mountains.social

welcome to the wiki!

Hi there and welcome on the wiki site of the Mastodon instance mountains.social. This Mastodon instance focuses on hiking, mountaineering, climbing, trail running, walking and all those who love and enjoy the mountains and the outdoors in general.

Additional features configured on mountains.social

On top of the many great features the Mastodon platform provides by default, mountains.social admins have added several features to enhance the user experience of the instance.

• Language translation: posts in other than your set language can be translated by the translation integration with Deepl. The website of mountains.social and most mobile apps support this translation integration and will show a "translate" option under the post. Deepl support multiple languages, which can be found here.
• Full-text search: mountains.social has setup ElasticSearch for full-text search. That means, that all post made on mountains.social are searchable (unless you posted them as "unlisted"). Post coming from other instances are not by default searchable by text. Only when the user configured his account to be searchable, these posts are included in the full-text search. You can configure this on the web interface: settings → Public profile → Privacy and reach → select "Include public posts in search results". This is deliberately an opt-in setting.
• Maximum characters for a post: the maximum number of characters for a post on a Mastodon instance is 500. This can be quite limiting, so the number of characters have been increased to 1000. Please note that a URL in a post only counts for 23 characters, regardless of the length of the URL. This means as well, that no URL shorteners are needed (which often have the downside of being privacy invasive).
• Traditional relays: as a small Mastodon instance we need to do a bit more to get posts from other instances. Therefore we have hooked up with a couple of relays via which posts are being sent to mountains.social. Relays get these posts from instances they have configured for the relay. This means we have no control over the relevancy of the posts to the instance.
• Additional themes for the Web UI: In addition to the default themes coming with the Mastodon software, we have added two theme packs created by enthusiastic developers. The first is the TangerineUI theme (in various colors) and the second is the BirdUI theme (which brings some nostalgia from the old Bird site). You can set your favorite theme in the Preferences --> Appearance and choose your favorite. Be sure to select "Enable advanced web interface" in case you want to use multi columns.
• FakeRelay: In contrast to the traditional relays (sometimes referred to as firehoses), the FakeRelay integration in combination with GetMoarFediverse works differently. As the name says, this is not a normal relay. The admin of mountains.social can define which hashtags from which Mastodon instances are to be injected in the federated timeline of mountains.social. As mountains.social is not the largest of instance, this type of adding posts into the federated timeline is particularly interesting. The up-to-date list of hashtags and instances can be found here. In case you would like to have specific hashtags added, you can request that via the admin of the instance. Don't be shy! The hashtags do not necessarily have to be mountains.social related.
• FediFetcher: "FediFetcher is a tool for Mastodon that automatically fetches missing replies and posts from other fediverse instances, and adds them to your own Mastodon instance. A lot of posts in your home timeline, will be from other instances. Very often, replies to those posts will not make it to your instance, and that's a shame. It means you might miss out on interesting parts of a conversation.". FediFetcher tries to solve this issue.
• Status page: in case you are experiencing connection issues with mountains.social, you can have a look at status.mountains.social if there is a known issue. This page will also be used for communication during outages.
• mountains.social admin accounts: the primary Mastodon Admin account is @bergmeister@mountains.social. In case there are issues with the instance itself and the Admin can't communicate through this account, a backup account has been set up: @bergmeister@swiss.social. It might therefore be a good idea to follow that account. It will only be used during outages of mountains.social, so it will not spam your home feed. The hashtag for communicating maintenance or other information directly related to the instance is #MountainsAdmin.

As some of you might have have noticed, two days ago Threads from Meta communicated that they launched in Europe and also started with (very limited for only a couple of accounts) federation with the Fediverse. Before this announcement, but certainly afterwards, there has been a "lively" discussion on what this means for the Fediverse and what the "right" way would be for MastoAdmins as a response. Bear with me.

There is one side of the discussion, that sees the opportunities (growth, openness, this will attract journalists/companies, etc.) and on the other side there is the view on risks (Threads will Embrace, Extend and Extinguish). This situation also asks from me as MastoAdmin of mountains.social a decision (no decision would also be a decision). I'm very well aware that there is no golden answer that fits everybody.

Based on the track record of Meta, I have no doubt that Threads does not exist for the good of the Fediverse. I believe that when Meta would have been truely committed to the spirit of the Fediverse, they would had donated in abundance to Fediverse developers to let hem speed up their work. It is exactly this setup of small communities without profiling, advertisement and algorithms that drew me to the Fediverse, as I have no interest in getting in bed with or federating with Big Tech.

Deciding for my own single use instance (have suspended threads.net already) is however something different than for a instance with a few more people on it. As stated above there will certainly be different views amongst us on this subject, so no decision will fit all. Therefore I have decided to "limit" threads.net for the moment.

This is not a hard block (suspend). Limit will make posts from accounts at the particular domain invisible to anyone who isn't following them. Of course everyone is able to suspend thread.net on top of the limit that I will put on instance level.

If this means, that you want to migrate your account to another instance that is not limiting/suspending Threads, I hate so see you go, but will of course assist in case you need help.

This decision was hard to make, as it will have negative consequences for people who were looking forward to full-blown federation with Threads. This would however have been to much going against my own principles.

Be gentle.

Bergmeister

Instance rules mountains.social

Every admin of a Fediverse instance sets his own rules. It defines what is allowed on the instance, to get a good experience for the people on the instance. The rules can be found on the About page as well. In general, we expect you to treat each other with kindness and respect. Keep conversations civil, respectful, and in good faith. We all want the mountains.social instance, and the Fediverse in general, to be a safe, friendly, and welcoming place for everyone!

1. Sexually explicit or violent media must be marked as sensitive when posting.
2. No spam or advertising.
3. No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, or casteism.
4. No incitement of violence or promotion of violent ideologies.
5. No harassment, dogpiling or doxxing of other users.
6. No illegal content.
7. Only languages that can be translated by the Deepl Translation integration are allowed (so everybody can read the posts). The supported languages are listed here.
8. Don't be a dick. Speaks for itself.

Supporting mountains.social

The nature of the Fediverse means, there a lots of instances around. These instances are run by volunteers, who often pay the server and other infrastructure costs themselves. In case you would like to support the instance by chipping in on the server costs, you can choose one of the below options.

At time of writing (August 2024) the costs of running mountains.social is around 47 USD per month (server, media storage, backup storage, domain, etc).