Being fed up with the shenanigans at the walled garden social media hubs like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram I was on the lookout for something more exciting and less frustrating (keyword “Enshittification”). In November 2022 I set up an account on a Mastodon instance and quickly after that, two accounts on different Pixelfed instances. I wanted to use them for separate purposes: Mastodon like Twitter, and Pixelfed like Instagram for my Home Cooking and Photography interests.
Because of the nature of the Fediverse with each of its different social media services spread over many instances, it seemed tricky at the beginning to find accounts to connect to, especially for Home Cooking. At some point I read about Groups and I thought that’s a concept worth trying to find more people with the same interest. I set up a Home Cooking group on chirp.social and pretty quickly found some stumbling stones in the way I was trying to use it.
That’s when I first realised that most things in the Fediverse work quite well as long as you stick with Mastodon as your base because many useful additions are geared towards it, groups and WordPress blog linking are good examples for that. But there are many more social media services which are supposed to interconnect with each other using the ActivityPub protocol and not a lot of information about which service works best for what. When you find a problem there is hardly anybody who had the same kind of issue as it seems that most people stay within just one service bubble. So I started joining other services and started following my own accounts just for the fun of it.
At the point of writing I have accounts on these services (the plan is to try even more):
Mastodon (similar to Twitter)
Pixelfed (similar to Instagram)
Friendica (similar to Facebook)
Firefish (was Calckey) (similar to Twitter)
Hubzilla (seems like the grandparent of social media, but don’t let the seemingly very simple interface lure you into underestimating its powers)
Diaspora (I haven’t had a lot of time to test yet but because it uses a different protocol its interconnectivity is very limited)
WordPress (a blog service)
In addition I have a group administrator account on chirp.social and have interactions with a group on gup.pe
Juggling my various accounts I got so confused about what works and what doesn’t between them that I set up a big table that I was completing bit by bit, ticking off open questions in a more strategic way. Some issues that I found are caused by the specific setup of a service, others have no explanation whatsoever. Especially commenting on posts from a different service and then answering them can be a sticky issue. I should probably join GitHub to log everything, but I have no time for that kind of engagement right now.
I realised quickly that the table format is not the clearest way to show what is going on between services, so with my latest new account that joined the Fediverse (this WordPress blog), I decided to write a whole post highlighting what works and what doesn’t from the perspective of a blog user (WordPress and the Fediverse). The plan is to do this for the other services too.
This is where I got to so far with my table (updated 4/12/23, can be downloaded as PDF below the image):
🟢✅✅ Green fields means that interactions between services seem to work well in both directions – or not at all (but intentionally so, e.g. because of a different protocol).
🟡✅💢 Yellow fields means there are either some one sided problems or some weird things happen that I still need to research further.
🔴💢❌ Red fields means something does not work at all.
⚪️❤️ White fields with hearts contain short comments about the services.
It’s best to ignore these for now as I’m still learning about the ins and outs of some of them and most likely do them a disservice out of ignorance.
⚪️ Just white means that I have not tested yet.
DISCLAIMER: The table is obviously not complete in any way and based on my personal experiences trying out pretty basic tasks. Sometimes problems are caused by just one single instance and how code is implemented there.
At the same time services get updates and issues I have seen might just magically disappear.
Or new ones appear. 😅
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The best place to comment or ask questions about this post is my Mastodon – Testing account: Sylkeweb on Mastodon
Mastodon does this shenanigans that when a post contains a title and body text or a video (as always in the case of Lemmy and Peertube and often with kbin and Friendica et. al), it only displays the title and a link to the original post. So you can put that on yellow IMO.
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