As previous months, I continued to share news about the Fediverse on Mastodon, in particular I enjoyed this analogy to Fediverse being vegetarian, organic, locally produced food and other social media being ultra-processed food by giant corporations. I also enjoyed this personal and educational explainer of the Fediverse:

This month I also encountered a lot of comparisons to Bluesky. While planned to be decentralized and federated, I read enough now to know that it isn’t yet.

Deactivating Twitter

I guess the biggest news is that I finally deactivated my personal Twitter account, @Jan Ainali. Taking the plunge was easier when I figured out how to share my archive, and you can find it on aina.li/twitter. Similarly, I published the much smaller archive for @openbydefault on openbydefault.se/twitter. What is left for me in this regard is to deactivate that account and figure out where and how to start a new Fediverse account, preferably using my own domain.

Streaming and podcast improvements

I continued to do some live streaming on Everything video. Unfortunately, there seems to be something causing to video and audio to lose sync after a few minutes. I think I need to file a bug report somewhere.

On the more fun note, I got into a conversation with the developer of the WordPress ActivityPub plugin on Mastodon and got some tips to make the audio file from our podcasts playable directly in the feeds. That’s a really nice step forward.

Post by @pfefferle@mastodon.social

View on Mastodon

The conversation also encouraged me to do a feature request on the plugin, my very first!

As previous month, I continued to share news about the Fediverse on Mastodon, it felt like that there was more good news this month. I highly enjoyed the FLOSS Weekly podcast episode with Andy Piper about Mastodon and I answered a survey for a bachelor’s thesis about users’ perception of Mastodon.

Creating PeerTube accounts

I finally found an instance that felt serious and allowed live streaming, and now I have a PeerTube account at Everything Video. The channels I have started and plan to publish videos on there is Wiki Editing for myself and one for Wikipediapodden.

I also found the niche instance Urbanists.video so now I have also started an account dedicated for biking in Amsterdam (but not published any videos yet).

Deactivating Twitter accounts

This month I got around to closing down some Twitter accounts I have been managing. Some I tried to archive properly using the instructions from the Internet Archive, but it looks from the logs that X makes it nearly impossible, as all new tweets failed to be retrieved. Some I just did a quick archive of the profile page before deactivating, some even failed archiving the profile page as Twitter makes a (hostile) redirect to another tweet instead. Here are the ones that I have already deactivated:

• Wikipedia Goes ESC, @WikipediaESC: Internet Archive
• Vegologisk, @Vegologisk: Failed archiving.
• Notabla Dödsfall, @nyligenavlidna: Internet Archive
• Nya Wikipediasidor, @NyWikipediasida: Internet Archive
• Riksdagen redigerar, @RiksdagWikiEdit: Internet Archive, archive downloaded
• Svenskspråkiga Wikipedia, @SveWikipedia: Internet Archive, archive downloaded

For Open By Default, @openbydefault I haven’t deactivated yet. I am both in need of starting a Mastodon account somewhere, and get around to publish the old tweets: Internet Archive, archive downloaded

For the Govdirectory project, we wanted to make sure no one else could claim the name, so we pinned a tweet pointing to our Mastodon account.

For Wikimedians for Sustainable Development, we opted to deactivate the account @wikisusdev: Internet Archive.

For Wikipediapodden, we opted to deactivate the account @wikipediapodden: Internet Archive.

Upcoming

In November month, I will publish some of the archives using this conversion tool.

Tips on Mastodon instances that would fit for the deactivated bots (now that Botsinspace is closing) would be appreciated.

This is the first half of my ninth report of my New Year’s resolutions.

September was more hectic than planned, so here comes two months of reporting at once.

Just as lately, these two months were largely similar to the last ones. I have continued to boost information about Fediverse apps, news and tips and tricks.

The larger thing I did do was to talk about and to recommend the Mastodon instance wikis.world for Wikipedians on the Wikipediapodden podcast.

This is the first half of my eighth report of my New Year’s resolutions.

This month has been largely similar to the last one. I have continued to boost information about Fediverse apps, news and tips and tricks.

The new development I have made is that I have started researching where I could buy a service to self-host a Mastodon server for my company Open By Default. Any tips of lived experience are appreciated.

This is the first half of my seventh monthly report of my New Year’s resolutions.

This month has been just as inactive as the last one. Even so, I have continued to boost information about Fediverse apps, news and tips and tricks. But besides that, I have not much to report.

This is the second half of my sixth monthly report of my New Year’s resolutions.

This month has been my least active so far this year. Even so, I have continued to boost information about Fediverse apps, news and tips and tricks. But besides that, I have not much to report.

What I am currently hesitating on, is setting up a PeerTube place to stream to. I am still not sure if I should host one myself, or just join an existing instance. A bit more research is needed.

This is the second half of my fifth monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.

As previous months, I have continued to boost information about Fediverse apps, news and tips and tricks. This month, I am particularly excited about the ongoing work of combining OpenBadges with ActivityPub. I saw it on this Mastodon-post, which mentioned ActivityBadges. Fingers crossed something useful comes out of this.

Also, like last month, I continued to update online profiles when I found some still referring to Twitter. I did a sweeping update on all Stack Overflow sites.

Motions to Wikimedia Sverige

I mentioned last month about two motions I submitted for the Annual General Assembly of Wikimedia Sverige. Unfortunately, they were both rejected. However, some of the discussion was about it not being appropriate for the assembly to make this small-scale decision. Perhaps it can still be a strong enough signal to the staff to take action. Time will tell.

This is the first half of my fourth monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.

This month too, I continued to boost information about Fediverse apps, news and tips and tricks. It is encouraging to see that there is a lot going on in this field and that it does not seem to slow down.

For myself, I have gone through my online profiles and where I previously linked to my profile on X, i have now changed them to link to Mastodon. I could make this change on GitHub, YouTube, Twitch and Facebook.

Motions to Wikimedia Sverige

I also wrote two motions for the annual gathering of Wikimedia Sverige, one to leave X, and one to join the Fediverse. We’ll see at the end of April if the other members agree.

This is the first half of my third monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.

This is the first half of my second monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.

This month was slower than January, but I did continue with similar positive reinforcements, namely boosting information about Fediverse. That activity was mainly on Mastodon, but I am aiming to widen that scope in the future.

I had planned to watch Fediverse related sessions on FOSDEM and State of Open Con, but could to my surprise not find anything else than very technical talks about integration on specific platforms. If you watched something good, please let me know!

Migrating Let’s talk about public code

In bigger news, I was influential in one substantial task, moving the podcast Let’s talk about public code to a Funkwhale instance: open.audio. The move itself was manual, but fairly easy due to the low number of episodes. Mostly, it was simple copy-and-paste work, and nothing really tricky at all.

One deciding factor for choosing this instance was that rather than open registration, all accounts are manually screened and all content need to have a Creative Commons license. Hopefully, this will be enough to keep the platform full of only properly licensed and sharable material.

This is the second half of my first monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.

In contrast to the other resolution, this has seen less progress, and it is still brewing a lot in my mind. What has come to change in my behavior on Mastodon, though, is that I this month has been actively boosting toots related to different Fediverse news, tools and platforms.

Learning

I watched this excellent conversation with Evan Prodromou and Flipboard CEO Mike McCue:

I was also experimenting with getting the MP3 into the toot on Wikipediapodden, a WordPress site with the ActivityPub plugin enabled, but to no success yet. It would be nice if it could be playable from inside Mastodon, just like an attached MP3 is.

Contributions

I started translating PeerTube to Swedish. Not in bulk, but at least I found where to do it and got my account going.

Planning for the year

I started a larger document with ideas of things to do during this year. Many small ideas that I need to think more about.

In particular, though, I am planning to transfer some of the Wikipedia bot accounts I set up on Twitter to Mastodon, but haven’t found frameworks that are simple enough yet. Any tips, especially guides rather than empty git repositories, for how to run that would be appreciated.