Gidi Kroon @GidiKroon@mastodon.social

There was a time when a politician's position could become 'untenable'...

Now, e.g. in the UK, a Prime Minister can take 'full responsibility' and then nothing happens. Other ministers can have reports published confirming they bullied staff, or wholly mismanaged an evacuation, and nothing happens.

Uh I just got DMed by the COO of Tumblr asking about hiring contractors to make us fully #indieweb compliant, and possibly even #fediverse integration. Anyone out there looking for work?

What to do if you're on mobile and there's a function in the website you're browsing that's accessed by 'just hovering over it'? Well, I don't really know, but some things that help me sometimes:

If you have an s-pen, you can hover with that

long tap the item so the context menu pops up. Click outside it so it disappears, the hover popup may also have popped up behind it and still be there. (Works sometimes in Friendica)

in some circumstances you can tap just long enough for it not to be a click (short tap), but short enough not to be a right click (long tap), but it still brings up the hover popup. (Works sometimes in Pleroma)

if the thing you wanted to see was alt text (image description), in some browsers like Chrome it will show on top of the context menu. So long tap... If the text is not fully shown, tap on the text and it expands.

I forgot about how central to the fediverse experience the search box is here. That's true for Mastodon, but also other software that connects here, like Pleroma or Friendica. If you want to follow someone that you found while browsing another server, or want to like or share a post you found, but you found it in a thread you were reading but you're not on your home server, the software tries to guide you through a remote-follow, or remote-like, process which is hugely complicated and error prone. It's much easier to copy paste stuff in the search box of your home server. When you hit enter, it actually loads the profile or post into your home server, where you are logged in, and you can click follow or like as normal.
#FediTips #feditip

Assume you have an account on mastodon.social, and you're logged in there. By clicking around you ended up browsing the mstdn.social server (another connected server) and saw this '@FediTips' account that I quoted below. That's fine, you can read these posts since they're public. But when you want to follow that account you hit the snag that you're not logged in on mstdn.social, a server that doesn't know you're logged in on mastodon.social, so it can't register who wants the follow the account. (Side note, the Friendica software can sometimes recognise login sessions of other servers, but forget about that for the moment).

So what is an easy way of doing this? Or maybe not easy, but less error-prone?

You open up the profile on mstdn.social, e.g. by clicking the name or avatar. The url of the account is now in the address bar of your browser. (I often use the web browser to browse social media, works fine, also on mobile. Especially Mastodon and Twitter work really well with their sites on my phone). Select it and copy the whole address to your clipboard.

Now open mastodon.social. You will still be logged in there. Paste the contents of the clipboard into the search box of the mastodon.social site, the search text will be like 'https://mstdn.social/users/feditips'. So this is in the search box of mastodon.social, not the search box of your browser and not the address bar of your browser. Hit Enter. You'll get the profile as a search result. If mastodon.social didn't know about this account yet, it will have quickly looked it up for you and loaded it. Now you see this account on your home server and you can click Follow as normal.

You don't need to use the url. You could also have entered the account handle '@feditips@mstdn.social' in the search box and hit Enter. The same thing would have happened.

What about a post you want to like or reshare? Sometimes when you load a profile like I said, it seems empty. Your home server (mastodon.social) will only show the posts it knows about, while back on mstdn.social all posts of '@FediTips' are there. That's because the posts only get sent to followers, and if you would be the first to follow a certain account on your home server, no posts are there yet. (Not likely with '@FediTips', because it's a very popular account that many other people were following already, so past posts have already been received).

You can also load a remote post into your home server to interact with it. Mostly that is not needed, but you can paste the url of the post on mstdn.social into the search box of mastodon.social and hit Enter. Now the post loads; if mastodon.social didn't have the post yet, it will quickly load it for you. The url of a post looks like (e.g. for the quoted post): 'https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108199521441536756'.

How to get this url of a post? Further #feditip: on almost all fediverse software the link to the post is hidden behind the date or time of the post. So if it says '2 minutes ago', or there is a precise date and or time, click it and copy that url to your clipboard. This is what you can paste in the search box of your own server.

Clicking on the time or date is also how you can see a post in its original form. Sometimes a post can look different on Mastodon than how the author intended it on their own server. Opening a post by clicking its link allows you to see it on the original server, with the original layout.

And yes, I agree this is all not very intuitive.

♲ @feditips@mstdn.social:

Okay, if that's not working for you, try just copying the address of the person you want to follow, then paste it into the search box within Mastodon.

When you search for an address, it will bring up a profile you can follow.

This works whether you're logged in with apps or the website.

People in the US and the UK can now see the Charlie-centric episode Mourning Cloak of Fear The Walking Dead (7x10). For me that's going to be another couple of months if not a year. In yesterday's Insta-takeover Alexa Nisenson (who plays Charlie) revealed what her favourite episodes of each season were to film: 7x10 Mourning Cloak, 6x07 Damage From The Inside, 5x04 Skidmark and 4x10 Close Your Eyes. I've watched the latter many times already and can concur that it's a great episode, as are the others she mentions, though 5x12 Ner Tamid is a classic too.

Since I can't watch season 7, but want to mark the occasion anyway, I'll be rewatching these other episodes. In reverse order. Starting with session 6's Damage From The Inside.
#AlexaNisenson #FearTheWalkingDead
www.imdb.com/title/tt13158346/

Any reason to join the #fediverse is a good one. For microblogging, join #mastodon. Video creator? Join #peertube! Into pictures? Join #pixelfed! Into books? Join #bookwyrm! Do you organise events? Join #Mobilizon!

You can subscribe to all of those services from one account. It's like following Instagram (Zuck), YouTube (Brin and Page) and Goodreads (Bezos) accounts from Twitter (Musk)!

Publish-subscribe at its finest, brought to you by the #openstandard #activitypub: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/.

New people, welcome to Mastodon and the Fediverse!

Here's how to get started:

1. Find some people to follow over on @FediFollows, and through Trunk (https://communitywiki.org/trunk)

2. Find out your Mastodon/Fediverse address so you can share it with friends (https://mstdn.social/@feditips/107248252715651564)

3. Invite people to join you on here by telling them to go to https://joinmastodon.org and click on "Get Started". It doesn't matter if they join a different server because the servers talk to each other (here's a bit more of an explanation https://mstdn.social/@feditips/107021461185874594)

4. Find out what the Fediverse is (https://mstdn.social/@feditips/107044096139091624)

5. Find out why Mastodon being on so many different servers/instances is a really good thing (https://mstdn.social/@feditips/107083735491993183)

6. If you see anything nasty, you can report it to your friendly server admin (https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106540152842368591)

7. You can (sort of) verify your account if you own a website (https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106274105538953001)

If you have any questions, @ me or DM me!

#MastoTips #FediTips #Mastodon

The blogging platform powering my blog, @writefreely, is one of many that can communicate with our community / Mastodon.

There's also @pixelfed (like Instagram), @peertube (like YouTube), and many others.

Also fediverse things:

Q: where are the adverts?
A: there aren't any.

Q: how do I switch the timeline to newest first?
A: it already is newest first.

Q: what algorithm controls the timeline?
A: none.

Q: do I get to see 'promoted posts'?
A: no.

Q: do I get to see 'posts that have been liked by someone you follow'?
A: no, if they wanted followers to see the post, they would have hit the button to share it with their followers.

Q: if I report a post that bothers me, what automated systems handle those reports?
A: a person does.

#FediTips #feditip There's more to the fediverse than #Mastodon. E.g. I post this from #Friendica, which allows longer posts with text formatting and pictures. It all connects anyway. (It also has editing, forums, side-channels, connectors with various mainstream services)

You also don't need to 'find a community that suits you', despite what many are saying, if you're not into that type of thing. You can, with some tech knowhow, self host a server like I do and have your very own place to post from. No-one setting quota, no-one setting rules you don't agree with. Or you can just join a big general server and post from there, if you want.

Finding posts about your interests is tricky however, since hashtags don't really work as you'd think. One way is to find people in the list of the trunk project or in the directories provided by your Mastodon or Friendica server.

Oh, and have fun!

It's a bit minimalist, but it'll have to do. Merry Christmas! 🎄

So apparently Instagram is working on trying to roll out the chronological feed somewhere next year.

Working on? Roll out? Next year? Just switch off that algorithm that messes up the feed and we're ok.

I also learned that people think that the rumoured $799 for a Samsung Galaxy S22 is aggressive pricing, i.e. cheap. That's not my idea of cheap. Prices for high end phones have gone totally out of control.

Stay Close, a series on Netflix that features Lindsay Armaou, will be available from 31 December!
#LindsayArmaou #StayClose
www.imdb.com/name/nm0035328/
Lindsay Armaou - IMDb

I'd do a tip saying that you can best run your washing machine in off hours since evening out energy usage is better for the environment and that always doing that is even better since predictability of energy usage is even more important, but I'm afraid someone would come by and cancels me for using a washing machine instead of doing the laundry with a washing board. Only for that person to be cancelled for doing any laundry at all, since it's best to just keep wearing your smelly clothes. So I won't. I'll leave this here, do with it whatever you want.

Tomorrow season four of Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous will be available on Netflix. The character Brooklynn is voiced by Jenna Ortega.
#JennaOrtega #JurassicWorldCampCretaceous #jwcc
www.netflix.com/us/title/81009…
Watch Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous | Netflix Official Site

Can you believe I never saw anything with Alicia Vikander in it? I'm going to watch Tomb Raider now. So I know nothing about whether she's a good actress (I suspect she is), but she looks ultra cool in the promo stills. The film also has the über cool Hannah John-Kamen in it.
#AliciaVikander #TombRaider #HannahJohnKamen
Tomb Raider

Just watched Teen Spirit, where #ElleFanning rather brilliantly sings the songs herself. It follows a girl from a humble background entering one of those televised singing competitions 'streaming to 10 million viewers', where she's clearly talented enough but can she handle the limelight?
Teen Spirit

New blog post: I make a list of all the upcoming Jenna Ortega projects and what I know about them. There are many!

Jenna Ortega: what’s in the pipeline?