Claudia Lo @cwylo@octodon.social
Real-life woman, currently grad student @ MIT's CMS program. Interested in queerness + games + community moderation.
OTOH there is an important distinction between prosocial and antisocial snark to keep in mind while reading
re "smarm culture", here's a good intro. http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977
Fortunately for us, I am not the only person on the internet to imagine the idea of teacup dinosaurs.
A couple of PSAs that new users may find useful:
- Faving toots does nothing, your followers (and local timeline) will only see things you boost
- Following people from other instances ensures you can see their toots in the future and that they'll show up on your instance's federated timeline
Watching @CobaltVelvet introduce community guidelines convinced me to become a Patreon supporter.
There are still many questions about what we all ultimately do together with this instance, but this is an important early start
The guidelines: https://octodon.social/about/more
The Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/CobaltVelvet/posts
what if thesis presentation days included scheduled nap time OR puppy cuddle time OR nap time with puppies
from a thesis presentation I'm at: "it is not civility that limits the democratic potential of conversation, but the confusion of civility with politeness"
Good morning everyone!
Building good communities is more important then enforcing rules
Helping someone understand why rules exist is more important then telling them what the rules are
You don't have to build your communities like you're a company. You can just TALK to people.
DO be explicit about your community norms. DO use your moderation tools to enforce them where necessary. But for the love of god, don't mistake rules lawyering for an actual community.
I think a major source of bad Mastodon takes is that people are used to a totalizing, Facebookian idea of why social networks have value; Facebook (purportedly) has value because every single person you know is on it. But from a lot of perspectives, this is a misfeature. People fail to grasp how Mastodon can have value when it's about participative communities and not about mapping your entire social life onto a digital space.
Jerry Lawson, the black engineer who made it possible to play on consoles with changeable game cartridges. https://www.wired.com/2011/04/jerry-lawson-dies/ #gaming
#dbmk20 Yasmin B. Kafai talking about games studies conferences years ago, where you had all these dudes talking about games and ONE panel on "gaming and gender, and that's where all the women were." The scene was changing, there were organised groups of female gamers, but at these academic conferences, "time stood still." #gaming #feminism
at Minefaire, audience is diverse - but YouTuber panelists extremely homogenous (vast majority young white men).
Though audience is diverse, who is being given voice and privilege? What bodies are represented in game or in promoted channels and in communities? Given the young player base of Minecraft, how might this affect their understandings of race, gender, and their place within these systems?
My advice to new mastodon servers: get help from people with experience moderating other communities. It's the best predictor of survival
Citation: online communities with moderators who gained experience elsewhere are more likely to survive over time: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/553b/7315936e49f98b18a37c4937a9170edab096.pdf
presenting a postmortem on my rockpapershotgun article https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/11/02/rimworld-code-analysis/amp/ in about 20 min!
Livestream here, with delay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqqFK__Gyh8
straight people: you /never/ see many queers hanging out with each other, that's not realistic
queers: okay but what if 40000 of us make our own gay leftist social network and also call everything toots
retoot if you love smashing capitalism, and being a bit gay
