🎉
🎉
To answer a question from a report this morning: we instaban any accounts that are just straight-up commercial advertising. I even added this as a "server rule" last month or so, but they don't seem to have noticed.
To be clear: self-promotion is fine, selling stuff via fedi is fine, and even officially representing an organization or company, under its name rather than the name of the human running the account, is fine -- as long as the account's purpose is positive engagement and not just ad copypasta.
There's a lot of theoretical grey area between those two, but fortunately not a lot of actual examples -- adbots almost always do certain things and are very easy to spot.
Okay, yes, we're back again.
I'm making some progress learning my way around the system @meatballhat engineered up for us to ensure that we can deal with future mass exodi from other social media sites, but I'm still getting to the "how to access other boxes besides the maintenance portal" part of the quest. 🔎 💻
The immediate problem has been cleared up, however, and we'll continue to look at what needs to be done to prevent this from happening every couple of days...
Got some new gamering emojis, engineered up by the indefatigable @rnd -- share and enjoy!*


(movement),
(clicking the sticks)
(start equivalent),
(select equivalent)
*as they say in the marketing division here at Sirius Cybernetics Corporation (part of the #TootCat™ family of shell-companies and intellectual property holdings)
Friends, I feel like maybe #TootCat
should (nay, is meowally compelled to) toss a chunk into this:
.meow — Next Round gTLD Application
It sounds excellent. Any reason not to? (...aside from them using #Kickstarter... though at the moment, I can't even remember why Kickstarter has a red flag in my brain.)
(h/t to @FrozenTrout for drawing this to my attention, and to @Harena for drawing to my attention the fact that @FrozenTrout had drawn it to my attention ^.^)
Now that quote posts are a thing on Mastodon, we need an insufferably cutesy nickname for them that everyone hates but still gets used anyway. To that end I nominate “Quoots”, a portmanteau of ‘quote’ and ‘toot’. I believe it’s the worst possible option, solidly cementing Mastodon in particular and the Fediverse in general as having the worst slang on the internet. Please quoot to spread the word.
This 1972 SF novel is set in a future in which #TootCat users are among the few survivors of a global calamity created by the "Demons" -- descendants of today's Republicans.
(I first read this as a tiny sometime in the mid-70s, borrowed from the Durham County Library downtown (when it was in this building iirc), only acquiring a copy for myself relatively recently -- which is to say sometime after 1985 or so. [straightface])
Anyway, I'm reading it to @Harena as a bedtime story.