The home of live coding. This server is intended for those involved with live coding in some capacity - practitioner, learner, researcher, or just getting started.

About TOPLAP Social

CONTENTS STILL EVOLVING

TOPLAP Social is intended as the home for live coding on Mastodon. It is for those involved with live coding in some capacity - practitioner, organizer, learner, researcher, getting started, or exploring.

Joining

If you want to participate in our live coding community, please request an account and briefly tell us about your live coding interest. If you are already engaged in live coding, one sentence is enough ("I'm currently live coding in Tidal, Hydra and Mercury.") If you are learning or curious and exploring, tell us more about what you want to do with live coding and why you want to join. If you don't mention live coding or something closely related, we will likely leave your account request in "Pending" and ask for more detail.

When you join - Profile + #introduction

Once you have your bearings please add details to your Profile and tell us about yourself with an #introduction post.

• What platforms are you interested in exploring, or what are you already using?
• Add info to help us get to know you, and perhaps link to some things you've made or are interested in.
• Be sure to add an #introduction tag, and other hashtags that you expect to follow.

Goals for TOPLAP Social

We are striving for an active, engaged, supportive, diverse, and safe environment.

• A place where live coders and those interested in live coding share their thoughts, ideas and creative expressions.
• It must be a place free of threatening or uncomfortable speech and generally not cluttered with a lot of unrelated chatter.
• We seek higher levels of engagement that foster communication, interaction, and vulnerability.
• Ultimately it should be simple and down to earth - a place where people talk about their activity, interests and journeys in live coding and related creative expressions.

Moderation (MORE COMING SOON)

Monitoring and managing content will become more important as our community grows. Fortunately, Mastodon has built-in tools to help. We plan to flesh this out as soon as we can, and plan to expand our team of admins to help review and respond to posts that may diverge from our shared community interest. For now, you can post any concerns about content to the @toplap shared admin account.

Content Aids (MORE ON THIS COMING)

• You should use Content Warnings (CW) for any post, graphic, or video that may potentially be unwanted by others.
• Add descriptions for media content.

Community and Project Accounts

We have made a point of bringing in local community accounts and project accounts.

• Community accounts can be existing TOPLAP nodes or any other local organization engaged in live coding activity. In this way we learn about and support activity happening at the local level.
• Project accounts represent specific live coding languages and platforms, like Mercury, Gibber, TidalCycles or combined projects like Bubo Tools.

Using TOPLAP Social

• Check the timelines regularly (Home, Notifications, Local, etc). The Home timeline shows activity from yourself and your Followers. The Local timeline shows activity from TOPLAP Social, all posts from all accounts on our server.
• Respond to posts of interest - reply, boost, favorite, bookmark, etc.
  
• Visibility (link icon): You can set the visibility level on your post, setting local-only vs federated for every post and reply you make. The default "Federated" is best for most posts, but circumstances exist where you want to limit something to our server alone.
• Visibility (globe icon): Select "Public", "Followers Only", or "Mentioned People Only".
• Annoucements: we will use these to communicate important messages to everyone.

Hometown

We run on a forked instance of mastodon called Hometown. It has a few key enhancements, including local-only posts, and an increased post limit of 1500 characters (up from 500). https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown

Admin team

• @highharmonics@toplap.org
• @saraghp@post.lurk.org
• @yaxu@post.lurk.org

We use @toplap@toplap.org as a shared administrative account.

We are actively looking for people interested to help. We need more people to help bring diverse perspectives and cover more timezones and (human) languages. We are seeking help with content moderation. As it's a brand new community, run with a flat structure by consensus, you'd have a hand in helping shape the community as it grows.

Costs / Open Collective crowd fund

For longevity of this server, we will establish an operating fund. This needs to be sustainable for the long term. The server costs are ~ $25 USD per month, which will increase to $35. With event streaming, infrastructure costs will grow to $50+/month. Our $100 referral credit has expired and we are now accruing hosting costs monthly.

The TOPLAP opencollective crowd fund is now available. People with funding sources and those with adequate means can contribute to the costs. Locations with advantageous exchange rates can also be considered.

Contributions: https://opencollective.com/toplap

More about Live Coding

Live coding is a movement in performing arts tech that began around the year 2000. TOPLAP is a loose organisation formed in 2004, to collectively explore and promote live coding.

You can read more about live coding in Live Coding: A User's Manual. Available via open access.

The aim of this server is to help host a community of live coders on the fediverse. You can find a growing list of live coding communities and project accounts (on this instance and beyond) in this post.

1. We do not tolerate harassment, e.g. offensive comments around gender/gender expression, sexual orientation, disability, race, ethnicity, religion and tech choices, and unwelcome sexual attention. <a href="https://www.un.org/en/hate-speech/">Hate speech</a> is likely to result in an immediate ban.
2. Please provide a summary/description for images, to keep things accessible e.g. for visually impaired people.
3. Be a kind host. If you make use of your invites to get new people to TOPLAP social, you are their point of contact! Show them around, introduce them to others who they might connect with and make sure they feel at home and make others feel at home as well.
4. Keep the 'local' timeline accessible and tidy! This is only shared space. Make top-level posts public and subsequent posts in the same thread 'unlisted' unless they are very important or updated at slow pace across time (like a slowly updated research log or slowly built collection).
5. Please do share your work, but avoid the excessive self-promotion styles seen on corporate social networks.