As I write this, the moderation on major social media platforms has been degraded, and the tools available to the user to curate their feeds are quite poor. So how could we improve our science social media feeds? As far as I can tell, scientists want a feed that is mainly science, with a side […]
Tag: mastodon
Exodus: moving to Mastodon
I jumped ship from Twitter following the Musk takeover in 2022. Seeking an alternative, I joined Mastodon and didn’t look back. Since then, I’ve enjoyed many wonderful interactions and conversations; and I feel a bit sad at what Twitter turned into. Now, with many more people realising that Twitter/X is not appropriate for scientific discussions, […]
Probot 2: upgrading a Mastodon bot
Earlier this year I set up a bot on Mastodon. The bot, AlbumsX3, posts an album suggestion twice-a-day. Performance has been good. It has only missed a few posts due – I think – to server glitches. However, I have made a couple of tweaks to upgrade the bot since my last post, so I […]
Mr. Mastodon Farm: analysing a mastodon ActivityPub outbox.json file
I migrated my personal Mastodon account from mastodon.social to biologists.social recently. If you’d like to do the same, I found this guide very useful. Note that, once you move, all your previous posts are left behind on the old instance. Before I migrated, I downloaded all of my data from the old instance. I thought […]
Free Bird II: Mastodon macOS clients
This is a brief review of macOS Mastodon clients that I’ve tried. It is unashamedly incomplete/non-exhaustive, but since the ones I found online from computing magazines literally look at one app, I am ahead of the pack here! tl;dr I prefer Ivory on macOS and prior to that, Mastonaut was OK. For clarity: I have […]
Probot: building a Mastodon bot
I have long admired albums2hear, a Twitter bot that posts albums. You can read a bit more about it here. There was no mastodon equivalent and so I decided to build one. You can follow the bot – currently called Albums Albums Albums (or AlbumsX3) – here. Idea behind the bot The idea is to […]
Free Bird: moving to Mastodon
There’s plenty of guides to getting going on Mastodon, aimed at people leaving Twitter. I just wanted to post a couple of technical points about making the switch that might be of interest to people who maintain webpages with Twitter content (feeds, embeds). Mastodon status updates (feed/timeline) Twitter provided a widget that meant that an […]