Hey topspicy.social folks! I thought I'd write up a few tips to make us super welcoming and lovely in this new place. It's quite different to That Other Place and as we pride ourselves on being welcoming and inclusive, there are some things on mastodon that folk really appreciate.
You might have noticed you can do content warnings on your toots. If there's potential triggering content (politics, health stuff, food stuff, sexual stuff, common phobia triggers, flashing gifs) please use a content warning. Don't worry about not getting seen! It's different here, people take the time to interact and be social, and they appreciate the warnings and will click to see what wonders are beyond them :)
There are some you might not have thought of too, like selfies with eye contact which can affect the many autistic folk who are here because other social networks simply aren't considerate to that type of thing. Also, if you're uploading an image, it's considered good manners to set a description on it too. You can do that by clicking on the image before you toot it, and provide some context for our partially sighted or blind friends. I like to write a bit of extra content there too :)
Lastly, if you see any nasty stuff appear in your timeline, you can block the person, and you can report the content to alert one of the moderators or tell me and bunty directly and we can suspend that person from our instance so no one here has to put up with nastiness.
oh, just ONE more thing, I should explain, because of the way things work here, when we say we can suspend a nasty person from here, we mean it will block that nasty person from showing up for anyone here, even if they're on another mastodon server! Just one of the great things about this place, it lets us protect our entire community !
They're the main way to discover new folk here. Put them in your profile! The new upcoming mastodon release will let you follow hashtags too! They're super important here for discovery :)
They don't exist here. They're very often used to harass, dogpile, and otherwise cause a bad time for folk. If you want to engage with a toot, reply! If you want others to see it, boost it!
Trust me, it's very freeing to know you can post your personal update without being concerned some arsecandle is going to QT it saying "haha look at this"
@nikki Be wary though, as far as I am aware, this isn't entirely true. There seems to be fediverse instances (such as Misskey) that do seem to have the equivalent of QTs. If I understood it correctly, it is just that Mastodon apparently does not notify you if it happens. See: github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18473
