Up until now our main means of communication outside the site during e.g. downtime has been via our Twitter account. Given 
's innovative destruction of Twitter as a serious or reliable platform, we'll be using a Mastodon account going forward: @hexbear@matapacos.dog.
If you're on Mastodon already, please give us a follow! And if you're not, you should sign up! https://toots.matapacos.dog is an instance hosted by our very own @PorkrollPosadist@hexbear.net. See you on Mastodon folks 😎
Elon can't respect his trans daughter's pronouns, but demands everybody go along with this "X" shit, smh
Is it possible to see updates from a hexbear account now that we're federated?
For now, Mastodon -> Lemmy Federation is basically just one way. Masto accounts can follow Lemmy users and communities with comments and posts, but all Lemmy users can do is interact with those. There don't seem to be plans to change that (unlike Kbin, which does link aggregator and microblogger on the same Fedi platform).
Given that it's mostly used for communicating about active site outages, this doesn't seem that important anyhow, but yeah @jack is correct. Would be neat in principle though, if not for this specific acct.
We're supposed to be able to, but it only seems to be working sporadically.
If you have any trouble signing up, contact me either on Matrix or send me a DM. A handful of mail providers (notably iCloud and Tutanota) appear to use overzealous block-lists which block the whole IP range.
An account is not necessary to view public posts though.
matapacos is just a nice space in general, so definitely worth checking out!
How do I browse the list of users? I only got like three recommendations and those accounts are not used much. Mastodon's lack of search and quote tweets and stuff really bums me out. Often I feel like I'm looking at less information than I want, and need several clicks to get to it. Or it turns out like quotes, they turned it off!
How do I browse the list of users?
https://toots.matapacos.dog/directory (then tick the "From matapacos.dog only" button)
This link can be found in the bottom left corner, near the about links and software version and whatnot. All recent activity will be also be sorted chronologically in the local feed if you are looking for people who are active.
Mastodon's lack of search and quote tweets and stuff really bums me out.
Quote tweets are probably never coming in official mastodon, but some other compatible federated softwares have them, along with some Mastodon forks (not Hometown though :/).
The search function in Mastodon is unique. CURRENTLY, you opt-in to making your posts searchable by including hashtags, and people search for hashtags. There is a text search function, but it only searches posts you have already liked, boosted, or bookmarked. The text search is mainly useful for digging up an old post you remember liking. It was deliberately designed not to search the whole network to prevent trolls from namesearching and jumping into people's conversations.
This appears to be changing soon though. I think they are going to make it do full text search of everything which is known to the instance. There are mixed feelings about this naturally.
Discovery and getting started on Mastodon is a bit rough. It is not very convenient to lurk. You basically need to follow people, engage, and post, because the source of discovery is mainly through other users. Sometimes you get lucky on hashtags or the federated feed, but generally you need to start by following people from the local timeline and seeing the stuff they boost.
It was deliberately designed not to search the whole network to prevent trolls from namesearching and jumping into people's conversations.
Yeah I know, it's incredibly stupid and because people have already made their mind up about how technology is corrupting people you can't argue with it lol
Don't feel pressured to use Mastodon in earnest. You can bookmark https://toots.matapacos.dog/@hexbear and check it if this site is down since the mastodon profile is public. If you use an RSS reader you can subscribe to https://toots.matapacos.dog/@hexbear.rss .
The good thing about corporate free platforms is that it won't try to force you to register, reel you in for engagement or any other nefarious garbage like that.
Good, but Matapocos doesn't seem to be updating on the main Mastodon app. I'm gonna just stick to the main website for now, I guess?
Matapacos is running a fork called Hometown. It is one major version behind, but receives timely updates for security issues (like the recent "TootRoot" CVE).
The fork gives us the ability to make local-only posts, and increase the character limit, among some other changes.
The official app is relatively new, and I haven't heard a single person say anything great about it. My understanding is that there are superior 3rd party apps. IMO, the website works just fine, and provides access to all features of the fork.
Also it wouldn't suggest matapocos when i tried to select a server I had to enter the whole name for it to appear 😥
it seems impossible to sign up to toots.matapacos.dog for me. ive tried a long time ago and again just now. i put in all the information for the account and its like "we'll send you a confirmation email" and then it just doesnt. ever.
From my experience it sends it to the spam folder so you'll want to check that
You'll be sorry.
