The Sunny Gardener - June 2025

– three friends by @remi_tootata

Disability Pride Month

July is Disability Pride Month, so what better time to brush up on your alt-text game.

If you’re already in the habit of using alt-text, that’s great! If not, you are strongly encouraged to add alt-text / image descriptions to any posts containing images or video, in all months!

• Write helpful Alt Text to describe images.

Terms of Service

On June 19, the Mastodon project announced a new Terms Of Service that would be coming into effect for mastodon.social on July 1. The new terms drew quite a bit of criticism.

To be clear, these terms would only have applied to users on mastodon.social, not users of sunny.garden or other servers (unless the admins of those servers also chose to adopt similar terms). But given that, there was also still concern that providing the default terms as a template would likely increase their adoption across other servers, as an easy default choice.

Ultimately, later that day, the Mastodon team decided to pause the rollout of their updated terms in order to gather “further advice and make improvements”.

Spam & Scam

There has been a increase in mutual aid related spam/scam posts this past month. If you aren’t familiar with the person making the request, some things to watch out for:

• Brand new account, no followers.
• Directly messaging you or others to request money, without any previous interactions.
• Requesting more money from you directly, after donating any amount.

Please report spam or scam posts that you receive so that they can be looked into and blocked at the server level for everyone, if appropriate.

What if you’re not sure?

You can still report it, and add a comment like “not sure about this”, or “seems sketchy”, “i don’t know this person”, etc.

A report does not automatically mean that the account will be suspended, but if an account is reported by multiple people getting similar messages, or multiple accounts are reported that all seem to be telling the same story, it can be easier for a moderator to spot the pattern than it might be as an individual user.

Summary

I don’t know how the report change percentages are calculated, but they’re totally wrong. 🤷

Hosting Costs

As always, thank you to everyone that has donated on ko-fi! There’s no obligation or expectation that you donate in order to use the server, and I’m still able to cover any shortfall myself if needed.

– Brook