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Hello everyone and welcome to Introduction to Mastodon.
This is a presentation of BITS, which stands for Blind Information Technology Specialists.
Thank you for joining us this evening.
We are an affiliate of ACB and we are welcoming anybody who would love to join us.
Dues for BITS are $20 a year and that grants you membership to ACB as well as access to all of our archived technology presentations that we have to offer.
For more information, you can go to bits-acb.org.
We have a list that you can join now as a person who is interested in BITS to get all of our announcements.
That is subscribe to by sending an email to bits-announce plus subscribe at groups.io.
That’s bits-announce plus subscribe at groups.io.
At this point, I’m going to turn it over to Brad Snyder who will be introducing our presenters for the evening and get us started.
Thank you, Nikki.
Another great intro.
Appreciate it very much.
As Nikki said, my name is Brad Snyder.
I’m the presentations committee chairperson of BITS and I’d like to thank everyone for joining us this evening to our presentation titled an introduction to Macedon what it is and how to get started.
So without further ado, let me introduce our presenters this evening.
We have Jeff Bishop and Michael Duys and they’re going to answer those two important questions and many others, hopefully.
So guys, it’s all yours.
Thank you, Brad and good evening, everybody.
My name is Jeff Bishop and I’m a member of BITS.
I’m also a member of the National ACB Board.
But tonight we’re here to talk to you all about Macedon and what it is, how to get involved, why it’s important, why you might want to consider it and really what it’s all about from an accessibility perspective and why you might want to really jump on board the Macedon train.
So we’re going to talk a little bit about that.
We’re going to talk about apps that both on the desktop, on Windows.
If we have time, we’ll talk about Mac and of course, we’ll talk about iOS applications that are accessible including some late-breaking knowledge that came out today about some innovations that are happening in this space that I think people are going to be extremely excited about.
I know I am and I can’t wait for this thing to come out and it’s going to be coming out in beta very, very soon.
So we’ll fill you in on those details coming up a little bit later on in the presentation.
So with me tonight is Michael Doeys.
Michael and I have been friends for a really long time.
We’ve worked on the ACB link app together.
Michael actually developed it in iOS and Michael is a founder of iAccessibility.net and just an all-around great guy.
He works at Weigharound and he’s just an amazing guy from a technology perspective.
Lots of expertise and lots of different things.
And so I want to give a warm welcome to Michael.
Thanks, Jeff.
It’s great to be here and you know, I’m very passionate about Macedon.
So I’m really excited to share what I know about Macedon as a developer, instance founder and all that good stuff and to talk about the fundamentals and things like that with everybody.
So, you know, thanks Jeff and Brad and everybody for having me.
Yeah, and then we picked up this other guy who runs this Unmute Presents podcast and he’s also a member of Bits and we thought we would have him come aboard too to talk a little bit about the onboarding experience and just, you know, he’s sort of brand new or at least somewhat new to Macedon.
So Michael and I have been playing with it probably a little bit longer than he has.
So there’s two Michaels.
So we’re gonna refer to Michael B and Michael D so that people don’t get too confused over all of that.
But so let’s get started and talk about why is Macedon, I can’t even say the word right, my tongue is not working properly tonight, why has this really become such a volatile thing in reference to the importance of it?
Do you want to address that Michael D?
Sure, I’ll talk about my perspective of this and if you want to add anything, you know, feel free.
You know, it’s a very controversial topic, but many people have been seeing that, you know, with the changes in the landscape of Twitter, there needed to be an alternative social media platform that offered very similar things to Twitter and this Macedon was created in 2017, but and there were instances back then and we’ll get into all in all that those terms mean, but when all of the drama with Twitter when Elon Musk purchased Twitter and when the accessibility team was removed from the company, a lot of folks felt like it was important to move somewhere else where they would be represented and that’s where Macedon has become very popular as it is an accessible option and and where, you know, you can have, you can be in different communities that are connected.
So this is, I think, why a lot of folks have decided that that is the place for them compared to Twitter where the news is changing on a day-to-day basis.
Right.
So let’s try to pare this down a little bit.
So Twitter and Facebook and and other social media platforms that have existed back in the day, some of us are old enough to remember things like MySpace and and other things like that.
BBSs.
Yeah, BBSs and all of that, but Twitter and Facebook especially, you can consider them like a town hall or a town square, right, where you are communicating with everyone all at once or at least the capability of communicating with everyone all at once.
There’s one central directory.
Everyone lives in the same space.
There’s, yes, there are things called Twitter lists and there are Facebook groups, but overall if you’re in Twitter or you’re in Facebook and someone knows your name or knows your Twitter ID, they can find you pretty easily and pretty quickly and look at what you’re communicating with.
You can follow people pretty easily.
You can find them.
You can interact with them pretty easily because everyone is in the same pile of groups, you know, of people, right?
So that makes it easy.
That makes it easier to collaborate and communicate with everyone from around the world.
And that is what is so attractive to Twitter and Facebook is that you have this, you know, especially for media presence, right, where they can communicate, you know, the CNNs, the Foxes, the MSNBCs, ABCs, all those guys, the president, whoever on Twitter or Facebook can quickly get their message out to a worldwide audience pretty quickly and efficiently.
Now Mastodon is a little bit different, right, Michael D?
It’s not necessarily that way from the standpoint of the way that it’s organized.
Do you want to talk a little bit about instances and what that means as far as, you know, the platform?
Sure.
So, you know, when we talk about Twitter or Facebook, like Jeff said, we have a central platform, a central place where all data is stored and shared.
You know, that makes it to where all data can be found in one place and not, you know, you don’t have to go out to other locations.
Mastodon is what’s called a decentralized social media platform and that means that you have different servers called instances that are able to be where people live.
I like to call them islands and you join an island and you pick, you know, each island has their own rules, their own ways of doing things, their own even character count.
Like Twitter is known for, I believe it’s 280 character count, where you could type 280 characters and then that’s it.
There’s talk of increasing that but, you know, that’s neither here or there.
Mastodon, it’s 500 characters, but there are some servers that have 2,000 characters.
So it just depends on where you call home.
Now, the neat thing is these instances are little communities.
So they can, you know, you have your accounts there, you have other accounts, but then they can talk to each other and the instances can talk to each other where you could follow people on other instances.
And that way you can have communities and follow people you want and talk to people you want on other servers.
The interesting thing is these instances have a way of communicating with, you know, each other and, you know, even if there’s abuse or problems between accounts, they have a reporting system where, you know, the other server can report to your server and say this user is having, you know, this bad behavior.
Can you do something about that user on your server?
If you don’t, we can block your server.
And that’s the other thing is the instances can say, well, that server is talking about some really vile things and we don’t want the content that they’re publishing to show up on our server.
So you can do that.
The unfortunate aspect to that is that some servers really do not like commercialism and specifically journalists.
And there’s a server where a lot of journalists signed up and they blocked a lot of instances have blocked that server, which is in my opinion kind of a shame.
I believe that people should be able to follow who they would like as long as they’re not breaking code.
But that’s just how mastodon instances work.
Your instance administrator has the ability to block or unblock other islands, you could say, and show the content from users on trusted places.
So like everything else, there’s good and bad that comes with a decentralized platform.
Yeah, but see, I think that’s what’s positive about this is that if you as a instance owner choose not to hear from journalists from, you know, XYZ news network, I don’t want to get in trouble with any sort of political stuff here.
Pick your news network of choice, right?
Then that is their right as a instance owner to say, you know, I choose not to bring that data across on my instance.
And so really what does this get down to?
It really gets down to owning what you truly want as an instance owner to be the user experience that you want your users to have.
And it’s up to users to opt in to those policies and to those agreements.
And we’ll get to what that means in a few minutes and then reference to signing up for an instance.
So there’s all kinds of instances out there and there’s communities for pretty much everybody.
There’s communities for radio personalities.
I saw an instance for DJs, which I thought was rather interesting.
A dot radio instance, which I thought was kind of interesting.
And now that’s unclear to me whether that’s radio amateurs or radio broadcasters or both.
Or I don’t know what that is, but it’s interesting, right?
There’s there’s Shelly Brisbane was joined one up for journalists that you mentioned.
All kinds of different instances out there.
LGBTQ instances, people who are looking for that.
You know, good friends of mine that that are members of ACB were looking for something like that, and there’s definitely an instance for that.
So that’s one thing you need to consider before joining as to as to where do you want to have your home.
And there’s there’s definitely instances where a lot of blind people are at, like Dragons Cave.
Space is one.
Twiz Cake dot social is another where a lot of blind people are are, you know, sort of, you know, centering around.
And we’ll get to what Twiz Cake in just a few minutes as far as its compatibility with this platform.
And there’s also the one I have, I Accessibility dot social as well.
That’s right.
There’s I Accessibility dot social.
Yeah, absolutely.
So there’s there’s all kinds of different places.
But just like if you live in an apartment or you buy a house, you don’t always have to live in that house.
Right, Michael?
That’s right.
And, you know, the neat thing is, is that you can you can live in that house or that island and you can go out to other and communicate with people in other houses or islands.
And that’s the wondrous thing about Mastodon is like, you know, on on my server, I’m Mike Doeys at Techopolis dot social.
And if you know that whole address or Mike Doeys at I Accessibility dot social, if you know that whole address, you can find me no matter what server you’re on, assuming that you’re there, the server you pick isn’t blocking my instances.
You could follow me on my server.
So, right.
You don’t you’re not limited to the people on your in your apartment building or your island or however you think of it.
You always can reach out and talk to people.
Now, the issue and Jeff, I’ll let you talk about this is how to find people.
And that’s kind of the one of the biggest drawbacks on Mastodon.
Yeah, that’s that’s that’s one of the biggest problems.
So there’s two things that you can do here.
You can have a number of accounts.
So, for example, I have at Jeff Bishop at Mastodon dot social.
That’s my or Mastodon dot online.
Sorry.
That’s my primary account.
I have accounts at Jeff Bishop at I Accessibility dot social.
I have one on Dragon’s Cave dot space.
I have one at Tweet Cake dot social.
But honestly, I’m pretty much centered on my dot online account, which is where I’m I’m pretty much, you know, just I’m just using that primarily.
Now, you do not have to necessarily stay on a specific instance if you choose that you’re finding that this instance is not well maintained.
It’s slow.
It’s not getting updated versions of the platform.
It’s not being well, well managed from a moderation perspective.
Then the platform allows you to to move your account very, very quickly and you don’t lose your posts.
And in some cases, it will even import your posts and your followers.
You can you can export your following and followers lists and reimport those into a new instance.
It depends on the other instance whether or not it will pull across all of your posts, though.
That’s a sort of hidden myth.
And it will just depend on the instance that you pick as to whether or not that’s something that’s, you know, really something that’s achievable or not.
As far as searching is concerned and finding people again, you know, we’re talking about a decentralized way of storing information.
So it’s not like on Facebook or Twitter, where if I search for, you know, Michael Babcock and we’ll get to you in just a minute, Michael, you you know, you’re going to find all of the Michael Babcock’s around the world, you know, pretty easily in a centralized list.
On on Mastodon, it’s a little different.
And it’s unclear to me exactly how this is working, because I’ve heard two different opinions.
What seems to be the in Michael D.
I’m interested in your opinion on this one.
My my my current understanding and again, this is sort of subject to change, but my current understanding is that the server knows about people based on who those people follow and what information is brought in from from people who are not on your instance, based on who people are following or who’s being followed by whom on a specific instance.
So, for example, if I search for Jonathan Mosen, for example, just throwing out a name.
Well, we know that he’s on Tweet Cake Social and he’s also on MSTDN Social.
And but he’s not on Mastodon dot online.
But if I search for him.
There’s enough people who follow him that are on Mastodon dot online that it will find him.
So that’s the key, I think, that that there has to be a number of people who are following people who you’re searching for in order for you to be able to link to them specifically, unless unless, you know, their full qualified name of a person.
So if you know, you know, the at Nate, you know, at I.D., in this case, at Jeff Bishop, for example, at and then the actual Mastodon server name, then then it won’t matter.
It will go off and it will attempt to find them based on that information.
But if you’re just doing a search for, say, Debbie Hazleton or Jason Castingway or whoever, pick your name of choice, then it’s going to be based on whether or not people are aware of that person that are you know, that that person has to be known on the instance by others who are following them.
I don’t think that it’s caching everybody on Mastodon in a in a full a full list of people.
I don’t first of all, I don’t think that would be very efficient for the platform.
Is that your understanding, Michael?
That’s correct.
It does.
It does cache messages and P and user accounts for.
And you could the instance admin can pick the amount of time that it caches that are stores that on the server.
But it definitely does cache users that you’ve searched for.
So like one of the you know, it it basically makes a copy.
It reaches out to the other services.
Can you give me the information on this user?
And it makes a snapshot and copies it to your instance.
And so when that user makes a post the next time, if they’ve updated information, it updates the copy on your server, which is great because.
All of that data doesn’t have to flow back and forth between servers constantly.
But that also does mean, like Jeff said, if you’re on a low on a low instance like me, there’s like seven people on tech, a plus that social.
We don’t follow a lot of different people.
We follow a lot of the same people.
So if there are new people that we want to follow, we have to pretty much know their their full name, full their full username and server name.
It’s kind of like typing an email address with an extra at the beginning.
It’s really all the same difference.
Same difference.
OK, so let’s bring Michael B. in and talk to him about the onboarding experience to find out what his experience has been in getting on to Macedon.
So, hey, Michael B., how are you, sir?
Hey, Jeff, I am doing great.
And I’m discovering new things about Macedon as as we go.
So real quick, anyone who has followed me on Twitter, I’ve said, oh, I’m not going to go over to that Macedon thing, mainly because I thought it was going to be super confusing.
Like that was my biggest challenge.
I am not going to, as the kids say, rage quit Twitter myself.
But I do think it’s important to be aware.
And I picked Michael’s instance.
And that’s one of the first things you need to think about is, is where do you want at least to start this adventure at?
As has been emphasized, you can move.
But I picked Michael’s server because I know Michael.
Like I felt comfortable with knowing who the admin was.
And if things don’t work the way I expect them to, I can pick up the phone and be like, hey, Michael, what’s going on?
What did I do?
How did I break that?
I know.
And so, yeah, he lives in a decent neighborhood, you know, so that’s good, too.
Right, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the process took, I think, 30 seconds.
I was actually on a Zoom call with Michael and I think Marty.
And he was telling me, yeah, you can go and go to accessibility.social and sign up.
And I didn’t think it was going to be that easy, but it was.
And the nice thing about it, and I think this goes back to what you and Michael were talking about is once I chose my username, entered my name and put in a password with one password and had it generated.
So it’s unique, you know.
It’s been ahead and signed me in just fine.
And it said I had to agree to the terms of the server.
And then it said, hey, go check your email and confirm that we have a valid email, which it accepted my dot media email, which was a plus.
Had to throw that in there.
So I went and I clicked on the link and and the very first thing I was presented with was, hey, do you want to follow Darcy?
Hey, do you want to follow nine to five Mac?
Hey, do you want to follow and several other accounts that I’m like, huh, these are all people and organizations I want to follow.
So I went ahead and told them none of them were on our accessibility server, though.
But because other people were following them on, I guess, right.
That’s right.
They popped up as suggestions.
And that’s how I did that.
It does.
It does do that.
And it’s really interesting to see, you know, you when I first signed in, of course, being on a dot online instance, of course, it’s a much larger space.
So it it brought up things that were just like, I have no idea who these people are, you know, and until I started following people, then it narrowed it down because it was looking at the people that I were, you know, I was following and it provided me results on on, you know, my what my friends were doing, which made it much more convenient.
So it learns it looks to to learn based on what you’re, you know, what your friendship circle looks like as you build it on the platform.
Can I share an important tip with people, though, during sign up, Jeff?
Yes, there are.
There’s one really.
I hope you’re going to talk about that one.
But go ahead.
Yes.
Yeah.
So hopefully I do.
And I neglected this until I started getting into some conversations with people and they said, hey, you should probably go create yourself a bio and put a little description about who you are and maybe add a picture as well.
Otherwise, other instances may block you or people in other instances may block you, I mean, and report you as spam.
And so I did.
I just went and grabbed a quick bio and put it up.
And and I think that’s important for newbies to newbies.
So you’ve been hanging out with the kids game for new individuals to learn is to create your bio and your profile and fill that out.
Was that what you’re thinking, Jeff?
Well, that that and there’s another thing, too, even before you get to that.
And I’ll get to that in a minute, though.
The other thing you might want to do, and it seems to be the etiquette on the platform, and that is to send out a post with a hashtag introduction tag on it that sort of also introduces you to the community.
That seems to be something people do.
And, you know, that’s something that’s strongly encouraged, especially, you know, pretty new into being on an instance that you that you do that so that people know who you are and you know what you know what what you’re all about.
The other thing I was going to mention, because this has bitten me a couple of times, is that when you’re signing up and you’re having to agree to the terms of service.
These terms of service are a little tricky, at least on some instances, because well, let me just warn you, you really, really want to make sure in this case to read the terms of service, because first of all, it’s going to define the culture of an instance and what the rules are on that instance.
But more importantly, it may define a secret code word that they want you to use and put in a specific field in the sign up form.
And if you don’t do that, guess what?
You’re not getting on the instance.
So I know I don’t think Michael did this on his, but I know, for example, that Twizcake.social and DragonsCave.space do this, that if you do not put in their magic keyword, then you’re not getting on their instance, because obviously you didn’t read the terms of service.
So just make sure that that you’re doing that.
And normally, you know, EULAs and license agreements and terms of service and all these things are boring and monotonous and horrible to read.
I found that at least here, they tend to be really short and concise and really important, because again, they’re defining the culture of an instance.
Yeah, they’re not long.
No.
So just keep this in mind, because there really are important reasons why you want to make sure to to be reading those.
So cool.
Michael B., what what what are you using to access Mastodon?
Well, well, up until this morning.
Oh, so I’m still this morning.
Right.
This morning, when I read that news that I think you’re going to talk about later, I’m like, huh, well, I think my workflow might change, but I am using.
Yeah, no kidding.
Right.
Right.
Meta text on the iPhone.
And I’m also using the web interface, just going to iAccessibility.social.
There is another tool that I forget the name of.
And Jeff might know that some people say is is nice.
I use article navigation a lot on the Mac or with JAWS, letter O on JAWS, and that’ll jump you between articles.
And each person’s post in your timeline that you’re currently selected is its own article.
So that’s how I quickly jump through things on the web.
I think that’s Pinafore that you’re referring to, right?
Yeah.
Pinafore.org.
Is that right?
Yeah.
My social.
I haven’t used it, so can you check, Michael, online?
Do you have to check real quick?
OK.
I think it’s I don’t know if it’s .org or .social.
I don’t know.
He’ll he’ll let us know here in just a second.
So, yeah, the web interfaces are very accessible.
And I know that Pinafore has been getting increased accessibility.
You know, pretty pretty much weekly.
So it’s a great social.
It is not social, not social.
Yes.
And how are you spelling Pinafore?
Pinafore, I believe.
But let me check to make sure.
Pinafore.
Yes.
So Pinafore.social.
OK, good.
OK.
And that works with any instance, right?
It’s not really an instance.
It’s a UI to an instance.
Right.
It’s basically a web.
It’s a web page to a web page.
Right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
It kind of it’s like a it’s like an iOS or Android app that’s a web page that works with Mastodon.
Right.
So you can’t sign up to an instance with that.
But what you can do is once you’ve signed up, you can log into your instance using that and you have to give it permission and then it will allow you to then do everything that you you know, you want to do.
And it tends to be a little more keyboard friendly, although I would I will say that the Mastodon interface is pretty good from a keyboarding perspective.
It’s it’s it’s it’s really decent, actually, from a accessibility perspective, not to mention the fact that they have two factor authentication, no audio captures.
If you do need to reset your password, there’s definitely a process to do that.
That’s accessible.
So that’s good.
Just an all around, you know, really inclusive and and very accessible platform overall.
Jeff, so, yeah, do they support you?
Bikini’s so I don’t know.
OK, I don’t I don’t know.
I know I know Bitwarden just announced passwordless Bitwarden capability this week for those that are interested in knowing that.
But but yeah, I don’t know.
I haven’t seen settings in the admin for that, but that doesn’t mean, you know, it’s not there.
Yeah.
And who knows?
Right.
There could be someone writes a plug in and you know, you know, that’s the beauty of this.
It’s open source.
So anybody can contribute.
And that’s the other thing is that users have control over their data as opposed to a corporation like Facebook or Twitter having control of your data.
So that’s that’s really important.
One of the things that I want to put out there that people really need to be aware of is you will find a lot of misinformation on Twitter and other places about Mastodon, because some people will still say, well, you’re in your data is still owned by somebody because it’s on an instance.
And that’s not true.
The data is completely just I mean, yeah, somebody could go in and delete the data or block a post and moderate.
But the data is just out there.
In fact, there is no encrypted data on Mastodon, so you have to be careful with your direct messages.
Don’t use Mastodon for anything sensitive.
I think that’s just good.
You know, I wouldn’t send a a a private DM on Twitter either.
Well, I was going to say I wouldn’t be doing that on Twitter or Facebook, to be honest with you.
I mean, we know the history on.
And I you need to be careful posting anything on Twitter anywhere, to be honest.
You know, for people to assume that you have privacy on the Internet, that you should never, ever, ever, ever think that you have privacy on the Internet unless unless you’re using, you know, and you know that that you’re using, you know, encrypted tools, you know, such as Signal and and other things like that, that that are truly, you know, encrypted and you hold the keys to.
In fact, IOS 16.2 came out today and there’s some some new features in it that allow you to have more control of your encrypted data, even on iOS.
And I know that’s not the topic of discussion today, but that’s just yet another example of, you know, one would have thought, well, wait, people might have thought that even on iOS that they had full control of of their destiny, of their data in an encrypted way.
Well, guess what?
That wasn’t necessarily true.
Right.
Look at the features that came out today.
So, again, everyone should be very, very careful and very, very cautious about anything they post.
You should assume that it can be read by anyone, anywhere, at any time.
Right.
You know, that’s that’s true anywhere.
And, you know, going back to that, what I was saying is, you know, a lot of people, not just people thinking that Mastodon owns your data, which they do not.
I mean, if somebody puts in the terms of service, for instance, that they do own your data, then you may want to think twice about being on that instance.
That’s just my my viewpoint there.
I agree with that.
But also, one of the I was one of the people that I follow that’s really big into technology said that they were, you know, leaving.
And this was in the blind community.
They said they were leaving Twitter and going to post social, which has a tendency to not be accessible from what I understand.
Yes.
And they are not agreeing to be accessible either.
Right.
And so I just asked in the thread when the person said they were going to post, I said, so I’m just curious, why are folks looking to go to post and not Mastodon?
And somebody shared an article written on post, which was pretty funny, saying that they were on Mastodon dot social and they shared a a post from post social and they were immediately blocked.
And so that was why they wrote this scathing article about Mastodon.
And, you know, I think that what happens is, is people try something for five minutes and they they do something that somebody doesn’t like or they get reported and they get their accounts suspended.
And because it happened on one instance, which, you know, people think that if you’re on Mastodon dot social, that’s the instance to be on the end.
You you have trouble that that’s the end of the road and you’re done.
And I just think that one of the things that I like to have people understand is there are so many ways to be on Mastodon.
I mean, there’s not just one place to go like there is on the centralized platform.
So it’s really what you make of it.
And the possibilities are just limitless.
You know, we talked about like certain instances are different and like Twi’s Cake and Dragon’s Cake, they’re not even the main Mastodon.
They’re they’re a thing called Hometown, which is a different.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Different.
Yeah.
Not exactly sure how they’re different, although I do know, for example, they have a character size limit.
Right.
So I think by standard instances that you have a 500 character limit and on hometown servers, it’s 2000.
That’s correct.
So that’s better than what Twitter currently offers, although Twitter is moving to 4000 characters.
But that may be a paid feature.
Right.
I don’t know.
I don’t know if that’s going to be rolled out for everybody or just for Twitter blue.
But the problem is, is that I mean, it’s great that they have those character counts on on those servers.
But one issue that does exist is you can look at the bottom where it says the version information that shows the hometown version, but they’re still stuck on Mastodon 3.5 and we’re at 4.2.
Yeah.
And there’s a lot of things like things like hashtag searching is not available until you get to four dot X and following.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
So so that’s that’s a problem.
I mean, they’re going to run into run into some problems with that.
Well, let’s turn our eyes now to two clients.
What once you have signed up for an account, you know what what clients are are currently available.
So do we want to start?
Where do we want to start?
Want to start?
Well, why don’t we start with Mac?
That’s that may be a shorter discussion and.
Which Michael wants to handle that one?
I can jump in real quick.
The so there’s three cakes on the Mac that you can use.
And then I did download MetaText, which will come up again when we talk about the iPhone and got it to work on the Mac once.
Now it just throws an error.
So not reliable.
And then there’s the web.
And Michael, do you know of another one?
I do not know of a current one.
One that I do recommend that you do have installed if you’re into this sort of thing is just the built in or not built in.
But the the supported mastodon official app.
And the reason is, is that it does have Siri shortcuts support.
So I have a post to mastodon action or shortcut in my menu bar, which is pretty neat.
That’s awesome.
And the drafts app, by the way, does support posts to it as well.
Right.
So if you’re a drafts user, either on Mac or on iOS, then you can you can use that, too, although that’s probably a little clunkier.
You probably truly want to an actual true, you know, client to be able to to use the platform.
OK, let’s go to Windows.
And there’s a number of choices here that are accessible.
I can think of at least two besides the web.
The web is, of course, everywhere.
There’s there’s Twis cake, which I think is probably the one that that everyone is gravitating to.
So that’s T.W.E.S.
The C.A.K.E. dot app.
And many of you may already be familiar with this because it supports Twitter and a bunch of other things, including radio stations, and it supports all kinds of crazy things.
That thing is incredibly, you know, just diverse and what what it can do.
It’s amazing that app.
So they’ve added massive on support to it.
And you you simply just add it as a session in your Twis cake application, and then you have full access to to being able to, you know, read your timeline and generate posts.
And all of that.
We’ll talk about what the terms mean in just a minute.
Things like what is a boost versus a favorite.
And other terms that might you might hear about on what’s a toot.
Although that’s been changed, at least in the official client, that hasn’t been changed everywhere at this point.
But what is that?
We’ll talk about the lingo as far as what these things mean in just a minute.
Those of you who are are are on Windows, you might want to look at the T.W.
Blue snapshots.
This is I don’t think that T.W.
Blue officially supports Macedon yet.
I think it’s only in beta in T.W.
Blue at this point.
I don’t think they’ve officially released a stable version, although I could be wrong about that, because that could be something that has changed since I’ve looked.
So T.W.
Blue is yet another Twitter type client that you might want to think about.
It’s been very popular in the blindness community, developed within the community itself.
So that’s yet another client.
Can anyone else think of any Windows clients that people are using?
I really don’t know.
I haven’t really tried to look for them in Windows, so I’m not sure.
You know, I just usually use the lab on desktop or laptops.
Sure.
Michael B., do you know of any other Windows ones?
I don’t think there are.
I I’m sure there’s other ones out there because it is growing quickly.
I can’t speak to the accessibility of those other ones out there, though.
So yeah, yeah, yeah.
To me either.
OK, cool.
All right.
So that leaves us to iOS.
And of course, we have we have a bunch in this space.
We have we have the Macedon client itself, which is access.
All of these are are accessible.
Some may be more accessible than others.
I’ll let you know what my current favorite is when we get to it in just a minute.
But the ones that I have installed on my device right now are the actual Macedon client, Metatext.
And I have Mercury installed, which is yet another client that that people have tried.
And then the last one is called Toot with an exclamation point.
And that is a paid app.
These other ones that I mentioned are free.
Toot is three dollars or two ninety nine in the App Store.
And honestly, it’s my favorite app of choice right now.
I think it provides the richest experience that I found.
Although Metatext is a is a close second.
My concern about Metatext is that the developer has not been committing to to supporting it.
In fact, he’s looking for someone to take control of the client and improving it.
Michael, you might want to get in touch and see if you want to take it over.
So those are the apps that I am aware of.
And some of these have rotor actions.
And I know, for example, I think Metatext has some and I know Toot has some.
I don’t know about Mercury or or the actual official Macedon client itself.
But the official client is getting them slowly.
OK, OK.
And I know that they keep mentioning accessibility and some of the release notes.
So they’re slowly integrating accessibility into the client.
So we’ll see.
Now, this morning I woke up and I, as usual, as I’m eating breakfast, I’ll grab my phone and I’ll look at Twitter and I tend to go look at technology news.
It’s I know it’s horrible, right?
That’s that’s kind of how my world works, I guess.
So I was looking at that this morning.
And those of you who are on Twitter know that there’s a there’s lots and lots of Twitter apps, right?
There’s there’s tweetings in the Twitter app and Twitterific and and Spring.
And, you know, gosh, I’m probably forgetting four or five more of them.
But there’s just tons of them out there that that people are using.
And Spring seems to be the favorite Twitter app of choice right now.
In fact, it’s the darling right now within the tech sector itself.
Lots of lots of people are are loving that.
Lots of great articles have been written about it.
It’s a it’s just amazingly great.
That Spring app.
Very, very complex in reference to its configurability.
Very, very, very, very accessible.
A plus accessibility.
The the attention to detail in that app is significant.
And you’re wondering, why does Jeff keep talking about Spring?
Why?
Why am I doing that?
Well, because this morning the Spring author announced that there is a new app coming soon called.
I think it’s called Mona.
Is that right?
M.O.N.A.
Yes.
Mona.
I’m not sure if that’s the way we’re supposed to announce it, but that’s how my screen reader announces it.
So I’m going with it.
So you can follow that on Macedon at Mona app at Macedon dot social.
And so you can keep up to date on what’s happening with with that.
So he tells us that those who own Spring will get an early preview of this new Mona app soon.
And it is built on the same framework as Spring.
So I expect it’s going to have a similar UI, similar capabilities, similar capability, you know, configurability, at least as much as possible that the protocol and the platform will allow.
And if he does that, then you might as well kiss all these other clients goodbye, because that will be the one that you will want.
And if it costs you ten dollars, then get in line because it will be worth it.
And it’s great.
Great app.
Spring.
And one of the things about Spring is I just want to look at it in the Mac App Store.
It is in the Mac App Store, by the way.
It is.
It’s it’s it’s it works on Mac, iPad and iOS, iPad, OS and iOS itself.
And the neat thing about it is, you know, I think, well, typically good accessibility and a great user interface and design for visual users don’t go hand in hand.
Well, this time they do.
It looks fantastic.
I’ll be purchasing it whenever we finish.
Surprise you haven’t purchased.
I was shocked when you told me you have not heard.
I have not.
I’ve heard of Spring.
What is wrong with you, Michael?
Oh, my goodness.
I am.
I tend to tend negative demerits to you, sir, for not getting Spring.
I’m teasing.
I’m teasing, of course.
But but I was a little surprised because you generally are like the first in line for these types of things.
So when I heard that you hadn’t gotten it yet, I bet you Taylor has already had it.
I know.
I know.
I’ve been using I’ve been using the abysmal Twitter for Mac app.
Oh, I’m so sorry.
But now you’re a Twitter blue subscriber, so you kind of have to do that because you’re paying.
See, so you know the features you have to have that right.
Well, you know, the funny thing is that, you know, the Twitter for Mac app has been severely not updated.
So all the verified marks are still white instead of blue and yellow that they’ve come out within the last day or so.
Yeah.
OK, so, Michael, do you want to talk a little bit about the terminology around, you know, what’s a two, what’s a boost, what’s a favorite?
What you know, these types of, you know, when people are getting into this, they’ll know exactly what they’re talking about.
So when you joined Mastodon.
Mastodon wanted to be all cool and things, you know, when you post something on Twitter, it was called a tweet.
So since it’s a Mastodon is an elephant, they called their posts toots.
So instead of tweets, they’re toots.
You get it.
Since then, they’ve now changed the term to post or publish, which, you know, is a little more professional, I guess.
Now, as far as you know, we talked about instances and basically what those are is your server.
So that’s, you know, where you pick to go live.
Some other terms are boosting.
So to boost is basically like a retweet.
Basically, you are sharing that information on your timeline with your followers.
And so you take some information that you saw in your timeline and you send it to the people that you follow or that follow you, I should say.
And, you know, the next thing is called favoriting, and that’s where you it’s kind of like liking on Twitter.
And one thing I want to say about boosting and favoriting compared to retweeting and liking is there is no gain by doing that.
So when you retweet or like something on Twitter, it influences the algorithm on Twitter to say this needs to be boosted up in the rankings of what people see based on the popularity.
Right.
That is not how Mastodon works.
And this is really one of the great things about Mastodon.
When you’re looking at something on your timeline, you’re looking at it in chronological order.
So you’re actually seeing what’s on your timeline as naturally what has been posted when.
And that’s a wonderful thing.
It’s wonderful.
You’re not influenced by timeline at all.
I mean, by algorithm at all.
Your timeline is just your timeline.
So there’s none of this.
This is more popular than that.
So it’s going to be put up there.
And this isn’t so you know, you don’t have to worry about those things.
There’s no ads unless you want to see them based on following people.
So that’s one of the big differences between the two platforms.
And so.
Some other terms, when you’re looking at Mastodon, you know, you do have your timeline, you have.
Well, OK, here’s another term you’ll hear a lot, and that is the Fediverse.
So Mastodon is what’s called federated.
It’s a federated social network.
And that just basically means it’s it’s decentralized and content is federated between servers.
So your server gets the content and federates it to other servers and they talk.
So that’s the Fediverse.
So there’s two type there’s three types of timelines on Mastodon.
There’s your own personal timeline.
There is the local timeline.
So you could see what other people on your instance are posting.
And then there’s the federated timeline where you could see what everybody that’s connected to your instance is posting at one time.
And this is really neat to discover new people.
And it’s really great to join the conversation while it’s going.
So that’s one thing you do not get from Twitter is kind of the like mindedness of people on your server.
And you can see what everybody’s posting.
Let’s see.
I think those are a lot of the main terms.
What did I miss any, Jeff, what would you say?
No, I think that I think that covers it.
So in the time we have remaining, I thought we would do now is open it up for questions.
I’m sure there’s going to be a ton of them.
So why don’t we go ahead and turn to any hands that might be here?
We have Lynn and she can now unmute Lynn Schneider.
OK.
OK, here we go.
Now we’re on track.
Hello, Lynn.
Hi.
So, yeah, I’m a Mastodonian for the past week.
And it feels good.
It almost feels like home again.
What instance are you on?
I’m on Twizcake.
OK, OK.
Yeah, I’m King Prince on Twizcake.
My question is that you sort of touched on something so on Twizcake, you can’t search, you can’t do hashtag searches.
Is that what?
Because when I never get anything and I just didn’t know.
OK, yeah, I think Michael, you might want to clarify this if I get this wrong, but I believe that requires Mastodon version four or later to be able to.
I know for sure you cannot follow hashtags on anything before four.
OK, searching, I’m not sure, but I know you cannot follow.
Yeah, I thought I read that, but I could be wrong on that.
That might be something you might want to actually tweet at the at Twizcake team at Twizcake.
Yeah, exactly.
OK, and because it could be an instance specific problem.
I know Jonathan Mosen, for example, was working on that for his Mushroom FM work that he’s doing.
He was specifically asking about Twizcake and doing that exact thing with with hashtags.
So it could be that, you know, there may need to be some work done on the instance itself before that feature will work.
OK, and I have another question.
You guys were talking about I think my struggle right now is finding people.
Yes.
Like I can typically find a lot of tech people, but like I used to follow health and science people like CDC and stuff like that.
And I’m just I’m wondering how I mean, I have tried Google searches and everything else and I can’t seem to find, you know, Mastodon doesn’t seem to have a directory or.
So you have a Twitter account, too, do you not?
Yeah, I know there are things where you can you give them your your Twitter credentials and they try to find.
Correct.
So there’s a site called Debertify.
Right.
I have heard of it.
And it what it does is it goes off and it will you log in with your Twitter account, you grant it permission and it will scan.
You can tell it to scan the people you follow or or the people that, you know, you’re following in followers lists.
And it will try to see who is on Mastodon based on what it sees.
Right.
It will generate a list that you can then save and download and then you can import into your instance.
So I did that and I I added, I don’t know, 100 people that way.
So you might want to try that.
That is not a guarantee.
The other thing is, is that this platform is growing very, very, very, very quickly.
So the fact that that you’re not finding people today, you know, two weeks from now, who knows?
Right.
So just a million as of today.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There’s just a number, by the way.
I don’t know, Michael, if that truly is eight point four million individual people or eight point four million account ID accounts, right?
Yes, exactly.
So I think that’s misleading.
Well, let’s be real.
That’s how Twitter figures out their numbers of people to.
I I’m willing.
Yes, I understand.
Yes.
I’m just saying that it doesn’t mean that there are eight point four million people there.
It’s probably I think I think someone said there’s statistically they’re thinking it’s more like six million unique and unique people.
I mean, think about it.
I mean, I have three or four accounts myself.
Right.
And Michael, you’ve got three or four.
And, you know, so if everybody’s doing that, you know, at least a good percentage, probably not the majority are.
But there’s probably 10 percent that are then it’s going to skew the numbers a little bit.
But it’s kind of an interesting.
Linda, do you have anything else you wanted to add?
I just wanted to say, I guess my my my dream thing would be for someone to come up with a directory or something that you could search.
You could put in.
Yeah, that would be great.
Or you could put in, you know, covid or inflow, because I track.
Pandemics and epidemics, and yeah, I’m just so full of joy.
I I like to track the flow.
And do you do you read a lot of pandemic books?
I do.
You know, things like one second after and.
Uh huh.
And Stephen King is my favorite.
It’s the one that the stand.
Yes.
OK.
Well, you and I should talk because I’m really big into those books.
You and I should get together.
We should we should chat some night.
So, yes.
So come to the bits chat.
We can go to a room and talk, talk, you know, all kinds of crazy book stories.
So, yeah, I’m waiting for that directory.
I’m waiting for somebody to come up with it, because right now I just it’s it’s a challenge to actually find.
Yeah, it’s it’s it’s fine.
It’s getting better.
It’s getting better.
At least we’re finding individuals.
It’s getting better now.
You know, journalists and professional sites and things like that.
That’s that’s harder, because I don’t know that a lot of commercial entities are moving there yet.
There are some there are some, but but by far it’s not the majority.
And the culture of Mastodon is really to frown upon that.
And unfortunately, but I think that’s going to have to change.
It’s going to have to change if it wants to be a player.
Well, thank you, guys.
This is awesome.
Thank you, Lynn.
You’ve been terrific.
Thank you for sharing.
All right.
Sure.
OK, next, we have John McCann.
I imagine that anyone such as Michael Doisy, who has accessibility dot social, you also had to get that top level domain name, the dot social.
You had to correct.
Yeah.
What’s involved in setting up your own instance?
So that’s actually a really good question.
So I’ve set up a total of three instances now.
So I’ve set up I accessibility that social.
I used a hosting provider called Mastodon, my Mastodon dot host, and that’s how I set that one up.
It was just a few clicks put in the name, pick the size.
And I had an instance.
OK, so you don’t have to run your own server back end in Linux or you.
Well, whatever that’s being done for you.
So on that one, it is.
But the issue is, is that they stop taking new subscribers.
Oh, yeah, they probably saw themselves being flooded and overloaded.
Right.
And so I tried a few others and I was not satisfied with their pricing.
So I did set up a digital ocean one click install of Mastodon.
And that’s how I got my tech opulence dot social set up.
Now, the pain was running the upgrade process from three point three point five point three to four point zero point two, because that process has to be done one at a time.
But you do have to set it up on Linux and you do have to, you know, put in all the data, set up an email service provider and all these other things that you need to be your own company.
Right.
So you have to have Linux and a good, reasonable knowledge of Linux.
Right.
Right.
That, you know, yeah, it’s not the easiest thing to do if you if you go that route.
But so I said that one and I set up for Taylor accounting dot social for accountants and financial gurus to to sign up for.
So, you know, I said both of those up with Digital Ocean and so it’s it’s it’s a process, but it’s very rewarding because you can set up things the way you want, exactly how you want, whereas like master host there like the emails.
I mean, it’s like CMS.
Right.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
In other words, you get the package and the package may suffice for most purposes.
But right.
But I think the front end learning curve on Linux and getting another computer.
I mean, all right.
We do that.
I might get a Linux computer just to run my own all star server on Amatrica, but we might consider that.
But maybe that’s a long term project.
But and then again, who all would I invite?
You know, my ten or fifteen closest friends.
I mean, I I I’ve sort of gotten jaded in social media generally, which I have not yet ventured into Mastodon because, you know, it was Facebook and then it was Twitter and then, you know, with Clubhouse and it was WhatsApp.
And then it’s like God, the father and Virgin Mary.
Where does it stop?
I kind of got that’s technology in general.
It’s always I know the nature of the beast.
And, you know, I’m intrigued and I might well do it, you know, because I could always undo it if I don’t want to just say I’m out of here.
You know.
Right.
And, you know, the neat thing is, is that you can move your account like, you know, we talked about and say, well, I didn’t like it where I was here.
I’ll just move.
I’ll move.
I’ll set up shop somewhere else and it will redirect people from the old one to the new one as well.
And the other thing, see, the thing I liked about Twitter was that, you know, I might I first of all, I made it a policy not to discuss politics.
So it’s just a loser, you know, right there.
But I mean, I might talk about technology one day and music the next day and, you know, something else on the third day.
You know, whereas these communities are very much their affinity groups and it’s nice.
But how many of them do you want to belong to and how distracted do you want to get?
I don’t know.
There are there.
Well, you know, one thing that’s nice about Mastodon, while most servers have a rule, you know, the rules and things like that in the communities that focus on certain things, people can talk about whatever on on the instances that they join.
So it’s not just limited to you have to stick to these topics or else.
No, it’s pretty it’s pretty lenient as far as you know, as long as it’s not.
Well, that depends on the list.
When I say listed administrator, I’m thinking in email terms, the instance administrator or the instance owner of the instance.
The person who’s actually in control of the instance, right?
He doesn’t own the.
Yeah, that’s correct.
John, you know.
Yeah.
OK.
Yeah.
All right.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Marty, are you with us?
Thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
My question is so.
I mean, a lot of us are on Facebook or some of the other social media sites to keep up with friends or family.
Yeah.
So getting on Mastodon, what I understand, I guess it’s accessibility.
But what would the advantage be?
I mean, since you, you know, I guess what I’m asking is, are there is this is this a site that your sighted friends would migrate to or would want to migrate to or would they be bored?
And there are millions of people that are.
I guess also like what would be the advantage of being on Mastodon say versus Clubhouse?
Well, I mean, I mean, Clubhouse is different in that it’s an audio based platform.
I think a better comparison would be Twitter and Mastodon.
I think that would be the comparison you want to look at.
I know a lot of people are very unhappy with the direction that Twitter is headed and the lack of moderation and the lack of just just not feeling safe on that platform, whether that’s right or wrong or whatever, if that’s how people are feeling.
So people are looking for alternatives.
And again, Mastodon has been around a long time, but it’s getting pretty popular.
It’s also very, very similar in reference to capability of Twitter.
So it’s something familiar.
It’s something people are already used to.
So it it is something that, you know, that.
Would be.
Again, familiar to to people, so.
But is it is it is that you think that will become mainstream or that sighted people will follow?
Oh, yeah, it’s good.
Already is.
Well, that’s an OK.
So this is this is where we may differ.
Michael D, I think I think that for the geek.
You know, look, people like myself, Michael Babcock, Michael Doeys and others.
We’re not we’re not the norm, right?
We’re not your mom and dad.
We’re not, you know, your aunts and uncles and your grandparents who are on Facebook, right?
And probably not even on Twitter or if they are, they’re not really as active as say we are on platforms such as this.
Is is this something that that they will migrate to today or tomorrow?
Probably not.
Will the general tech enthusiast migrate to it?
I think people will poke their head in and take a look around.
Will it be sustainable in the near term?
I don’t know.
I think I think there’s some growing pains that it has that that is going to require them to to shape the platform a little bit more to be more adaptable in reference to things like, again, finding people.
I think that’s one of the key crucial things that’s that’s missing is while the data is decentralized, it needs to act as though it’s centralized.
And that’s a hard problem to solve from a technical perspective.
So it’s it’s a beauty of the platform, but it’s also a problem of the platform of being able to locate people.
So I think it’s got promise, though.
I think that the protocols, the openness of the platform has significant opportunity.
And the fact that it’s open and it’s it’s it’s not controlled by one entity is a big selling point.
So I think it will always exist.
Will it will it have 300 million people in it?
No, I don’t know.
I don’t know.
You know, going off what Jeff said, going off what Jeff said, I think Mastodon will get very popular in specific communities.
Yeah.
And we’re already seeing we’re already seeing that, you know, science, technology, certain other communities, it’s getting very popular.
But what I’m what concerns me is that we have all these other private social networks, like other companies popping up, like Post and all these, you know, different ones that are going to be talked about on the radio, they’re going to be talked about on news programs and and news media.
And, you know, they’re going to say this is towards this group of people or this is towards this group.
And we’re going to start seeing fragmentation.
And that’s that’s what I’m concerned about, where Twitter allowed for people to be in one space.
You’re going to start seeing fragmentation of people onto these like other social networks.
And so the nice thing about Mastodon is it is a decentralized place, but everybody can communicate with each other.
Whereas a lot of these other networks where we’re seeing these where we’re seeing spring up are not going to be decentralized.
They will not communicate with others.
So me personally, I really like the idea of being able to speak to people no matter what instance they’re on.
So that’s one of the reasons why I think Mastodon has a lot of promise.
But I do agree for it to go bigger.
It’s going to have to adapt and adopt different culture as well.
That’s right.
It’s going to have to evolve over time.
Any other questions, Marty?
Yeah.
Any other questions, Marty?
No, it’s fine.
Thanks.
OK, great.
Thank you.
Any other hands?
We have Sue Ellen.
OK, so I go, I get my Mastodon app.
I set up my profile in there.
How do I search for the instance that’s going to be the right fit for me?
How do I find the instance where people are going to talk about the crime shows and 70s music and that is a great question like that?
That’s interesting.
Yeah, that’s a great question.
And, you know, we’ve talked about instances of communities that we know of that we’ve created or joined.
But when you so if you go to, I believe it’s join Mastodon dot is it dot com or dot org?
I think it’s dot org.
There’s also instances dot social, isn’t there?
Mm hmm.
I think I want to check.
I want to check that.
I think that’s right, though.
But both of these Web pages have where you could look up different servers based on interest.
Right.
And the native or the the official Mastodon app also has server lists as well that you can look through.
And they’ve curated those lists, meaning that they’ve gone through and they’ve validated their terms of service for each of the instances to make sure that they they meet a specific standard.
So you’re not going to end up getting things that you really don’t want.
Right.
That they’re safe.
You know, those kinds of things.
So that’s also another thing you might want to consider.
But there’s and word of mouth is also a good thing to be asking, you know, ask on Facebook, ask on Twitter.
Doesn’t hurt to ask.
OK, so I so but I set up my profile because I’m going to do it through the iPhone, because I.
Yeah, yeah.
You want to find an instance first.
That’s going to be your first thing that you want to find first.
OK.
And then you set up your thing.
You download your app and all that.
Yeah.
You want to find your instance first because you need to be able to create the account there first before you actually even log into your account or set up your profile.
So you need to know where you want to sign up.
Yeah, it’s like you want to know where you want to live.
Yeah, I understand.
Yeah.
Any other questions?
That covers pretty much what I wanted to know.
All right.
Well, we’re around.
We’re definitely around during the BITS chat on the weekend.
So if you have more questions, then stop on by and we’ll chat with you there.
OK, cool.
OK.
Great.
OK, so we don’t have any other questions, but do you guys know David Tinsbury just raised his hand?
Oh, did he?
Oh, there he is.
OK, let’s do that.
Go ahead, David.
Hello, David.
Yes.
Hello.
One question.
I’m a little confused.
I’m wondering if I’m missing something.
Is there any real difference between an instance and a server?
You sort of use them interchangeably sometimes and maybe less so in other.
Same thing.
Same thing.
OK.
Easy.
Yeah.
Thank you.
I mean, technically, that could be different, but probably for the sake of this discussion, yes, the same.
OK, thank you.
Yeah.
John McCann raises his hand again.
Yeah, I see that.
And I asked him to unmute.
Yeah, and I have unmuted this.
I’ll be very brief since I was here once before, but I just want to check that the spring app is my spring mobile.
It’s got like one million ratings, four point five.
I can send you a link, John.
I just have a quick question for you guys, and it’s one I’ve wondered about.
Actually, what are the advantages to being on more than one instance?
Because right now I’m on one instance and I’ve thought about getting on another one.
But I.
Well, yeah, I think that’s a great question.
There’s there’s there’s different timelines.
And, you know, when when you’re on an instance, you can view the home timeline, which is basically what what activity is happening.
You know, on that instance only.
So, for example, let’s say that you you want to to join an instance that’s talking about, oh, I don’t know, science fiction books.
OK, let’s just throw out just an example.
And you’re just wanting to to to go and see what people are talking about, just about that specific topic.
And that instance is sort of segmented just for that.
So you could log into that instance and then just look at the home timeline and look at people, you know, look at what people are talking about.
That might be one way of of being able to do that in a way where you can very quickly and easily pare down what your conversations are that’s happening.
That’s that’s that’s the reason why people do it.
So that now now apps like Toot, for example, allow you to browse another instance without even logging into it.
And actually looking at content.
So, you know, that that’s the beauty of that app.
It’s actually pretty, pretty sweet.
Jeff, just to let you know, I believe I and I didn’t realize this, but any mastodon four point oh instance actually shows their local timeline on their page before you log in.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that’s that’s the reason I think Jason races in to.
Let me see here.
Yep.
Let me.
Yeah, because that’s one thing I haven’t figured out in Twizkake, how to view that other timeline.
Jason should be unmuted now.
Yes.
Thank you.
Hello, everyone.
Great, great presentation as always.
I have a quick question about different timelines because I’ve seen home and local.
What do you want to describe?
Where do they differ?
So again, the home timeline is your timeline of people you follow.
Local is everybody on the server on the server.
So sorry about that.
I mixed up on that.
Yeah.
No, that’s OK.
That’s that’s fine.
OK, that that makes perfect sense.
And I don’t know why I didn’t think that.
And Jason, there’s a federated federated.
The federated timeline is every post that comes in and out of that server.
Yes.
OK, that right.
That’s usually what I’m looking at.
But I noticed the others and like, OK, I might want to know more.
And Twizkake has commands, keyboard commands that allow you to open up those different buffers.
So you should check their documentation and get familiar with that.
That’s how you would want to do that.
Oh, yeah.
I jump around pretty quickly on there, which is that’s what I love about it.
Yep.
Yep.
Keyboard commands.
Yeah.
All right.
Thank you very much.
You’re more than welcome, Jason.
It’s good to hear from you.
All right.
I don’t think there’s any other hands.
I would just encourage everyone to consider it.
It’s definitely, you know, a new thing, a new, a new shiny technical thing.
Although it’s been around a while, but it’s getting lots of interest.
So give it a shot.
If you have specific questions, then you can you can join us on the bits chats.
We can, you know, go into the technology room on the weekend and have a conversation there if that’s what you’d like to do.
So we’re not cluttering up the bits chat.
You can post to the bits list as well and ask questions.
We’re there, too.
So feel free to reach out there and ask any specific questions that you that you might want to to ask.
You do have to be a member of bits to actually post to the actual bits list.
You know, I do want to point out one thing that I really do like about Mastodon compared to Twitter and other places is our Mastodon is very much more conversational.
You will feel more like you’re having conversations with people instead of people talking at you on your timeline.
And that’s one of the things that I’ve just really valued from the Mastodon experience.
Would you say that, Jeff?
Absolutely.
I think I think it’s it feels more like Twitter felt like, say. 15 years ago, you know, when we joined Twitter back in 2007, when it was a really new thing and people were really polite and nice and real friendly and really help and great conversation, it kind of feels like that all over again.
Will it stay that way?
I hope so.
But, you know, that’s what it is today.
So it feels warm and friendly and fun.
And I actually found that myself, and I want to let everybody know that you can join the BITS chat even if you’re not a BITS member.
So even though you can’t post to the BITS list, you can join the BITS chat and to get those announcements, you just have to subscribe to that BITS announce list I mentioned earlier, BITS dash announced.
Plus subscribe at groups that I owe.
And every Friday and Saturday night, you’ll get a message telling you about the chat and directing you where to go.
So you can join us for that chat, even if you’re not a member.
That’s right.
Thank you.
Guys, this has been this has been a really great, great presentation.
Great conversation.
An exciting new platform.
I appreciate you guys being here and doing this for us.
Sure, Brad.
It’s been fun.
Did you have a question, Michael?
Yeah, really quick.
Do we want to share how you can get a hold of us on Mastodon?
So if you join, how you find us?
Yes, please.
Sure.
I’ll start.
I’m at Jeff Bishop at Mastodon dot online.
And that’s probably the quickest way to reach me.
So if you are on the platform, then follow me and I’ll follow you back.
See, Michael, I already did.
I’ll do it right now, Michael.
And I said, and I am Mike Doeys.
It’s M I K E D O I S E at Techopolis T E C H O P O L I S dot online.
If I can talk, I am at P A Y O W N at I Accessibility dot social.
And one thing to be aware of and how I found Jeff, because I’m like, I can’t spell Mastodon right now.
I’m really busy doing the Zoom thing in Metatext.
You just tap on the Explore button and I just typed in Jeff Bishop and it showed his name right there.
So keep that in mind.
Wow.
Amazing how that technology works.
Good.
Mm hmm.
And I just followed him back on the notifications tab of toot.
So there you go.
And I got to go find Kane Prince now.
I wonder if it’s P R I N T S or P R I N C E.
No, I’ll have to see.
Lynn, are you still here?
Let me see if she’s here.
Hi there.
Yes, it’s P R I N T S.
OK.
Yeah.
OK.
Yeah.
OK.
It’s from like my the strange patterns that my cane would make in the snow.
Yes.
Got it.
Mm hmm.
Got it.
Got it.
OK.
All right.
I will I will look for you.
All right.
Thank you.
Also, if you should have a follow request, I just said you want to.
Did you?
I have not received it yet, but I’m sure it’s coming my way.
All right.
Well, thanks, everybody.
And thank you, everybody, for joining us.
Yep.
And great.
Thanks, everybody.
Thanks again.
OK.
Nikki, go ahead.
OK, we will now.
Thank you.
