Re-boosting your own posts for 'the morning crew' or 'the night crew' is an acceptable and encouraged practice here. We are largely a community of supportive people who enjoy being given the opportunity to help each other and boost content we may have previously missed.

You should never feel ashamed of promoting yourself, especially as an artist, when it's so difficult to reach people. If anyone doesn't want to see your boosts, they can just scroll past.

#WormsOfAffirmation 🐛

Some Mastodon thoughts, for bird-site expats (which include myself). I'm aggregating these from posts I've boosted before, so little of this is my own brain.

- There's no algorithm here. That means favoriting/liking doesn't do anything except communicate approval to the OP and others (which is still nice!).

- No algorithm means boosting ("retweeting") is the true method to increase a post's visibility. Do that more than you did on birdsite.

- There's no post-quoting here, and that's by design. Look at quote-tweets on the birdsite; it's a feature primarily used for toxicity.

- There's no direct word-search here either; that means you want to use hashtags to make posts more searchable. This is also intended, since word-searching posts was often used to harass/stalk on the birdsite and elsewhere, so that was left by the wayside here. This also means hashtags are much more a thing here than any of the algorithm-powered sites.

- It's encouraged to put in text descriptions when you post images; a lot of Mastodon users use screen-readers due to various disabilities, and getting an image description read out loud helps them immensely.

- Speaking of screen-readers: using capitalization in your hashtags allows the screen-readers to read them more easily, especially if you're smashing multiple words together. #rockmusic = unreadable. #RockMusic = readable.

- The best way to make threads is to make set your first post as public, but "unlist" all of your replies. This prevents your whole thread from clogging up feeds.

- Content Warnings should be used more liberally here. If you haven't gotten the impression yet, much of Mastodon was built and populated by marginalized groups who were harassed/bullied off of other platforms. This is the culture they built, to respect each other's mental health. It's not a rule, but it's well-appreciated.

- Consider chipping a few bucks towards whomever runs the server you're on; the strain is real, and most server admins were likely paying out of pocket before so don't have an existing donation base. The growth here has been extremely fast, and that means money's needed.

- DMs are just posts with privacy settings. So if you @ someone in a DM, you pull them into the thread. That could be embarrassing.

- Also, no, DMs aren't end-to-end encrypted, but they aren't on Twitter either. Don't use either if you want true privacy.

- Including your Mastodon handle in your birdsite profile will help people find you here; there's a tool (pruvisto.org/debirdify/ is one of them that's used) people can use to pull Mastodon handles from Twitter profile.

- Use the blocking and reporting features liberally, if needed. This should go without saying, but they work, and work well!

- If there's an entire Mastodon server you don't want to hear from, you can block the whole thing too.

- Preferences -> Appearance -> "Slow Mode": this can make larger "Local" feeds and any "Federated" feed much more readable.

I'll reply with some more as I see them, or reply here too. I've only been here 4 days but I'm loving it so far.

Did you know that most heavy equipment on construction sites are “keyed alike”? This means that a SINGLE key for a backhoe from a specific manufacturer will work for ALL backhoes from that manufacturer.

But wait, it gets better! Often, that one key will work for ALL MACHINES created by that manufacturer.

For example: the Caterpillar key that you can buy on the internet for less than $10 will work for most Caterpillar heavy equipment! Yes! It’s all the same key! Read the review on this post or ask literally any one of your friends that have worked on a construction site before.

But why is heavy equipment “keyed alike”? Imagine if every single heavy equipment machine had a unique key. Can you imagine the nightmare that would ensue because Josh left the backhoe keys at home and now the entire construction plan is set back an entire day? It’s much easier to have all the keys keyed alike. It’s not like someone would just drive off the site with a backhoe, right?

When doing physical penetration testing, it might be useful for you to buy Tornado’s set of 100 heavy equipment keys. They usually cover every single machine that doesn’t have require an RFID chip or some other ignition code (modern machines are being developed with higher security, but the bulk of what is near you is probably old).