I’m @tlalexander@queer.party and I’m a trans robotics engineer from the Bay Area, developing an open source farming robot (see my HN profile for details).
Feel free to reply to this with your fediverse handle! Also is anyone on cohost or other platforms like that? I’ve seen some friends join cohost and I submitted the application form.
I don't understand the appeal of things cohost. It just seems like "twitter, but this time we're good guys, we swear!" Which, even if true right now, will certainly change if they get popular and become influential, because the pressures and incentives are too great. It takes some fundamental difference (like federation) to provide at least some safeguards against that.
For two, and this is just out of curiosity, what's the reason for mentioning you're trans? I don't mention I'm cis when I introduce myself, it seems like nobody should care.
Humans connect via points of commonality, especially ones that aren't so widely shared.
I do see your point about points of commonality, I'm just curious why it was just that one and not hobbies, etc then. I just don't think that being trans should be pointed out as being "niche", I'd rather it was just your gender and we forgot about it.
But also because I’m trans, and that’s going to upset a small number of bigoted people who will refuse to follow me, and that’s how I’d like it. And since I post about being trans they’re going to find out eventually, and be a problem on my feed.
Definitely new to Mastodon. If anyone has any good instance recommendations I'd appreciate them :)
Not on mastodon.social, unfortunately. (Unless the reader also happens to be on that same instance.)
In most other instances, linking to the profile would allow us to click on the follow button on that page, login to our instance in the new window that pops up, and follow you from there. mastodon.social uses this new UI that doesn't do any of that, instead just tells you to copy-paste the address into our instance's search bar (opening it ourselves).
So @dom96@mastodon.social is not any different from https://mastodon.social/@dom96 in this case - in both cases we have to do the same thing, paste it into our instance's search bar, to be able to follow or interact in any way.