Brief overview of how I’m active in the fediverse.
My site
I would prefer this site to be the centerpoint of my fediverse presence. For now that isn’t fully feasible, but it will be over time. Already the building blocks for WordPress to be a fediverse actor exist. The Activity Pub (AP) plugin and Webfinger plugin by Matthias Pfefferle are useful, just not allowing enough granular control yet to my taste. For one, the AP plugin exposes actual usernames of my WP site, a disclosure I don’t like. I need to be able to set the actor names for AP, through the AP plugin and/or the Webfinger plugin. Second, the AP plugin allows sharing my blogposts but only all blogposts, and I want to be able to only publish certain categories of posts as well as individual posts marked for sharing through AP. Third, the AP plugin doesn’t yet take into account the interaction parts of AP (like follows etc.).
Mastodon
I run two Mastodon instances, one hosted at Masto.host. Masto.host has been a very reliable service since I started hosting with them in 2018. I ran a personal instance (m.tzyl.nl) with them until late November 2022, and started one for my company (m.tgl.eu) early November 2022. I run my personal instance of Mastodon on a VPS with Yunohost, at m.tzyl.eu
Discoverability hack
I have added simple text files to /.well-known/webfinger to both this site and my company website that allow discovery of my existing Mastodon profiles through my site’s and work e-mail addresses. This is just a hack, and I should replace it with actual functionality to disclose actors on both those sites.
Bookwyrm
Bookwyrm is the book reading application on AP. I have an account at the primary instance and supported them financially for a while, but haven’t used it much since spring 2022. This is one of the things I want to do myself through this site.
Potential AP projects
As said above I’d like to be able to share my reading through AP from this site. I would also like to be able to share my planned travel and/or check-ins through this site in AP. Specifically travel plans (Dopplr like) are of interest to me. AP, unlike this site, would allow non-public sharing of this information to followers only.
@ton I loved #Dopplr … still use Tripit for similar sharing to select audience (and I now have a lot of stats with it), but would use something non-corporate-owned, especially if it could accept historical data ex-Tripit
dopplr
@aqualung yes, I do miss Dopplr for the meetings it helped make possible. I never made use of Tripit mostly because of its focus on the trip logistics (flights, hotels etc), whereas the charm of Dopplr was simply announcing I’d be in some city between a few rough dates.
Peter has experimented for a while with Mastodon (and the ActivityPub protocol behind it) and decided that it’s not for him.
I very much recognise his point. The disbalance he mentions I felt strongly in the past month, where it was absent in the five and a half years before it. The enormous influx of people, positive in itself, and the resulting growth in the number of people I followed made my timeline too busy. In response I started following topics more and am evaluating rss feeds from ActivityPub servers. The disbalance expresses itself in spending too much time in the home timeline, without that resulting in notable things. (I mean literally notable, as in taking notes) Unlike my feedreader. It does result in some interesting conversations. However such interactions usually start from a blogpost that I share. Because of the newness of AP and Mastodon to the large wave of people joining, many posts including mine are of the ‘Using Mastodon to talk about Mastodon’ type. This is of course common for newly adopted tools, and I still have a category on this blog for metablogging, as blogging about blogging has been a 20 year long pattern here. Yet it is also tiring because it is mostly noise, including the whole kindergarten level discussions between petty admins defederating each other. There’s a very serious discussion to be had about moderation, blocks and defederation, to turn it into a tool that provides agency to individual users and the groups they are part of. These tools are important, and I’m glad I have them at my disposal. Ironically such serious discussion about Mastodon isn’t easy to conduct in a Tweetdeck and Twitter style interface, such as Mastodon provides. I moved the home timeline over to the right in my Mastodon web interface, so I don’t see it as the first thing when I open it up. I’ve concluded I need to step away from timeline overwhelm. Much as I did on Twitter years ago.
A tired purple mastodont lies on the ground sleeping while groups of people are talking in the background, sketchbook style. Dall-E generated image.
There are however two distinct aspects about AP and the recent incoming wave of people that I am more interested to be engaged with than I was before this started.
First, to experiment personally with AP itself, and if possible with the less known Activities that AP could support, e.g. travel and check-ins. This as an extension of my personal site in areas that WordPress, OPML and RSS currently can’t provide to me. This increases my own agency, by adding affordances to my site. This in time may mean I won’t be hosting or self-hosting my personal Mastodon instance. (See my current fediverse activities)
Second, to volunteer for governance related topics in the wider Dutch user group of Mastodon. Regardless of my own use of Mastodon, it is an environment in which many more people than before have new choices to make w.r.t. taking their online presence and tools in their own hands. A step from a global silo such as Twitter to e.g. a larger Dutch instance, while not the same as running one’s own, can be a significant step to more personal agency and networked agency. I’m involved in a group discussing how to establish governance structures that can provide continuity to the Dutch instance Mastodon.nl, lets people on the instance have an active voice and role in its internal governance, and raises awareness of the variety of tools and possibilites out there while purposefully avoiding becoming a new silo (through e.g. providing pathways away from the instance). Such governance is not part of the Mastodon instance, but structured around it. Such involvement is an expression of my experience and role in using tech for the past 33 years online as being inherently political.
A purple mastodont is conversing with a crowd of people, sketchbook style. Dall-E generated image.