As the year winds down, thinking about the fediverse, I want to do a better job in 2024 of making the case for independent blogs. Lots of platforms with thousands of users on each server talking via ActivityPub is great, but more blogs also helps with portable identity and a more distributed web.
Absolutely, and now you can attach WordPress blogs to the fediverse.
Here's an explainer >>> https://mastodonmigration.wordpress.com/2023/11/07/understanding-mastodon-federation-wordpress-fediblogs/
@manton I was also thinking about this last night while reading David Pierce's article. I need to spend some time over the holidays thinking about how to consolidate my Activity Pub identiy down to my blog (or at the very least, micro.blog)
@jordon Let us know if you have any questions. Personally I love having it consolidated, but of course it doesn't work for everyone.
@manton yep. Check out #100DaysToOffload
It's been a great way to find people blogging constantly and I hope a lot more people join next year if they're up to the challenge!
@manton Perhaps Mastodon can add a feature in which users can follow a blog's RSS feed as if it was a user account.
New posts from the blog would appear in the user's Mastodon timeline, and the user could boost them to followers.
@manton +1 I use MB primarily as a blog hosting platform. I occasionally check in here but it's not the main reason I subscribe. More blogs. Less feeds.
@manton would love to have you on my channel next year to talk about this and other topics related to the Micro.Blog project.
@manton Not That Micro.blog is or should be competing with Mastodon, but this is a good way to differentiate. Lots of Mastodon instances federating with each other is a step in the right direction, but to fully embrace diversity on the internet, everyone should have a domain of their own.
@manton Also, leaning hard into the non-social aspects of the fediverse will help clarify things in your mind and for future users. This discussion on the Help forum on why someone needs a Mastodon account or a Micro.blog or both is helpful. Referencing your post on why Mb isn't more viral, the lack of likes, follower counts, hashtags, etc. may be the reason, but if you, as a founder of Micro.blog, find those missing things as features, then you probably will have to live with a smaller user base (unfortunately or fortunately), ergo, less revenue.
@manton I tried consolidating onto micro.blog a short time ago and found it didn't work for me. At least not for now. Maybe another day I'll feel differently.
I like +1s as a signal that someone is reading my activity—although the number of +1s I receive is relatively unimportant. And I like reposts. I'm primarily a linkblogger, and the ability to repost--and to see others' reposts--is a big part of that.
And yeah I'm finding the feeds and streams less important. Though I'm still using RSS as a major tool, and that's a kind of stream.
@vladcampos Sure, I'd be happy to be on sometime! Send me an email in the New Year whenever it's convenient.
@Ddanielson Yeah, Micro.blog isn't well-suited to the ephemeral right now, but I could imagine an app that was focused on that and would delete older microblog posts. Also might be some trickery possible with blog themes to make things fade away.
@manton @Ddanielson I remove short posts from my Archive. The URLs still exist and content is in the feed, but from my site at least, low emphasis placed on microposts.
@clorgie a custom template for the li.html partial that just doesn't do anything with posts that don't have titles.
@mastodonmigration @manton The ActivityPub plugin is Amazing and their support forum on wordpress.org is super responsive too.
@mbrailer Oh! Someone have done a tool (sorry I couldn’t find to link it) that turns any rss into a activityPub account that you can follow on Mastodon
@Ddanielson I have the same problem, but perhaps more so because a lot of what I post to social media are memes, vintage photos and other found media that I scrounge primarily from Reddit, Tumblr and Facebook. My solution is to simply NOT post those things here.
As for other ephemera that I do post here, I think the solution is to highlight the long-lived stuff rather than fade the ephemera. I recently came across a micro.blogger (I can't remember his name now!) who uses lists that appear to be manually compiled; this seems to be a good solution.
