Ok, I’ve done it. I’ve installed the ActivityPub plugin and put this blog on the Fediverse. Why? Well, it’s new, it’s interesting, and I really want to see the Fediverse grow.
What is the Fediverse, you ask? Well, in a nutshell, it’s a network comprised of various types of social networks that use a common protocol to talk between them. That protocol is ActivityPub.
There are tons of different types of social networks you can use. Mastodon is the primary one folks know about. Mastodon is a social network similar to Twitter, Bluesky, etc. But there are others.
PeerTube is a Youtube style network for hosting videos.
PixelFed is an image sharing network. Think Imgur or Instagram.
Lemmy is a conversation platform similar to Reddit.
And there are a TON more! Each of these is an app you can run on your own, thus owning your own content and making whatever choices you want with respect to the content. And if you’re not interested in running your own instance, there are plenty of instances out there that you can join.
Right now I’m just experimenting to see how this works with a blog on the Fediverse, but I’m hoping it works out and I can get back to blogging on a regular basis.
@xenophage I’m reading this on mastodon, so that’s pretty cool. I assume that my reply shows up as a comment on your blog? I’ve wondered how some of the nuances translate. For example (not to be one of those guys) blog posts tend to be longer than a typical mastodon post, so if you wanted a content warning near the top how would you do that? Iirc, WordPress has something similar called headline or something? Does that get interpreted by mastodon as a cw? I’m sure there are other nuances to consider when deciding how something will look on multiple federated sites, and I think it’s interesting how the details shake out. Thanks for demonstrating this.
It did, in fact, show up in the blog post. I’m curious if this reply shows up on the Fediverse or is that’s a current limitation.
The content warning question is a good one. Thus far the ActivityPub plugin looks to be quite passive. That is, if I post something on the blog, it’ll show up in the Fediverse, and replies show up in the blog. But, there are no buttons/sliders/switches that I’ve seen in the interface to change *how* something is posted. I know the plugin is in it’s infancy, so maybe that will change. It could also be that I haven’t used this enough, yet, to know how to do anything different. Time will tell.
Thanks for the comment!