"Steve's Place"

The Fediverse – for folks who don’t already know – is what folks call the constellation of applications that use the ActivityPub protocol. This makes ‘em interoperable in ways the big platforms are not. There are dozens – hundreds – of apps that use the protocol. Personally, I use Pixelfed (think instagram), Mastodon & Pleroma (think twitter-ish), and WriteFreely ( a blogging platform – this one, in fact). What that means is that you can follow all of those activities – photos on Pixelfed, posts on Mastodon and Pleroma, and blog posts on writefreely – all from your e.g. Mastodon account. It boggles the mind. :D

I’ve played with various Fediverse options over the years. I am an early adopter. Historically I created an account on every “new thing” that came along. Sometimes I forgot about ‘em, and then when that “new thing” caught the attention of the computing public, I would try to log in and discover my usernames taken… by me. “Forgot password?” then sure enough there was the email.

I have made mastodon accounts in the past. Then forgot about them. I have no idea what instance they were on or whether it still exists. I didn’t hang around to understand the Fediverse, though, and that was my mistake.

The big social media platforms have the inertia of “everyone is already there”. I tried to get folks to move off of BookFace for years, to no avail, and kinda surrendered. But since Elon bought twitter…

It’s not that I care one bit about which rando billionaire celebrisicle owns the bird site. It’s commercial, and it subsists on advertisements, so it can’t help but be evil. The fact that so many people are motivated to bail on the bird site by Emo’s purchase is a bonus, IMO. The more folks we can get pried away from the algorithms, the better, and one reason is as good as the next. Healthier, happier interactions, with more control over your ‘feed’, moderation, etc.

I’m cajoling my bird-site circle to relo to the Fediverse. I dunno if it will stick. I don’t know if it will work. But it’s worth a shot. I’ve spun up my own instances of a few things – Mastodon, Pleroma, WriteFreely – and Pixelfed is next, I think. Only a handful of users, but it’s been a lot of fun learning this stuff. It was worth it for that.

And, I think I will be sticking around. Mastodon – Steve