New #paleoart at #Patreon! Here's an image that I'm sure won't cause any upset at all among tyrannosaur fans: giant azhdarchid pterosaurs drive T. rex away from a juvenile Triceratops carcass. High-res version, WIPs and discussion here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/103222863#sciart#dinosaurs
@futurebird@mike I've personally lost a lot of lunch to fearless chickens. You can see my anguish channelled into the distressed face of the tyrannosaur.
The #spamapocalypse is real! Mastodon needs some sort of shared spamlist option. I mean, we can ban all these accounts at Sauropods.win, but, wow, it would be so much better if they were gone once the first trusted server banned them.
@mike@john I'm being inundated with it, unfortunately. I've reported and blocked dozens of posts like this since yesterday. There's a few more every hour.
@mike@john Maybe? I wouldn't know where to start with blocking sustained spamming. This is a new experience for me on a social media site. I assume a lot of spam protection is usually built in, but doesn't the Fediverse structure complicate that?
@john@mike Ok. I'm cautiously optimistic that a solution has been found against this attack at least, as I've not received anything in the last hour or so... but we'll see.
@AdamStuartSmith@mike@john@Gizz47 isn't either. I guess I'm just lucky. Also - my cautious optimism of a moment ago was premature, the posts are still happening.
@AdamStuartSmith@mike@john@Gizz47 To add one further detail, none of the spam being sent to me is from Sauropods.win. I have no idea how important or useful that info is.
@john@AdamStuartSmith@mike@Gizz47 So you're getting my reports? I've been reporting and blocking every message, but I can stop and just block them if it's overwhelming your inbox.
@john@AdamStuartSmith@mike@Gizz47 OK, will do. Apologies for any further messages about spam! Hopefully Mastodon finds a way to solve this at a more fundamental level soon. It's the sort of thing that will get very old, very fast, and is only going to lessen the user base further.
As Twitter self-immolates, I am seeing people I know setting up on Bluesky.
I find this perplexing. Can people really not learn the lesson that a social network owned by a capitalist is a social network they don't control?
You can argue about whether Bluesky or Mastodon has the better technology, but what's 100% clear is that Mastodon is run BY users FOR users. And that difference is the only one that matters in the end.
@AmyIsCoolz@mike I can only speak from experience as I don't understand a lot of the tech stuff. Broadly, it seems that it's a lot more challenging to build a following and get engagement here. My Twitter account grows pretty constantly, but I've apparently hit a ceiling at 1.7K on Mastodon. And pre-prioritisation of blue ticks at Twitter, I was getting hundreds or thousands of likes on my art posts; here, I get a few dozen on a good day.
@AmyIsCoolz@mike@codefolio I suspect the lack of an algorithm is a major factor. Twitter used to be very creator-friendly, keeping posts bobbing up in a feed for a good while. Here, posts sink far quicker, giving them less time to do their work.