I’ve been having continuing second thoughts on even remotely participating in Bluesky, largely due to the fact that the CEO is now pulling a Lowtax and banning people for criticizing her. You know, among all the other things her and the mod team have been doing all week (trolling people, silencing transphobia labelers, banning users from the Blacksky alternative PDS/relay, etc, etc). But, that’s fine, because now the fediverse is seeing it’s eighty billionth influx, despite all the naysay.
I’ve been kind of a fedi wanderer ever since I shutdown my Mastodon instance, and that’s largely because, I never quite feel like I’m “at home” on the social web, unless I’m the one building it, and maintaining it. Maybe that has a lot to do with how I use my PC and laptop (Linux, and Linux), and how, for the longest time, I spent quite large amounts of time doing what other people wanted me to do.
Which made me miserable.
And it took a long time for me to go, “No. Actually, I want to do what I want to do!”
Sometimes what I want to do is spend three days playing with scripts, no gaming, no talking, just scripts. Other times, I want to setup a new fediverse instance, and see how it goes.
Now, obviously, I’ve already talked about setting up a GoToSocial instance, but there have been … developments.
My PDS is now in hibernation mode, and I’m not sure if I’ll turn it back on. Bluesky would have to make significant improvements in not moderating based on personal gripes and bigotry, and even then, I’m not sure I’d trust them.
So, I went ahead and gave my GTS instance a bit of a face-lift, and increased its resources slightly, and then opened it up for registrations.
With what I have running now, I could probably stand to take on somewhere around ten to twenty additional users. So, if you're interested in checking out GoToSocial, or even the fediverse, [url=https://gts.mkultra.social/signup]sign up[url].
Or don’t, there are plenty of options out there, especially if you’re running away from Bluesky. All you’ve got to do is look.
But hey, here are some pointers if you’re brand new, and wondering why things seem so quiet on a new account.
Firstly, don’t just wait for an algorithm to feed you content: There isn’t one, not on any of the available fediverse software. And, especially on GoToSocial, there isn’t even a federated feed to watch. If you don’t know anyone on the fediverse, and nobody you know from Bluesky has joined yet, or shared their usernames with you (which you would enter into the search bar to find them), simply search up hashtags of things you’re interested in, and then follow those hashtags!
Gradually, your feed will start updating with things from those tags.
And then you can pick and choose who you want to follow based on what they post.
It’s kind of almost like how you’d follow feeds on Bluesky, except it’s just called hashtags. Which you’re probably already familiar with, since all of us came from Twitter.
You can make lists, but the lists are private, and they aren’t blocklists. Public blocklists were never really a great idea, anyway. You wanna talk about people using personal grudges to silence innocent strangers they simply don’t like? Welcome to Bluesky!
On some instances, you can just search up text regarding things you’re interested in, but not all of them work that way. Since all of this software is hosted by volunteers and regular people interested in the fediverse, not everyone has the resources to host comprehensive search functions (yes, you have to host this with apps like Elastic Search if you’re an admin).
But, the biggest rule of thumb, is that when you’re looking at an instance, always read the rules first.
If an instance does not have any rules, you probably shouldn’t join. They’re likely to be not good.
Anyway … I’ve talked about all of this before, and if you’re new, and looking for some guidance, feel free to search me up and ask all the questions you could possibly think of. I got the answers. My handle is @cmdr_nova@gts.mkultra.social.
Source: https://mkultra.monster/social-media/20 ... he-social/
