Mastodon

Sorry. I took it down for a snapshot and then work had the audacity to distract me. I will however be taking it down down at the end of the month unless someone wants to take over for me.

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For anyone who’s orphaned, I’ve had accounts at gamedev and zirk.us. I started at gamedev, but moved to zirk.us since most of my content is about playing–not making–games. They have a broadly-defined humanities focus. Both seem sensibly moderated and are probably too large to vanish overnight. Several IF people on gamedev.

E: The migration process is pretty painless.

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Yeah, moving servers is so easy it made me even more bitter about the bad UX foisted upon us by companies attempting lock-in.

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Thanks for the recommendations, I need to figure out how and where to migrate.

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Wasn’t there talk of an IFTF server possibly being started up? That would be cool I think!

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Yeah, it’s in the works, but no time table has been announced.

Specifically, I have failed to announce a time table. :/

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Just out of curiosity: what is the advantage of an IF-specific server? I’ve really enjoyed picking a server with a public feed that interests me featuring people and threads I wouldn’t be able to find on my own. The thing about an IF server is: what’s the discoverability advantage? I’m here every day. I follow competitions. I follow some prolific rebloggers that do choice IF over at tumblr.

I mean, we’d all be on the same server, but I follow all of you anyway.

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Well, there’s 239 folks on zork.social. That is waaaayyy more than the handful that I’m aware of being there from the active IF community. Having a visible IF related instance has pulled in alot of peripheral folks.

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Speaking for me personally, I’m kind of allergic to social media and would prefer something with the smallest reach possible. I admit that’s an atypical use case though!

(Probably the less idiosyncratic advantages would be that the moderation rules and community norms would be aligned with the ones for this forum, and we’d have confidence in the accessibility and judgment of the folks running the thing – potentially a big deal given the federated nature of Mastodon).

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What with the forum/IFDB/IFWiki, we have established and trusted moderation standards. Also we’ve demonstrated that we can keep a server running for thirty years.

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Would you say that you are getting IF news specifically from the public feed of zork.social that you could never find anywhere else? My question was about discoverability in the public feed.

Yeah, a small server will accommodate that.

Sure, I get that.

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I’m saying they are getting IF news they would never find anywhere else. It helps outreach, which brings more people in our orbit, which creates more games, events, and projects for all of us down the road.

I’m not as concerned about my feed; I simply follow who I want to hear from.

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You are lucky to have already found everyone who might know something worthwhile :slight_smile:

If it is your experience that people find and join servers before searching for hashtags, that is interesting to me. I don’t know enough to agree or disagree. Anecdotally, I think at least half of my followers found me through the #interactivefiction hashtag. There are only a handful of people using it, surprisingly, which must make us easy to find. Not that I have a huge number of followers!

Nevertheless, I understand the appeal of familiar and reliable standards and tech. I’m sure many people will be interested.

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For me it was the thing that made it easiest for me to sign up and figure out Mastodon. It cut out the choice paralysis of researching servers and I was comfortable hopping in on the local level with people I talk with already first to get my feet wet. I don’t think it has to be a “discoverable place for IF people.” It can be a resource for whoever is here.

The cool thing about Mastodon is you can get your feet wet in what amounts to a tutorial village with people you know without you tooting (or whatever) to the entire gosh darn world yet, and then you reach out and find other content outside that when you’re ready to curate your own special social media/miniblog feed.

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I don’t think the relevance of this can be overstated. With Mastodon, your server admins’ prudent moderation ends up determining whether or not you get chopped off from parts of the fediverse. And things operated by an individual automatically have a single point of failure. Going with a server that has a team with well-defined moderation and governance policies is important. (One of my accounts will definitely jump ship at such time as the IFTF stands up a server.)

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You mean censorship, right?

I left Twitter years ago, when I realised that certain voices in UK politics were blocked from my feed.
Now suddenly that Twitter filtering has become inadequate so we all have to move elsewhere?

Please, am I being naive? Explain it to me.

This forum has well-defined moderation and governance policies. You can read them here: FAQ/Guidelines/Code of Conduct

If IFTF runs a Mastodon server, it will have similar policies.

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I mean since the IFTF isn’t a state actor not really? If you mean to say that any form of moderation necessarily infringes on some speech, sort of but that’s a feature, not a bug, since at least in the US context freedom of association is a core part of our speech-related values. And the theory would be that the community that’s familiar with the norms and practices here would likely also like to see the same norms and practices support a social media community on Mastodon - one of the selling points of the federal model it uses is that folks can move around to find a place they like, rather than being stuck with whatever the dude who owns Twitter wants the experience to be.

Anyway here’s the more granular explanation:

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Thanks for the reply. I find it strange that a community focused on works of text would be so opaque in declaring what it is permissible to say.

The very first post on this thread says this:

Well, I have failed to guess them.
Please state the nature of the emergency.