Jerry 🦙💝🦙I KNOW IT SUCKS, I KNOW IT IS NOT WHAT YOU WANT, BUT PLEASE DISABLE YOUR DAMN OPEN MASTODON INSTANCE REGISTRATIONS
lamb 🐑
Amber 
@lamb @jerry open registration allows anyone to create an account at any time without moderation having to approve it. The instance you're on (transfem.social) has approval-based registration. For every user I as an administrator have to go into a setting panel, view the new sign ups and hit a button to Approve or Deny. Part of what I look out for there are usernames and emails with obvious hateful references (such as 88, ss and other dog whistles) and the reason they have for joining. On transfem.social, we have words like racial slurs banned from usernames so nobody can register a username with slurs in it. Iirc mastodon doesn't even have the ability to denylist certain words. Combine that with open registration, and basically, it's an all-you-can-eat buffet for bad actors with zero ways of filtering them out.
jtb@puppygirlhornypost2 @jerry @lamb I only found out what 88 meant recently by watching 'Mystery Road: Origin' on TV, so what if I had actually chosen 88 as a random number?
dragonfrog@jtb @puppygirlhornypost2 @jerry @lamb I've had a few conversations with well meaning folks who were born in 1988 or whatever, not realizing the message their ID was unintentionally sending. They usually changed their ID.
Vile Ox@dragonfrog @jtb @puppygirlhornypost2 @jerry @lamb
What about Michael_Irvin_88?
There were quite a few well-known players with that number in the NFL.
I realize that hardcore NFL fans and mastodon users have a somewhat limited intersection, but there must be a few of them.
@VileOx @jtb @puppygirlhornypost2 @jerry @lamb oh for sure, same as being nerdy about Norse mythology and civilisation and stuff. Nothing wrong with the being into the actual historic period. But if you put a Valrknot as your avi and have a user name that references Odin, you are screaming "I'm a Nazi" and driving a lot of people to avoid you
You may not realize you are, which is why it's a kindness to inform someone of the message they don't realize they're sending.
@VileOx @jtb @puppygirlhornypost2 @jerry @lamb I onc broke the shoelaces on my black Doc Marten boots and was near a shoe store that only had white ones in the right length.
A little later someone kindly informed me that there is a whole boot lace colour code in the punk scene and my white laces on black boots said "I'm a white supremacist".
I bought black laces at the next opportunity.
@dragonfrog @jtb @puppygirlhornypost2 @jerry @lamb
Hardcore dive in the Norse mythology and Mastodon are a match made in Valhalla. I am with you so far. In addition, threre are not so many people who are really into it.
NFL is not even a subculture (unless the whole of the USA is), it is as mainstream as it can be. There are literally millions fans, thousands of whom wear 88 jerseys. Many of the wearers are African-American, and so are the players.
So if I were an admin/moderator, I would probably let it be.
P.S. Some of these things are quite culture specific. Even 4/20 means very different things depending on which shore of the Atlantic you are at.
P.P.S. I would also change the shoelaces, but that is a hyperspecific cultural niche I wonder what would the punk scene aficionados think of a black guy rocking black Doc Martens with white shoelaces (and being quite oblivious of their arcane knowledge).