Blogging Federatedly: Reclaim Hosting Community Chat

Just to keep the blog reflexes flexing, this is a brain dump recap of me having enjoyed a session yesterday being on the Reclaim Hosting video chat session Blogging Community of Practice. Is that the right link or is it this one?

Anyhow, Maren and Jim et al invited me to blab about “Blogging in the Fediverse”, all in the ramp up to the upcoming Reclaim Open Conference (rewild the network!). What is more mind bending and wild than the fediverse?

I tossed a bunch of slides into their deck (these are my additions extracted), the ink still wet on them.

I had everything lined up with a full browser window with the slides, and about 15 tabs opened for things I wanted to demo. About 30 seconds in, just to prove my sage advise that “the technology will always fail on you” the slides froze. I could see in the little whereby window of people with cameras on that Taylor Jardin’s was weirdly glitching, then my whole screen went flashing.

Kaput, Chrome was overloaded. It could not handle the truth of federation and blogging. So I had to quit Chrome, find my way back, endure the well deserved mockery, and muddle ahead.

So just for some notes and links following the lovely slides.

The t-shirt I was wearing and (and available to anyone) was created when I went to OER24 and signed up to do a Gasta talk on embracing the fediverse. My wife urged me to do something different, to do the 5 minute talk as spoken poetry, which I had never done in my life. It was fun, yes, and I have pretty much closed windows on all the other social spaces, except for Mastodon.

I had to mention for Martin Weller’s sake, a kick at the fall of the One Big Social Media Tent.

My hopes for more to come along have tempered down, and of course “everyone” is in Bluesky, plus somehow, and it baffles me, how much energy people put into the data extration machinery of LinkedIn. That’s another post, but it turns my stomach.

What I tried to wave Gasta style was the federation was really aligned with the original concept design of the internet, de-centralized, a la Paul Baran/s diagram.

Tell me which one is LinkedIn. Oops.

But yes, I accept that the complexities of the federated idea and the interface of Mastodon ends up with people saying, “It’s too complex, it’s too hard.” No wonder they flock to the one that is pretty much the same design as Twitter.

Oops.

There is the dealing with the double @ style of addresses, and knowing to flip as needed- my Mastodn handle @cogdog@cosocial.ca is twisted on itself to get its web url https://cosocial.ca/@cogdog and you can flip back. That’s really hard. Like anyone with an advanced degree cannot figure out the pattern. Oops.

I also pointed out the idea that you can easily (?) move your presence elsewhere, you are not stuck in that warehouse party that lacks fire exits. I have made the jump of my @cogdog@ mastodon stops from mastodon.social (2016) to social.fossdle.org (2022) and currently to cosocial.ca (2024).

A number of folks are caught up in that a migration does not bring all your old stuff along with you — it brings whats important, the people who follow you do not lose that connection.

Now to me, I don’t care about having a nicely wrapped archive of what’s been past posted, it’s all disposable (well I do have something I shared later, where I have an integration set up using Make.com to archive all my posts to a google sheet, and I have that back to my previous home). Besides, that gets left behind. If I really wanted to enjoy my past, it’s all there at mastodon.social, everything posted through Dec 2024 when I moved.

I think it helps to think beyond Mastodon, that’s just one flavor of the fediverse. I demo-ed my photos in Pixelfed, how in my stream, I follow some accounts that are on pixelfed, but I also follow D’Arcy Norman’s mastodon account, which means in pixelfed I see all photos he shares. And how I can comment on them from Pixelfed. Or how in Mastodon, I can follow pixelfed accounts, where I can see and comment on photos in my Mastodon flow. I tried to suggest it was like in days of yore, that I could have that same integration between photos in flickr and people I followed in Twitter.

That was just the set up, what they wanted was…

Now my blog energy might be waning to capture it all. The first approach I shared was what I discovered and set up in 2022, the idea is having all my blog posts when published, also be spit out into my own Mastodon account. This was done with Ye Olde RSS feed from not just my blog, but also tagged sites in my Pinboard, tagged photos in flickr. I still run with these.

Gizmo-ing Stuff to Mastodon

Back then I used IFTTT but these days you need a pro account to use the web hook to post to Mastodon. There is a whole fleet of these “integration” type services that let you more or less do the old small pieces loosely joined approached to have actions from one platform trigger a response elsewhere.

I have become much more a fan and regular user of Make.com for this. You can create more complex flows, not just If This Than That (though I have not done this), but more importantly, when you are creating the output, you have access to apply different functions to the text you are working with. Also, Make.com has an easier integration with Mastodon, not creating and passing API keys. I use it as well to do the archiving of Mastodon posts (trigger is RSS) by writing to a Google sheet. And I have done ones to take triggers like a new item added to a padlet (look, RSS again!) and create a post on a discourse channel.

This in general is what folks seem to want/expect, to have their blog output stuff to their Mastodon stream. It can be done, but see below for the next level.

I did interject an RSS intermission.

I can never give up making the case how utterly valuable RSS has been and is right now. It is in many ways the mythical “eduglu” I pulled out my old schtick that whenever any tech person or hyperster tells you a technology will “save you time” that this is code language for “I am lying”. RSS is the only one tech I think holds up to that. I have a few blog posts, just a few.

The Indispensable Digital Research Tool I can Say, Without Lying, Saves Time

I gave a spin through my Inoreader interface, really to show the power of putting feeds into groups as folders of topics you are interested in… well just read that post above. The thing I wanted to emphasize though was that in a feedreader you can take that set of feeds in a folder, export them in that jazzy OPML file format. When shared, it lets anyone else in one swoop follow all the same blogs. It’s the original starter pack, and I know that Reclaim is looking at doing that for all the blogging action around the november conference.

The real meat was getting to the part I have been working several WordPress blogs on over the last year or more, using the ActivityPub plugin to not just spit your posts to the fediverse, but to turn your blog into its own mini fediverse instance. Sure I do my own mastodon yacking, but my blog does its own if you search for it by url or its identity @bark@cogdogblog.com

I did try to walk through the settings that I found best for me.

As well as the blog profile tab where you can add links to appear in the profile. One of the most interesting and obscure settings is where the plugin can add opengraph tags to your site that gives it credit anytime someone else posts a link to your blog.

It’s a bit of a mindwrap to think, but it takes away the ability foe someone to post stuff pretending to be you, or at least making sure, any links to your site get an attribution link on it. That’s really valuable! Read the whole background on this feature.

I set this up as a demo, a quick post that includes a link to some junk on cogdogblog.com

Who would not want that?

The last thing was a live demo of what I accidentally discovered last week. I had published a WordPress post that went out with a typo in the title, and another in the first line. I experimented, and simply updating the WordPress post triggered an realtime update in Mastodon

Federating Typos

I even did one test where I changed the featured image, published, and watched it flash to a new image in Mastodon.

One of the biggest mind hurdles, and I acknowledge it myself, is accepting the idea that using the ActivityPub plugin makes your blog its own entity in the fediverse, not pushing stuff into your account. What you do get though, is the flow back to your blog with comments in Mastodon showing as comments on your WordPress site.

Yeah, in the end, it is a more complex, more to figure out. You want easy? Ask Todd about that. As the poem went:

“But it’s complicated!” “It’s confusing?”        
So is love.
So is poetry.
So is learning. 
That’s opportunity. 

Get Federated Slam Poem, OER24

C’mon join me, The Daily Create (@creating), my Sadly Robotic Metaphors (splotted@sadlyrobotic.cogdogblog.com), even my OEGlobal Voices podcast (@oegvoices) as Federated and Federating WordPress sites.

Guess what happens to this post when I click publish?

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Featured Image: In the spirit of community chat, conversation… The Conversation flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)