#aethytips — Public Fediverse posts

I originally wrote all this in a series of sporadic discord messages to a friend who was concerned about whether to hashtag his art in the first place. I used to do a lot of independent sleuthing and research on my own for years trying to figure out the best ways to build my audience. Judging by how sometimes people get amazed at how many other people I know, maybe there is some weight to my words? Heh, but humblebrag aside I am extroverted to begin with.

Don't sweat it everyone. Theres always luck involved too. Dont delete your stuff. Repost if you wanna. who cares! In my personal opinion, microblogging social media platforms were meant to be snapshots of the present and are hard to keep "clean" while still cultivating an engaged audience unless you're already established. But at the end of the day, I'm still just some guy and you canb take or leave whatever I say with no issue. Go for what makes things click for you and dont be afraid to experiment. Ciao.

#BeebzBlog #ArtAdvice #Aethytips #Artsupport #postingtips

Even with all this in mind, it's easy to feel as though hashtagging is still overwhelming because of everything you have to look up. However, if you consistently draw or post things with overlapping themes, the process for tagging new posts can become easier as you get a more assembly line approach to it. When I tag my art posts, my thought process is tagging for my Constants,. basic Variants, and Key, Traits.

Constants would be what is always consistent for my character I'm posting for and my organization. #BeebzArt #TristeMiedo #catboy #OC.

Variants are what I use for what I think would be the most commonly searched objective truth about the drawing #furry #fursona #anthro #kemono.

Traits are pretty much anything else that I think would be the appealing thing someone would look for that would be appreciated in my work for one reason or another. It's also to help peoples filters who dont want to see these traits properly hide the posts so I dont make anyones day worse, heh.#femboy #nudity #ass *#chubby

Image attached for a practical example of how i did this :3

#BeebzBlog #ArtAdvice #TaggingHelp #Blog #Aethytips #Feditips #hashtag #SEO #socialmedia #fediadvice #filters #cw #contentwarning #blacklists #alt4me

In my opinion, its good practice to evaluate your posts and define the objective aspects of it. As an Example this could be Gender, Species, Kink, Theme, but those categories can be whatever you want. (It is at least good to CW and/or hashtag kinks or themes people may like to avoid, because even though your post would be filtered, not only does it not get you flack from someone who didn't wanna see it, you intrigue people who ARE interested to have a look)

If you had fanart from a show with 2 characters in a ship you like, the objective truths about the art you can tag for would be Name of the show, character names, ship name, or even what AU the picture is! Its your blog you can use hashtags to find your posts again too!

For organization sake I try to put the categories of my hashtag all together in order so I'd have something like Numbers, Alphabet, Double Digits It'd be like #1 #2 #3 #a #b #c #10 #25 #42 This is completely optional and order does not matter for visibility, its just something i like to do to keep organized

#BeebzBlog #ArtAdvice #TaggingHelp #fandom #fandommeta #Blog #Aethytips #Feditips #hashtag #SEO #socialmedia #fediadvice #filters #cw #contentwarning #blacklists

To figure out which tags you want to use, it can be a combination of trying to puzzle out the correct format of the tag or using other people's posts to hop between the relevant ones. For example, if you are tagging fanart for a show with spaces in it, what is more often used? Would it be #The_Show or #TheShow? Same goes for characters. Is it #Character_Name , #CharacterName or #TheShowCharacterName

What I usually do is check my first instincts of a tag and evaluate the frequency of them so I can make my own judgements of which I'd like to use for my own blog archives and visibility. From there, I'll see if the posts in that tag have adjacent posts, as other people often will do what we said in the last post. Use different hashtags for the same concept. Especially in cases of fandom work, this is an easy way to gather intel on what the community is using the most.

#BeebzBlog #ArtAdvice #TaggingHelp #fandom #fandommeta #Blog #Aethytips #Feditips #hashtag #SEO #socialmedia

The effectiveness of Hashtags can usually be broken down into how often people post to them. High frequency tags will have more posts with less time in between the dates of the posts while lower frequency tags will typically have less posts with more time between each post. Middle frequency obviously are somewhere in-between, sometimes fluctuating even.

There's a tradeoff when it comes to posting with a high or low frequency hashtag. If you post with a high one, you'll have a larger audience to see your work, but a potential downside is if it is really active it could be bumped down quickly. If you post to a low used tag, you'll remain in the forefront for longer, but not as many people may use the tag when they search. In my opinion, the best way to split the difference is use the tags you personally like for the same thing, but of various frequencies. E.g. #Water #Agua #H2O

#BeebzBlog #ArtAdvice #TaggingHelp #Blog #Aethytips #Feditips #hashtag #SEO #socialmedia

There's a lot of things to consider when it comes to putting hashtags on your art, but it can often be overwhelming. Sometimes people might feel discouraged from using them because of bigger social medias purposefully placing posts with hashtags lower in the ever mysterious algorithm despite these sites having created the use cases of it in the first place.

Luckily, on the fediverse (or at least mastodon in my experience) there is no almighty algo to punch your posts dead in the water because you dared to try to become seen. So the first advice I have at all is, if you want a higher chance of getting more followers, engagement and even potential clients, is use hashtags! Try to ease yourself out of the hesitation and utilize these tools for the purposes they were meant for in the first place.

#BeebzBlog #ArtAdvice #ArtPsychology #Blog #Aethytips #Feditips #hashtag #taggingishard #socialmedia

Aethy tips!

(Authors note: I'll be making many changes and small fixes to this post frequently, knowing myself. I suggest that you turn off post-editing notifications in your notifications tab :,) Please forgive me!!)

Basic lingo: TL (Timeline), Fedi (Federation, Other mastodon instances, etc..), Fediverse (Large network or sites and instances), Retoots/Boosts are our reblogs/retweets. (idk what else to add here, suggest stuff!)

New to Mastodon? https://fedi.tips/ is super useful in my opinion! Asking the community directly is also OK! Many are willing to help! Some features aren't on Aethy, but if you want them here, you can suggest them to @/staff! (They often look at Aethys Matrix chat, if you want to do it there!) Pick a mastodon app you prefer, Tusky is a popular choice (I could be wrong)

Aethys look. There are currently two themes: Default/Ruffy and Glitch/Mastodon theme. Taullo, the admin is currently working on the Ruffy theme, so features on it might change! Take your time to mess with the settings.

New to Aethy? Welcome! What to do now? You can make a full introduction post with: Your other social medias, hobbies, and fandoms (be sure to use hashtags for them so other people can find their fellow fandom people as Aethy doesn't have full-text search right now, only hashtags are searchable), you can also add what you will be posting and the possible trigger/content warnings. Hastags like #/Intro, #/Introduction, #/NewToAethy. It's good to also add your personal hashtag!
Many are sus of users with default profile pic, so I suggest getting one at least!
You can turn your follower count private, you can choose only accept followers, and there are many settings to look at, don't be afraid to ask for help.

Posts, privacy settings and such

Post formats: Plain text, is just what you see you get! No tricks there. HTML and Markdown both work, and have plenty of articles online to help you (I, Sini, don't know how to do this). As of right now, images only show up at the bottom of the post, so there is no way to use images as dividers.

Post privacy options:

• Local only, feature opts out of fedi timelines, and it makes the post visible to logged-in users only! In case you do not want lurkers or don't want to privatize your entire account,
• Private/Followers, only posts are just that, only visible for followers! Aethy does warn that anyone can see it after following IF you do not have follow-requests enabled.
• Unlisted, Replying option, not a mandatory thing, but many replies are unlisted to not spam Aethys TL. The only downside is posts do not appear in search or under hashtags. It can be used to write longer threads, to again, not spam TLs! (Besides followers home TLs)
• Private mentions (PMs), Conversations, the only way to "DM" someone on here. You can @/mention multiple people and everyone mentioned will be able to see the post.
• You can delete and rewrite a post to change privacy settings if you mess up! Doing so will reset your interactions and break message chains, but that's ok!

Edit logs are public for everyone, so if you post something you don't want others to see, delete and rewrite/re-draft! There is no queue feature on the browser or official Mastodon app, but Tusky app does have one. There is no draft feature either, but many apps do have it! My hack is to create a "draft" by @/ myself, with the posts privacy settings turned to mentioned people only. Then I can work on it, and once done, delete and rewrite/redraft (whichever your app uses)

About looking up stuff: Hastags, use them. My old hashtag suggestion post has plenty of pointers (at the bottom of this post), I might make a larger idea collection post if there is interest in it! :D
Create your own hashtag! Hastags are not case sensitive, but for easier reading, I suggest capitalization for longer hashtags! Don't be afraid to spam your posts with tags, as it's the only way to find things here at the moment! Tag your name/personal hashtag, fandom, type of content/art, and some "for reach" tags like #/MastoArt or #/WritersofAethy. Using symbols besides underscore ( _ ) breaks the hashtag, so tags such as #F/Oimagine will not work.

ALT-text, accessibility, inclusivity.

Use the right language option for your post, we have DeepL here and it makes reading posts in other languages easy, if you have the right option that is. In many mastodon instances, it's curtesy to use ALT-text! There are many sites, articles ect. online to help. Here's one:
https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/describe-content-images . ALT-text also is helpful to everyone who has images autofiltered, as when you hover over the image, you can read what the image is before showing it. Neat!
It can be stressful to come up with good descriptors on the spot, so I personally suggest writing all handwritten text into the description, along with translations if needed. Generally what one is looking at, here's an example: A drawing of an anime character from a series called this on a pale green background. The character is yelling "This is an example! Follow my lead!". Viewers should feel secondhand embarrassment for the character.
Some people use screen-readers (me included), and most screenreaders have varying abilities to read emojis, alternative symbols (for example: ⋆, ︾, Ⅻ) and ALT-text, so I cannot give a full guide, but WIN10s SR at least reads posts normally unless you mistype all the words and use typing quirks! If you think your post isn't screen-reader-friendly, you should put that in the CW!

Filtering out stuff. DO NOT CENSOR WORDS, ever! Censoring words break the filter system, and since we don't have term-based search, you don't need to censor (this includes, meme writings of names, using / or *, leaving out letters) Filters are kinda wonky, here is one guide to them here ! Basically, it takes a lot of time to get your filters to work properly (depending on what you want to filter out!) And the cause of this, I cannot emphasize enough adding words to your posts! Even if it's just art, nothing else, especially if you are not going to CW the post! You can filter post-by-post as well, but it's just THAT post you filter. There is no AI/algorithm that picks up on that post and filters the next ones according to it. Content warnings are explained well on Aethys about page!

Aethy posting culture.

Aethy is a chill place, we talk about many things here, no matter your fandom, background, and posting habits. Rant about IRL happenings, post art memes, go wild with thirst, and link your fanfics! If you don't see a type of post, doesn't mean you can't post it! Many people are here for fandom reasons, sure, but variety is nice!
Posting stuff: We have a culture of using CW warnings to summarize what a post is about! For example: "Fangirling over F/O", "IRL happenings in my personal life", "All caps yelling!!". "Long post"'s here are like 500+ letters (looks long on mobile) But not super needed, but I heavily suggest putting a warning for 1k long posts! There is a setting that auto-collapses posts that are long, but the collapsing function isn't the best since it counts the post by PIXEL, not word count.
Do not be afraid to interact with others! Boosting cool stuff, commission info, raffles, etc. is all good! Boosting your own posts is completely normal, and encouraged since posts tend to get lost (especially if no hashtags were used)! Boosts show up on your profile and your follower's home TL! Favorites are used like on other social media, liking a reply is a "I saw this!", faves are only visible to you under your favorites tab, it's not good to use it to find stuff later, use bookmarks instead! Bookmarking is a private tab, the poster won't get notified of their post being bookmarked. There is no search function in bookmarks unfortunately, hashtag is still the only way (I'm really honing it in haha)
I'm a chatty person, and I often comment stuff. I hope you feel comfortable talking to other people here too. I get that big social media has left people anxious to reach out to others, especially in fandoms with hostile people/antis. But we should be okay here! Even a small comment goes a long way. Without a community Aethy will feel cold and lonely (like those big social media I'm referencing) so let's be social! :D Take your time, feel it out, I believe in us! I'm willing to help and encourage you personally, don't be scared to PM me :3

(my brain is running out, and dyslexia is kicking in, please let me know if there is anything I should add or rewrite!)

OG links:

• Hastag ideas and suggestions
• Welcome guide, old
• My personal guide

#Aethy #AethyTips #Masto #Help #Guide #Saippuatxt #NewtoAethy #WelcomeToAethy

I was supposed to share this ages ago: https://fedi.tips !! Those who are new to Mastodon, in general, might want to read some tips/articles from there! c: Some features aren't on Aethy, but if you want them here, you can suggest them to @/staff! (They often look at Aethys Matrix chat, if you want to do it there!)

We on here have been using tags more often, which is great :D I've seen some neat tags and I want to list them so people know about them! I will add more when I find them, feel free so reply with suggestions:

• New to Aethy/Masto #Newtoaethy #WelcomeToAethy #aethytips for helpful information about our instance. #FediTips #MastoTips
• Community and creativity #Aethyart #Aethywriting #Arttips #Critiquewelcome #/your own personal tags! (list them somewhere on your profile so people know what they mean! :3)
• Tags for fediverse #Aethy #Mastoart #Petsofmastodon (or other animal) #introduction #intro
• Other tags #sfw #nsfw #drawing #writing #oc #fanart #/fandom tags for your fandom full and abbreviation #/charcter names #/ship tags that fit #/project tags #/prompt tags #/kink tags that apply #/LGBTQ tags that fit #/hobby tags #/Positivity and negativity tagsMore and specific = Better! That helps people find the content they want to see! You can also follow Hashtags! If you do not want fedi to find your posts, use the "Local only" privacy option!Hashtags do not work with / - etc. only letters (most languages), numbers, and underscores. CapitalLetters make long tags a bit more readable! I suggest putting tags at the bottom since # in the middle of the text can intervene with TTS/Screen readers!

I hope I don't sound preachy or something like that, I'm using my brain cell to be useful at least once #saippuatxt :queer_heart:​

People have been posting helpful posts here and I would like to add:

We have a culture of using CW warnings to summarize what a post is about! For example: "Fangirling over F/O", "IRL happenings in my personal life", "All caps yelling!!"

"Long post"s here are like 500+ letters (looks long on mobile) But not super needed, but pls do when 1k or more letters per post, some of us (me) get spooked!! (aka not a must, do what you feel is the best)

PLEASE USE ALT-TEXT when posting images! Masto has a nice culture of using alt-text to be inclusive. If you are not sure how to use/write alt text, [ https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/describe-content-images ] and other posts that have examples, writing exercises, etc.!! DO NOT underestimate how much it means for disabled/visually impaired people to feel included !!!

PLEASE I beg!! Please: interact with your fellow aethy users! Fave, when you see a post, you like. Boost when you see neat art/media! COMMENT !! I personally like talking and commenting on other people's posts. I don't want the twt culture of "I'm too intimidated" or "I'd be annoying" to be the default <3 I'm sure people appreciate all notifications they get!!

TY for looking!!!

#saippuatxt #NewToAethy #WelcomeToAethy #aethytips (added tags to help people find helpful posts easier! If you posted a guide, tip or other helpful post, tag it as well :D!!!)