re: Mastodon servers.
A lot of general purpose instances exist and some topical ones.
Traffic is sharply rising over the last few days.
Many instances are pretty full and you cannot just make accounts. Your mastodon server/pod determines your address but you can in general post from everywhere.
So I am currently yashima@mastodon.cloud
But mastodon.cloud is one of the OG instances and pretty full and sometimes the servers just donât work well under the load.
Another popular one is mastodon.social. I think there is also a general purpose one on mas.to.
Tabletop.social is currently only for people who get a recommendation from someone already on it.
Many organizations run their own pods.
Your pod mostly determines your address and what you see when you click on âshow only localââŚ
One can move between instances. Or have multiple accounts. The software allows for all that.
Hope this helps.
PS: there is a video of Twitter HQ making the rounds where someone is projecting insults to Musk on the building. My favorite is âSpace Karenâ.
Some of the techie folks I follow are on âchaos.socialâ which is invite only and not generating invite links currently.
So theyâre pointing people at âleds.socialâ and I do like LEDs.
Chaos.social is probably run by the CCC (Chaos Computer Club) I would assume. And so is obviously popular with techies. The admin account is called âOrdnungâ which says everything you need to know.
Hilariously, I just fired up the desktop computer and glanced at Twitter in the browser. These were trending:
If anyone here were in a position to do that, I wouldnât say no.
npi is on there
Yeah, but they have no idea who I am. 
So GitHub - mastodon/mastodon: Your self-hosted, globally interconnected microblogging community has 700+ contributors. I just checked to see which language it is using. Obviously I am not surprised that it is something I have had trouble understanding in the past⌠(ruby on rails). Ah wellâŚ
On German twitter âStudiVZâ is trendingâit was a German shortlived facebook analog way back that only this spring shut down completely.
I have never seen something like this happen quite that fast on the interweb. Sure myspace, friendster, studivz, lifejournal, icq and so many other sites/services died (why is tumblr still running?)⌠something new always comes along. But mostly these pages die because something else came along that usurped the userbase. I have never seen something crash & burn quite like this. #spacekaren
I have seen a few people stand up their own instances of Mastodon just for their own accounts. RaspberryPi and StrangeParts as examples in my Twitter-sphere.
Iâm currently hosting my website using a Google Cloud VM, so I guess itâs possible I could do the same.
Itâs actually doing pretty well at the moment. Now itâs no longer owned by a big corporation who were trying to turn it into something itâs not, itâs instead managing to sustain itself by leaning into things the userbase actually likes (even if what the userbase likes is paying money to show a random selection of users a stupid post or getting two blue checkmarks for $8).
You donât need a fb account to use WhatsApp, just a phone number that can get sms messages.
A key thing I noticed is that mastodon allows you to move your account from one instance to another instance; Iâm not sure the UX of doing so, but it apparently even automatically updates for other people who may be following you.
My understanding is that you cannot now set it up without an FB account, but if you have a WhatsApp installation that pre-dates the change you can still use it.
Your understanding is incorrect. (I even tested it.). Itâs possible there was a y time where that it was required, or an announcement was made that it was going to be required, but the current state of European privacy requirements prohibits it. Meta will happily link accounts, the better to target advertising at you, but you have to allow it.
this is a pretty good summary of why twitter is hosed: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1593541177965678592.html
the author is an ex FB PE. they know what theyâre talking about (PE == âproduction engineerâ, who are the people at FB who make stuff work, and keep working, even when the last minute user count jumps from 100 million to 200 million, while thereâs a forest fire that took one of your biggest datacenters offline.) Their take on this pretty closely matches mine, though Iâve got some quibbles with some of the details.
There used to be a whole bunch of plugins for The Gimp that would save out each layer of a document as a separate file. But they all got broken by the Python 2â3 transition.
Now the way to do it is to export as PDF, with various optimisations turned off, then strip out the images from there. (And in my case then combine images with masks to get back to images with transparency.)
Fortunately this is not hard, and Xia PBF looks like a possibility.
Arenât gimp plugins written in a Scheme dialect? Where does Python fit into things?
Answering my own question: Gimp Python Documentation
Yeah, I think a lot more people wrote stuff in Python2 than in Scheme.