Keeper of the Labyrinth @admin@labyrinth.social

#Mastodon #Hometown #Admin

I love documentation, so I've written a bunch of docs about labyrinth.social, the small invite-only instance I run.

In putting it together, I looked at a lot of other instances to see what kind of docs and policies they had, so now I want to pay it forward and put it out there for others to use as a basis.

If you run a small instance or are thinking of doing so, feel free to repurpose what I've put together!

https://thomasmdickinson.github.io/lab-soc-about/

A prospective new user asked me if mastodon supports two-factor authentication. Good question! it does.

You can (and should!!) enable it in Preferences > Account > Two Factor Auth.

It doesn't work over SMS, you'll need an authenticator app like Google Authenticator. Personally, I use 1Password. Any TOTP (Time-based one-time password) should work.

hey lab.soc users, I don't think I wanna go too crazy with lots and lots of local emoji, but a few never hurt. let me know if there's any you want me to add

#Mastodon #Hometown #Admin

I love documentation, so I've written a bunch of docs about labyrinth.social, the small invite-only instance I run.

In putting it together, I looked at a lot of other instances to see what kind of docs and policies they had, so now I want to pay it forward and put it out there for others to use as a basis.

If you run a small instance or are thinking of doing so, feel free to repurpose what I've put together!

https://thomasmdickinson.github.io/lab-soc-about/

I'm also mirroring all the same info on github pages if that's a comfier reading experience.

https://thomasmdickinson.github.io/lab-soc-about/.

There's been some pretty substantial changes to the labyrinth.social "about" page.

No substantive changes to our policies, but lots of helpful information.

Check it out if you're curious!

https://labyrinth.social/about/more

I've been doing some #fediblock research and blocking a bunch of instances. As of now, the list of blocked instances for labyrinth.social can be found here:

https://labyrinth.social/about/more#unavailable-content

Please let me know if you have any questions/concerns about instances I've chosen to block.

Note: this isn't the big new Mastodon 4.0 update you'll be seeing elsewhere. it will take some time before those updates make their way to Hometown.

labyrinth.social has been updated to version 1.0.7 of Hometown, and 3.5.5 of Mastodon, as per my previous boost!

It's kind of hard to find information about relays that are out there, since it's not a feature often talked about.

But the one I am planning to use is https://federation.stream. They seem reputable, and also make an effort to block shitty instances.

Right now they're down, because like many high-traffic fediverse services they're seeing a lot more activity than usual this week, but I'll be enabling the relay when I can.

announcement! I'm going to try setting up a relay. This will make the federated timeline on labyrinth.social more lively, with content from other instances who also use the relay.

This should also make hashtags more useful... right now they kind of aren't useful here on labyrinth.social because they only pull in content from users that this instance's federated timeline knows about, which isn't that many.

any other small instance admins have experience using relays to make the federated timeline more lively with posts from other small instances?

I can think of reasons to do it, and I can think of reasons not to do it. Interested to hear what folks think.

Boosts appreciated!

excited to announce that blue checkmarks on labyrinth.social are only $7/month

If you are interested moving to labyrinth.social (or just setting up an alt here) please send me a DM!

You can find out more info about the server here:

https://github.com/thomasmdickinson/lab-soc-about

For the moment I will not be inviting strangers, only a small number of people I’m already acquainted with.

is there a list somewhere of possibly blockworthy instances I can review and use as a starting point?

Custom theme WIP

shout out to schlaugh, a small private social blogging platform run by friend of mine which as far as I know has always had end to end encryption on DMs.

https://www.schlaugh.com

It's very strange to me that Mastodon DMs are still currently stored as plain text.

As I think about eventually inviting people to join me on this server, I've been considering the security/privacy implications of being a random person who invites some friends to join a server you control or even physically own.

And also, some issues inherent to federated models

In some ways it's a lot thornier than the security issues on big corporate platforms

https://github.com/thomasmdickinson/lab-soc-about/blob/main/security.md