I'm writing you because I came across your blog site and thought you may be able to leverage the Fediverse in conjunction with your WordPress site's publishing horsepower.
As a #FOSS advocate with great enthusiasm for mass #Fediverse adoption, I'd like to suggest a couple of things for you to consider, and the following treatment can also benefit others who also have bridged over to the Fediverse that already have a WordPress installation, or have been looking to deploy one.
First, that you think about establishing a Fediverse account other than that of a stock Mastodon instance. Sure, keep your @Teri_Kanefield@mastodon.social account, just create another account for yourself on a platform that will afford you more options that can facilitate your creative freedom (let's not dissect that word, lolz) to publish posts that are in excess of a paltry 500 characters, along with things like Markup capabilities, Etc. Just a thought. ...
This leads into the next suggestion, ...
Second, why not make that account your existing WordPress blog, where you already have a permanent, branded presence and readership? Let's supercharge your WordPress site by making it a full and complete publishing platform completely integrated with the Fediverse.
There's a couple of methodologies, but generally speaking, once you install the ActivityPub plugin any future blog posts are on the Fediverse as well as any other distribution channels you may already have (say, by virtue of having installed the JetPack Social plugin that propagates into the deprecated silo networks).
One method I can recommend is to follow this basic procedure to popularize your blog posts and gain followers - just like you probably have been with the mastodon.social account you already have:
) If you've already created a new account on a more feature complete platform that's better suited for long form posting, inline images, Etc., like #Friendica, #Socialhome, any #Misskey or #Pleroma family fork platform, #Hubzilla, or #Mitra (They all have excellent Markdown support too); simply follow your #WordPress user account @<username>@terikanefield.com. If not, then simply follow your WordPress Fediverse user account from your existing masto account - which you should do anyway since I gather you have some respectable measure of followers.
2.) Everytime you publish a new news article / blog post on your WordPress site, you'll see it in your stream on your fediverse accounts.
3.) Boost each article from those accounts, your followers will see what you boost in their streams.
4.) encourage them to boost as well and/or comment - you'll see those comments in the reply section of each article on your WordPress site - Awesome!
5.) Now that you have followers of your WordPress user's Fediverse account you should be able to garner more direct interaction on your WordPress site, instead of having to post links to those posts from your mastodon.social account.
) From your @<username>@terikanefield.com account at your WordPress site, you can now directly interact with your followers, even those who post replies/comments to your articles, whether or not they are a follower of yours.
I'm taking the time to write because I see that you have a relatively decent circulation and engagement between readers and your blog articles, and the more people that see you engaging with others in the Fediverse directly from your WordPress site, the more people are encouraged to Join the Fediverse.
I am, as stated in my profile and also leading in to this, a FOSS and Privacy Advocate.
So here's a couple of links, one to the plugin itself - it's easy to install and deploy. Another older one that's still relevant that shows you how to do the install, and I think that's about it. We'll see ;)
HowTo with Video - Really simple, easy install, right from your WordPress admin panel
JetPac Social - I'm definitely not a fan of this kind of engagement (with the privacy mining, deprecated, monolithic silo networks), but you do you - it can afford you with even greater reach through syndication, and if you write about the Fediverse, well, ... So much the better!
You should also consider following the magnanimous @pfefferle - one of the primary authors of the #ActivityPub_Plugin.
@mike 's contributions to #FOSS and #DeSoc go back much further than just the #ActivityPub portions of the Fediverse, well over a decade in fact, as the creator of #Mistpark, now #Friendica, and also #Zot6 and #Nomad, which promises to be a show changer for identity in the world of Social communications.
More champions of the relevance of #FOSS, #Dogfooding, and deprecating proprietary close source systems like Google and Dropbox in favor of taking back the ownership of our own data, and moreover, our privacy 🙂
More than anything, the following isn't any sort of treatise on threads itself. In fact, Threads is largely irrelevant - this is an impeachment on the state of the (deprecated, monolithic silo) mentality that is somewhat pervasive in the Fediverse: That you switch one Satan for another Satan. You swap out #Sunnyvale_Syndrome silos managed by people who in no way have your best interests in mind for some masto admin you don't know anything about, regardless of their stated mission.
You're not consulted, at all, about blocks and mutes of remote users and domains (instances) that you may or may not have interests in following, connecting with, or otherwise engage. Such is indeed the prerogative of the instance admin and their so-called staff members, and truth be told, all without due consideration of your particular feelings.
A couple of notions, ...
First, Fediverse development is in a state where you can choose to migrate your account elsewhere - well, not really the history of your posts, includng graphics, etc., intact, but certainly, your follows and followers lists. Masto no longer can monopolize on keeping you put and under the thumb of what could very well be eventually revealed as some, immature, juvenile, tyrannical despot who wears the clothes of some benevolent dictator as their disguise.
Next, even with respect to the most feature complete platforms, you easily can self-host the most comprehensive amongst those - if you can install a WordPress Website, then you can install a Hubzilla or Friendica Server. You can invite your friends and family, or just leave it as a single-user instance.
If you do that, no one can tell you what is appropriate - it's your world. You make your own rules. you decide what and who you want to see and allow through your machine - Want Threads? kewl. Don't want to interact with the big bad zuckerberg wolf? Kewl - block it. It's your world.
Similarly, and I cover this often, there's no real community in selecting an existing server to join. Sure, you can choose to only watch the "local" stream, revealing just how limited and how little in common you share with most of those folks, or you can build your own streams by following the things that interest you and allow people to connect with you on your own terms. The community you have, is always ultimately going to be the community you build for yourself - not some recommended antennae designed by some admin on a Misskey fork that purports to know what you want.
Some added benefits of Hubzilla and Friendica instances are built in interoperability with other Fediverse network protocols. No, Threads is not one of those. Threads is ActivityPub. I'm talking about native communication between your account and Bluesky, or Diaspora - two very vibrant and active networks of Fediverse instances that don't even speak the same language as the old, feature starved masto platform.
I'll also post real quick, just a mention (with links this time, I've been asked to always do this) of single-user-by-design Fediverse platforms you might find quite to your liking. They vary in features and even the bells and whistles that their respective developers felt that they wanted to address, but the basic functionality is there - again, you decide for yourself what sort of community you want and what kind of blocks or mutes at the domain or user level you're interested in.
Now, let me just say, smolweb, instead of single-user Fediverse platforms, because as suitable as they are for self-hosting (often in your home on an old laptop or Raspberry Pi) as single-user instances, that doesn't have to strictly be the case with some of these:
I'm going to keep this short enough to put the emphasis on the boost of my previous post below - the important concept being that in coming to the Fediverse, it is you, who should be in charge of what and who you interact with, and not somebody else who (as evidenced recently) will pull the rug out from under you and tell you what you can and cannot do, who you can and cannot talk to, or worse than all of that, ... Will judge you.
You shouldn't take that kind of shit from anybody. You be you. You're fine just the way you are :)
> On any online space, you should consider who you give power to. Who has the control over who you choose to associate with?
I concur 100% with this assertion.
> All that the instances who sign the fedipact are doing is signalling to some of us that somewhere is safe for folk who don't want to engage with Facebook at all.
I don't think that's all, and actually, What those instances may (inadvertently) be signalling is that they will take it upon themselves to remove the Freedom of Association from the user themselves, without prior expectation or consultation.
I don't know where "Freedom of Speech" entered the conversation, but the notion of "Freedom of Association" has indeed been taken from those who have chosen to excercise those privileges belonging to the users themselves. Waking up and realizing that you can no longer communicate and share recipes with grandma, without evern having been consulted, is an affront to the Freedom of Association - it's inclusive of an even larger issue surrounding the reasons that *smolweb and single-user and self-hosted platforms are protective of such principles Freedom of Association.
Further, it serves to create an environment (especially when so many platforms now support migration ingress) where one's Fediverse accounts are considered ever more transient, as the realization that having an account on a silo based Fediverse instance is the antipathy of #Fediverse and #DeSoc philosophies.
It also erodes the trust between the average user and administrators that you thought you could entrust with respecting your freedom of association with.
> This is a Freedom of Association issue, ...
it is indeed, and a betrayal of trust for anyone who realizes that it is the overreach by someone else to decide that you should not have the Freedom of Association that likely brought most folks to the Fediverse in the first place.
I did a little non-scientific, anecdotal survey by contacting people I know on many of the instances that arbitrarily decided to remove those freedoms from their users overnight, and discovered that many have already migrated to other instances, or are contemplating it - the interesting thing? Many of my acquaintances had already decided to, or even configured their accounts to block #Threads; but to have someone else tell them what they're allowed, or not allowed to do, is a violation of someone's freedom to choose for themselves by despot personalities who dismiss the relevance of a right to choose for oneself.
It's a simple matter, to block instances, at the domain level, from one's own user account, and on most Fediverse platforms, there's actually an announcement utility (usually only used to beg for donations) whereby administrative staff can inform their user base of their own ability to control how they themselves choose to exercise their own preferences with respect to #Freedom_of_Association.
Ironically, when perusing the stats, it's the very largest (deprecated, monolithic silo oriented) Fediverse instances (in terms of the # of user accounts and MAU) that have chosen NOT to trample upon the individual user's Freedom to Associate with whom they themselves decide.
NOTE to Fediverse instance admins: Please take under consideration the trust that has been placed in you with respect to the freedoms all individuals are entitled to determine for themselves - reach out to your user base, deploy surveys, collect votes, whatever, but please don't just decide for someone else what you decide is good for people who are NOT YOU.
Subjugation and assimilation into the Borg Collective goes both ways folks.
This was my #Stanley_cooker and oven. I even managed to make a couple of cakes in there - now that's a challenge, but once you develop an intimate understanding of working the firebox and valves to maintain the temps you want in the oven, all things are possible.
But it still took about 45 minutes to get a fire going and the stove top hot enough to cook a skillet of 🥓 bacon & 🐣🥚 eggs
Be sure to check the Link below in the link that @jeze left and sign up!
Pretty kewl, IMO. Thanks for sharing Elley :) it looks really nice and I created an account for myself. Seamless federation with the others too - very nice :)
@ben If I read everything correctly, you indicated that it should be able to recognize WordPress sites that have the ActivityPub plugin installed, but I didn't try to plug any of those in.
It is reminiscent of Share to Any and a couple of others that used to aggregate almost all of the available share points in the old monolithic social spaces, like del.icio.us, Diigo, and the thirty or so others supported by that plugin.
I'm looking forward to seeing how your effort progresses though, and it would be kewl if you could post an Atom or RSS feed link to make that easy in the meantime, although I'll follow you now and hope not to miss any milestones :)
I did plugin many Fediverse platforms such as various Friendica, Mitra, Misskey, Iceshrimp, Hubzilla, Diaspora, Akkoma, Lemmy, Takahe, and Pleroma sites, but none of those were found.
masto is obviously low lying fruit, but the real measure, IMO, is breaking out into the #Fediverse at large (not just masto). Interesting though, and thoughtful, that you Support Threads and Bluesky. will you be following up soon with nostr as well?
Exciting work there! Thanks for sharing (no pun intended ;) well, maybe a little ).
Oh, the comedy of it all. Snivelers exclaiming, "The horror, the horror", as if they're actually gasping for their last, selfish breaths, clinging to their maxed out credit cards that are maxed out coz their mommies and daddies stopped paying the balance on, lolz....
10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know You Could do With Nano Editor
OK, you probably do know at least one or two of these, but I’ve added the auto backup, line numbers, mouse support, and scroll bar to an alias for every time I start up nano.
I love perusing the various stats, and this particular one left me with that pain in your side from serious gufaw gufaw's, ... Sulu outranks Eugen - now THAT, is fricken' funny! And he's also organically ranked above @gargron too, lolz.
Now, the sad part about this, and one would need to have been a Fedizen going back for a few years, is that as a techno early adopter, #Wesley_Crusher was summarily and relentlessly flogged and ridiculed until he was driven from the Fediverse by selfish, jealous little children here in the Fedi about 5 years ago.
I mean, sure, Wesley Crusher was a total goombah on #TNG, while #George_Takei is a superhero from #ToS, yet in real life, #Will_Wheaton was among the first generation of (albeit, minor) celebrities to embrace #DeSoc and the #Fediverse, and our local stable of miscreants (every social network has them) hounded, maliciously trolled, and harassed him until the only conclusion that could be arrived at was that the Fediverse is a hostile environment not worthy of belonging to.
That really angered me, but at least everybody loves #Sulu :)
12 August 2020, off-grid on the living room of my cabin in the wilderness of Humboldt, California.
My rooster waits for me to come outside so he can flog me... Cuz he's one mean assed motherfucker and never learns that Imma just punt him instead.
That is, if my favorite hen, who also waits for me everyday to follow me around and body block him. Yeah, she literally would kick his ass when he tried to attack me.
She would eat yummy veggies from my garden right out of my hand.
I just went out to get my kid off the bus. It's cold outside, so I put on a gray pea coat over my T-shirt and blue plaid flannel pajama pants. It's snowing, so I added a black wool Stetson. Then the bus was late (probably due to the 2" of snow on the ground), so I pulled on some tan leather lined work gloves and shoveled the walk.
Fortunately it was my younger who was getting off the bus, and she is rather a sartorial free spirit. My older would have been mortified. #DadLife
@elb bruh! You are rockin' the fashion world and don't let anyone tell you different.
As for the older kid, let's fix 'em - go back in and change into a power ranger costume and make sure all their friends are observing when they come down off the steps of the bus to greet them Muahahaha 🤘🤡🤘
Me, an idiot: “So, kids, by setting the thermostat a little lower and eating less meat, we’re doing our part to make the world more sustainable”
VCs, very smart: “We just raised $100 billion dollars from the sovereign wealth funds of three petrostates to build the world’s largest AI supercomputer. It uses as much power and water as Guatemala and the primary use case is for management consultants to autogenerate powerpoints for justifying mass layoffs.”
@jimray
So you're about ready to come on over to my place so we can BBQ up some Humboldt grass fed beef 🐄🥩 on my propane fueled grill?
I can drive on over and pick you up from the airport at ✈️ LAX ✈️ in my big, fire engine red V8 powered 4x4 pickup truck with absolutely no apologies too, because I truly don't give a good goddamn about any of that nonsensically manufacturered emotional blackmail that you're so effectively and quite eloquently exposing as hipocracy. 🖖
Here's a screenie depicting both sides of a typical Fediverse interaction between NodeBB and platforms like Friendica, Misskey, Soapbox/Pleroma, Hubzilla, Takahe, Socialhome, and others.
Markdown published on NodeBB is preserved surprisingly well on Mitra, including the H3 heading. The bullets in the unordered list look really nice too.
Included is a screenie of what it looks like from both sides of the interaction between #NodeBB and a typical #Fediverse platform instance.
I loathe those little mouse pointer controls popping up like awhackamole in the middle of the keyboard - every time I see one of those I just wanna grab a pair of pliers, rip it right out of the keyboard, and stick it onto the end of a pencil as if it were a brand new replacement eraser, lolz....
to this day I even disable the track pads and carry around a little USB mouse. Otherwise my lazy palm wreaks havoc on any document I'm currently editing 🤣
> What do you think the future of XMPP will be like? I think it might be the protocol I enjoy using the most
Interesting, and refreshing, to see optimistic XMPP thoughts on, I guess, adoption? After 25 years?
People have been proclaiming the death of Jabber/XMPP for many a moon, yet its utility and existence just below the surface of mainstream awareness remains healthy. Yes, it is sometimes thought of as long forgotten, and no, it's not losing any um, ... Market share, so to speak.
For most things, and especially as a chat/communications platform between people, I migrated away and onto other solutions, leaving it alone and largely dormant for nearly two decades; yet it has always been part of my infra - mostly just between me and machines I've managed (notifications mostly).
I think part of the reason for it being so summarily dismissed was due to the rise of things like AIM, YIM, etc., and its perceived 'death knells', following Google's choice to (at least publicly) migrate away from it in the course of killing some of their public services.
More significantly however, IMO, were the abhorrently ugly and unintuitive UIs most chat clients sported - I'll call that era the time when XMPP clients mostly appeared like something you'd see on Angelfire or GeoCities web pages - before the MySpace and subsequent early Faceplant years following the breakage of the Pimp my Myspace page phenomina.
Like Samuel Clemens, once stated, ... "The report of my death was an exaggeration." If XMPP were itself able to express such sentiment, I believe it certainly would, lolz.
XMPP is simple to use, fast, secure (not by default), and by creating a situation where the user is transparently ignoring the JID + "/resource" and numerical priority that served to constantly confuse laypersons with multiple devices, the neo-adoption of XMPP and the introduction of 'pretty' clients has to a large degree, made it seem as if XMPP is something that is rather novel in the communications (chat) sector.
Clients like Conversations, at least on the #Android platform, have enabled this renaissance. There's also more desktop clients that sport a good look (pretty), offering an intuitive UX.
Is it going to be the next great thang? Doubtful. As @silverpill stated:
> I think It will remain a small network, unless something really bad happens to matrix (its main competitor).
... There's that elephant in the room.
On the other hand, for those of us who were early adopters of the hopeful #Matrix protocol, the promise hasn't quite been realized as expected, and further, it's been rife with disappointments - How many times have I myself integrated Matrix into system monitoring infrastructure only to feel that dissapointment?
XMPP doesn't offer me that - it works, every fucking time, fast, and I need it fast. I need to be able to call my customers and tell them that there's a problem and that I'm working on a fix before they even know there's a problem. I can plugin Zabbix, Observium, Nagios, Cacti, #NetFlow, etc., and when I hear that cacaphony of an alarm in the middle of the night, know that I need to get out of bed and start putting out fires.
I use Matrix - daily, all the time. But when people close to me ask which one of my non-email contact methods is best (besides actually calling me on the phone), I let them in on a little secret - "If you really need to get a hold of me, like, right now, and want my undivided attention when some IM pings me, then use my Jabber address". It's the first thing I check when I wake up, and I don't even usually check Matrix (it's mostly just for discussions and private chats nowadays anyway in my work flow).
Do I care if it's going to be the next great thing? Well, I prolly, when thinking about it, would prefer that it not be - Here's why:
Mass adoption by my friends and colleagues who I converse with would only serve to dilute the priority to which I assign my #XMPP communications
Migrating from Matrix (or something else) to XMPP for my virtual social interactions would prolly spur me towards wishing I had a dumb beeper again on my belt, lolz.
Sure, I can take advantage of different JIDs/resources, and even install separate XMPP clients if I wished, but managing different alert sounds, etc., and, ... Basically just complicating something that is so simple and effective the way I use it now kinda defeats the purpose of having a (mostly) dedicated interface between me and my boxes :p
Well, that's my 2 cents ;) and of course, my XMPP addy is in my profile if someone wants a priority chan to rattle my cage - but please do use #OMEMO as a matter of practice, even untrusted e2ee is better than clear text and I believe that we should, whenever practical, use encryption by default....... because. Just because :)