👋 Welcome
Connect with others that were born, live, and work in the Norwegian capital of Oslo.
🧬 How does this work?
Just like a real town there is lots of things happening in your local area. When you are signed up, clicking the Local / Lokal tab will show you everything that is happening on this website. If you want to explore the wider world, click the Federated / Felles tab to see everything happening across a lot of websites connected to this one.
When you see someone interesting, Follow / Følg that person for future updates. They will appear in your Home / Hjem timeline. You can follow anyone in the whole world - whether they are local or not.
When you see something you didn't want to see, you can Mute / Demp or Block / Blokkér that person or the whole website. If you see something on the local timeline which you don't think should be on the internet, you can Report / Rapportér it to The Mayor.
For a more geeky insight into how the site works, you can watch this YouTube video or read the Documentation.
🏵️ The Mayor
When you sign up to the website, you will instantly be following @themayor to get the latest updates straight from the oslo.town town hall. It is highly recommended that you follow The Mayor, but it's your life - do what you want - you can always unfollow them.
📜 Code of Conduct
If you want to stick around this place you should just try to be nice to people. As a general rule, that will work fine. Here are some more rules:
- No racism, xenophobia, sexism, discrimination, nazis - If you post offensive stuff then you are going to get banned. Just don't be a dick.
- Use the Content Warnings - Should you feel the need to post some content that might be offensive to someone (explicit nudity, violent or upsetting images, anything you wouldn't like your colleagues to look at) then use the CW feature to hide text and the Sensitive Media checkbox to hide image and video.
- No Robots - If you look, sound,and smell like a robot then you might just get deleted. If you want to be a robot, visit botsin.space
- Post in any language you like - You don't have to speak Norwegian here, but should expect Norwegians to speak Norwegian and foreigners to speak foreign.
🙋 FAQ
Who actually runs this site?
The site is run by the user @matt but also pretends to be the character of @themayor. This is also why everything is in English so far - his Norwegian sucks. Sorry about that.
How does the site make money?
The site doesn't make money. So long as the site doesn't have hundreds of thousands of users, it isn't very expensive to run. This means it's all paid for by @matt and there is no need to make any money from it. If the cost becomes too much, the site will run on donations.
Why should I use this instead of Facebook / Twitter / etc. ?
Nobody can pretend that oslo.town can replace any popular social networking website, but it's meant to be a nicer alternative. Unlike the big social networking sites, we don't collect your data and sell it. You are not a product. The whole point of this site is community and being able to connect with people locally and globally.
Is my information private?
The goal is to collect as little information about the users as possible and that when information is collected, it is stored for as short time as possible. If you care to, you can read the full Privacy Policy.
To protect your privacy even more, please don't share any personal information with anyone on the site. Think carefully about the username you choose. Share only what you are comfortable sharing.
Do my posts get listed in Google / Bing / another search engine?
In order to protect your privacy, we have opted-out of listing your profile and toots on search engines. You can turn this on yourself in the settings. Please be aware that anyone can still screenshot your toots and sites like archive.is or web.archive.org could potentially still create a copy of your publicly listed toots.
How do I only see languages I understand?
When you hit the Federated timeline, you will see many users from around the world speaking their native languages. To filter these views to just languages you know, you should set up the your language preferences.
How do I get featured on the Explore page?
Simple! To get featured on the Explore page, just go to Edit Profile and check the box which says List this account on the directory.
I see offensive content. Can you block it?
If you see an account you see posting offensive content, please use the Block and Report functionality. If this is content that is not hosted on oslo.town then check the option which says Forward to... which will report the account to the appropriate administrator.
Directly from the offensive post, you can also click the option Block Domain which will prevent you from seeing any future content from that website.
The policy at oslo.town is as follows:
- We will ensure that bad things don't happen on the Local timeline.
- We attempt to hide (but not block) any NSFW or spam content from the Federated Timeline.
- We block any external accounts or domains that are known to frequently spamming our users.
However, we do not aim to act as your moral compass and will not do domain-wide blocks based on the users of that instance having wild opinions. You should be able to follow anything (even the hidden content) and block these domains or people at your own discretion.
A full list of hidden or blocked domains is published below.