where i'm going with this is that witches.live was inspired by witches.town, which had a feature where registration was only open during "the witching hour" which was like, midnight france time or some such (admin was french). i remember camping the signup page at work to get in at like 11 am or whatever it was lol

i feel like that is a bit restrictive, as w.l has capacity to handle anyone who wants to sign up so i haven't brought that back in any capacity. but... i have complicated feelings about our current workaround for bot and spam signups

i do... kind of feel like it's appropriate for a witch instance to have a little bit of an initiation of sorts. i actually kind of like our three questions thing, it's entertaining and we still see plenty of signups, though impossible to know how many people thought it was too much bother or thought it is meant as some kind of strict gatekeeping (not that it isn't, but it's to keep bots, fash, TERFs, etc out not this or that school of thought or practice)

honestly more than anything i'm frusturated that there seem to be a lot of signups that were getting there from some app or something that bypasses the questions

one thing i do care about though is people don't like waiting anxiously to see if they get approved, so i try to check the queue frequently. in addition, i generally let anyone through who i am reasonably sure isn't a bot anyway, but even if you sign up on w.l's domain itself it's a wall of text with the instructions and questions with no way to easily say, have three fields for each answer. there's also nothing that lets me deputize greeters that can approve signups without giving them buttons for all the other moderation functions

one of my grand ambitions before things got slow and weird for the fedi last year was to actually make a thing where greeters could see new signups in their "The Raven" feed and as long as, say, 2-3 people approved it, the account would activate, and the "waiting room" settings screen you get before you are fully approved duly informed new users of the procedure and progress

i'm wordsing about like 5 things at once now but just. i don't know, i feel like the attitude that joining a particular server is this insurmountable thing people ~just wont understand~ is ridiculous in a world where the most boomer computer network feature in common use is email, which has the exact same goddamned model

i think it should be generally expected that outside of some general purpose services like mastodon.social, there is a rite of passage somewhat to join a more specific-interest server

a lot of people on here love to complain about how eugen is a horrible monster or whatever because mastodon.social is big but i think he generally has the right idea, it should be a landing page for everyone who doesn't get it yet, and the account migration feature is great for those people when they do understand and want to join another server.

this is why barring some fundamental shift in the status quo, i am never defederating from mastodon.social or similar. it seems silly for any special interest server that isn't a closed group to cut itself off from people looking for a more specific online home

but yeah idk as usual, day ends in y and anna is upset that capitalism and corporations have stripped us of spins wheel rites of passage

FOOTNOTES:

oh yeah the three questions are:

1. what is your favorite emoji
2. tell us a fact about cats
3. what spell would you use to end capitalism

most people do simple answers along the lines of "cats are cute and fluffy" or "a banishing greed spell" which is all i want to see (it used to just be the emoji one but i got bots signing up by putting emoji in the answer field) but every now and then i get a genuinely interesting cat fact, or catch some ancap loser saying capitalism is fine 😄

ANOTHER FOOTNOTE:

oh yeah one thing that isn't obvious is that there's an invite system too, and it bypasses the questions and such. i wish this was more... obviated. i try to inform people of it but it's an uphill battle.

so fyi to witches.live users: the "offer fellowship to the coven" link lets you make invites for friends so they can sign up right away. feel free to ask them the 3 questions yourself if you want though!

@anna right?!

@anna

That's a crappy place to be. I'm sure it has been overwhelming with the number of people leaving Twitter.

On one of my MeWe groups, we had over 2000 new signups trying to get in during Nov-Dec 2020, right after the election and everyone was leaving FB. It was a nightmare and I had a mod team of 8 people. I really appreciate all that you are doing. I do.

@anna
Emoji:
cat fact: I've never seen a feline cop unit
spell: eatus richiccus (idk latin, I tried)

@littletranspunk APPROVED!

@anna I don't think I had to answer these, so...

1 - oh there are soooo many 🤘 🤷‍♀️ 🤪 🔥

2 - cats spend more time sleeping than awake; they only visit us here to take care of their bodies, ie eat & clean. I read something once about how many umlauts (several) & diphthongs (1, I believe) cats have access to vocally, & I wish I could find that info now!

3 - as a friend of mine once said: "My hands were made to burn money!" That might be a decent basis for an anti-capitalism spell?

smiles,
(& thanks for everything) 💕
5

@anna Fun cat fact: the fold in their ears is called a Henry's Pocket.

Fun cat fact 2: Cats and humans have a Jacobson's Organ, but only cats really utilize theirs (I forget how) :D!

@cr1901 i have a lot of questions about what henry and jacob have been up to

@cr1901 ah the jacobson's organ is a sinus/olfactory organ that does pheremone sensing but requires direct contact. i only looked at it briefly and im making some assumptions here but i think cats have theirs on the outside and actually use them and is probably the deal with the face rubbing and whatnot

@cr1901 @anna@witches.live the human Jacobson's organ is vestigial--it's definitely not functional, even if it is present.

@cr1901 you may be thinking of the Flehmen response for how to get things to it. I can't see the original toot so I don't really have context.

@endrift Oh Anna was asking for Fun Cat Facts and how to end capitalism, among other things.

So I gave her two Fun Cat Facts :3. I thought the Jacobson's Organ was vestigial on humans, but cats (and snakes) somehow use it.

@cr1901 wish I had insights on the latter, but I definitely know more about the former.

@cr1901 @anna blep

@anna Can't remember if I answered these & feel compelled to do this here for shits & giggles.

1. 🕷️

and

2. Apparently cats have been domesticated twice in human history (can't remember details). A 2nd fun fact is that tortitude is legit & real. Source: my chubby tortiseshell calico.

3. Ending capitalism is a complex thing, so it depends on where you want it focused on. Here are some topics of focus:

- Increasing awareness of the benefits of mutual aid
- Increasing the awareness of the concept of money being a scam
- Increasing solarpunk awareness

*finger-guns*

@anna i had a terrible experience there and would never recommend it for anyone as a permanent home, but it has a place as an onboarding station to give ppl a feel for what mastodon is like and it's too big to nitpick about this or that mod decision- i agree their mods suck, but what else are a bunch of volunteers gonna do under that kind of workload

@ancient_catbus yeah it's not an ideal experience, but i'd rather people get going on there then find out they can move somewhere better for them once they get their bearings than get decision paralysis joining something more niche and fuck off entirely

@anna the new user experience would be 100x better if the default was just "ok you're on this.server" with a detailed explainer about what the federation is and how to swap to a different server once you get a feel for things

@ancient_catbus there was a video @BrodieOnLinux put out like two days ago showing the current signup process and i will say it does obviate that a bit more now, though if i have any criticism for how Brodie and others present it, it's the assumption everyone is like "oh god picking a server is so overwhelming!" and putting that first over telling people "yes there are a lot of servers, join one that looks cool/join the one i'm on i can help you meet cool people"

@anna @BrodieOnLinux
i did one that was like "here's what you do- log in on jorts, follow me, check my follows, you will see a lot of friends, follow them, BOOM" and pinned it, it's been pretty effective

@anna like in the interest of being part of a solution and not just whining about it

@ancient_catbus a lot of people have a lot of opinions around here but only want to complain about (mostly other marginalized) people having fun on the platform without them, or otherwise existing without their explicit blessing

@anna like "here are THESE server rules, but there are a thousand other servers with different rules, find one that suits you" with maybe some kind spreadsheet or something idk

it just feels like it doesn't have to be as confusing and annoying as it is

@ancient_catbus need an innernette style selector that puts you in one of over four (five!) different instances:

POP

COUNTRY

R&B

KIDS

EASY LISTENING

@anna this is one of those constant push/pull struggles in community management and honestly: there will never be a good solution in fediverse for it. You can’t tech around the community/HCI concerns and shouldn’t want to.

(Also if there were one spell that could end capitalism we would’ve all cast it by now and be living in a world where neither Kronstadt, Kristalnacht, nor Leningrad were part of our collective pasts, to say nothing of settler colonialism and imperialism or orientalism)

@jlc my answer to the question is: class conciousness

@anna SPLITTER
(But also yes, as a syndicalist, I completely agree)

@jlc i find getting along as leftists is more important than anything else at this time, and trying to dunk on each other when we have less than zero political power is counterproductive at best and fed shit at worst, so i try to avoid anything that might start shit, but gestures at username im not exactly NOT an ml lol

but yeah like. priority A1 is getting everyone to realize they are fucked, and who is fucking them. we can argue about how to go from there once we have the strength to get the boots off our necks

@anna I only joke about it because I’ve seen too much energy burned on it. I give a shit about people I work with and the world I work in, which ought to be enough to motivate the work, but so it goes.

@anna
... that sounds like my newsgroup moderator days, except I was a teenager and totally unable to articulate it.

@edclayand i love newsgroups and i love reading hundreds of gigs of messages every month!