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Protesting the Bloor bike lane removal, day 2

Update (Thurs. Oct. 15, 3 PM): For up-to-date information in a slightly more accessible format, see /r/torontobiking or sign up for alerts.

Via Robert Zaichowski’s post covering days 1 and 2.

(Adapted from this thread.)

Background 🎁 (just imagine this in a Star Wars opening crawl): for longstanding grudges largely to do with petro-masculinity, Premier Doug Ford declared that not only would municipalities need provincial approval to remove car lanes in favour of bike lanes, the bike lanes that just happen to be on his commute from Etobicoke to Queen’s Park would be removed—starting with Bloor St. While a court injunction delayed the work for several months, it was overturned on appeal. A large crowd of cyclists deterred contracted construction workers the night the removal was to begin, but notwithstanding the permit limiting them to nighttime work, the contractors returned the next day… Continue reading Protesting the Bloor bike lane removal, day 2

Fifteen years

At City Hall for the last Council meeting of the term, and it’s fifteen years to the day since that marathon Executive Committee meeting that was my introduction to Toronto City Hall. In some ways, it feels like I’ve come full circle: on the outside, out of the loop, utterly ignored, just an odd little person hunched over a laptop or a phone, posting to a handful of people. Continue reading Fifteen years

How to Choose a Mastodon/Fediverse Server

Featured image by @nestort@mastodont.cat, via Wikimedia.

In a previous blog post, I recommended some Mastodon servers for people moving to the Fediverse. Since then, the great migration of November 2022 happened, and an awful lot of those servers turned out to be horrifically ill-equipped for the increase in users. I don’t mean in terms of technical infrastructure, but governance and moderation.

So instead, I’m going to talk about what to look for in a server, rather than recommending any particular ones. Continue reading How to Choose a Mastodon/Fediverse Server

Some Mastodon server recommendations

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Note: This post is very old. I don’t recommend many of these servers any more, and many new ones have sprung up, too many to keep track of. Instead, read my new post on how to choose a Mastodon/Fediverse server.

(Expanding on this viral post and this thread.)

So an obnoxious billionaire just bought Twitter, and a lot of people are signing up (or reviving their accounts) on the “flagship” servers, mastodon.social or mastodon.online. But you have more options! Continue reading Some Mastodon server recommendations