Comment by camjohnson26 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by camjohnson26 | Hacker News Reader

DigitalOcean has a one click app that lets you setup a Mastodon instance ridiculously easily. For my own reasons I’m trying to migrate away from Twitter, and have found it relatively easy to sync Twitter profiles with a self hosted Mastodon instance so I can follow the accounts I’m interested in without directly interacting with Twitter. Configuring email sending and DNS is a little tricky, but if you use namecheap and mail gun it’s not too bad.

I routinely on Twitter criticize Musk’s bad behavior and lies about the full self driving product, but semi anonymously since Musk and his fans have a history of doxxing and harassing critics: https://www.inverse.com/article/47461-elon-musk-responds-to-... His purchase of the platform makes me worried that my identity and private messages could be misused, so any alternative is much appreciated.

Unfortunately it looks like Mastodon still hasn’t renamed their “toots” to “posts,” which sadly makes it impossible to recommend to others because there’s no way they’ll take it seriously in the US, due to the double meaning.

>Unfortunately it looks like Mastodon still hasn’t renamed their “toots” to “posts,”

Hasn't it? The PR to rename them was merged just over a year ago, and there have been many releases since then with the new strings.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/v3.5.1/app/javascr...

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/v3.5.1/config/loca...

etc.

I do notice that the documentation still uses "toots": https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/posting/

That’s what I was expecting, but as of today it still shows up in the onboarding tutorial and with the big “TOOT!” button on the main page, but these may be specific to desktop. It’s a little disappointing because it was a big announcement when they decided to change, and it really is the little things that make the biggest differences.

Right, so the software has been updated, but the documentation hasn't for some reason.

>Unfortunately it looks like Mastodon still hasn’t renamed their “toots”

Maybe we wouldn't have so many reasons to leave twitter if people had taken tweets less seriously in the first place. If everyone knows that artificially short posts with insanely widespread potential reach are all 屁s, that could help fix a lot of what's wrong in our world.

I suspect there's a limited number of people who want to be told so explicitly that they're just farting their thoughts out online.

Well, if we overanalyze everything, the same could be said about the neediness of tweeting birds to get the attention of a possible partner [1].

[1] https://i.imgur.com/Ks17qEJ.png

It’s not over analyzing though, it’s literally the first thing many people will notice.

You're probably right, and they're probably pretty interesting and fun to be around.

I'm back, to smell and reply to my own toot today. It's always better fermented. I want to talk about the kanji I used earlier, "屁". Like many movements about what should be done with regard to social media platform policies, it's composed out of radicals.

In the case of 屁, that would be this radical, 尸, whose on yomi is shi, and 比 which is hi. The kun yomi are longer and not derived from the shared Japanese heritage with China, who also use this kanji for the word "fart". The Japanese word is "Onara", the chinese word is "Pi" which seems a lot more onomatopoeic.

尸 in this case has a meaning of "corpse" or human remains, and is very close to the kanji for "door", I almost mistook it for just being that. 比 has to do with comparisons, also apparently has something to do with race. So the image I get through this kanji when I connect it to "tooting" on social media, is as follows: "The corpse of someone who could have been somebody opens up the door of its sphincter, and releases a gaseous comparison about race."

There are many people who are proud of “shitposting”.

> I can follow the accounts I’m interested in without directly interacting with Twitter

You could just use Nitter.net and put all handles you wanna follow separated by comma after slash like this https://nitter.net/handle1,handle2,handle3

Thanks for the tip! I have a Nitter instance, but didn't know about this.

and, you can get an RSS feed simply by appending '/rss' :

https://nitter.net/handle1,handle2,handle3/rss

they are called posts now https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16080

according to this PR so yeah

Considering the US managed to vote in a guy called Trump I don’t think there’ll be a problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com