Something a bit different today...
There's a really nice Fediverse admin on here called @stux who provides lots of free decentralised public services (public instances of Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, Matrix, Nitter, Invidious, Searx etc).
Stux is spending hundreds of euros a month so that these services remain free and operational.
Apparently Stux has had a tough time finding work recently, but has their own small business which provides web hosting.
If you're looking for a small indie hosting provider, this might be a really good choice as the money raised will help keep the Fedi going too:
(I'm sorry to embarass you Stux, but I think you deserve a shout-out for the good work you do!)
I know this is US-centric, but the coolest library database is Freegal, which gives you X number of downloads per week. There are some real gems in it. The metadata isn't great, but other than that it's perfect: a perpetual source of cool music I can own. Definitely check it out if your library subscribes.
free covid tests (u.s.)
you can request free covid tests from the federal government again! this time we get 8 free ones
Come work with me! We're hiring a generalist academic librarian for a tenure track position in Brooklyn, NY:
Boosts welcome.
I love weekend NYC sports-talk radio when the Rangers are in the #NHLPlayoffs It's great to hear it exhaustively discussed for once.
Mastodon has gained 106,723 monthly active users since the end of March (when Elon bought 9.2% of Twitter's shares). 93,603 are new accounts. Overall that's a 42% increase in Mastodon's MAU.
Welcome to all the new Writing Exchange users joining us from Twitter!
We're friendly here. If you want to send out an #introduction post, I'll boost it so you can start finding some followers.
Otherwise, check out the Local Timeline to see what conversations are happening.
So you just arrived here from twitter and it's quiet. Real quiet. That's because there's no algorithm here designed to drive engagement(which equals profit).
Here, you are the algorithm. It's up to you to find and follow people that are interesting to you. You can also see who they follow and who else follows them, as you build it up, it gets more interesting.
Also, if you find people you don't like or entire instances you don't like, you can mute or block them. You are in control.
Hi! mastodon.social is being slow right now, as far as I can tell because there's twice as many people using it at the same time as ever have; I'm working on making it go fast again, but in the meantime, do remember to invite people to joinmastodon.org instead of directly to mastodon.social. People don't have to be on the same server to follow you! Thanks!
Librarian and writer. Librarianship all day. Linux and blues all night.