A small Fediverse/Mastodon community for the Edmonton (#yegBike) community and friends!

Welcome to yeg.bike!

We are a small Mastodon instance created by and for the Edmonton cycling (#yegBike) community, its friends, supporters, and allies around the world.

Admins

• @Daveography - He/Him

Contact

DM one of the admins above, or drop an email to social@yeg.bike. We're happy to help answer any questions about the Fediverse, and to help guide your move!

Registration

Registrations currently require manual approval by the instance admins. We will accept registrations from any person aged 18+ who is a friend, supporter, or ally of bikes, cycling, and active transportation, and accepts the rules laid out in the section below.

We will also accept registrations for non-profit organizations involved in improving cycling and active transportation in the Edmonton region looking to have a presence in the Fediverse. Contact social@yeg.bike to find out if your organization is eligible.

Existing instance users may create bot accounts, but please contact the instance admins to run it past them first.

Usage Guidelines

Some tips on how to get the most out of Mastodon and to help find new friends and followers:

• Post an introduction about yourself, tagged with #Introduction as well as other hashtags relevant to your interests, and pin it to your profile
• When you find friends and follow them, also check out who they follow to expand your network
• Boost, boost, boost those posts and content you like! There is no algorithm here to bubble-up content automatically, users here rely on those boosts to be seen
• When you click on a hashtag, you can then follow it like you would follow another user to see more content with that tag in your feed
• When in doubt, post cat photos

Content Guidelines

Some general tips for providing the best experience for everyone:

• Add descriptions for images to help those with visual impairments or using screen readers
• Use Camel-case or Pascal-case hashtags (e.g., yegBike or #CyclingInEdmonton) to help ensure they can be read properly by screen readers
• Use Content Warnings and mark as Sensitive any content and media that is commonly considered sensitive, triggering, involves common phobias, etc.

Server Info & Funding

yeg.bike is currently being run as a small niche instance on a personal server connected via a domestic Internet connection. It currently costs very little to run, so we're not looking for funding or donations at this time.

This may change if upgrades become necessary down the road, such as if stability or speed become an issue.

What if I'm not into yeg.bike?

If you're interested in joining a Mastodon instance but aren't sure if yeg.bike is the right place for you, we recommend giving mstdn.ca a look.

What is the Fediverse?

The Fediverse is a decentralized social media network made up of thousands of individual server instances run by a variety of individuals, organizations, and companies, meaning no one corporation or individual can own or control it.

Individuals can sign up to any instance that best suits them, and from there can follow users and content from any other instance that is federated with their home instance without needing to register an account on those instances.

Instance administrators can selectively defederate other instances that do not satisfactorily moderate their own users' content.

What is Mastodon?

Mastodon is one of many types of software applications that can participate in the Fediverse. Mastodon provides a birdsite-like social media experience, focused on short text posts (500 characters by default) that may optionally be accompanied by images, and made searchable through the use of hashtags.

Other applications may provide different social media experiences (such as Friendica which is more more FB-like, Pixelfed for photo sharing, and many others), but you can follow their users and see and interact with their content from Mastodon seamlessly.

Recommended Clients

Web

• yeg.bike (the OG)
• Elk (if you miss that birdsite muscle-memory)

Android

• Tusky

iOS

• Ice Cubes

Land Acknowledgement

This instance is run and operated on Treaty 6 territory - the traditional and ancestral territory of the diverse Indigenous Peoples whose ancestors’ footsteps have marked this territory for centuries, such as nêhiyaw (Cree), Dene, Anishinaabe (Saulteaux), Nakota Isga (Nakota Sioux), and Niitsitapi (Blackfoot) peoples, as well as the Métis’ homeland and the home of one of the largest communities of Inuit south of the 60th parallel.

We acknowledge the many First Nations, Métis and Inuit who have lived in and cared for these lands for generations. We are grateful for the traditional Knowledge Keepers and Elders who are still with us today and those who have gone before us. We make this acknowledgement as an act of reconciliation and gratitude to those whose territory we reside on or are visiting.

1. Be nice, avoid personal attacks.
2. No harassment, bullying, dogpiling, doxxing, or unwanted advances.
3. Zero-tolerance for hate speech, hate symbols, slurs, epithets, etc.
4. Content that is sexually explicit, depicts violence, or is similarly sensitive must be put behind a Content Warning (CW) and any such media must marked as Sensitive.
5. No content that is illegal in Canada, content for which you do not own the copyright, or any content or behaviour that could otherwise cause the proprietors of the site legal issues.
6. Zero-tolerance for homophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism, ableism, ageism, etc.
7. Respect and use preferred names and pronouns.
8. No incitement of violence or promotion of violent ideologies.
9. No disinformation, deepfakes, or content otherwise intended to mislead or misinform (unless clearly labeled as such for discussion purposes).

1. nothing.tacowolf.net: suspension