@futurebird @livcomp my long term project is to move some volunteering work to this platform and this mega thread has been a useful well of ideas on how to justify the move to the rest of my team.

The almost resolved question that has been my main personal stumbling block has been deciding on which instance to select.

@futurebird @diraquel @utopiarte notifications from my closest friends are my solution too

@futurebird @livcomp I mean the world is bigger than the US. Federal or Confederation, to think in Canadian, is considered a good thing elsewhere

@taylorlorenz @bigolewannabe and given the weird ways Google has been presumably trying to fight spam, it's in some ways breaking email.

I try to email folks from my third party email service and Gmail will periodically block my legitimate messages if I cc too many Gmail people, so I have to use a mass email product instead to reach them which.... Hurts my head.

@taylorlorenz @ben the other thing that struck me ages ago was that if I got notifications on Twitter I'd get a bit of an anxiety spike as the network got progressively more toxic.

Here, it's 99% pleasant and when it's not, it's still not stressful, just a case of folks getting a little too earnestly pedantic and even those edge cases are weirdly endearing.

@wiredfire falling down @cmconseils 's meme tunnel was not what I expected to do this evening but I got some great laughs and it reminded me of another thing few people have mentioned to @taylorlorenz - the extensive and enthusiastic use of #alttext to not only make this place more inclusive for those who need it but to make content easier to understand (and in the case of jokes flying over peoples' heads... Also because they need it).

@RowinSpeez @taylorlorenz @nikatjef no centrally pumped forced ads, but I'd legitimately want to know which server has tried this.

I did a cursory search and this was a top hit that barely answered the question

https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/13m7vbs/how_to_advertise_on_mastodon/

@quaff @renata
A good friend indeed

And one of the "killer app features" I like is the expiry window on messages which I use to manage how much of my device storage is taken up by the many pix and video I share with friends and family.

Standard android texting does not have any controls over how much device space gets eaten up duplicating photos in the text app's cache which.... Became a problem on my last handset....

@renata the day I felt like fcbk needed an out of office option was when I realized it felt like work and I wasn't being paid to be there.

Glimpsing the platform sporadically on other people's devices reminds me I'm not missing much.

@quaff @renata haha I've had the same experience. Only one close friend grumbles that I force them to go on Signal to stay in touch with me, the rest chose of their own accord or we just use ordinary texts with the others who aren't into that.