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:

To avoid confusion and to ensure healthy engagement on our services we may verify certain accounts of notable organisations or persons. If you believe an account that represents you, an organisation you represent, or a client you are representing has been registered in bad faith on toot.wales and you wish to reclaim it, see https://forms.gle/ScBxTt2EL7atPq577

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.