Tŵt Blog

You may not use Tŵt services in a manner intended to artificially amplify or suppress information or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts another member’s experience.

This includes commercial spam, and spam that typically aims to drive traffic or attention from a conversation on Tŵt to specific or third-party accounts, Web sites, products, services, or initiatives.

Tŵt Cymru | Toot Wales (“Tŵt”) interconnects various services using the ActivityPub standard. ActivityPub provides two layers; a server to server federation protocol so decentralized websites can share information, and a client to server protocol so real-world users, bots, and other automated processes can communicate with ActivityPub using their accounts on servers.

Tŵt curates the third-party servers with which it federates, with the aim to provide a moderate, friendly channel for people to use for all manner of topics and conversations, while observing the general etiquette of being in a public space.

Automated accounts must be marked as such in their account settings (https://toot.wales/settings/profile).

The following bot activity is prohibited and will be suspended from the service:

• Wholesale redistributing or mirroring content from external services with no discernable consent
• Mirroring or copying content from people who have not given consent
• Automatedly posting about trending hashtags or topics
• Posting the same content across multiple accounts

We welcome national and local news and weather accounts that are relevant to our member audience.

We believe that participation in social media should be a rewarding activity, one that brings joy and connection. As such, while there are topics and content that are worthy of discussion, we hope our members are mindful of those who do not want their social media feed to be divisive, inflammatory, or upsetting.

Preamble

Tŵt Cymru | Toot Wales (“Tŵt”) is a collection of Web services whose mission is to connect Cymru and its diverse community, at home and abroad, encouraging and enabling the use of the Welsh language online. We strive to provide a welcoming, bilingual platform that is free from hate, discrimination, and abuse. To that end, the following guidance reflects the wishes of the Tŵt staff and membership. In all cases, when using the Tŵt services we ask you be respectful, be mindful, and be nice.

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.