Dad joke I just heard:

- How did the hacker get away from the police?

- He ransomware!

Just resist the urge. Because you're not going to think to check for robots.txt, but you ought to, that's how we communicate we don't want to be involved. You're probably not going to bother to read the various terms of service for the instances you touch, many of which explicitly ask you not to do any scraping or automated activity beyond normal use of the service. You're not going to know to respect people using the NoBot hashtag that was meant to prevent automated follows. You're certainly not going to parse user profiles and pinned posts to learn how people like to be approached, what will get you blocked, or even think to heavily throttle your activity because instances are falling over in response to load.

Whatever your thing is, make it 100% opt-in. Make it appropriate for a significantly more at-risk user than you are. Make sure it forgets things, purges info about servers it can't contact, can't operate in any sort of logged-in mode where consent is an issue.

We will straight up help advertise your cool thing if it respects users properly and takes the time to consider the safety and preferences of every person involved. There are a lot of fun, thoughtfully-designed toys! And there are a lot of people really tired of having to come and tell you off when you wanted to help, honestly. Help yourself and ask around before you flip on your cool new thing, let folks point out what you're missing.

I keep seeing people saying that they can't figure out Mastodon, and I kinda wonder if some of that is that it *feels* weird that you don't already know who to follow. Starting from scratch is tough.

I had a bit of that myself, but once I had found a small "starter" group of people to follow who were using it, the joy of this kind of thing came back quickly.

How we know I'm getting serious about Mastodon. I have created a list within Mastodon of journalists, and set up a separate column for them. (I will admit that, until a few hours ago, I was not aware that Masto even had a list feature, and I'm not sure how it works at all — did it alert people that I added them to a list? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

Anyway, if this works, then next week I set up the tech law list...

Train Heist [40x30]

#ttrpg

Made in Inkarnate

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