Hello, 'shop! Hope you've all got your warm drinks and cozy socks. The first new invite code of the mid-winter festive season is up. Perfect for gifting, costs and weighs nothing, and keeps you connected to friends new and longstanding. As always, share around to anyone you think is gonna be […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@AltTextHealthCheck/115601552575124648 I love that wandering.shop is often near the top of this occasionally generated leaderboard. Alt-txt inclusion is an important accessibility tool for anyone using screen-readers (or sometimes just those of us who can't parse […]

Renewed the invite code again! As a reminder to anyone catching this for the first time - wandering.shop is open for new members, but we have a front-door-greeter policy that has been very successful at keeping us from being abused, and growing responsibly. We are a volunteer collective, and […]

Wow, the spammers this week are not even trying to look like they're duping any so-naive-they-just-crawled-out-of-1983 marks that are here to be duped. This drivel wouldn't fool my Nigerian Princess grandma. The latest copy resembles 2017-era chat GPT, makes me think of paint colours like […]

I've been a little bit negligent (life interferences and attention problems) at getting to our email heap in a timely way. Apologies for that - I've now caught up with everyone who has mailed our account in the past 5 weeks or so. I have ALSO rejigged some filters on the inbox, so the […]

Mod blurt as my brain is still procrastinating on things I really ought to get to ... A reminder that Wandering.Shop retains Limited engagement with Threads, respecting our users' need for promotional/business access but we do not carry Threads posts in our public TLs. With respect to Bluesky […]

RE: https://social.growyourown.services/@FediTips/115553091637188269 I've shared this with y'all here at the coffee bar, right? It's worth a periodic reminder, as we play whack-a-rat with these scams. If you're in my communities, you will only, ever, receive account related messages as a […]

heh. Breaking the 4th wall a bit to say hey! It's November 15th, @Johannab showed up in the Wandering Shop 8 years ago today. (And is the present co-driver of Proprietor) Happy Fediversary! I need someone out there to come up with Open Social long-distance food replicators so I can actually […]

Hello everyone! As some of you noted, the Sysops side of the Proprietor team got us updated to Mastodon 4.5 over the last few days, and we now have quote posts. Like just about everything Fedi, there is no unanimous agreement on benefit/detriment, though as […] [Original post on wandering.shop]

New invite is back up in the Announcement! Go forth and bring 'em in from the cold.

Hmmm. Couple of interesting reports in the bin to catch up today. Just in case you've not come across my past mod-blurts on those "ew well I don't like it either buuuutttt...." judgements, I'll reiterate where we've reached a consensus on adjudicating content: We do not *censor* content which […]

Couple Proprietor musings for tonight.... We know we've, well, not completely lost, but seen a drop in activity from some of our longstanding contributors over about a year, as people found the Bluesky PDS and figured it was a little less friction for getting their thoughts out and connecting […]

Trick or Treat, the Wandering.Shop invite code is renewed again! All Wandering.shop'ers can copy and share a code we post in the Home Timeline's Announcements. If you want to join us here as a cozy little nook from which to watch the social web go by, browse a bit of our public timeline, and […]

*plonk* ... if you would like to guess about the current Proprietor operator's age, that *plonk* is a very satisfying onomatopoeic word to a certain generation of community manager ... 😆 bye-bye li'l fashies, go poop in your own sandbox. thanks as always for the diligent reporting and sharing.

Hello, booknerds and coffee appreciators After timeout or two as the Admin dashboard loaded data behind its various widgets, we have again - properly this time - let mastodon.social out of the corner to see how things are going. Please report any problems you see, particularly if find there is […]

Blogging was a different medium - and there's still a need for it more than ever. #technology https://werd.io/what-made-blogging-different/

Hi! "Canadian Thanksgiving", or as we call it here, um, "Thanksgiving" is all wrapped up except for the weeks of turkey leftovers. Now it's SPOOKY SEASON! The invite code is up on top of the Announcements again - go ahead and invite in any trick-or-treaters. As always, feel free to share around […]

⚠️ SW-ISAC Advisory A pro-Russian propaganda network, possibly related to the Portal Kombat network, is active on numerous ActivityPub services. We are directly contacting affected services, but all admins should check for the accounts listed below, likely created after September 8. Based on […]

While I'm waiting for a boarding pass to download from my online checkin, back to share a thought/reminder for our community and broader ones about some of my instances' choices on federating, bridging, blocking, etc. There's been another tempest in the Bsky teapot I won't waste electrons […]

Night-night modblurt from yoru soon-to-be airborne Proprietor. I've renewed the Invite code again, bit early to make sure it's all good until I get home from a little trip. Caught up on our email, too, and found some new asks for accounts - this is great! But our email gets buried in […]

hey there, 'Shop! It is not normally Proprietor's role to share, chat and advocate outside of 'Shop business. And I would guess many of you are well aware of the Anthropic lawsuit and settlement. But as the mopper-upper around this wonderful community, who knows how many of you put your real […]

Mastodon ain't goin' anywhere for a loooong time, but I must admit ... ... after just a bit of playing in the #bonfire, I am seeing a lot of potential.

Mmmm-Kay folks. Yer proprietor is up way too late, and is thus feeling uncharacteristically strict about absolute enforcement of certain rules. Well ok… one certain rule. And it’s not even my rule really, so it’s not like it really applies to y’all… BUT NEVER MIND RULES ARE RULES DAMMIT […]

Mod blurt post, narrating my inner monologue ... Every now and then, we see a report that needs some line-by-line inspection of Rules and CoC, and a dive into context, to determine IF, and WHAT action should be taken. And I still land in a grey area. I, like many mods/admins, am a little bit […]

Online Safety Act 2021 (Australia) https://connect.iftas.org/library/legal-regulatory/online-safety-act-2021-australia/

Refreshed our invite code again. Bring some good folk in from the cold, pour a tea. The usual requests: please don't repost the code in open public view; we'd like to make sure everyone in the tea house has a friend to greet them when they come in.

Hey all! Sorry I was snoozing at the keyboard - actually, I got a day job for a few weeks - and the invite code expired. Fixed now! New one is up in the announcements, and I've mailed it to a couple folks who asked as well. Please go forth and find us some new coffee dates! Friends, fam, that […]

Hey friends! The current spam wave is not abating despite the best efforts of many - it's getting to be a lot to keep up with. Since mastodon.social is the source of most of the scam/spam/phishing accounts I'm seeing reported, we are going to put that instance into "Limit" status for a while […]

Friends, I just boosted a #feditips post & boost about the latest wave of “your account needs to be verified” phishing that is going on. We have some pretty reliable confirmation that the links being sent out are malicious, DO NOT CLICK THEM. Report the post. The other great advice in that […]

Hi, 'Shop! Updated our invite code for another week. Same announcement, up at the top of the Home timeline. Go forth and share with bookish friendlies!

Oh. OH. I will not live long enough to ever stop thinking about this. #civicspark Heisenberg’s ideation principle? 🤣

My #fediforumfriday for today is — the CrowdBucks source-code is here: https://codeberg.org/crowdbucks It is MVP right now. So A LOT more work needs to be done, but — it works. #crowdbucks #fedicon #fedicon2025 #fediverse

*ahem* (taps mic) Happy #worldcon to those who celebrate! Wandering.Shop's origin story is that it was build to model and keep alive the "coffee shop at a busy convention" vibe, in virtual space. I believe that WAS Worldcon (those who know I'm wrong, please update me!) In celebration of the […]

Ah, I see the "Your account must be verified, click here" scams have spread from Mastodon to PixelFed servers. I'm quite sure they're on Bsky as well, but probably getting squashed quick (that's harder in AP-fediverse space). Please block and ignore!!! Signed, tired community admins.

Is there any plausible way to put #anubis in front of a Cloudfront distribution? I would really love to deter crawlers from hitting the media bucket for wandering.shop.

Hello, 'Shop. After a little more discussion and a little more intel coming our way, wandering.shop is going to place mastodon.cloud on our "Limited" federation list effective immediately. This will keep public timeline info from mastodon.cloud out of our feeds, and new follows/followers can […]

New blog post: https://jaz.co.uk/2025/08/14/there-is-one-fediverse-there-are-a-million-fediverses

I got a report about one of OUR users today! It's so rare that happens, I do look into EVERY one to make sure. Only among the rarest of the rare are such things barely credible, too, and this report was not, just required a bit of information back to the reporting instance. Please continue to […]

Hi friends! yer Proprietor is going to be taking an extended weekend break. I won't be totally incommunicado but will be away from the full-screen interfaces until Monday. We have become aware that the instance mastodon.cloud may have become unregulated, despite being a popular, large and […]

Cooperative Digital Infrastructure With CoSocial (FediCon 2025) by Dawn Walker @dawn @dcwalk https://spectra.video/w/46hxmdNW11MAoZxk4X1c1b #cosocial #fedicon #fedicon2025 #fediverse

Fellow patrons of the shop, be aware that your dedicated maintenance staff has repainted the shelves and tightened some of the door hinges. (We are now on Mastodon 4.4.3)

Here is a rather good, recently written Privacy Guide for Mastodon. This is aimed at the basic user - you have an account, you're maybe still discovering many things about the client and interface you've mostly happened to land on, and you want to understand the balances and intersections […]

Yer Proprietor usually doesn't engage with content outside 'shop biz, but this is obliquely related, as there's been a little uptick in the separatism-unto-personal-attack-level feedback out on the timelines, when it comes to interactions with "Bluesky" and bridged accounts […]

I know a lot of folks have their qualms about Bluesky, but I hope folks are paying attention to what Rudy Fraser and Blacksky Algorithms are doing to decentralize their community from Bluesky PBC infra. Decentralization at every level of the stack is happening on ATProto. It started *within* […]

I got a friend of mine to attend FediCon 2025 who founded an important online bookstore in another country (other than Canada). After being at FediCon he got interested in creating a decentralized way for authors to sell books. #fedicon #fedicon2025 #fediverse

Hello! I am finishing some recombobulation after cross-country travel on our (Canadian) holiday weekend. The open invite code is again updated in the Announcement at the top of your home timelines. Feel free to copy and share. As always, we just ask that you don't repost completely in public […]

I did this over a year ago and have never once regretted it: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/enough-is-enough-i-dumped-googles-worsening-search-for-kagi/ Dropping #google search for #Kagi made me actually efficient using web search again. It's not that I don't use LLM web searches where […]

Heeeeey there Wandering.shop'ers ... Yer Proprietor spent an dense 72 hrs in Vancouver at #fedicon ... and 36 more sleeping off the damage from the budget redeye home... I'd like to remind you how AMAZING the wandering.shop community is, and to let you know how much you were an inspiration for […]

As an instance admin, I feel bound to slight restraint before a fediblock ... That said, my tolerance level for truly fashy posts is pretty damn low and I'll block a user for sure. BUT I will give another admin a chance to toss their trash out before I block their whole community. One chance […]

Also, I've again renewed our open invitation code for everyone to copy and share around as they like. Remember we've been adding a "Front of House' team too so we have more of us able to hold the door open. Ask around if you need an invite, someone from Wandering.shop can either make them, or […]