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by disinfoniacs #69 & #1
Welcome to the telex, your digital doorway into the fediverse, a network of decentralized social posting platforms. This is a quickguide to make the most of your time here in the content mines. While you’re plugged in, remember: Defend your info and yourself. Post vigilantly and diligently. View and follow discerningly. Make some fun or ELSE. This is not some kind of loser space, have some fuckin respect for yourself and your friends.
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There are 5 types of post (toot-styles) you can make. You can select between them whenever you compose a post, including when you post responses.
The people who mostly will are those in servers (instances) that are closely related to your own. As people in your server become connected (via following) to users on other servers, you’ll start to show up in the federated timeline (behind the Globe icon) of those users, and vice versa. You basically see posts of your friends’ friends’ friends. This is sometimes called the “federated timeline” or “fedfeed” and can be found under Timelines as the same Globe icon.
If someone visits your server from another instance or from outside the fediverse, they will not see these posts (only Globe posts from users of your server). Basically your server’s groupchat.
Posts like this don’t pop up in the fedfeed, so they’re useful for back-and-forth conversation out in the fediverse that won’t clog up the timelines of your network. Or, you might want to post and/or pin something on your personal public feed for people only to see if they visit your profile.
You don’t have to follow everyone in your server. You also can follow people from other servers. If you have followers from your server OR another server, a Locked post will only be shown to this mix of followers.
This is a private message. It’s only visible to the person you’re messaging—as well as the admin of your instance if they have visibility enabled (not all do, disinfo does not—or does it). Always assume you're being surveilled, something to consider when messaging direct.
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There are 4 main timelines and 2 additional timelines. All of them can be viewed under Timelines in the hamburger menu. The main 4 are represented by icons on your mainpage.
See the public posts your friends and local posts of your servermates, as well as any DMs, Locked or Unlocked posts mentioning you. This acts as your semi-holistic personal view.
See the public posts of your servermates and users on any servers your server has associated with (bubbled up).
A weird misnomer in naming. This is the timeline of just your servermates. It is not “public” beyond your server. Posts here are only being seen by servermates, not the public.
This is the federated timeline, where your public posts are posted to for other people to see. You’re seeing the public posts of the users who are servermates of the people you follow. Your friends’ friends and their friends, or your known network. There’s a much wider fediverse out there, but these are the ones you have some a few degrees of association with.
Additional timelines
Bookmarks: These are posts from anyone that you’ve bookmarked.
Direct Messages: These are messages sent directly to you.
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There are 5 main response types to a post in one of your timelines. Each of these notifies OP that someone has responded to them. They are represented by buttons underneath each post. There are also 5 additional ways to respond that do not result in notifications. These are all hidden in […] under each post.
Main response types
You can choose what post-type you’ll make your reply. You can reply publicly with the Globe which will be seen by OP, as well as everyone in your known network. You can reply unlisted by choosing Unlocked to keep the convo from being pushed to the fedfeed but still visible to anyone viewing the convo. You can also DM OP. Finally, you can make a reply that only shows up locally on your server by pressing Group; good for responses you only want to share in your safe space.
This type of response can be posted across all the same toot-styles as your replies. Please refer to the details above.
This simply repeats a post to the same timeline it was posted to. If you repeat a public post from your fedfeed, it will be repeated to the federated timeline. If you repeat a local post from your server, it will be repeated to the timelines of your servermates. An unlocked post will be repeated only on your profile, and a locked post will only be repeated to followers. DMs cannot be repeated, so the repeat icon is replaced with a lock icon.
These are your favorites. They can be reviewed under a tab in your profile. You can make your favorites visible to your followers and servermates or not in Settings.
These are unicode emoji reacts that can be added to a post. You can respond with multiple.
Additional post responses
You can mute a conversation thread so that it does not show up in any of your timelines. This does NOT mute the user entirely. Visit a user's profile to mute entirely.
Save to view later in your additional bookmarked timeline.
To share it somewhere else.
Alert the moderator of your server to a post. If you report a post from another server, you can opt to include that mod as well.
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This section is for nerds. Only read if you want to know more about how all this works on the back-end.
The telex is an “instance” of a social posting platform called Akkoma that lives on the disinfo.zone server under the control of server-admin Disinfoniac #1. Akkoma is a forked version of another platform called Pleroma, which both support a protocol known as ActivityPub. This protocol allows them to network with one another, in addition to other similar posting platforms including Mastodon and Misskey, as well as more diverse platforms such as Pixelfed (photo sharing), PeerTube (video sharing) and Hubzilla (website networking).
D1 is currently researching connecting some of these other platforms on our server, as well as in-telex bots or mods. If you come across cool ideas from other instances or encounter problems on ours, please let D1 know via DM or local post @[email protected].
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