A Mastodon account for Crystal?

So, in case anyone missed it: Twitter is kind of on fire, almost (but not quite) literally. The details of this don’t bear repeating, but I was just wondering what the chances would now be of an official Mastodon account would be, akin to @CrystalLanguage on Twitter.

(Note that various crossposters between Twitter and Mastodon do exist, so this wouldn’t necessarily require duplicate postings.)

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You’re not the first one to ask, and it’s been spinning in my head this past days, but to be frank I don’t think we currently have the person-power to do it properly.

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Out of curiosity, is this because the current Twitter account also tries to RT or respond to community posts and stuff? (I checked the reply history and didn’t see the latter, but I’m not sure if it’s just not used for that yet.)

(Worth also mentioning that the amount of fires is increasing.)

I think there was a misunderstanding between Mastodon account and instance (a server). We don’t have the capacity to run a server.
But creating an account with cross posting from Twitter should be easy enough, assuming an appropriate server is open for registrations.

Recommendations about where Crystal’s home in the Mastodon sphere could be hosted are welcome.

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I’ve noticed that some Ruby and Crystal people have been on ruby.social. My personal experience on mastodon.sdf.org has been excellent. Those are just off the top of my head :smile:

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Two of the well-run ones I’m aware of are https://social.treehouse.systems and https://hachyderm.io. (Treehouse is trickier to get into, both have acquired some notable user bases.)

Yes! I forgot to mention that I had mistakenly understood it as “instance” and not just “account”. It’s in my backlog. I’m on types.pl, which has nice moderation and and a cool relatable name.

Fosstodon is also popular for open source projects.
From their description:

Fosstodon is an English speaking Mastodon instance that is open to anyone who is interested in technology; particularly free & open source software.

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Fosstodon indeed is, but I withheld a recommendation because, for a while, they hard-blocked mstdn.jp, the largest Japanese-speaking instance. I think that’s since been reverted, but it’s still a bit of a problem, esp given Crystal’s userbase.

From the linked thread it seems that they blocked it because it allowed content which is illegal in US, UK, EU, and other laws.

This was the likely cause for pawoo.jp, but not mstdn.jp. (Even without that, you have a fundamental problem with blocking such a large instance: even instances that aren’t fans of mastodon.social just mute it, instead of blocking it, because there are just too many people there.)

To throw in another mastodon instance in the open source scene: https://floss.social/

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Twitter no longer provides free tier API access starting from Feb 9th, and crossposters might be affected by this. The second one in the OP has already shut down.