mastodon ⁽⁵⁾

In the fediverse, of which Mastodon is a large part, it is very much appreciated when you add alt-text to an image. You know, the additional work you do for the vision impaired people who can't see the image, but who can form an idea based on your added (alt) text. Thank you for adding it. Sometimes, though, an image contains a lot of text, or the image is quite complex, and typing all that…

Today I closed my oldest twitter account. Over 12 years worth of time there, gone. And it's good. Twitter was and is getting more radical, hate-prone and right-wing by the day. I spent less and less time there, as it was a waste of time, energy and emotional well-being. It's a strange feeling, after all that time, but also liberating. Reason to pull that plug now is Musk's announcement to take twitter out of the…

A new post on the Mastodon tag. Ilja was very quick to respond, and soon I had my own instance up and running. It involved a few technical steps: deciding on the subdomain of a domain I already own (I have several, so that was a bit of a dice game), and adding a "CNAME" DNS record to that domain. That was basically all. Well, that, and making sure Ilja gets reimbursed for the cost…

Keeping Mastodon friendly for others There are many vision-impaired people on Mastodon / the Fediverse. Just like in the real world out there. For those, there are special screenreaders that read out the posts and toots, which is great. For that reason, Mastodon instances offer the option to add text to images, and everyone's encouraged to do so. If a screenreader only says "image" or not even that when going over your post, that takes…

Twitter The Twitter exodus is a fact. At the same time, Mastodon is a puzzle. Many people are scared. So many servers, waiting lists, shit stuff, don't-knows and more. "Mastodon" is a collection of computers that are interconnected. So if you join e.g. Mastodon.world, you can still talk to everyone on all other servers, like Mastodon.ai, writing.exchange or toot.community. Yes, these are actual names on actual servers. You find subjects by looking for them through…