New users should give this a read through, to make sure they understand privacy implications of joining snake.club, and also to get some recommendations on using the services best.
Upon joining, you should be added to the snake-club-users Google Groups mailing list. If not, please subscribe. This mailing list will be rarely used and will simply announce downtime, maintenance, changes, and new services.
If you don't have access to one of the services listed on the main page, and you want access, then you should reach out to me directly. I will manually give you access. Depending on the service, I may send you a temporary password. Ideally, contact me using Signal so your temporary password is kept secret.
You can create private toots with "followers-only" access permissions. Do this by using the "globe" icon in the composer interface (it changes to a Lock if you have changed the toot audience). This is roughly similar to Twitter's private account feature. However, to make sure you get the privacy level you asked for, you should enter your profile settings and check the box to "lock" your account, so that new followers must be manually approved.
Note that followers-only toots are visible to anyone who follows you (thus the account lock). If somebody from a different Mastodon server follows you, then the maintainer of that server will have access to that toot content in their database (the same way I have access to all toots on this instance -- see privacy notes below). Keep this in mind when using Mastodon.
From an iOS or Android device, you can use the bookmark / add to home screen feature to install Mastodon to your homescreen as a web app. However, notification support can be poor (especially on iOS, where Apple has blatantly refused to implement standard Web APIs in an attempt to force users into their native app store). You may want to select a native app from the list here.
I recommend the following based on my own use:
pip install toot) is very niceAll your IRC messages are logged to a sqlite database file, which I'm happy to provide for you if you'd ever like to do analytics on it. I do not backup these IRC logs, though I do try to my best to preserve them for your benefit.
If you are a heavy user, especially on high-traffic IRC channels, I might reach out to you to reduce the space taken up by your IRC logs. I have developed a tool which allows me to cull messages older than a certain age from a database. With your consent, I can provide you with a report of all channels and their message counts, and we can use this tool to trim the usage.
There is no mobile app for The Lounge, but you can use the "bookmark" / "add to homescreen" feature of your mobile browser to add it as a web application.
When you join snake.club services, you're giving me some data. I respect that and try to keep your data secure and private. However, I'm just one person. I have no security team, but I plan to keep my server up-to-date, and with reasonable security measures in place. I pledge never to access any of your data except for the following situations:
You should know the sort of data which my server receives as a result of your use of the services. Note that none of these services are end-to-end encrypted.
Again, I pledge to never access any user's data (other than my own, in the course of testing) on any service, without prior consent. But, please be aware of the data you place in my hands before you use these services!