The media has been reporting a lot on mastodon, but often reports as though mastodon is the fediverse. I saw a well-intentioned article today that the platform started six years ago, but this erases the immense amount of work that many put into ActivityPub.

Having done standards work myself and learning that I am unable to manage the immense social pressures of coordinating divergent goals and stay happy, my hat's off to the dedicated folks who made the fediverse happen.

@[email protected] 👏

We know you're famous, we know you're celebrities, and we know you're accustomed to being treated like the cream of the crop - but this is our network and we have an important rule of etiquette:

Please put your news under a Content Warning

If you're talking about Ukraine, use a cw "Ukraine". If it's about a school shooting, use "school shootings", or "school violence". If it's about us politics, use "US politics" or "US pol".

If you're talking about Twitter, please use "Twitter". I'm not kidding. Do you know how stressing it has been for us to deal with this whole thing? We're sick tired of hearing Twitter news. YOU ARE the twitter news. The last thing we need is to see someone boosting a distressing piece of info that isn't safely hidden under a title.

For you it may seem like it's a bureaucratic hassle, but for us it's our mental health where talking about.

There are people with PTSD in here. There are people with burnout. We value mental health and we value consent.

We don't like content being shoved down our throats.

If you want an analogy, consider your stuff Mordor News and we're hobbits from the Shire.

Just because you're big personalities doesn't give you the right to ignore our customs and do whatever the hell you want anyway.

Consider the fact that we left Twitter for a reason. It's not merely the platform, it's not merely Musk, it's not merely the corporation; it's Twitter's toxic culture that we ran away from.

This is our cozy home. We do not starve for content and we're not addicted to engagement in here. We do not like quote tweets, we do not like naked screenshots. We do not like noise.

This is NOT Twitter; Mastodon is a very different beast. This platform is already over 5 years old and its culture is entirely different from yours. We have cozy little instances where we find comfort, friends, and peace.

You arrived unannounced to our virtual piece of land, and we expect you to at least have the decency of learning our customs.

Thank you.

The Increasingly Less-Brief Guide to Mastodon has been updated:

* I just attached a picture to my toot. How can I add a caption to it? (More information added.)

http://guidetomastodon.com