Composed while offline 14 hours on a trans pacific flight…
While I playfully gasta-cated at OER24 for folks to put on the Get Federated t-shirt, I knew then and more now that it’s not going to be for everyone.
“It’s too complicated reigns”.
Where to Go?
Hence the ongoing gnashing of “where to be”? The “professional” pulse of LinkedIn (I’m a bit gutted to see folks who have left their own blogs to home there). The great sea of email newsletter? The light up your Starter Pack of bluesky? It’s become a mad rush to go Sky. Buying into the meta trio of InstaThreadBook?
I fault no one for making their choices, or taking the post and spray the same stuff everywhere idea. I get the sensibility, especially if your source is your own microspace.
Frankly (why am I using that expression so much? It sounds like an old man tweed dusted phrase), I desire to not have that many scroll spaces. The blog, this here one, had to be central and first for me. I consider most other as exhaust. I’m making a turn to put my energies back to work here rather than falling again for Cousin Elon’s Farm.
And like the Great Cory D citing the Ulysess Pact after so many iterations of enshittified web dust biting rounds, I am not going to pony up to another masters house. Sure the skies look happy blue.Tell me- how are y’all gonna pay when they want something more than users?
I am quite liking the smallness of the fediverse which, as many spaces potentially offer, that original sixth sense proprioception of accidentally bumping into (in the good way) people you don’t know.
If you seek push button simpleness and algorithmic drip feeds, there are plenty of options. Actually what I relish about the fediverse is the non simplicity— that gets internet fled with confusion but if you discount the possibility to learn nuance, non obvious paths, than you are discounting your own human ability to learn, adapt.
I have plenty of minor gripes in Mastodon. I am never more that 40% confident that a private message is just that (why does the button say “Publish”. And for all the increased proportion of Mastodonners posting images with alt text, why is it so hard to access it in a copiable form (in the web client).
Being Fragmented
One of the oddest wraps is that as you take on more fediverse tools, you actually end up fragmenting your identity. It’s all connected and interminable, but on every service/instance, you are a new identity.
Bug or Feature?
Huh?
Okay, my main and longest lived identity is here where I started, in Mastodon, as @cogdog And note again the power of fedispace. I started on mastodon.social then jumped to social.fossdle.org and finally where I am now. The jumps were pretty easy to do (plus one for Mastodon).
Yet my ActivityPub enabled WordPress blog posts as @topdog@cogdogblog.com Anything I post there goes to a different and smaller number of followers (not that I look or count much) (okay I looked, 12). I am fragmented.
Really the only sensible approach I have found is to repost stuff from my WordPress identity under my main. It probably looks like vanity self tooting. Shrug
Note that I still have running an IFTTT thing that listens to my RSS feed and posts to my main Mastodon account. I’ve not figure out which I prefer so they are both in play.
But wait, here are more fragments. I’ve been doing some photo posting to pixelfed as @cogdog@pixelfed.social — that’s Another me! I am looking at putting more of my photo energy here and leaving the IG behind.
And confusion happens here. I can follow a mastodon account in Pixelfed, like Darcy Norman @dnorman and where I see only his posts that include images.
Then flip to Mastodon where I can follow any pixelfed accounts to see the newest photos. Indeed it all interworks fluidly. As ActivityPub should and does.
But to connect mine or at least coordinate, in mastodon I follow my pixelfed feed and the boost new photos.
It can be confusing.
This will happen if I decide to toss my @cogdog self into any other federated service. I will have yet another account somewhere.
Don’t think I am pining for some kind of fediverse account ID system, it might be technically feasible, but just noting that being federated means fragmenting of ourselves (solvable) but also being not in one giant vat of other users — what the sky people seem to crave, but swirling from and to smaller ponds.
It might look too complex, but again, isn’t find your way through complexity the leveling up of learning we want you to see others do?
I’m all for federation, and can call up the poem (maybe) (likely not) if requested (hardly likely), and accept the fragmentation as more feature than bug.
Embrace the non simplicity. Stay Federated. Don’t fall for the Shtick.
Featured Image: My own photo. No need for extruded generated images. The world is full of metaphors, why just give in to the chat box?
