 Today I wanted to make a short video letting you guys know that I am opening registrations at my Mastodon instance at distroutoot.com. So a few days ago I made a video announcing that I was creating my own Mastodon instance at distroutoot.com because on Mastodon you toot rather than tweet. And a lot of you guys were like, hey, DT, I want to join your Mastodon instance but you don't have open registrations. But well, I didn't allow public registration is because it was my very first time installing Mastodon and I wasn't sure everything was going to work correctly. And I'm glad I didn't allow public registration initially because everything did not work correctly. The web host I was using a few days ago, it had all the SMTP ports blocked so I couldn't get outgoing email on that web server. Without outgoing email you wouldn't get notifications. You wouldn't get registration notifications or password change notifications or notifications about people mentioning you or direct messaging you. So it was a complete deal breaker. I was trying to get that host to unblock those SMTP ports and after waiting a couple of days I hadn't heard back from them. So what I did is I just moved to a different web host and signed up with a company that allowed outgoing email. So I set up this distrotoot.com website a second time and everything seems to be working. Emails working, being able to post images and everything. Everything looks correct. I've been playing with it for a couple of days now and I'm going to go ahead and allow you guys to register on my Mastodon instance. Now I created this Mastodon instance mainly for me, for my personal use. Now I don't mind opening it up to the public, but you guys have to understand if you're going to be on my Mastodon service, we can't have any drama. Because quite frankly, I'm busy. I'm way too busy to deal with all the drama and hate and everything that goes on on other social networks. Places like Twitter. If you're going to be one of those people that likes to be argumentative and spiteful and you're just a nasty person, please register at twitter.com. Do not register at distrotoot.com because quite frankly, I'm just not going to put up with it. So I'm just warning you now for those of you that do want some rules. I mean, I just quickly threw together like a quick code of conduct. The code of conduct is basically four words. Don't be a jackass. You guys know how to treat each other. I mean, people know how to treat each other. When you talk to somebody, you know if you're being respectful towards that person. And you also know if you're being disrespectful towards that person and everybody else knows it too. So if I see somebody obviously disrespecting someone else, you're gone, right? So the rules, I mean, obviously don't do anything pornographic, no gore, no violence, no racism, sexism, you know, nothing bigoted and prejudice, nothing like that. I don't want any talk about Nazism, national socialism, fascism. I don't want promotion of socialism or communism. I don't want anarchism, anti capitalism. Just just leave all the political BS somewhere else because those kinds of discussions always devolve into people just getting into this massive argument. And that is best done on a platform like Twitter rather than distrotoot. Obviously, this being my instance of Mastodon. I mean, what kind of topics are appropriate? Well, obviously anything related to free software, open source, Linux, BSD, programming, technology, digital rights, internet security, internet privacy, those kinds of discussions. Anything kind of tech related is absolutely OK. That's probably going to be the main focus of a lot of the discussions on this particular instance, but I'm OK with anything, anything as long as it's not against any of the rules. So again, no, no, nothing sexually explicit, no, nothing graphic, nothing racist or sexist in tone. And obviously if it's something political, that's best avoiding political discussions at all cost. Obviously some discussions about tech and free software and open source software. Sometimes those discussions do have a political element to them and that's OK. But if it's something that's obviously overly political and it's going to be something overly divisive in tone, it's best not to post that or at the very least do use a content warning on that market as being politics or market as NSFW not safe for work because not everybody wants to read that. And even if you market with a content warning, you know, that doesn't absolve you from still being respectful and following the rules if you do the wrong things even behind a content warning and probably still just going to ban you. For those of you that are new to Mastodon that really don't know how Mastodon works, Mastodon is very much like Twitter. It's a micro blogging platform. You have a 500 character limit and you just, you know, start typing a message. You know, this is a message and, you know, matter of fact, I'll go ahead and make a complete post here. All right. This is a post for my latest video. And if I needed to market as a political, you know, make a content warning, you see we have this CW tag here. You know, click that and then you can actually specify the warning. You could actually write, you know, politics here. If that's the case, why it's, you know, needs a warning. But in this case, this message does not need a warning. Then I just click to, and my toot appears and people are going to start reading it and responding to it and boosting it and favoring it and all kinds of other stuff. You know, I've got my timeline over here. Here's one I marked not safe for work earlier, which was just testing to make sure the content warning tag works and it does. All this was, by the way, this sensitive content was a picture of Richard Stallman with his belly hanging out of his shirt here. So any of you guys, if you want to sign up over at distro2.com, you are more than welcome. Just again, be respectful to everyone. Don't do anything crazy or you're going to get slapped with the band hammer. Also realize, you know, managing my own mastodon instance. This is the first time I've ever played with mastodon. You know, things may break. So bear with me. Also don't hold it against me if the server ever goes down in a major way and we lose all our information, you know, that's a risk. I'm willing to take because it was my personal server, but you guys, I want to make sure you guys are also willing to take that risk. So I'm going to go ahead and open up registrations now. So now when you go to distro2.com, instead of seeing this warning that we're not accepting new members, you will actually be allowed to register. All you need to do is give a username, your email address, because you will get an email notification. And then of course you need to enter a password and confirm a password. This word also agreed to some server rules and terms of service. I'm not exactly sure what these are. I didn't write any. So let's actually see what that is. Did that open in a new tab? It might have. Yeah. The privacy policy is probably just your standard cookie color privacy policy and the terms of service. I think it's just my about page. Yeah. And that's where I threw together a very quick code of conduct and some rules to follow. All right, guys. Well, that's all I had. Again, just check out distro2.com and again, be nice to each other. All right, guys. Peace.