Notices by #?.info :commodore: (poundquerydotinfo@forum.virctuary.com)

Listen, I was just maintaining my lists, and I've noticed a bunch of you who I follow HAVE NOT POSTED ANYTHING IN AGES.

Now, before you get all snippy with me, there is no excuse for this! None! Yes, I get it, you read on Reddit that Mastodon is too hard! You have to pick a server! YOU. HAVE. TO. PICK. A. SERVER!

Well, you already *did* pick a server, so now it's as hard as Twitter was, which is to say, not at all!

"Oh but I switched to Threads" you claim! Sure you did! Well, at least turn on federation on your Threads account and let us follow you then. And don't forget to tell us in your old account what your Threads account is.

"Oh I wouldn't switch to Threads, it's a corporately owned evil organization!" you claim, "So I switched to the corporately owned evil Bluesky instead because all the anti-mastodon snobs who aren't sure why they don't like Mastodon but are pretty sure it's bad because reply guys* and because certain folks have rights on Mastodon like the right not to be harassed, are on here. This is the platform my favorite authors would switch to if they didn't love Twitter so much, like that author of that fantasy wizard kids book I love, what's her name, not that I share her views!", well at least post that fact. Nvm we know why you didn't! But you'll be back eventually because BS will screw you over just like Musk did when he closed Twitter and replaced it with the decrooked swastika*** site. So why not skip all that crap and just post here anyway?

Come on, you owe me content! A human can only live on so many cat pictures a day!

(j/k, also I'm getting too much content if anything, though that friggin cat pictures account does post rather a lot. But I did notice, alas, a lack of activity by a lot of accounts I was hoping to see content from.)

* I'm not entirely sure what a Reply Guy is, the people certain Mastocelebs describe sound like the kind of trolls I put up** with all the time on Twitter anyway (at least until I added privacy), so I'm not sure how Mastodon has more of them. If it's the content/etiquette policers, who genuinely can get annoying and see Maspecific, remember you can probably avoid them by not using mastodon.social. Then it's literally none of anyone's business how you post. But use CWs folks especially when discussing hate crimes, include alt-text on your pictures, and most of all don't be a bigot, because that's what good people do, regardless of whether they're on mastodon.social or not.

** Edit: to clarify, "put up" is past tense here, I don't have an account on the decrooked swastika site.

*** Edit 2: For those who weren't brought up on WW-II movies as a kid (they were cheap in the 1970s and 1980s for the BBC to license), the swastika was referred to as the "crooked cross" in half of them. Just thought I'd explain that.

#fediverse

So I have an answer to the question you probably didn't realize was important to begin with:

Is #Mastodon's view really reverse-chronological? Or is it focusing on making sure I see everything posted by people I follow at least once?

The answer is the second. My instance was offline for most of the last 48 hours, and as it's been catching up over the last few hours, the content isn't completely in-order. I see stuff I posted 4 hours ago coming lower down compared to content dated 5+ hours ago.

Which is what you'd want. (Probably) nobody truly wants reverse-chronological: if a network glitch means one server sends its posts two days late to another, we don't want that to all be inserted in our feeds where all the other posts that are two days old are, as we'll miss it if we've already read everything (except those posts) from two days ago.

It's good to know Mastodon does it the right way.

@cstross I remember having a discussion about British Rail vs Privatization, I wasn't exactly pro-Privatization but I argued it was more complex than "Utopian government-run system vs Greed" which, you know, is too nuanced so people took at as meaning I was pro-privatization.

Anyway, the person I was arguing with came up with a long list of ways in which British Rail was "better" (faster, more on time, cheaper, the usual things people are sure happened) including, amazingly, that the trains were "cleaner".

I pointed out exactly what you're pointing out - he was looking at BR with rose tinted glasses. The reality was every train before the early 1990s was basically caked with cigarette ash - and that was in the no-smoking sections. My first memory as a kid was riding the train from Aylesbury to London, with ash on the floor, on the doors, on that weird metal dotted thing attached to the doors that smokers were supposed to use to stub out their cigarettes, and that yellow haze on everything.

It wasn't that BR was bad because of that of course, had BR survived to the 2000s then, yes, quite possibly the trains might have been cleaner than those today. it was that BR lived in a naturally dirty era. So somehow remembering the trains as "clean" means you don't really remember the trains back then.

(On a related note, was rewatching ET recently and thought "Wow, they got it close", the communal areas of the home in that film had that dirty haze around them even if I don't think anyone are actually shown smoking, the kids bedrooms were a realistic mess.)