There are different communities on Mastodon, and the greater Fediverse. They have different personalities, topics, and rules.
Before joining an instance (community), you should check to see if it looks like a good fit for you. Check the instance 'Rules'. Some might suprise you, but they usually exist for good reasons, and often because someting bad happened in the past.
Vis.social is a topic based community of creative people, especially anyone in SciArt, SciVis SciComm, data science, data visualization, creative coding, and related arts and research.
Registration is currently paused. We expect to open then again in a few weeks. Registration is currently OPEN, and MODERATED. If you'd still like to join, get in touch with contact listed on our https://vis.social/about, with a brief introduction and why you'd like to join our community.
This instance is financed by its admin, with contributions from community members.
Our annual opperating costs (hosting, domain renewals, etc) are currently over $2,400, and all admin and moderation is performed by volunteers.
There are currently 3 options for chipping in to help support server hosting and other expenses:
- https://ko-fi.com/artatomic
- https://github.com/sponsors/KristinHenry
- https://www.patreon.com/KristinHenry
** The following is currently in development and may be frequently modified **
- These words are often used interchangebly, and some prefer one over another. They all basically refer to the same thing: software installed and running an a server, used by an online community.
- The Local timeline is the heart of our community.
- this is all the posts from accounts on this instance that are public. See 'unlisted'
- If you're using a client that doesn't show you the 'Local timeline', you may use a browser to access the instance and stay connected with our community.
- Your home timeline has posts and boosts from accounts that you follow. These can be from your instance and other instances.
- this is all the public posts on all of all public instances of mastodon (that our server interacts with).
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vis.social is a topic based instance, but our topics are fairly broad: "SciArt, SciVis SciComm, data science, data visualization, creative coding, and related arts and research".
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are 'off-topic' posts ok?
- yes, but please in moderation. Try to keep your posts mostly on topic, but we are all full persons and have many interests and experiences
- if you're not sure, use a CW as a 'Wrapper' or 'Headline', and let folks decide if they want to read your off-topic posts on the Local timeline.
- You can set the privacy level of your posts, but clicking on the 'globe' icon in the post interface. This will bring up a menu of options:
- Public: it shows up in the Local timeline, and is fully public.
- Unlisted: doesn not show up in the Local timeline.
- Followers only: only your followers will see this.
- Mentioned only: This is the equivalent to a DM on other platforms. They are not visible to anyone except the accounts mentioned. Moderators will not see these, unless someone mention reports it to the moderation team. Note: If you recieve an abusive mention, please report it, so that we can help keep vis.social a safer place.
- Every Mastodon instance/community has their own set of rules.
- Please review our community Rules: https://vis.social/about
- Boosting is how Mastodon supports sharing posts.
- Your followers will be able to see your boosts, if they haven't set their client to filter out boosts.
- Unlike other platforms, starring has no impact on how often a post appears on anyone's timeline. There is no algorithm to manipulate.
- Starring is a lovely little note...when you don't have the words...to just say to the author "hey! I liked this!"
- When you upload an image as part of your post, depending on your client, you should be able to add a description of the image...otherwise known as 'alt-text'.
- Part of our function as moderators, is to boost posts from folks on our instance...but we'll only boost your posts if you've added alt-text to them. Sometimes, it's really hard for us to resist, but we're pushing ourselves to only boost images posts that have alt-text.
- Bottom line, we're not going to suspend you for not bothering with alt-text, but we won't be boosting you.
- After posting, you can still add alt-text in and edit. You have to edit the post,
delete the image from the post, re-upload the image and add a 'description' which is alt-text.We can now add alt-text while editing an existing post, just as if it were a new post.
- While "CW" technically stands for "Content Warning", vis.social and most instances use it as a "Wrapper". It's a way of adding a content label, with is very useful for noting if a post is off-topic or might need a subject line.
- vis.social requires CWs for various subjects, including food, alchohol. Check our Rules for current topics require (or request) CWs on.
- It's easy to add a CW while writing your post. You can even edit an extisting post and add a CW.
- Additional info:
- when uploading an image or video, you can check the 'Mark as Sensitive' option.
- anything that might need to be marked as sensitive, should probably also have a CW.
- Unlike many social media platforms, Mastodon does not use an 'algorithm' to control what shows up in your timeline.
- ToDo!
- Yeah, we all want to do it, but this isn't twitter, or whatever.
- We're building a community, not individual broadcasting
- We're all human, and sometimes, we just need to express!
- That's cool, we all do that from time to time
- Try to remember to make these posts as 'Unlisted' or 'Followers Only', and not on the Local Timeline.
- But if all you do it sh+t-posting, maybe this isn't the instance for you.
- ToDo: write this
- on our instance
- from other instances
- click on the "..." of your post
- Select the "Edit" option
- Edit your post.
- open the 'edit' option on the image
- Add text describing the image, or edit existing descriptive text.
- Click on the "CW" at the bottom of your post
- Enter text describing the content of the post
- Save Changes
- click the 'globe' icon at the bottom of your post
- Select the setting you want.
- Please avoid uploading directly to our servers.
- Instead, please upload to another service and post the link here.
- Why? To avoid using up our server space and increasing the cost of running this istance/community servers.
- hashtags
- CWs...
- unlisted posts...
The massive influx of folks in late 2022, was a bit overwhelming to keep up with. Mastodon is evolving, and we're figuring out what this means for us at the same time. So, this is a work-in-progress.
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The Mastodon software that runs on our server comes with a lot of tools to help us build, support, and protect our community. Some of them are great, and some could use improvements. We work with the tools we have.
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Pace yourself! It's easy to get overwhelmed and burn out. It's easy to get lost down fascinating rabbit holes, loose track of time, and burn out. If you need to, give yourself time limits.
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Boost insteresting posts from our community, and beyond -- images should have alt-text
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Help process reports for our community, and participate in discussions of reports that are unclear.
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Remind folks to add CWs for off-topic posts that include images of food, etc. check our current guidelines.
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Help folks learn how to add CWs and edit posts, and so on.
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We're also considering some optional community building activites, but they're still on the back-bench for now.
Usually, it's just a few minutes a day.
Occassionally, an issue comes up that needs to be dealt with. This can be a minor thing in our community. But sometimes, it's a case of bad actors on other instances attacking/harassing our community members (these attacks are usually targetting many comunites, not just ours). These are usually quick to deal with, but are sometimes more involved. In these cases, you'd want to get in touch with the moderation team.
Some common cases and things to say, when you see a post on our instance that needs reminders about our policies and rules.
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Case: a new application looks topic-related, but the person clearly has not read our Rules:
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send an email from curator @ vis.social
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email subject:
Action Required: Your application to join vis.social- text of email:
Hello! Thank you for applying to join our community on vis.social! While your application looks great, you left out something we asked for. Please read our 'about' page and all of our **Server Rules**, before reapplying to join our community. Our Server Rules are listed at https://vis.social/about Depending on the client you use for Mastodon, you may need to scroll down to see our 'Rules'. Or use the web browser client. If you have any questions, feel free to reply to this message and we'll do our best to help you out. If you're using a mobile app to sign up, you might not be seeing our full Rules. You may need to sign up through the browser client to see all of the instructions you'll need for a successful application to join our community. -- vis.social moderation team -
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Case: a new member has joined our community
- send a DM with
Welcome to vis.social! In case you haven't seen it, we've worked on some documentation so folks can get familiar with mastodon and our community: https://github.com/KristinHenry/vis.social --vis.social mod team #visSocialWelcome -
Case: post is not in English and doesn't have an English translation
- Reply with
Just a reminder that "English is the common language of this community instance. Other languages are welcome, but please be kind and post English translations so that we can all read your posts on the Local Timeline. Alternatively, you could edit your post and set it as unlisted or followers only." https://vis.social/about -
Case: post shows off-topic food photos:
- Reply with
I'm not sure if you're aware, but we're asking folks to use a CW "content Wrapper" with "food" as the heading when posting photos of food and some other topics. Fortunately, mastodon lets us edit posts and add CWs. -
Case: post about AI/ChatGPT:
- Reply with
Just a gentle reminder about CW's on our Local timeline and our instance rules: https://vis.social/about CW on AI topics. Please add CW for posts about AI, including tools like ChatGPT.
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There are tools that only Admins have access too in the Moderation interface.
- Start with a Limit!
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With the help of our community members report spam, we can see patterns more quickly.
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When spam wave reports start coming in:
- open the reports and look at what instance domains they are coming from
- open the moderation interface for that domain
- if we have any connections with that domain, place the domain on Limit. The limit may be lifted, after the wave is over. We have had to do this several times with some of the larger instances.
- if we have no connections with the domain, a Suspend might be in order.
- Look to see how old the domain is, and if there are active accounts on that domain that seem valid. If the domain seems to have been abandoned, and taken over by spammers, Suspend the domain.
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