A welcome to all the newcomers! If your timeline feels empty right now, you can easily change that. Just pick some hashtags you like, search for them, and follow everyone who seems remotely interesting. Everyone is doing that!

However, first fill out your profile and write an introductory post - both should use hashtags. Other people might be leery of following you if they don't know what you are all about!

Here's your irregular reminder that:

Twitter was a multi-billion dollar company with thousands of employees.

Mastodon is a niche hobbyist product run by volunteers

The fact that we're being seen as a viable alternative to them is an admission that a federated, decentralized future is not only possible, but desirable.

Mastodon is not one thing, or one place. It's a network of many things and many places. We don't have a spokesperson (I mean, there's me. I'm the official spokesperson for 💯 of the fediverse, but beyond me there is no spokesperson) we don't have consensus on moderation or blocking or tools or what is good and what is bad. Some of us are professional SREs and Sysadmins, some of us aren't. Some of our instances have been around for 5+ years, some won't be here in six months.

And that's good! All of it, every last bit of it is good.

We're wrestling power away from the billionaire class, in real time, and reclaiming it for the People.

To all mastodon admins:

Hi! I’m Evan Phoenix, the primary author of puma, the ruby webserver that powers mastodon!

Please reply or DM me if you need tuning help! I’ve got no officiation with the mastodon, just want to see you succeed!

(Quick Tip: set WEB_CONCURRENCY to core count * 1.5 and then tune MAX_THREADS. High thread values will see diminishing returns!)