I have a request.

Bad actors will soon figure out - if they haven't already - that setting up impersonations of important organizations now will allow them to set off an explosion of chaos and confusion at a time of their choosing.

So if you run an account for an organization (especially #LGBTQ), please set up link verification between your Mastodon account profile and your organization's website.

If not, please boost.

Instructions are here under "Link Verification":
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/profile/

How freakin' cool. A #meteor was picked up by EarthCam's CN Tower webcam in #Toronto.

Several hours before it hit, David Rankin at NASA's Catalina Sky Survey spotted the object, and Michael Busch started a thread: https://mastodon.online/@michael_w_busch/109368965024525842.

As the night unfolded: https://groups.io/g/mpml/topic/c8ff042_probable_impactor/95129080

EarthCam archives about a day's worth of video, so you can still catch it here: https://www.earthcam.com/world/canada/toronto/cntower/?cam=towerview. Tap Archive, select the 3-4AM clip and scroll to the 3:25:56 mark. #astronomy #space

ACCESSIBILITY TIP: Adding emojis to your display name is terrible for people who use screen readers.

I was just reminded by someone that when you do this (as I had done), then they have to listen to the screen reader read out all the emojis/icons BEFORE getting to your actual post.

So my name came across as:
----
dan york satellite graphic satellite studio mic graphic studio mic curling stone graphic curling stone
----

Thank you to the person who reminded me of this!

#accessibility

Hey folk - making fun of people who find Mastodon difficult and claiming that it "weeds out anyone too stupid to use Mastodon" or "they're too attached to Twitter so their opinion of Mastodon is suspicious" is really not the move.

Firstly, this was the kind of rhetoric that got me infamously racially harassed my first few hours on Mastodon back when it was super new.

Mainly though - it's unneeded superiority, it's ignoring very valid accessibility concerns, and it's just straight up exclusionary.