Federating with Threads + Chanterelle Chatter: Project Mushroom's Latest
Should we federate with Threads?
You may be familiar with Instagram's Twitter clone, Threads. Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads) is currently piloting the ability for Threads users to follow Mastodon accounts, and possibly integrate with the Fediverse in the future. This has raised red flags due to this company's track record with data privacy and moderation failures, but could allow our community's members to connect with a larger community of users on Threads. We want the decision to be made by the community, so we've set up a post here where you can discuss and vote in a poll to express your thoughts on this decision:
Chanterelle Chatter
In this issue of the newsletter, we're introducing a new recurring feature called Chanterelle Chatter, where we'll highlight some of the most active posts on our public facing instance, spore.social. The selection will be lightly-curated to provide a mixture of topics and posters, while still reflecting the things that are top-of-mind for our community. Here are some of the posts we noticed since our last newsletter.
COP28
With COP28 wrapping up, the international climate change conference is a hot topic on our network. Community members are joining the conversation using the hashtag #COP28, such as spore.social member _noelamac_, who drew attention to three ironic "successes" of the conference:
We love this post that Dr. Elizabeth Sawin made after the announcement of the COP28 agreement. If we wait for big institutions to lumber towards a sustainable future, we're already too far behind. That's why we keep building intentional communities for mutual aid and transformative action no matter what.
Centering Joy
With our mission being to create "a safe place on the internet that centres joy and action," we wanted to show off some of the #DogsOfMastodon on spore.social, such as, Merson the Person's adorable orange corgi:
And here are Goose is eyeballing you's Great Pyrenees dogs, Charlie and Gretchen taking a nap – along with some great examples of using alt-text to convey details of the photo!
How to get involved in Project Mushroom
Project Mushroom is a Mastodon-based social network focused on climate and social justice. With over 641 monthly active users, we are one of the biggest activist communities on Mastodon. If you're not in the space yet, you can click here for an in-depth guide on how to get started on either our projectmushroom.social or spore.social servers.
Project Mushroom recently became independent of its former parent company, Currently Weather Service, and is now fully led by the community. Paid subscriptions to this newsletter now go 100% to funding Project Mushroom expenses, which are primarily server costs. We've recently added the option to make a one-time contribution as well. If you have the means, please consider joining the 190 other supporters who help us keep the lights on!