Now that the deal is done and Musk captured the bird, i.e. Twitter, let’s see what happens. Will there be a wave(let) of people migrating to decentralised places in the fediverse? There were mulitple connection requests in my inbox this morning.
It might be a strange experience for most newly migratory birds, as finding the others on Mastodon isn’t as easy. Especially not finding your current others that you interact with already on Twitter. The path that one needs for this is like it used to be: once you connect to someone you check-out the people they follow and are followed by. We did that for blog rolls, and for every YASN (yet another social network) we joined, and we asked people in person for their e-mail addresses before that. Now I am doing the same for people using Hypothes.is. The difference is probably that many never encountered that tactic before, because it wasn’t needed and you can follow the recommendations of the platforms who do the ‘finding the others’ for you (for their definition of finding, not yours).
Anyway. I am on Mastodon since 2017, find me there. I run my own instance since 2018, hosted by Masto.host run by Hugo Gameiro, who provides a great service. But you’re more likely to start at a existing bigger instance: here’s a useful tool to help you decide.
Zoek je een Nederlandse Mastodon server? Kijk naar mastodon.nl, beheerd door Maarten den Braber.
Come find me. That’s how you find the others.
An AI generated image (using Dall-E) with the prompt ‘A blue bird has an encounter with a grey mammoth’
Today at 14:07 twenty years ago, I posted my first blog post. Well over 3000 posts later, this blog has been an integral part of quite a stretch of my life, to the point where it is unavoidable that if you’ve read along you now probably know more about me than I think I’ve actually shared in writing.
In the past few years I’ve taken this blog’s anniversary as a moment to reflect on some of my blogging practices. That yearly reflection started 5 years ago when I was just leaving Facebook. This time it coincides with #twittermigration, where many people are exploring federated options now that Musk has taken over Twitter. Whether that is something that will stick is uncertain of course, but it is interesting to watch playing out. Other earlier such reflections: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021.
Last year I wrote:
Indeed, that is exactly what I did from early this year: ensure that I could post directly to this blog in different ways. The key to that was create a Micropub client, which posts to this site. Once I had that I could create different paths to feed a post to that Micropub client. From inside a feedreader, directly from my notes in Obsidian, or through a simple web form. More recently I created different versions of that web form, to also post check-ins, and announce travel plans. In all fairness, my habits in how I post things haven’t fundamentally changed yet: I’m writing this in the WordPress back-end. But increasingly I am using those other paths to get content into this site.
Making it easier to post, puts the friction of blogging where it needs to be: wanting to write something.
Connecting things up into flows, blurring the lines between my site, online interaction and my notes for instance, stays an interesting thing to experiment with. In the past months I started using Hypothes.is more intensively, to annotate things I read on the web. Already all those annotations seamlessly end up in my local notes, from where I can work with them, and where they concern my own site I’ve made them visible here.
But most of all, aside from all the more nerdy things of tweaking this site and my information flows, this blog has been a source of conversation for twenty years now. It was my original hope, and my ongoing motivation to keep blogging.
Which brings me back to the earlier mentioned #twittermigration. Musk declared the bird is freed, but it seems quite a few people think the bird was caught and rather take wing on their own. Quite a few of those are the people I early on conversed with through their blogs too. If there’s a key difference between ActivityPub/Mastodon and Twitter, it’s that the federated version only ‘works’ if you actually interact with other people. Likes don’t matter in highlighting a message. Boosts do only share a message with your own followers, and has no other effect. It doesn’t mean it will be put higher in the timeline of others, it’s all in the now. There’s no amplification. Conversation is the key, if you interact then others may also see it and join the conversation. Twitter used to be like that too.
Conversation is key, and that is why I blog.
Here’s to another year of blogging and conversation.
I’ve set up a Fediverse account on a private instance of Mastodon. Here’s why.
This Article was mentioned on timnolte.com