I stopped using ‘social media’ for a while now for the usual reasons — it’s an inhumane way of interacting with people, is fully controlled by billionaires who seem hellbent on destroying democracy and life in general, is terrible for mental health, in certain cases unapologetically generates revenge and child porn, and so on. It was fairly shocking to see what it took for organisations to stop using twitter/X, and some are still on there.. and facebook, tiktok, instagram etc aren’t much better. I have still used mastodon though, it’s been great enjoying its (mostly) slow growth. Mastodon is one aspect of the wider ‘fediverse’ – this means you can use it to follow blogs, video feeds, event feeds and so on.
This feels a lot like the ‘good old internet’. In the early days of this blog, people would be notified of new posts, and drop by to leave a response, often leading to really nice discussions in the comments. These days people don’t often log in to leave a comment in my blog, but instead they follow and reply to my posts on the fediverse (thanks to the excellent wordpress activitypub plugin), via their mastodon account. For example this recent post about repetition has some thoughtful follow-up taking apart my rather shakey rant about repetition.
This plays well with ‘syndication’ using RSS thanks to the feedwordpress plugin – I can make a post on the Then Try This blog, then press a button to publish it on the algorithmic pattern blog. From there, people following that blog on mastodon can read it and share/repost it. Previously it was a bit of a nightmare copying posts between the too-many blogs I manage, now I just have to write in one place and have it aggregate elsewhere.
This is inter-operation between software has more or less vanished from the corporate web, holding out in some limited areas like podcast feeds and email, but with spotify, google, apple etc doing their best to stamp it out. I’m happy to be part of a community of people using self- and community-hosted technologies that actually work to help us talk to each other.