Much of my short status updates cross post to @chrisaldrich@mastodon.social while everything can be found at the “Mastodon account” @chrisaldrich, which is really just my personal website pretending to be a Mastodon server.
If you want your own website that acts a lot like traditional social media I also recommend you try out micro.blog where you can follow me @chrisaldrich.
If you have difficulty finding/reading my content wherever your new internet home is, let me know and I’ll see what I can do to help. I try to support a number of open standards to be read in many forms and formats.
Before you leave, do let me know where I might find and stay in touch with you, because it’s the friends and the people that make any of this worthwhile at all.
@chrisaldrich I do like the idea of micro.blog but certainly there should be a way to do this with WordPress itself. Right now I’m using a plugin to auto-toot my blog posts here.
@skquinn Which WP plugin are you using? How do you like it?
@jalefkowit Mastodon Auto Share version 1.4 by Hellexis, and for what I need it to do it is working okay. CW support is damned wonky though (won’t work properly for scheduled posts).
@skquinn I’ve been tinkering with the ActivityPub plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/), and it doesn’t auto-toot so much as it does turn WP into an ActivityPub endpoint, with WP user accounts mapping to AP profiles, posts & pages showing up in the profile feed as notes, etc.So, like, my blog at https://jasonlefkowitz.net can now be found via Fediverse search at @jalefkowit@jasonlefkowitz.net, just as if I was running Mastodon there.
Could you please elaborate how to configure the plugin so it does auto-toot your posts to Mastodon? I’m missing something or I’m in lack of some programming skills.
Thanks!
@jalefkowit This may be what I actually want long term. Is there a way to toot from that other Fediverse account without blog posting? I have a use case where I would want to toot a lot to the followers of my blog without necessarily polluting my main feed (this one).
@skquinn But that just ends up feeling weird, because it LOOKS like a real AP user, but in practice it’s just a feed full of auto-toots. You know? And I’d have to tell people to follow two accounts, one for my blog posts and one for my Mastodon posts.I feel like, if you’re gonna make WP an ActivityPub endpoint, it either should be a full-fledged one (i.e. I don’t need Mastodon at all anymore, I can toot in WP just like I can post) or not be one at all.
@jalefkowit In my case I’d rather they be separate. I had made separate “birdsite” accounts for two of my blogs, one of them no longer an active blog, one of them an active blog that I just quit using the separate account for.
@skquinn I’m not sure. Right now, AFAIK, it only maps posts and pages. You maybe could use posts as toots? There’s some configuration available as to what WP post types map to what AP content types. But now you’ve lost the ability to use posts as, well, posts.
@jalefkowit Right, and half the reason I have blogs is to share things that don’t fit within a 140/280/500 character, plain text only (“microblogging”) type of format. Live-tooting pinball tournament progress/scores fits that well, though a lot of people undoubtedly wondered what all the weird names and numbers were coming out of my account that weekend.
@skquinn The plugin configuration makes some noise about being able to map particular WP post formats to AP content types. There’s a standard post format, ‘aside’, that might map well to a toot. But I dunno how complicated it is to wire that stuff up. https://wordpress.org/support/article/post-formats/#supported-formats
@jalefkowit The scores were later put into a blog post, of course. I also had the tournament software logging each game, and it came in handy in my case that I had the scorekeeper record each score instead of voiding the lower scores like some players did. The tournament software wound up being a more reliable source as I couldn’t live-toot the last few scores due to network issues.
@jalefkowit Yes, post formats are something I haven’t fooled with much. I originally thought I was going to be able to go back to the Vim plugin I was using to post to WordPress, but for better or worse it almost looks like XML-RPC is intentionally being sunset by WordPress’s dev team and no new plugins have been written to utilize its replacement (I think there is one but I have not read up on it and damn if I remember what it’s called).
@skquinn oh yeah, XML-RPC is on the way out (sigh). The new hotness is the HTTP API, which is much RESTier. https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/http-api/
@skquinn Oops, that link is pretty generic. This one is better. https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/
@jalefkowit Is it possible to post to one’s blog via that method? I hope the Classic Editor sticks around, after this year there’s no longer a hard guarantee that it will. (I don’t want to switch to Gutenberg for basic blogging.)
@skquinn Yes, though you’d need to find a client to do it through.You can use the same API on the frontend, which leads to the “Headless WordPress” scenario — you don’t have to build themes in PHP anymore, you can build a front end in any language you want and it just retrieves data through API calls. https://wpengine.com/resources/headless-cms-and-wordpress/
@jalefkowit From what I can see it only supports the block editor (Gutenberg). I have nothing against Gutenberg but I strongly believe the Classic Editor should remain a viable choice for those who still prefer it.
@skquinn Gutenberg depends on it, but it’s not necessarily tied to Gutenberg. One could write a completely separate client that uses the same API.The question becomes, has anyone already done that? Much easier to pick up someone else’s project than to write your own from scratch…
@skquinn (and yeah, one of the things keeping me from picking my blog up again is Gutenberg, which I cannot imagine doing any serious writing in)
@skquinn Depending on how wedded you are to WP, it might be easier to just move to a different CMS. WriteFreely, which is built on ActivityPub like Mastodon is, looks interesting. https://writefreely.org/
@jalefkowit Same here. This is why I am very hesitant to add too much more that is WordPress-specific, as I want to reduce my workload should I want/need to ditch WordPress for my blogs. I’m already looking at converting 6-7 years’ worth of pinball/arcade picture galleries by hand.
@jalefkowit Indeed, I’m rather wedded right now, unfortunately. So much so that I’m on the organizing team for our local WordCamp, which was originally scheduled for 2020 and then the pandemic hit.
@skquinn oh, my whole consulting business is built on WP. I’m lashed to this mast whether I like it or not 😆
@jalefkowit Just looked at WriteFreely. I like the concept but the hosting I am on will make it difficult to use right now.
@jalefkowit Indeed, I followed the whole Larry Garfield/Drupal leadership saga. He was and I think still is in more or less the same boat (with that particular WRS). Though, I don’t think the issues he had affected his consulting business, but I’m pretty sure he no longer presents at the conferences because of what happened.
I tried Mastodon a few years ago and found it was a desolate place where little happened. Has that changed?
I think it can work as part of a wider mix including Twitter and WordPress. This might be a good time to revive my micro.blog.
It’s definitely evolved. It’s both a bit bigger and more mature. Likely to get bigger by the day, though the question is: who leaving Twitter now will still be there in two weeks or even a month? (I still prefer using my own site and syndicating though…)
I still love micro.blog for its community aspects and feel.
@chrisaldrich@mastodon.social @chrisaldrich@boffosocko.com @alcinnz your blog is the first place I’ve seen since 2015 that is using hypothes.is I was super passionate about it but when I saw the lack of interest in development by their devs and after few messages with them, I finally let go of my account in 2019. Good to see someone is using it anyways 👍🏼
@chrisaldrich do you have any thoughts on which Mastodon instances are worth looking at?
There are now so many that it’s difficult to filter through them and choose. I appreciate mastodon.social as the one that Eugen, the originator, set up as I suspect it’s likely to be one of the longest lived. http://indieweb.social/ has a solid IndieWeb focus and community around it. I’ve heard mostly good things about https://scholar.social/ from academics, though I hear that they’re not fans of cross posted content from other places, including syndicating content from your website. Be sure to read the community guidelines for whichever you do join as some can be quite quirky.
That is very helpful! I didn’t know about the history of mastodon.social nor about scholar.social. Thank you for the tip about checking the community guidelines too.
social.coop is another that seems stable, active, and feels like it will continue to last a while.
I feel like I’ve been here before, looking at this site and feeling like that Chris is living the federated dream…all your posts, articles, annotations, quotes, etc. truly having a single home “here,” including hypothes.is annotations, whatever. I also feel like I’ve been here wondering where to start?
It’s overwhelming. I’m relatively tech-literate, I have decent WordPress chops, do some minor coding and hacking, but find myself in the rare position of needing a guide, not necessarily for Dummies, but close, to get started traveling through the Fediverse. Is there such a thing?
I’ll tell you the secret: I’ve been working on this site and learning from it slowly but surely since around 2005. Things saw an uptick in 2008 when I moved it over to this domain and there was another uptick around 2015ish when I found and joined the IndieWeb community.
Since then I’ve been slowly playing and experimenting to build the home online that I’ve always wanted. Having a community around me like IndieWeb.org has helped me immeasurably. It’s great having others around who come up with interesting ideas, write code I can borrow, provide a sounding board for ideas, can tell me about the pitfalls and traps I’d have never expected.
I started off as many did in the old blogosphere days by looking at what others had on their websites and trying to puzzle together how I could have it for myself. Then I made an ordered list of what sorts of functionalities, design, and layout I wanted to have. Then I did some research on plugins and methods until I could get each part roughly the way I wanted it. Each step along the way I was able to get the help and support I needed from the IndieWeb, Domain of One’s Own, and other communities and friends. Slowly but surely over time, I’ve been able to slowly tweak and refine things so that they work the way I’d like them to.
I was also able to provide my thoughts and feedback both on what worked and didn’t for me personally which I think has helped refine some of the code and plugins I’ve borrowed. I’ve also tried to document how I did many things (both on the IndieWeb wiki and on my own website), so that folks who find intriguing pieces can more easily have it for themselves (or so that I have a chance of fixing it when I inevitably break it). In many years of doing this, nothing warms my cockles more than to see others use the same paths I’ve walked, borrow functionality or documentation, and even—in some cases—completely copy entire pages of text from my website.
I’m far from done, but it’s been an entertaining, engaging, and incredibly fun hobby. Over time it has slowly turned into something. Even better, along the way, I’ve been able to not only save my memories for myself, document how things work, but I’ve made lots of friends and had a great time doing it.
Another not-so-secret, I do a lot of tinkering, and only know enough code to break things, but haven’t really built or written large amounts of code for myself. So if I can do it, I’m sure that with some help others certainly can too. I’ve seen some of the most creative, highly paid, and busy web designers, developers, and engineers on the planet take newcomers aside and show them how to register a domain name and write HTML from scratch. Our collective goal is to allow anyone to be able to do what we’re doing.
Given what it looks like you’ve already got Chris, you’re most of the way there and have a more solid base than when I started out. If you’re game, I’m happy to help and provide other advice about particular pieces based on my experience. My first recommendation is that you, or anyone else for that matter, pop over to chat.indieweb.org and introduce yourself. Then take a look at their Wikifying page, and work your way through it. In particular start thinking about this part: https://indieweb.org/wikifying#Write_down_your_itches. Once you’ve got a list of things you’d like your site to do, start searching the wiki, looking at sites, and asking questions in chat.
You’ll find lots of help because you’re definitely not alone.