three managed services: Mastodon, Pixelfed, and WriteAs, for which we pay managed hosting fees.
In addition we have four domain names with annual fees, and some administrative fees to operate the non-profit.
Cyber liability insurance is the only other major expense, and will be reflected in the New Year.
As of November 2022 we have seven volunteer staff who take no money from the charity, but if donations increase we will consider a stipend or a wage as the service becomes self-sustaining.
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:
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.
A quick note for new members jumping ship from Twitter. First off: welcome! We are incredibly glad you have come to see what Mastodon and Mastodon servers like Tŵt are all about!
In all cases, you will find a community of friendly people ready to help you navigate a slightly different experience than you're used to on Twitter. Ask your questions in the app and you'll have an answer in no time!
This is not Twitter or an attempt to clone Twitter. It's the same but different, and is intended to be so. We are micro-blogging for people who want to control their social media feeds, be free of harassment and abuse, and want to join a more communal, supportive service that is non-toxic, non-corporate, non-surveillance.
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.
Community Requests for Account Suspensions (2 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 2 of 3 Regarding specific account suspension requests
As a preamble, I want to remind anyone reading this that I chose to not block Gab before they came online. In the run-up to their launch there was a lot of conversation about defederating them. And within a couple of minutes of them coming online, we had them blocked. But not before they contravened our Community Guidelines. That’s a principle I cannot waver from. I’ve been around the block a few times, I’ve seen my assumptions been wrong more than a few times, and I’ve seen people change over time. I had very little doubt what was going to happen when they came online, but nonetheless the way I operate, the way I work, they would be blocked the second they contravene our stated Guidelines. Anything else – to me – is unfair, hypocritical, and a dangerous precedent. I am not the judge of all things, I am merely the current administrator of an Internet service with a stated code of conduct.
###
The first account I want to discuss is from an account that posts what one user-submitted report labelled “religious spam”. Here is one of the three toots for which we received a report:
Everything we do is motivated by the life, teachings and ministry of Jesus We believe that every human life has equal value and that every person should be empowered to reach their God-given potential. To do this, we all need to belong to flourishing communities
These words were reported as “Racist spammer”.
If I were to put my non-moderator hat on, I would silence this content. I would mute this account. I would take a one-click action to never see this person’s thoughts again. I have no interest in it, and I find it disagreeable to me, personally. I do not enjoy being preached at.
And this, to me, is one of the strongest tools Mastodon users have that other services either don’t or have weaker versions of. Mastodon makes no inferences about what “should” be in your feeds. No algorithms deciding to “surface” content for you.
You decide. You own your feed. You own your experience. If you don’t like something, you never have to see it again.
