A small instance for and by people who make things! We stand for an open, independent, sustainable, inclusive, and accessible web.

Table of Contents

• Welcome
• Support
• Content cache retention period
• Help
• Appearance
• Code of Conduct

Welcome

Mastodon.design welcomes all makers and designers who love to build things and talk about them. We stand for an open, independent, sustainable, inclusive, and accessible web. Its current admin is @timotheegoguely, the previous one was @mcpaccard (we both speak French and English), and the current moderators are @rafa (English), @lirontocker (German, English and Hebrew), and @isunknown (French, English).

Support

Although there is no registration fee, it would be SUPER nice if you’d drop a few $/€ to support Timothée with the instance hosting costs. This instance is hosted in France on OVH servers via Masto.host (Galaxy Plan + ElasticSearch add-on) for 118.80$/month (many thanks @Hugo for all the good work!) and has a custom domain for 44.45€/year at Infomaniak.com for a total bill of ~1474$/year (~123$/month).

💛 So if you can afford to financially support mastodon.design (tiny monthly donation helps more than one-time ones), you can click the Donate button on Timothée’s Liberapay or Ko-fi page.

Content cache retention period

⚠️ As explained in this announcement, our Content cache retention period is now set to 730 days (2 years).
This means that all posts and boosts from other servers, and all your bookmarks, favorites, and boosts will be deleted after 2 years.

Help

Need help? Mastodon can sometimes be a strange place for newcomers, but understanding its core concepts and exploring it is also very exciting! Here is a list of guides and resources to help you in your journey:

• What is Mastodon?, a short introduction video
• Mastodon quick start guide, an article from Mastodon’s official blog
• An Increasingly Less-Brief Guide to Mastodon, a massive Q&A by Joyeuse Noelle
• Mastodon Help, a website translated in Español, Français, Català, Galego and Italiano
• Fedi.Tips, an informal and unofficial guide for non-technical people who want to use Mastodon and the wider Fediverse
• Conseils transition Twitter vers Mastodon et le Fédivers, a backup maintained by Louis Derrac of a collaborative Mastodon and Fediverse guide (in French)
• How to use MASTODON: the COMPLETE GUIDE (join, use, find people to follow, etiquette…), a 19-minute video published by The Linux Experiment.
• Move to another Mastodon server, a straightforward guide by Christian Winther that will help you move your account to another server.

Appearance

Mastodon.design uses a custom theme with the following features:

• Warm light theme (inspired by Obsidian one)
• Responsive 4 columns layout for advanced web interface on desktop

Custom CSS works at the instance level, so if you want to use you own custom CSS, you need to use add-ons like Stylus or Live CSS Editor. For example, you can add .layout-single-column .colums-area__panels { flex-direction: row-reverse } if you prefer to use the single-column layout with the logo and navigation menu on the left, and the search bar and compose form on the right.

If you miss the Twitter X’s user interface, you can use the advanced custom theme Mastodon Bird UI designed by Roni Laukkarinen.

Code of Conduct

If you would like to join Mastodon.design or already have, you agree to behave according to our Code of Conduct below:

Accessibility

Please make sure you caption the images you upload. Image descriptions, also called alternative text or alt text, are text descriptions of an image. These descriptions support people who are blind, have low vision, use assistive technology, live in low-bandwidth areas, or want more context. The goal of writing image descriptions is to be clear and concise, while giving more context to your post. Here’s a list of recommendations for writing great image descriptions:

1. Capture what's important
2. Be succinct, clear, and detailed
3. Be objective
4. Write out or summarize text in images
5. Watch out for acronyms and abbreviations
6. Include the image type details
7. Use regular sentence structure and letter casing
8. Avoid redundant information
9. Take care with complex visuals

For those who want to improve their knowledge, here are two comprehensive guides on the subject:

• Alt-texts: The Ultimate Guide, by Daniel Göransson for Axess Lab
• How to write an image description, by Alex Chen for UX Collective

Media size & quality

Please reduce your images’ size and compress them before uploading. Mastodon automatically downscales images to 1.6 megapixels (enough for a 1280×1280 image) 8.3 megapixels (enough for a 3840×2160 image)* and compresses JPEG and PNG with a quality of 90**, but you can often get much better compression by using free tools like Squoosh (web app), TinyJPG (up to 20 images, works for PNG) or imageOptim (desktop app).

Avoid uploading large animated GIFs, videos, or audio files as much as possible. It takes up a lot of disk space, which means more hosting costs in the end. For videos, you can use the open-source tool Handbrake (this simple guide written by @gauthier will help you if you don’t know how to use it).

Post etiquette

You agree to put sensitive topics behind a content warning (CW) (photos must be marked with the eye symbol - after uploading, before posting). Here are a few topics you'd want to CW:

• Politics
• Graphic violence / gore
• Sexual content / nudity
• Spoilers
• Hate topics (racism / sexism / homophobia / transphobia, etc)
• Depression / suicide / mental health (you can add (-) or (+) to indicate tone)
• Flashing video / GIFs
• Drug / alcohol use
• Food / diet / weight
• Medical
• Religion

When in doubt, CW. More people than you think can be badly affected by specific topics, or just the current state of our world. If you think that anyone could suffer from reading your content, please hide it behind a Content Warning and mask your pictures.

Content rules

The following types of content will be removed from the public timeline, and may result in a ban from Mastodon.design:

• Plagiarism (see definition)
• Posting other people's work/photos/art without credit
• Untagged pornography and sexually explicit content
• Untagged gore and graphic violence
• Racism or advocation of racism
• Sexism or advocation of sexism
• Xenophobic and/or violent nationalism
• Intentional misinformation

The following types of content are explicitly disallowed and will result in a ban from Mastodon.design:

• Sexual depictions of children
• Holocaust denial or Nazi symbolism
• Conduct promoting the ideology of fascism/radical nationalism
• Promoting the oppression of any group based on gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or class

Any conduct intended to stalk, harass, or intimidate other users, or to impede other users from utilising the service, or to degrade the performance of the service, or to harass other users, or to incite other users to perform any of the aforementioned actions is forbidden and subject to punishment up to and including a ban from Mastodon.design.

This can include, but is not limited to, the following behaviors:

• Continuing to engage in conversation with a user that has specifically requested for said engagement to cease may be considered harassment, regardless of platform-specific privacy tools employed
• Aggregating, posting, and/or disseminating a person's demographic, personal, or private data without express permission
• Inciting users to engage another user in continued interaction or discussion after a user has requested for said engagement with that user to cease and desist may be considered harassment
• Posting and/or disseminating a person's posts ("toots"), including screen captures or any other content without express permission
• Intentionally posting or disseminating libel, slander, or other disinformation.

This Code of Conduct applies both to content and behavior online and to public spaces when an individual is representing Mastodon.design.

Reports of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behavior may be made by using the report button. All reports will be reviewed and dealt with as soon as possible. Admins are obligated to maintain confidentiality with regard to the reporter of an incident.

The Admin reserves the right to revoke any user's content on or access to Mastodon.design at any time, for any reason.

1. Sexually explicit or violent media must be marked as sensitive when posting
2. No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, validism, xenophobia, or casteism
3. No incitement of violence or promotion of violent ideologies
4. No harassment, dogpiling or doxxing of other people. Approach people with politeness and precaution. If someone asks you to stop mentioning them or expresses their wish to be removed from a conversation, stop immediately and remove them from the discussion.
5. No content illegal in France
6. Do not share intentionally false or misleading information
7. Any reversal of systemic oppression is forbidden. Examples: “racism against whites”, “sexism against men”, “heterophobia”, “cisphobia”, etc.
8. Content created by others must be attributed, and use of AI must be disclosed. Profiles that only post AI-generated content will not be tolerated.

1. mytter.jp: suspension
2. soc.jrconlin.com: limitation