A brief summary of the “fediverse” and a place for regular contributors to make long posts and link to them.
So, what is the fediverse, mastodon and how do they differ from fb, x and the rest?
The fediverse is a collection of thousands of servers that talk to each other quite seamlessly thanks to installed software. Thousands of small servers all over the world talking, communicating with each other with no boss .. yak yak yak 🙂
You can see the difference quickly. Zuk, Musk et al have one centralised system feeding their customers whatever garbage they can mix in with your content to keep the shareholders happy, to keep the competition between Zuk, Bezos, Musk and one or two less well known governors culturally hot and as well as materially, egocentrically obscene.
I don’t like this and facebook wasn’t at all like this in the beginning, it has evolved into the egregious system that it now is and if I can find a good alternative I’ll do my best to work with it. I think I have.
The software behind this is Mastodon. There are others, I haven’t tried them but after getting this to work have played around with it and I do like it. I enjoy social media again.
Instead of putting up with rules that Zuk’s algorithms allow, however daft they are .. they’ve gone. I was never one for twitter, so X isn’t in my view anyway, but you’ll not find any of the nonsense that he subscribes to on yakify. There is a series of rules, it’s part of the Mastodon thing, but they’re our rules, if you’d like to help me with them please do so ..
Why Masdodon? Using a personal server you have the opportunity to join an already mature system that will continue to evolve with your input.
The alternatives, Buddypress, WoWonder, Elgg, Drupal’s commons and more .. I’ve tried them all, they are closed, confined to the walls they create. The same as facebook, twitter and to an extent blue sky. Pretty small walls when the member number is low.
Mastodon has over a million members, quite literally here and there, with their own ideas, liking the decentralised structure. Lots of places with their own walls own rules, but with windows and open communication to the rest.
Members.
To keep things simple and not chaotic, I think that me inviting my fb friends, a lot of you know each other personally anyway, will keep things to a manageable amount. I’ll see what server hit is like and if the experiment works, after a week or two, then you can invite your friends, if that works a third iteration of invites might be sent out .. we’ll see, server costs are an unknown to me and whilst I’m sure that the first iteration won’t increase the load enough for me to upgrade the server I’m using now possibly not the second, depending on how it goes, but the third ..?
So, I’ll keep every member informed about what’s happening at the server level and the cost, we can then decide how things go .. It’s a reality that won’t go away, and a price for no adverts, no bots, no rubbish cluttering the garden.
At the moment this server costs 11.90 euros a month, no problem ..
Posting.
Posting on mastodon is twitter like, it is said. I’m not sure of that, But the default post is limited to 500 characters, that’s normally enough. Normally. I can change the code to give more characters, 1,000 might be good. I’ll make a poll when there are enough members.
If you want to make a large post with lots of images, that’s what this place is for. Become a member here and you’ll have the chance to do so. Ask me and I’ll make an account for you, I’ll give it a password, you’ll change that as soon as possible. The only condition is that you make a few posts on yakify first.
There will be a link on these posts to the yakify instance.Simple.
Posts don’t last collecting virtual dust for ever. You can choose how long your posts will stay on the server, I have set mine to two weeks. How many posts of yours have had correspondence for more than two weeks? What sort of post are they? If you want a certain type of post to last longer, you just have to set it to be so..
Friends.
You will be met with some strangeness, all’s good, there are good things in the strangeness and I’m still exploring ..
There are some filters built in naturally, but to see the posts of people that you want to, on their own, you have to make a list of them. It’s easy enough, if you have 400 of ‘em and want to see all the posts of 400 people you’ll have a long list and it might take a while, but once you have it, it’s there. One click and their posts are nicely filtered from the rest. If you need to give someone a rest for a while, remove them from the list ..
That’ll do for this one, you have enough there to properly get started ..
The URL ..?
Last but not least on this page, a really detailed description of the fediverse can be found here. No need to redo the wheel, as detailed as you like.
Fedi.tips