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I made a huge mistake in my article on how to post to Mastodon through IFTTT.

I gave the wrong directions on what to put in the Application Website field in Mastodon. It just needs to be https://ifttt.com. It isn’t used for identifying the source to your Mastodon server as I thought it was, but appears as a link when the post is viewed by itself on the web. If you followed on my mistake, I highly recommend (1) removing the URL from your Mastodon config and just putting in ifttt.com and (2) going into your Webhooks settings at IFTTT and generating a new key. I feel horrible that I messed this up, and I am so sorry to everyone I steered wrong.

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Drawing of a silver person standing in the desert in front of a flying saucer.I really enjoyed the original run (Saucer Country) at Vertigo and the second run at IDW (Saucer State)…that ended on a cliffhanger, and I’m really looking forward to being able to read the conclusion!

The crowdfunding campaign launched today (perfect timing) and runs through December 8.

Saucer Country is a dark thriller that blends UFO lore and alien abduction with political intrigue, all set in the hauntingly beautiful Southwest.

The comics by Paul Cornell & Ryan Kelly follow a presidential campaign whose candidate believes she has been abducted by aliens, what that means to her and the country, and weaves through every aspect of UFO conspiracy mythology you can think of.

The first volume ran from 2012-2013, and the second volume picked up in 2017…and it was really weird to see how prescient the first run had been, as well as how the 2016 election season influenced the second part.

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I’ve been on Mastodon for several years now, and it’s almost completely replaced Twitter for me.

It is a shift in perspective on how social media works, so here are a few tips to help wrap your head around it:

1. Mastodon isn’t a single company or service. It’s software. It’s a type of service.

Policies, moderation and admin are handled separately by each site. Just like there’s no central Email administration, but Gmail and Outlook have their own policies, spam filters and admins.

2. Picking a site seems challenging because we’re not used to doing that anymore. Each has its own community flavor, but you can still follow and talk with people on other sites, and you can migrate to another one anytime you want. No need to stress out over where to start!

3. Once you’re in, it’s almost a Twitter clone, with some key differences due to:

  • Accounts being spread out.
  • Design choices.
  • Culture.

Dive in, by all means, but read the room!

4. It does take some effort to get started. Twitter throws a lot at you, but on Mastodon you have to look for people. Fortunately there are lists of interesting posters like fedi.directory and curators of recommendations like @feditips@mstdn.social.

5. Think of Mastodon as a type of account (like email), and the server you sign up with as where your account lives (like Gmail or Yahoo). Ex. I’m @KelsonV@wandering.shop, so I have a Wandering.Shop account that speaks Mastodon. (Mastodonian?)

6. Finally, There’s a whole “Fediverse” out there of other software that talks together. Pixelfed is a photo service like Instagram, Lemmy does link sharing/forums like Reddit, PeerTube does videos, etc. And you can do things like follow & reply to Pixelfed accounts on Mastodon.