I’m pulling the veil off of toots.matapacos.dog, intended to be an unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance. It is a more-or-less standard Mastodon installation, however I modified the nginx configuration to omit IP addresses from the access log and put bogus information into the X-Real-IP and X-Forwarded-For headers (because Mastodon records IPs for the moderation panel and session tracking features).
Upon setting up the instance, I discovered a couple things. First of all, it appears only new activity gets federated. If you follow an account on a different instance, you will need to follow a link to that instance to see posts made before federation was established. This issue is being worked on, but that is the present situation. Second, the federated timeline appears to only show accounts which are followed by users of the local instance.
In short, the timeline is very barren, and it will take users posting as well as following active accounts from other instances to make it more vibrant. Discoverability of users on other instances is particularly poor until this initial bootstrapping phase can be overcome.
Anybody who would like to try it out anyway is welcome to join. If anybody wants to be deputized as a janitor for whatever reason, I will verify your identity on here. If anybody has already settled in to Mastodon, feel free to share your handles (if you want) so we can exchange follows and start getting linked into the network. Also feel free to recommend cool accounts.
followed a bunch, I’m still settling in on another server so I guess it’s time to see how that Home tab looks with other instances feeding into it
@ghostrodeo@post.rodeo or https://post.rodeo/@ghostrodeo
As far as good follows go, I’ll dump a couple I’ve found over the past couple weeks
Molly White (Crypto researcher, guest on TrashFuture and This Machine Kills) is pretty active on Mastodon. She also runs an account for her blog Web 3 is going great.
Caitlin Johnstone is on here for better or worse.
Radio Free Amanda posts interesting stuff on Twitter, isn’t as active on Masto.
Paris Marx, host of the “Tech Won’t Save Us” podcast. He’s a Mastodon skeptic and should be bullied for this, but at least he posts.
Eli Valley - He’s not very active though.
Not Just Bikes - Anti-Car-Action urbanist youtuber
Antifada Sean - not really active
Benjamin Norton - I don’t think he really posts with this account, just syndicates things posted on other outlets such as Multipolarista.
The instances jorts.horse and monads.online seem to have a high density of kindred shitposters.
Just followed everyone in this thread, catch me at https://mastodon.social/@SSJMarx
Is there a way to auto-follow an entire server? I don’t want to have multiple accounts if I can help it.
Is there a way to auto-follow an entire server? I don’t want to have multiple accounts if I can help it.
I don’t think the standard Mastodon web/mobile app supports this. If the instance makes their local timelime public (ours does) you can view it at /public/local (for instance: https://toots.matapacos.dog/public/local). There are some third-party mobile apps which allow you to add tabs for local timelines of other instances, but I’ve been using the web app more or less exclusively. We have been trying to use the #hexbear hashtag for any hexbear-related news/memes/announcements which you can follow.
There is no way to automatically follow all the individual users on an instance. Well, there is, but it is not built in, and considered bot-like behavior. Entire instances get blocked for letting users do this.
I’m here at:
